This article ran in the August 1992 issue of Australia's Surfing Life. It has been slightly edited.

A few weeks ago, after three of the best surf days in Southern Cal for 1992, Christian Fletcher came into the Surfing mag offices to show off a new tattoo on his elbow.

The waves had been insane, so I asked Christian where the hell he'd been. He looked surprised. "Oh, man," he said, pointing to the tat, "I had to wait until this thing healed."

Right then I knew it was time for a trip to the central coast, and a few hours of Dave Parmenter.

Parmenter is incredible. At 31 years of age, he is a kind of surfing High Priest—a former Top 16 professional as well as a brilliant writer who combs the coasts near Big Sur, hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles, in search of clean challenging surf and empty lineups.

Parmenter says he can tell what the surf is doing just by looking at the morning sky above his small farmhouse. He drives the coast for hours each day searching for the right waves in which to work his powerful rail-to rail style. His small garage has been converted to a shaping bay where he makes his living with a planer that grows steadily hotter each year.

In short, he is Terry Fitz's old image of the Total Surfer; riding his own equipment, surfing with an intimate understanding of wind, tide, reef and swell, riding small and big waves with equal skill.

But in a Southern California surfing scene where a tattoo and a single-digit IQ are positive career moves, Parmenter doesn't fit. There is no room for him. The crowds, the freeways, the developments, the inanity, all fill him with disgust. Instead he stalks these cold, lonely, windy, lovely coasts, slitted eyes gazing out across the reefs, occasionally returning to the pages of the mag with the righteous fury of a Clint Eastwood, pointing his pen like a .44 Mag at some witless spaz-air expert or other moral backslider and snarling: "Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"

Clint Eastwood is one of Parmenters gurus. Clint pictures hang on the walls of his house next to hellfire shots of radical freezing-water reefs and a nine-eight big wave gun that waits for it's true test this winter.

We drove north through a cold foggy morning. "I don't normally go this early," said Parmenter. "This fog—it makes you depressed. Two weeks like this could really do some damage." Parmenter learned to surf at Newport Beach, California, in the days before modern surf stardom had penetrated the American psyche. He watched with amazement as the Newport scene developed and hot young kids dressed up in polka-dot shorts and performed for the cameras.

His heroes were a different breed: surfboard shapers and big wave hellmen, people like Ian Cairns, whose steely resolve in giant surf drove Parmenter by example, pushing him into larger surf than made him comfortable.

By the early eighties the polka-dots kids—Danny Kwock, Preston Murray and the gang—had graduated to jobs in the surf industry around Newport and Huntington, while Parmenter tackled the pro tour. He cracked the 16, but became disillusioned by years of bad surf and constant swings of fashion in surfing. His final statement came in 1986 when he rode a longboard against Richard "Dog" Marsh in a heat of the Op Pro, citing contempt for everything—the surf, the opponent, the judging, the system.

Now, while Kwock and the boys still pull down the big bucks in Orange County, Parmenter travels the coast, straining to capture some of the purity that once existed on those southern Cal beaches before the freeways, the crowds, and the rest of the nonsense.

Does he ever regret being the outsider? "I do what makes me happy," he said evenly.

Parmenter took us to a beach called Piedras Blancas, miles from anywhere. We built a fire out of driftwood in the dark sand dunes and surfed a four-foot beachbreak that was the best wave in miles, as good as anywhere in California that morning. Slowly the sun came out. The only building was an old lighthouse on the southern headland. There was no other human in sight.

Another of Parmenter's gurus—perhaps not quite the right word—is the white shark. Parmenter's respect and fascination for the beast borders on religious reverence, like an Indian with his totem. We stood on the beach at Piedras Blancas, smelling the smoke from the fire and imagining. "It wouldn't be bad," he mused. "A white wouldn't play around with you. One big bite, maybe. Take a leg and you'd bleed to death. There'd be just enough time to crawl up the beach. You could lie on your back alone and look up at the sky while you went."

He was almost smiling. "A warrior's death."

Right then I almost told him the story about Christian and the tattoo and the three days of surf . . . but I didn't bother.

[Photos: Lance Slabbert, Cindy Hackworth]

"WHAT I LIKE ABOUT DAVE," NICK CARROLL'S BILLET-DOUX TO DAVE PARMENTER

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