The Big Tradeoff 

It’s dinnertime, just getting dark. We’re the only customers at the counter of a take-out shop on a back street that runs parallel to Thurso’s Main Street. The place looks new. That, or it doesn’t get much business. The name above the door is El Mondo. 

The setting and fare are typical for a kebab shop in the U.K.—garish red, yellow, and chrome interior, chicken laid out on skewers, shredded lettuce and tomatoes chopped in plastic tubs, a sweating hunk of doner meat spinning insistently on a spit. 

Steam and foreign chatter pass back and forth between the kitchen and counter. Yet we’re the sole customers. We’re also strangers in this cheerless town. The fish and chips vendor next door has a queue spilling into the street. The patrons look like locals. You can tell by the way they glance at you—part curiosity, part hostility, part apathy.

The far north of Scotland is grim at the best of times—a craggy, gray, mostly flat landscape pockmarked by turbines. Despite being the fourth largest settlement in the Highlands, with a population of around 8,000, Thurso is a fringe settlement.

We get our food—pizza, chicken pakora, mixed kebab, and chips. It’s decent, even good. People here just aren’t keen on change, I guess. Too new, too exotic, too foreign. Skepticism is a particularly Scottish disease. “What’s for ye won’t go by ye,” is a popular mantra. In other words: you can’t fail if you don’t try. Best to keep our horizons narrow and humble. We’re hardened against expectation. Hopes and dreams calcify quickly in this part of the world. Grand promises haven’t always worked out in the far north.

In the 1950s, a burgeoning nuclear industry led to the construction of the Dounreay Reactor and injected Thurso with the false hope of a future. Anecdotally, according to ex-schoolteachers who oversaw the swelling of the school rolls, the collective IQ of the area virtually doubled overnight. Once upon a time people had actually moved to Thurso. But the flare then fizzled. Nowadays, for most of the locals, the concept of moving in any direction other than away would be tantamount to madness. It is a town bereft of energy and of defeated potential, like it’s in a permanent state of decommission. Yet, there are certain people here who would rather be nowhere else. 

Just on the edge of town, at the mouth of the River Thurso, lies a slab of rock that forms a threshold between land and sea. And on the right day, its a world-class wave.  

Heading east, you swing sharply off the main road and bump down a stony track toward a farmyard flanked by barbed wire and “ghost bags”—grim remnants of black plastic used to wrap bales of hay. Tangled and shredded, they whip back and forth as if dismissing your presence. 

Arriving for the first time, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in the wrong place. You might see a farmer hulking hay with a tractor, carrying animal feed, or tending to cows clanking and steaming in the byre. As you reach the edge of the plot, there is a precipice marked by a wire fence, and the quietly rusting carcasses of machinery. Beyond, the ground drops sharply to a ruler-edged wall of water, which tapers toward the mouth of Thor’s River with mechanical precision. This is Thurso East. I often wonder what the farmer makes of the peeling righthander that breaks almost into his yard, the salt spit gracing his masonry. I wonder how many days of utterly perfect waves he and his cows have happily ignored.

The farm at Thurso East could be one of the most prime pieces of surfing real estate on the planet. Nearby is where Chris Noble has staked his claim. His commitment to this particular slab of Caithness rock is as palpable as it is factual. Originally from Fraserburgh, on Scotland’s northeast coast, he made the permanent move to Thurso some 18 years ago. Before that, he worked as a fisherman. Every time he came home, he would make the awkward, 200-mile, L-shaped trek to the north coast, and sleep in his van until he had to go back to sea. It made sense to finally move. 

Noble didn’t discover Thurso East, but he became synonymous with it. For years he gorged on clean, open walls and peat-brown barrels. This led to magazine attention and sponsors. He was the go-to guy whenever mags sent pros to Thurso. He still is, but he no longer pursues the attention.

Thurso is a paradise lost for Noble. I struggle to imagine what it must have been like nearly two decades ago—no Internet, no hourly forecasts, no cheap air travel. It makes me think of my school days, and of furtive, late-night radio sessions listening to bands no one had heard of, and the ire I felt when others discovered them. Today, transient surfers breeze in and out, carried through all-night drives from the south coast of England and further afield on a tide of five-star forecasts and hope. All spill from vans and cars in Noble’s front yard. All are eager to claim their few seconds of prime, fleeting real estate. 

This must be difficult, I suggest to him. It must be hard to sit through all the flat days, and the onshore days, and the blizzards. And then, on the perfect days when there are 6- to 8-foot tubes spinning down the reef groomed by offshores, to have strangers come swarming like wasps on an open jam jar. 

When the hoards began to arrive, Noble admits to a phase of his life when surfing went hand in hand with anger. He remembers how much he began to resent the whole experience—how a few isolated, perfect waves became tainted. He’s a stocky, powerful-looking figure, with the physique of a bull terrier. There’s an intensity in his eyes as he stalks the lineup, remnants of a tension that is discernible in his voice when he talks about how surfing once made him feel. 

This is apparent the first time I speak with him on the phone. I notice he’s picking his words carefully in order to avoid swearing. “Come on, Chris,” I say. “What are you selling?” I immediately regret my turn of phrase as I sense him bristling, the edge of his past perhaps not altogether blunted. All I meant was, to whom does he feel accountable? “Well, you don’t know who might be listening,” he says.

I press him for detail, but he’s unwilling to excavate this further. He alludes to “one or two instances where things got heated.” Talking with him, and watching him patrol the lineup, I’d guess these specters are never too far away. He texts me at one point: If you had someone come and take a shit on your doorstep, it wouldn’t be long before you told him to fuck off.

But this is in the past, he says. He feels like he’s transitioned. “I’ve learned to live with it now.” Surfing has changed over the years, and so has he. I get the sense he feels it’s for the best. At 42 years old, this seems to be something he is acutely aware of. 

He still watches over the reef at Thurso East as if it were his duty, even if his relationship with the wave has occasionally been one of battles and toil. He’s relaxed about it now, though. He doesn’t want to send you in unless you’re really out of line. Instead, he wants to educate those who don’t respect lineup etiquette. He only wants to preserve the sanctity of the wave where he’s made his home. 

He lives a simple life—surfing and family. I ask whether the change in his outlook coincided with having children. Probably, he admits. It certainly gave him perspective. Poacher turned gamekeeper, as the saying goes. 

Aside from Noble, resident surfers are still sparse. You might think that a world-class wave, which has been surfed for the past 30 years and breaks virtually into the town center, would have inspired a generation of Thurso locals. But not so. The exotic, tanned visitors occasionally seen around town don’t seem to have had much impact. They come, they snag a few waves, then they leave as quickly as possible.

I’ve often wondered if it was worth it, living in Thurso. I ask Noble if he’d still live in the area if it weren’t for surfing. “I guess if I didn’t surf, I wouldn’t live here. But who knows where else I’d be or what I’d be doing.”

He seems happy, and it makes me think of my own situation. I think about it a lot. I think about moving my young family somewhere with consistent surf and quiet lineups. Somewhere a bit like Thurso. But there’s always so much compromise, perhaps too much to justify the ends. I think of all the things I’d be giving up in exchange for getting just one. I wonder if it would be worth it—the forfeiture of life for waves. It’s a daily meditation on my dissatisfaction with surfing—an endless, churning desire. 

I was back at El Mondo again recently, grabbing some food for the road. The restaurant had a new name above the door. In capitulation or tribute to Scottish horizons it was now called Thurso Best Kebab. As I waited in a queue of one, I considered the four-hour drive ahead, the midweek waves, and sparse crowds I would miss, the pre- and post-work surfs that would almost certainly enrich my life. I thought, once again, about uprooting my family and moving, just so I could surf more. I wondered if the nature of surfing was to be forever dissatisfied. No matter where you get to, things can always be better. As I stood there, I questioned if there was any point in trying to have it all, or if it was ok to just have enough, even for a while. 

I have a conversation with Noble at some point, which plants a branch, firmly, in the spokes of my mind. Unintentionally, he gives me at least part of the answer I’ve been searching for. “If all I’ve done is surf perfect waves by myself,” he asks, as if thinking aloud. “Is that going to be enough?”

I’ve kneaded this over and over.