Darren Clementine is a surfer who has never seen the ocean.
An Iowa man who self-identifies as a surfer is lashing out at critics after posting on social media about it.
Despite never having actually surfed, Darren Clementine, a 37-year-old rancher from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, believes he is a surfer. “No one can tell me what I am or what I’m not,” he told The Inertia. “I simply am a surfer. I don’t need to KNOW how to surf to be one. After all, it’s a lifestyle.”
By his own admission, Clementine has never seen the ocean. He has, however, watched the original Point Break well over 100 times. “The first time I watched [Point Break],” he said, “that’s when I knew. I knew I was a surfer, and I always would be.” He also attributes much of his realization to the 1987 film North Shore, in which a surfer from Arizona travels to Hawaii and learns how to surf. “I just saw so many similarities between me and Rick Kane,” he continued. “Like, we both thought surfing was cool and stuff.”
Clementine’s friends and family first began to notice the subtle shift in his personality in the summer of 1992, when he asked his mother to buy him a puka shell necklace and a neon yellow Quiksilver t-shirt. “I just thought it was a phase,” Darren’s mother, Phyliss Clementine, said. “But then he just never really grew out of it. Before we knew it, he was talking about how hard he was ‘frothing’ on the ‘sick shore-break nugs’ at Gray’s Lake. We had no idea what he was talking about. My sister thought maybe it was drugs, but Darren told us it was just ‘surf stoke’.” Gray’s Lake is a popular recreational-use lake located in central Iowa.
Clementine runs a wheat farm on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, a city in Eastern Iowa. When Clementine decided to go public with his identity, he posted an image to Facebook. In it, he can be seen holding his hand in a “shaka”, a symbol that originated in Hawaii and is widely used by surfers. “To all my surfer dudes and dudettes out there,” he wrote, “I just want you all to know that you have a surfer dudebro here in Cedar Rapids. Shaka braddahs!”
The post quickly gained traction, gathering tens of comments from his friends and family.
“Darren,” wrote his grandmother, “while I appreciate your enthusiasm, you’ve never even seen the ocean, so you can’t actually be a surfer.”
“Uh, what?” wrote Tom Torpencloth, a friend who works on Clementine’s farm. “You grew up milking frickin’ cows and sleeping in haylofts. Don’t you have to surf to be a surfer? And I’m pretty sure you can’t actually swim.”
Darren Clementine doesn’t actually want to learn to surf, but he is a surfer.
For his part, Clementine isn’t paying attention to the naysayers. He’s planning on getting rid of his cowboy hat, getting highlights in his hair, trading in his boots for a set of checkered Vans slip ons, and is practicing his surfer talk in the mirror at night.
“Brah!” he exclaimed when The Inertia asked for a demonstration. After taking a deep breath, he furrowed his brow in concentration, paused, and threw a shaka. “Like, this is SO sick that you’re even asking!” he said. “You see how gnarly that chandeliering section was at Slater’s wave at Teahupipe? Like, BRAH. It was SO SICK.”
Clementine isn’t letting the negative talk get him down. “Dudes don’t understand, you know? I’m finally comfortable in my own skin. I know who I am. It’s like, SICK that I’m a surfer. They’re all just being total kooks.”
When asked whether he had any plans on attempting to learn to surf, however, Clementine was surprised by the question. “What? No way. I’ve never even seen the ocean. That would just be crazy!”
Editor’s Note: If you didn’t figure out this was satire within the first few sentences, shoot us a note and we’ll send someone to hit you over the head with a frying pan immediately.
