Anonymity. A cloak of invisibility. Move with the current. Speak softly in broken Spanish. Disappear into the desert and leave no trace. It’s a Baja dog’s tradecraft. Blend in. Scott Hulet wouldn’t have it any other way.
The longtime creative force behind The Surfer’s Journal, the man’s new collected works, Flow Violento: A Scott Hulet Omnibus, offers a sweeping study of south of the border observations, surfy musings, and dead-eyed fish stories. Thirty years of scribblings, notes and published works, the evocative intermingling of storytelling and prose go down as smooth as a taco de lengua from San Quintin.
With his bebop, rhythmic writing style, love of language, deep appreciation for the subtly (and absurdity) of life and razor-sharp wit, Flow Violento is not so much a collection of individual stories, although it is, but more a comfortably complex portrait of the people and places Hulet has chosen to spend his time with over the years. Writing on his terms with an anti-commercial commitment that cuts to the core, this isn’t your typical surf journo slop. The pieces in the book are not about shiny, happy pro surfers or well-adorned tropical resorts. They’re dusty, salty, and marinated under a beating sun. The stories Hulet writes roll down from a place of honest humanity. Plainly put, they’re real.
TSJ
Full transparency, for a few years I had the privilege of doing time with Hulet at The Surfer’s Journal. We spent enough hours breaking rocks together that in Flow Violento I can hear his voice bouncing around my hazy cranium, echoing like all the shit we used to talk during our ping pong battles in the warehouse (because every proper surf magazine is required to have a ping pong table in the warehouse…or at least they were).
“Looking off to the sunrise from Baja’s eastern shore, we give little thought to continental Mexico. Easier to focus on the job at hand, nursing coffees and tying sabikis,” writes Hulet in the story “The Other Sea of Cortez.”
“There’s work to be done right here. Sonora? Sinaloa? They might as well be Central American nations, detached as they are from SoCal fishing consciousness,” he continues. “After all, we have a lifetime punch list to investigate on the Mar de Cortes: Gonzaga, Bahia de Los Angeles, San Francisquito, Mulege, Lorreto, and on down until the peninsula gets skinny.”
We used to have an “editorial punch list” when I was at the Journal with Hulet, which usually entailed caption writing, title sculpting, copyediting and all the nuts and bolts that breath life into a magazine. It’s been a few years since we worked together, but sitting down for tacos recently, Hulet slid a copy of the cover across the table and looked up with his sly, Cheshire grin.
Far too humble to ever admit it, if I didn’t know better I’d say Hulet was downright proud of the new book. I don’t anticipate you’ll see him on the book signing tour anytime soon, he’s too content splitting time between Baja and San Clemente, but it’s my guess that he’s genuinely happy with the tome. And I don’t say that lightly or dismissively, Hulet’s eye is critical, his bullshit detector well trained. And that’s what makes all 26 pieces in the omnibus so honest and genuine. It’s fun and refreshing to read, and definitely worth picking up a copy to keep on the dashboard of your preferred surf rig.