May 30, 2022 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Lauren Collins’s “Soaking It In” and William Finnegan’s “Big Breaks.” In “Soaking It In," Collins visits the Thermes les Dômes, one of several spa facilities in Vichy, France. She takes the mud treatment:

I was two minutes late for my treatment. “Oh là,” the therapist clucked, looking at her watch. She instructed me to undress—the spa provided a disposable G-string—and to sit on a table covered with a plastic sheet. Without further discussion, she began daubing my back at strategic points with steaming, tawny mud. When she had finished, she eased me into a reclining position and folded the sheet around me, forming a sort of Hot Pocket in which the mud was the cheese and I was the ham.

She drinks the spring water:

I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard.

And, most memorably, she undergoes the douche à jet:

Later that morning, I visited the hydrotherapy rooms, where I was greeted by a therapist in a black T-shirt and pants, topped with a black plastic apron. I went into a changing stall to hang up my robe.

“Should I leave my bathing suit on?” I called, over the door.

“You can, but it’s better without.”

Soon I was standing stark naked at the far end of a narrow, gray-tiled room, clutching the side bars of a waist-high metal support. About ten feet away, the therapist was unfurling a thick hose from a wall mount.

“Turn to the right,” she said. “Ready?”

I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole!

“Lift up your feet,” she said.

She hosed down my soles. Then my palms. My whole body was being spray-painted, and she was determined not to miss a spot.

At the end of the treatment, the therapist had me turn toward her. Here it was: the full-on douche à jet, straight to the gut. I closed my eyes and thought of the circulatory benefits.

When she asked if I’d like a final blast of cold water, I surprised myself by saying yes.

Wow! What a great scene! That “I could taste the salt” is pure Collins. Her style is both factual and sensuous. 

Finnegan’s “Big Breaks” profiles extraordinary big-wave surfer Kai Lenny. What makes him extraordinary? Finnegan shows us. He describes a video of Lenny surfing at Nazaré, one of the main arenas of big-wave surfing:

He starts by fading left on an absolutely massive black wall of water, and then reverses direction, driving hard against the grain. The wave is a solid seventy feet by the time he reaches the bottom, but it isn’t the height that stops your eye. It’s the concentrated power of the ocean behind him: probably the hardest-breaking wave ever photographed at Nazaré. Then Kai, turning sharply and slicing cleanly up the face, changes rails and gives it a little downcarve. If you don’t know that he’s surfing straight at a cliff, it probably seems less insane. Still, the nonchalance on a seventy-foot death wave is indelible, which is why they’re playing it over and over in an ad.

At Nazaré, Finnegan watches Lenny attempt a super-dangerous, near-fatal surfing move:

And yet Kai ended up going right. He later said that he had misjudged the takeoff, and let the left get away from him. But it was breathtaking, seeing him run against the grain of the swell on a very large wave. He accelerated, now low in the face, then hit a stack of small wavelets coming off the cliff. It was like running over speed bumps while going eighty on a highway. His fins began to cavitate. His board flipped in the air, bucking him off, and the whole wave landed on him from a considerable height. He later said that his jersey was pulled over his head, so that he couldn’t get to the rip cords for his inflation vest. He was underwater for quite a while.

I was at the lighthouse, looking down on the action. Chumbo was running the ski behind the wave, and when Kai didn’t appear on his board he swerved left toward the turbulence. Kai’s head finally popped up. Chumbo raced to him, slung him onto the rubber sled that rides behind the ski, and gunned it. The next wave was a foamy mess, and Chumbo hit it sideways. The ski went up on its side, and Chumbo tumbled into the water. Kai hung on to the driverless ski for another second or two, before it flipped over and the whole contraption went over the falls. It was a yard sale, with intensely swirling currents, but the two surfers seemed unruffled. Chumbo was mostly concerned that he had lost his phone. He yelled something to Kai, who turned and swam seaward until he found it. Then they were both thrown on the sand by the shore break, along with their tumbling, eight-hundred-pound vehicle.

Again, wow! That is a superb piece of descriptive writing! “Big Breaks” contains other lines equally as good. This one for example:

All the takeoffs were elevator drops, but the faces, some as big as fifty feet, were unusually clean. Kai was taking off extremely deep, chipping in early with crazy paddling power, and then turning hard as the waves spat clouds of trapped air. 

And this:

The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist.

Collins and Finnegan are two of The New Yorker’s best writers. These two pieces – “Soaking It In” and “Big Breaks” – exemplify their art at its finest.