Neutral Ground

Can surfing help bridge our cultural and political divide?  

It’s a question that author David Litt seeks to answer in his funny new book, It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground. 

Litt is a Yale-educated former senior speechwriter for President Obama and writes jokes and speeches for a host of CEOs, athletes, philanthropists, and other prominent public figures His wife Jacqui is a staffer in Congress. Both are Democrats. 

Jacqui’s brother Matt, a New Jersey native, is an anti-vaxxer electrician and hard-core surfer who loves chicken tenders, heavy metal, and motorcycles. His most prominent tattoo depicts a “giant robotic claw reaching across his collarbone, slicing his flesh with metal talons, and ripping back his skin to reveal a bloody mess of muscle and machine parts,” Litt writes.  

When he asks Matt why he got the tattoo, his response: “I dunno.” 

“He drove a Dodge Ram; I drove a Subaru,” Litt writes. “He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Lizzo. He was a Joe Rogan superfan; I was a Stephen Sondheim aficionado.” 

To sum up It’s Only Drowning, Litt basically finds himself in a post-COVID state of liberal fear, depression, and overall flabbiness, and views the relative happiness and fitness of his blue-collar, surfing brother-in-law as a sort of life example to explore. So, he decides to take up surfing in his mid-30s, and the rest of the book tracks his and Matt’s adventures together on the waves, culminating in a big-wave ride on Hawaii’s famed north shore. 

I grew up surfing in Virginia Beach and spent many hours on the water there and in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, which has consistently better and bigger waves than Virginia. I largely stopped surfing after college but took it up again after moving to California in the late 1990s. Litt has a perfect description of the difference between West and East Coast waves: “A Santa Monica peak breaks like a door being closed by the hosts of a dinner party as they wave goodbye to their guests. A New Jersey peak breaks like a door being slammed shut in an argument.” Those gentle West Coast waves were much more forgiving on my aging body than the “punchy” East Coast waves of my youth, many spent riding in the dead of winter when the waves are bigger.  

I assume most people who’ve never surfed wouldn’t be interested in a book about surfing, but It’s Only Drowning is about much more than surfing. It’sliterally about the country we live in and how hard it’s become to have a meaningful, civil conversation with someone “not like us.” 

Litt’s book doesn’tcontain some major epiphany about finding common ground in this divided era, butrather offers an illustrative story about how easy it is to willfully misunderstand the motivations of someone who thinks differently than we do. 

He is smart enough to know how silly many of his own likes, tastes, and views are to Matt, and he balances that with wry but respectful observations of Matt’s own likes and peculiarities.  

The two never succeed at winning over the other to their way of thinking, nor do they really try. And that’s kind of the point of the book. 

“Two years earlier, keeping someone like Matt at arm’s length had been a matter of principle,” Litt writes.“I felt a civic responsibility, if not to shun him, then at least to be unwelcoming until his worldview matched mine.” 

By the end of their surfing adventure, however, Litt comes to realize that finding common ground with those we disagree with isn’tnearly as important as finding neutral ground that allows you to simply get to know someone before foolishly presuming to know what they’re thinking. 

Eventually, Litt and Matt’s relationship is strong enough for Litt to broach a topic he knows the two won’t agree on. 

“So Matt,” he said one night over a shared Joe Rogan podcast. “Did you ever end up getting vaccinated?” 

“Neh,” Matt replies in his reedy Jersey accent.  

“Why not?” Litt asks. 

To his credit, Litt doesn’tdisclose Matt’s reasoning to his readers, but uses the exchange as the perfect summary of their time together. 

“I didn’t raise the issue of vaccines thinking I’d persuade Matt, and I doubted his reasoning would make sense to me, and I was right on both counts,” he writes. “And that was okay. What mattered about our conversation was not its contents, but the fact that we’d reached the point where it could take place.” 

Winning isn’t everything. Sometimes listening is enough.