Dan Merkel
for L/F.
Excerpt from an article on photographer Dan Merkel for the Lost and Found Collection.
On a Wednesday morning around 3 o’clock, when the brackish Californian air is still and the moon hangs high above the horizon, a sprinter van cranks to life in an empty sea side parking lot. Where it will take Dan Merkel is anybody’s guess, though these days he’s known to head east through the LA Basin, riding the 5 to the 15 off into the desert and through Hesperia and Yermo and Afton, blowing by the clubs and bars of Vegas strips he no longer knows, hopping state lines not once but three times, dipping through the Moapa Valley, the Valley of Fire, passing Hurricane and other sleepy towns whose excitement is noted only in namesake, before hours later arriving in Zion National Park. There he’ll trek to a bluff. A canyon. A cavern. A location scouted for years with hope it will someday soon present the sunrise composition he’s envisioned, but yet captured.
Tapping his number into my phone I’m clouded with expectations and assumptions about a figure whose photos hang on my wall, whose stories I can only imagine, and have, replaying in day dreams as if his experience was my own, as if I was there, struggling to float with a 40 pound camera on my back, keeping one eye on the action, the greatest surfers of the greatest era, and the other on approaching swell transforming the horizon. A character who must be larger than life. “Mountain Man” Merkel. And then, as the phone rings a fifth ring on what would become the first of many late night conversations, so comes calling the realization that the only reason I’m here, in the larger sense as a surfer who writes and not the other way around, is because of Dan Merkel. He answers the phone.
On one of our calls it’s a Tuesday night or a Thursday and it’s late. He’s talking about shooting from the channel at Waimea Bay and I’m nodding on the other line like I understand exactly how it must feel to focus a shot in 5 foot chop while 40 to 50 foot waves surge and explode just out of reach. He’s casual. Not disinterested, just matter of fact, as if to say “this was the job, kid.”
“You don’t want to swim there”. And that much I piece together. “Because there’s a lot of bump on the surface of the water. I always used a canvas inflatable mat to help get above that stuff and scoot around quick. Getting into the lineup is easy, you just time it. The sets would be rolling in, so you’d jump in and keep kicking and hope you break the current.” He never did tell me what happens if you don’t break the current, but the lava rocks and boulders beneath the cliff upon — and which sits a tiny steeple with a large white ominous cross —are sharp and unforgiving. The whitewater is crushing and relentless. The list of who’s drowned there long and ever-growing.
“It’s getting out that’s hard”, he continues. “Once you shoot your 36, you gotta sit right on the whitewater line, catch some whitewater, and try to ride it in. You gotta hang on to the airmat and that fucking housing, and you rush on the beach and you gotta stand there and hope the water doesn’t suck you back.”
When his work was featured in the blockbuster surf film Free Ride, it was 1977 and my parents were high school seniors. I’d only watch Big Wednesday, his first major Hollywood production, for the first time some 30 years after it initially hit theatres. I was maybe 19. By the time I started surfing, that is doing nothing else but, Gerry Lopez had moved off the North Shore in favor of some Oregon mountain range, Michael Peterson hadn’t touched a surfboard in decades, and many of the irreplaceable women and men I’d never met but felt like I knew — Margot Olberg, The Bensons, Jonathan Paarman, etc. — had been banished to obscurity. Heroes of a forgotten generation, save for those the industry kept alive for marketing. They were my upbringing and I don’t believe I was alone. Who are we supposed to look towards when living 30 minutes from the coast and another 40 from good surf? For those of us who didn’t have a guide to this world, how are we supposed to learn? Those photos I knew so well, Rory Russell drawing an early line on a first reef bowl, empty lineup shots of Bali, Baja, some far off planet, photos I can still see when I close my eyes. Those were mine and others' introductions. I didn’t know it then, but those photos were Dan’s.