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In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road

Amazon.com Price:  $13.55 (as of 06/05/2019 03:06 PST- Details)

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Description

In 1996, Allan Weisbecker sold his home and his possessions, loaded his dog and surfboards into his truck, and set off looking for his long-time surfing companion, Patrick, who had vanished into the depths of Central The united states. In this rollicking memoir of his quest from Mexico to Costa Rica to resolve the circumstances of Patrick’s disappearance, Weisbecker intimately describes the people he befriended, the bandits he evaded, the waves he caught and lost en route to finding his friend.

In Search of Captain Zero is, according to Outside magazine, “A subtly affecting tale of friendship and duty. [It] deserves a spot on the microbus dashboard as a hell of a cautionary tale about finding paradise and smoking it away.”

In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Commute Beyond the End of the Road is a Booksense 76 Top Ten selection for September/October.

In 1966, Allan Weisbecker “made a Manhattan run from the landlocked suburbs” to soak up a siren-song movie called The Endless Summer, a documentary that depicted the carefree life of two beach bums who roamed the world in quest of the easiest wave. Weisbecker was once hooked, and he became a hardcore wave rider, a fixture on the Long Island surf scene. With a friend, Christopher, he also undertook illegal how you can finance his passion, transporting drugs from exotic countries, a business only briefly interrupted when Christopher went off to Vietnam. There he took fire and came home scarred; something in him changed, and at some point he simply vanished.

Weisbecker’s book, a sort of gonzo detective story blended with travelogue and peppered with hang-10 jargon, does many things, all of them very well indeed. It offers up a vision of innocent times brought to ruin by war and drugs; it recounts his search for his lost friend, whose life had gone from bad to worse far away from home; and it affords a look inside the ordinary culture of surfing, whose masters “understood, in a visceral and soulful and inexpressible way, the machinations of the sea, and, by subtle inference, the universe at large.”

Full of regret and exhilaration, Weisbecker’s memoir is a fine chronicle of a dream gone sour and a friendship redeemed. –Gregory McNamee

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