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When I travelled around Europe a few years ago, I was lugging around my surfboard. Any time I ventured away from the Atlantic seaboard, I caught the strangest stares from land-locked Europeans. "Is that an airplane wing?" one local asked me, mistaking my silver-padded surfboard case for plane parts. From Paris to Dublin, teens taunted me with reinvented surf lingo—Hang Ten Dud!—or abused me with Beach Boys lyrics as I sought the bus for the coast.

 

Last month I visited Munich, a German city that perhaps couldn't be further from the ocean. And I was shocked. Barefooted Germans in wetsuits carried surfboards past others in suits and ties, and no one batted an eye. The surfers were all headed to Munich's Englischer Gartens for a ride on one of Europe's best waves, albeit in a river.

 

The park itself is huge, much larger than any in New York. At its south end, next to the modern art museum and past not a few nude sunbathers, I sat below the Prinzregentstrasse bridge and watched half a dozen surfers tackle the Eisbach River wave.

 

One at a time, experienced surfers jumped from terra firma onto their surfboards, which they threw in front of them like skateboarders who use their launch for momentum. They then tore up the cold, metre-high wave. Munich's true watermen carved through the 40 feet of liquid playground and bunny-hopped the rampy sections. When their legs tired or manoeuvres went awry, leaving them too high on the wave's crest or too far back on their boards, they were sucked behind the wave and pulled down river.

 

Neophytes took a less acrobatic approach, opting to start their ride from a seated position along the riverbank. By placing their boards in the water first, with their feet fastened to the waxed deck, they'd push away from the wall, but were often quickly sucked downstream.

 

But it's not a wave for the novice. A sign depicting a decapitated stick-figure surfer warns eager dreamers of the concrete baffles below the churning waters. Laid in the 1970s to weaken the river's flow, these cement slabs inadvertently help to create this standing wave and shallow hazard.

 

"It can get up to two metres on a good day," one surfer told me. "But the board is broken." By way of explanation, he pointed to a long plank that had snapped and was set along the riverbank in two pieces. Surfers had installed these planks in the Eisbach to help give the wave added height and improved shape. The wrecked plank meant the wave's crest was somewhat diminished.

 

Surfers have been coming here since the early 1970s, and the wave started to become popular in the late 80s and 90s. The day I visited, many of the surfers were local, while others had journeyed from places like Stuttgart for a long weekend. Tourists with cameras and joggers completing their runs lined the riverbanks. Others draped themselves over the bridge as water flumed beneath them from two archways, rushing toward the lone surfer battling to stay in place like some hopeless, adrenaline-seeking salmon.

Watching these men and women ride the river made the Eisbach seem like some parallel surf universe. Ocean-surfers fight to move forward on waves. River-surfers have mastered the art of avoiding going backwards. Even the most commonplace skills for an ocean-surfer—paddling through big surf, duck-diving swell, vying for position in the line-up, dropping into waves, popping-up—are useless talents for the river-surfer. (Surfer, by the way, is a word I never suspected would require modification.) This was actually the first trip I took in awhile where I was without my surfboard. I was stuck on the sidelines. It was frustrating.

Connie, a second-day inductee to the Munich surf scene, was constantly being tossed over the rapids that bubbled above the concrete. Still, he was all smiles. "It's fun," he said somewhat breathlessly, and then rejoined the line-up that waited along the riverbank for their next ride.

 

 

(Noah Lederman is a writer based in New York.)

 

Picture credit: Marissa Steinberg