“Are you kidding?” one guy said as he looked at me, or more accurately, my bikini. Enough said there.

“I like to feel the water against my skin,” a surfer friend of mine said rather casually. However, it just might be the closest thing we have to a historical answer.

You see, I contend that the ratiocination for surfers preferring nothing to neoprene is the same as baseball players preferring real grass to Astroturf: It’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s how it was in the beginning.

Most people believe that surfing started in Hawaii, but that’s not entirely accurate. Over a millennium ago, people began riding waves in Tahiti and Bora Bora. But, as seems to be the human condition, things got a little crowded and people left their world for an unknown one hoping for a better life. When these Polynesians found Hawaii, modern day surfing came to be.

The Hawaiians had localism: If commoners surfed the elite’s break they were put to death—literally. They had boardism: The longer your board, the cooler you were. What they didn’t have was wetsuits.

The water was warm. The air was hot. Levis weren’t big. Abercrombie and Fitch would have sold fishing line instead of cargo pants because this crowd wasn’t big into clothing. These people surfed naked. Naked.

The nudity continued for centuries, until those ever-annoying “civilized” Europeans arrived and shamed them, telling them that God wouldn’t let them through the pearly gates until they covered their coconuts with a fig leaf. Never mind that the Hawaiians were having a hard time understanding monotheism and why these new arrivals were so pasty. Surfers then were forced to wear trousers and muumuus. And we thought a couple mils of neoprene were cumbersome.

I floated this idea with some surfers between sets. “Do you think we like to surf in less because that’s the way it was originally done, that it just seems right? Maybe surfing in less feels to us the way Mecca feels to Muslims.”

Most hemmed and hawed at the analogy, but one guy offered an opinion. “Naaahh, I think we just like to see other people naked,” he said.

“Maybe we all just like to be naked,” I suggested.

“That, too!” the guy replied.

“Just like the first surfers did?” I asked.

He didn’t answer me. He just laid his bare chest on his longboard, paddled easily into a wave and, once up and riding, screamed, “Naked surfing!”

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Elisabeth Gause is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Vyuz.