How an elite surfer followed the wave of his dreams back
home to the Baltic Sea
Even for those who have never stood on a surfboard, it’s not
hard to imagine the exhilaration of the sport – the immediacy of fear-tinged
thrills, the might and weight of the seawater, the wonder of moving with and
across waves. And when surfers describe the feeling of freedom, the connection
with nature and the camaraderie that they find in their pursuit, most of us can
probably come up with our own analogous experiences, even if they’re less
obviously adventurous or skilful. The short documentary Live to Sea offers a
rich sense of these and other aspects of surfing, but another theme also pulses
through the film and transforms its story into one that resonates in unexpected
ways.
Freddie Meadows, the Swedish surfer at the centre of this
saga, speaks frequently of his dreams, not just in the sense of aspirations and
objectives, but also as something akin to visions. To be sure, this more
mystical strand of dream is inseparable from his primary goal, which is to find
the rare and elusive waves in the Baltic Sea that can challenge and excite a
professional surfer. But he has a curious turn of phrase – ‘dreaming myself
into all these places’ – that he tends to use to describe a kind of imagining
that lets him see what he has not yet found. That something so intuitive and
internal is central to how he seeks those waves gives his striving the shape
and valence of the classic hero’s journey.
The film follows the archetypal quest narrative described by
Joseph Campbell in 1949, from ‘The Call to Adventure’ to the eventual ‘Return’,
via a period of training in Portugal, international surfing competitions and a
period of illness. But it’s the emotional journey of Meadows in relation to
substantial physical and psychological obstacles that ties his story to the
grander narratives that are so familiar in literature and mythology. This is
not to say that the story itself reaches the heights or profundity of epics
such as Gilgamesh, The Odyssey or Parzival, but there is compelling
psychological grist swirling within this extreme sports documentary. While the
imagery of Sweden’s rugged coastline and the mysterious swells of the Baltic
have a palpable power on screen, it’s the internal undertow of Meadows’s
dream-questing that can move us to consider our own paths to self-development
and self-knowledge.
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