Author, Tavarua, Fiji, 2002
TEN
THE MOUNTAINS FALL INTO THE HEART OF THE SEA
New York City, 2002-15
A LONGBOARD BECKONS. IF I LIVED IN A HOUSE NEAR THE BEACH, or in a house at all, or had a van, I would probably own one by now. But I live in jammed Manhattan, and I can stuff my shortboards in closets and corners, under beds, in homemade ceiling racks. I can jump on trains and buses, even the subway, with a shortboard, run through airports with relative ease, and lock boards inside cars, where a longboard wouldn’t fit. So I keep putting off the inevitable. In small, weak waves, I struggle to my feet now, especially if I’m wearing a thick wetsuit. A longboard would be a blessing on those days—easy, graceful gliding rather than blown waves and frustration. Instead, I avoid small, weak waves. In waves even slightly bigger, my shortboards still work fine. The stronger push, the vertical dimension—the board drops away on takeoffs, leaving room for my feet to get under me properly. I’m not riding tiny, up-to-the-minute boards, which are now mostly under six feet. I am, however, still riding boards that, by my standards, are loose and quick and fit nicely in the barrel—in those rare, electric moments when I manage to find my way there.
I’ve become, strange to say, over the last decade, a New York City day surfer. Coastally, the city sits in the crotch formed by the sprung legs of Long Island and the Jersey Shore. While it took me years to discover Montauk’s waves—partly because I was busy but mostly because of a deep-dyed West Coast snobbery toward all things Atlantic—it took me longer still to see that there was surf of real interest practically on the city’s doorstep. The opaque screen behind which the best waves broke—I should have known it—was winter. Not only are winter days short and punishingly cold, but the window of good conditions—solid swell, offshore winds or no wind—is often brief. East Coast summers are dismal for surf. Fall is hurricane season, which can bring good swells. But it was winter that hooked me on chasing waves on short notice from the city. Storms known as nor’easters charge up the coast, not infrequently producing combinations of swell and wind of shockingly high quality. You just have to know where to go when.
You also need to have work that can be done at night, a tolerant family, a state-of-the-art hooded wetsuit, and, in my experience, the Internet. Without online buoy data, real-time wind readings, precise wind and swell forecasts, and “surf cams,” it would be impossible for me, at least, to know where to go when. The cams are online video feeds from cameras mounted here and there—on deck railings, burglar bars—and aimed at the ocean in places known to get waves. On days when the window of good surf is only a couple of hours, the cams tend to tell you what you missed. If it looks good, that is, on your screen, it’s probably too late. Conditions will deteriorate before you get there. You dash on an educated guess.
Chasing waves remains for me a proximate cause of vivid friendships. My education in the vagaries of local jetties, sandbars, wind patterns, shore-town cops, and desperate wetsuit-changing spots around New York has come mainly from a goofyfoot dancer named John Selya. He and I met when Mollie was small. Selya lived just a few blocks from us, on the fuddy-duddy Upper West Side, but he was also renting a house, with a bunch of other surfers, in Long Beach, on Long Island, in the wintertime, when rents were almost nothing. Long Beach gets waves. It has a train station. It’s less than an hour by car from Manhattan. If we surfed there, or anywhere nearby, the house was a place to change, dry wetsuits, leave boards, even sleep in the event of a two-day swell. But the house wasn’t essential. If the winds blow out of the west, as they often do, we go to New Jersey, not Long Island. Selya’s main surf buddies were another dancer named Alex Brady and a goofyfoot geophysicist whom they called the Lobbyist. I didn’t even notice when they let the house go. By then, I was in the rotation, permanently on call, dropping everything when the planets (and the buoys) lined up, going alone half the time, in borrowed cars.
John Selya, New York, 2015
Still, Selya makes me look half-committed. “This surfing once a week is no good,” he says. “It’s barely maintaining.” Selya has one of the worst cases of surf fever I’ve encountered. He’s insatiable; he’ll chase any hint of swell. He’s a binge-watcher of surf videos, an exacting connoisseur of great surfers and great waves, a student of advanced technique. He actually expects his own surfing to improve. And it does, perceptibly, each year. I’ve never seen that before in anybody beyond their teens. Selya was in his midthirties when we met, and already an excellent surfer, with a style that manages to be both muscular and delicate, but when I compliment him on a wave well ridden he says things like, “Thanks. It was sweet. But I need more verticality.”
This must be a dancer thing.
“And a Jewish thing,” he says. “You gotta suffer.”
But not, in his case, whine. Selya joyfully surfs junk waves that I wouldn’t consider leaving my desk for. He’s an old-fashioned craftsman—he works hard to make things look easy. One December afternoon, we were out in an ice storm off Laurelton Boulevard, Long Beach. The surf was big: meaty, long-walled lefts, way overhead, pouring out of the east, all gray-black and ragged, with a hideous westbound current. Selya and I seemed to be the only people in the ocean. There was a hard north wind, dead offshore. We had to paddle ceaselessly against the current. When one of us veered to catch a wave, the ice pellets coming off the land were blinding. You had to stare down at the deck of your board, push over the ledge by feel, and then surf with gaze averted. Selya got a long one, riding for a block or more. He battled back outside. I asked him how his wave was. “Like buttah,” he yelled. That became the catchphrase for the session. We were too tired to say much more. The waves were actually splendid, more than worth the toil and trouble. And there was something perfect, in that stormed-out, ugly North Atlantic winter ocean, about pretending it was easy.
When we finally washed ashore, incipient hypothermia was having its way with my sense of time and space. Trudging, board clamped under arm, head down against wind, past the hulking nursing homes of Long Beach, I wasn’t sure what day it was, or if we were on the same ice-covered street where we had left the car. We were. Selya couldn’t afford a surfed-out daze. He had a show that night. In fact, he was the star of a long-running Broadway hit—Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out. We changed in the car (this was after the rental house) and dashed back to Manhattan. I dropped him at the stage door. He panthered in with minutes to spare.
• • •
MY PARENTS HAD MOVED to New York in the mid-’90s. Moved back to New York, I should say. I saw it as a triumphant return, a big “Blacklist this” to the ghost of Joe McCarthy. But when I said so they seemed nonplussed. That was ancient history. They had come because their kids were here. Michael was an investigative reporter at the Daily News. Kevin was a labor lawyer in Manhattan. And Colleen was nearby—she and her family lived in western Massachusetts.
My parents were both still producing movies and TV, which meant they were often in L.A. or on location. But their apartment on East 90th Street became the new clan gathering spot, especially once the grandkids started arriving—Colleen’s two daughters and then our Mollie. For me, it was a middle-aged second chance, to be enfolded again in the family I had left too young. Moll had a seat on the back of my bicycle, and it was a short ride across the park to my parents’ place, where we always felt intensely welcome. We ate in the kitchen, dogs underfoot, TV news grumbling in the background. I couldn’t possibly fit in the place that part of me yearned to reinhabit. There was, of course, no going back. Still, I was shocked by the comfort I took from hanging out with these lively, doting, terribly familiar people, my parents.
They had a mysteriously rich social life immediately. Some of their new friends were actually old friends—film and theater people they had worked with. But they also seemed to reinvent themselves with unnerving ease. When Frank McCourt had a hit with Angela’s Ashes, it turned out they were buddies from the Irish Arts Center—or maybe it was the American Irish Historical Society. I had never known my parents to take the least interest in things Hibernian, but hey, they were new in town, and they had a fine old-sod name. They went to concerts and plays and readings at a furious rate. My mother, especially, had a formidable cultural appetite. My father parked his sailboat on Long Island and started exploring the local waters. I imagined he missed California, but the more we sailed together, the more I saw that I was wrong. He loved poking around new bays and reaches. My mother, meanwhile, soon insisted she barely remembered L.A. (She didn’t call it L.A. All her life she called it “Los Angeles,” on some obscure point of principle or hometown pride.) Nearly seventy years of living there did a quick fade now, into the fog of memory. New York was home. I make her sound like a diva. She wasn’t. She was forward-looking. Although she had been taking French classes for years, now she started taking Italian too.
• • •
CAROLINE AND I SANG Mollie to sleep, first in our room, where her crib stayed for a couple of years, and then in her room. We made up a song, which named every aunt and uncle and cousin and grandparent, celebrating how much each one loved her, and ending with our own declarations. It was a soporific, deeply felt lullaby, and it always came first. After that, we each had our own songlist. I would hear Caroline’s high, clear voice from down the hall, slipping sleepily through “The Holly and the Ivy.” My repertoire was mostly folk music from the LPs my family owned when I was a kid—old American tunes, or latter-day imitations, sung by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Also some early Dylan and, of course, the Fool’s Song from the end of Twelfth Night.
But when I came to man’s estate
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate
For the rain it raineth every day
This stuff had lodged deep, obviously, beyond all critique. I sang until Moll was asleep, then tiptoed away.
I wondered, as she got older, if she listened to the lyrics. We sang her to sleep, ritually, until she was eight or nine. I once asked her, just to see what she would say, about a line in the fourth verse of “Autumn to May.” It seemed she knew every word. The downy swan’s hatchling went from snail to bird to butterfly, she said. “And he who tells a bigger tale would have to tell a lie.”
Mollie, Long Island, 2009
• • •
I WENT LOOKING, as a reporter, for the place in Los Angeles where I grew up. It no longer existed. The hills were covered with houses. Mulholland Drive was paved. New-tract saplings had turned into redwoods. Woodland Hills had become a mature suburb. I interviewed Mr. Jay, my favorite English teacher from high school. He said the school had gone to hell. Ethnic gangs fought in the parking lot. (Armenians versus Persians, he said.) Shakespeare classes were long extinct. Families who had the money now sent their kids to private schools. If I wanted to write about growing up in a newly minted bedroom community, which I did, I would need to go at least two valleys farther out.
I made my way to the Antelope Valley, in northern L.A. County. All the discontents of sprawl were concentrated there, along with the fallout from a busted housing bubble, shrinking defense and aerospace industries, and shrinking public budgets for everything but prisons. There was a suffocating racial tension in the schools and an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse. I ended up writing about a number of teenagers who were washing around, trying not to drown, in this toxic exurban pond. My story focused on two warring skinhead gangs, one antiracist, the other neo-Nazi. It was difficult stuff, even before one of the kids I got to know stabbed one of his rivals to death at a party.
This was not the place where I grew up, nor any kind of updated facsimile. This was a cold new world, all stark downward mobility. I found the reporting, which took several months, deeply disturbing, and I tried to take occasional breaks, and to time those breaks to coincide with promising surf forecasts. I would drive late at night to a little condo that Domenic kept then in north Malibu, let myself in, sleep, and in the morning ride a borrowed board at a nearby pointbreak. Those mornings were both cathartic and Edenic. Bougainvillea spilled down chalky cliffs. The kelp, the eelgrass, the gentle blue waves. Seals barked, gulls cried, dolphins breached. I felt spiritually poisoned—some acrid cocktail of anger, sadness, hopelessness—by the story I was working on. Surfing had never made more sense.
It traces a bright memory thread through a motley of assignments. In 2010, when I needed a morning off from debriefing police torture victims in Tijuana, I knew a wave, a glossy left, just across the border, and that was where I ran. In 2011, I was in Madagascar with a team of reptile experts who were trying to stop poachers from driving a rare, golden-shelled tortoise into extinction. The team members could talk turtles, snakes, and lizards all day, all night. They could bushwhack, it seemed, indefinitely through killing heat if they thought a good specimen might be hiding under a rock out there. I realized at some point that Selya and I were much the same, minus the science and conservationism, about surfing. We could talk waves until any nonsurfers in earshot, starting with our wives, fled in horror. We did it on surf runs, over surf mags and videos, at sidewalk cafés on Broadway, trading shots of tequila, which Selya called “loudmouth soup.” The topic was inexhaustible, in our view, its finer points effectively infinite. In Madagascar, my companions decided to launch yet another expedition to see yet another tortoise, and I bailed out, going off the clock in a coastal town called Fort Dauphin, where I found a board—a beat-up but serviceable 6'6"—and surfed myself to exhaustion in rowdy, wind-ripped waves for three days until they returned.
In 2012, a story took me to Australia. It was the first time I had been there since Bryan and I ducked out of Darwin. I was writing about a China-driven mining boom, and a mining magnate named Gina Rinehart. She was the richest person in Oz, floridly right-wing, and something of a national obsession. My reporting was partly in Sydney and Melbourne but mainly in Western Australia, where the iron ore and Rinehart were. I found Australia changed, less cheeky, less “Jack’s as good as his master,” more preoccupied with its billionaires—or maybe that was only because I was writing about one of them. I looked up Sue, my old pal from Surfer’s Paradise, who was living on the coast south of Perth. She, at least, was as cheeky as ever, bless her larrikin soul. She was a besotted grandmother now, living in a house full of books on a gorgeous bay. “Bet you never thought I’d make a quid,” she said, which was true. She had somehow turned an abalone license into a comfortable life. She advised me to remember that Rinehart, who impressed me as a paranoid bully, was the only woman in the man’s world of mine bosses, which I tried to do. Sue’s son, Simon, who lived nearby, loaned me a board and wetsuit and gave me directions to a beachbreak called Boranup. It was a country spot, with cold, clear turquoise water, white sand, big, brushy hills with no buildings in sight, and a scatter of surf trucks parked on the beach. The waves were four-to-six, peaky and clean, the wind offshore. I surfed for hours, slowly figuring out the bars. My last ride felt like a reward for effort: a long, smoking overhead left all the way into the shallows.
• • •
SURFING BLEW UP, I’m not sure when. It was always too popular, in my narrow view. Crowds were always a problem at well-known breaks. But this was different. The number of people surfing doubled and doubled again—five million estimated worldwide in 2002, twenty million in 2010—with kids taking it up in practically every country with a coastline, even if it was only a big lake. More than that, the idea of surfing became a global marketing phenomenon. Logos identified with surfing, slapped on T-shirts, shoes, sunglasses, skateboards, hats, backpacks, flew off shelves in shopping malls from Helsinki to Idaho Falls. Some of these billion-dollar brands started out as back-of-the-van boardshort vendors in California and Australia. Others were latter-day corporate concoctions.
Actually, surfing imagery has long been used to flog product. Fifty years ago, Hamm’s beer signs showing Rusty Miller dropping in at Sunset were an American bar and liquor-store staple. In the industrial wastelands of New Haven, Connecticut, I once saw a billboard depicting a guy deeply tubed—also on a wave recognizably Sunset—with SALEM stamped in smoke rings on the wave face. Alcohol and tobacco companies, keen to have their names affiliated with a healthy, picturesque sport, were prominent contest sponsors in the early days of pro surfing. But the spooky and incongruous ubiquity of surf imagery today is something new.
There are five blood-red surfboards bolted to a granite wall in Times Square. I’ve been cutting through Times Square in all weathers since 1987, when I first went to work for the New Yorker. But I only started feeling furtive there in the last few years. It’s partly those boards. They’re all single-fin pintails with an elegant, exaggerated, needle-nose shape. They’re not actually surfboards, they’re just décor—shop frontage for a Quiksilver outlet—but for me their stretched-teardrop outline recalls, viscerally, a time and place (Hawaii, my late teens) when boards with a very similar shape were all the rage in larger waves. Then there’s the video running on multiple big screens above the same shop. For anyone else on the street, I assume, it’s just more flashing eye candy. That turquoise wave reeling from screen to screen? I know that wave. It’s in eastern Java, off a jungle wilderness. Bryan and I camped there, in a rickety tree house, in another life. Why do they have to show that wave? And the young guy slouching in its depths? I know who he is. He’s an interesting character, mainly because of the things he declines to do with his talent. He doesn’t compete, or pull the obvious big maneuvers in the obvious situations. His sponsors, including Quiksilver, pay him to slouch stubbornly, stylishly, a postmodern Bartleby admired in the world of surfing for his refusals. So why does it matter that I know at a glance just who that slacker threading a familiar Indonesian barrel on a video in Times Square is? Because I sometimes feel like my private life, a not-small corner of my soul, is being laid out for hawking, anything from consumer loans to light trucks, on commercial surfaces everywhere I look, including, lately, taxicab TVs.
Surfers hope bleakly that surfing will one day become, like rollerblading, uncool. Then, perhaps, millions of kooks will quit and leave the waves to the die-hards. But the corporations selling the idea of surfing are determined, of course, to “grow the sport.” Some underground panache may be useful for marketing, but really, the more mainstream, the merrier. Meanwhile, thousands of entrepreneurs, most of them underemployed surfers, have opened beachfront concessions to teach surfing in dozens of countries. Coastal resorts now include surf lessons among their amenities. “Cross surfing off your bucket list.” It’s unlikely that surf schools for tourists will add many new faces to the crowded lineups where seasoned surfers battle for scarce waves. Still, I find it unsettling when random Manhattanites jauntily announce that they surf. Oh yes, they say, they learned how on vacation last summer in Costa Rica.
• • •
SURFERS AROUND HERE—Long Island and Jersey locals—are strangely genial. I’ve never gotten used to it. There was a baseline reserve in California and Hawaii, an idea of cool in the water—what was worth saying, what level of ride or wave or maneuver merited a hoot of approbation—that I internalized as a kid and can’t unlearn. On this coast, people will hoot anyone, friend or stranger, for almost anything that looks halfway decent. I like the unpretentiousness, the lack of snobbery, and yet some unredeemed part of me recoils. Greater New York lineups are, against stereotype, mellow. I have never seen a threat or even an angry exchange, let alone a fight, in the water here. That’s partly because the crowds are never maddeningly terrible à la Malibu or Rincon, partly because the waves are usually not worth fighting over, but mostly it’s culture. A certain superciliousness and self-absorption that long ago became the norm on more celebrated coasts and islands in surf world have never taken root in these parts. It’s easy to strike up a conversation in the lineup with a stranger here—I’ve done it a hundred times. People are even eager to share detailed knowledge of their local breaks. Another transplant surfer I know calls it “urban aloha.” But it’s really more suburban or shore-town. At least I’ve never met anybody in the water who said they live in Manhattan. Brooklyn, a few times, yes.
Selya is a local everywhere we go. He was born and raised in Manhattan, but he lived for a critical adolescent surfer-development period on the Jersey Shore, and he’s consummately at home on Long Island. In fact, Movin’ Out is a musical about blue-collar kids on Long Island, set to Billy Joel tunes. Selya played a prom-king type, Eddie, who ships out to Vietnam and comes home damaged. Heavily muscled, high-strung, charismatic, not tall, he looked the part, and became the character, and his dancing shot out the lights. When we first met, he asked if I knew the New Yorker’s dance critic, Arlene Croce. I didn’t. “I gotta put that lady on my payroll,” he muttered. I looked up her review of Movin’ Out. It called him “an utterly remarkable dancer.” Selya had spent much of his career at American Ballet Theatre, initially under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov, before moving to Broadway. He still had the ballet dancer’s duckwalk. I noticed that in an interview with the New York Times, he compared dancing and surfing. With music as with waves, he said, you are “yielding to something more powerful than yourself.” I thought he had that right.
Chasing waves with Selya is like diving under the surface of this octo-megalopolis we call home. He knows shortcuts, in-jokes, dive bars, lore. He slips into a Broadway diner at dawn, orders an egg sandwich with the kind of regular-customer byplay you normally see only in a tightly edited movie. “Make it nice.” He listens to obnoxious two-guy sports talk radio with a faraway grin. I suspect he can talk each Mets pitcher’s mechanics as long as the shock jocks can. Like Peter, he’s a pleasure to surf with. He’s competitive and self-critical. He’s a much stronger paddler than I am these days, and he catches a ton of waves. His surfing is precise, aggressive, explosive—balletic. He’s also an unusually astute audience. On a cold winter afternoon in New Jersey, we’re surfing big, shifty waves at a spot we rarely ride. Our regular spots are too big today, all closing out. Late in the session, I paddle for a warbling, lurching set wave. I get hung up in the lip—cursing my heavy wetsuit, my weak arms—and then barely stick the drop, bottom-turning in a pressure crouch under a surprisingly tall, dark, heaving wall. I make the wave, pulling out in cliff shadow far inside. I’ve lost track of Selya. As I start back out the channel, wondering if he saw that drop, I get a glimpse of him way outside, bobbing over a swell in a last slanting column of sunlight. He has his back to me, but one arm raised high, fist clenched. That answers my question. He saw it.
On another Jersey winter day, even bigger, and sloppier—the swell’s too east; our educated guess on this dash was not so smart—Selya says, “I’m not feeling it.” He stays on shore. He’s not a big-wave surfer. Neither am I. But I can’t face returning to the city completely skunked. So I suit up and paddle out. Water in the thirties, air in the thirties, an icy west wind. Evil brown ocean. I have an awful session—missing waves, getting blasted. The surf’s huge, by East Coast standards, but it’s not good. I wash in. Back at the car, Selya says, “Sorry about the stench of defeat in here.” I manage to convince him, I think, on the drive home that he missed nothing but punishment. As the Manhattan skyline lifts into view across the salt marshes and docklands of Newark Bay, Selya says, “Look at that. It’s like a giant reef. The rock and coral sticking up, all the sea life down in the cracks.”
Selya’s work takes him all over, and he contrives to surf between shows on tour. In Brazil, in Japan, he’s found boards and waves. He once dashed from London to Cornwall, a five-hour drive, to surf. Last year, from Denmark, he texted me cell phone shots of tiny gray, horrible-looking North Sea slop: he was all over it, clambering across jagged rocks. He does an annual gig with Ballet Hawaii, in Honolulu, in December—the heart of the surf season on the North Shore. He and his wife, Jackie, who’s a Broadway singer, flee to Puerto Rico when they can. In 2013 they rented a house in the northwest corner of the island, which is surf country, during surf season. I bunked with them there during a swell so solid that I was very glad I’d brought my 8'0" Brewer gun.
We sometimes chase waves far from home. A few years ago, with a bunch of other surfers, we chartered a boat out of West Java. Surfwise, the trip was a bust. We anchored for ten days off an uninhabited island in the Sunda Strait that’s known to get great waves. It was the height of the swell season in Indonesia, but the surf stayed small. Selya brought a bag of DVDs—some Steve Buscemi movies and a complete set of The Office, the British original, with Ricky Gervais. He screened them at night, on a tiny portable player, in the sweltering hold where we all slept, and Gervais became the unlikely trip mascot. Selya knew the scripts by heart. You could hear him in the lineup, cracking himself up with favorite lines, nailing the bumptious provincial accent of David Brent, the office manager played by Gervais, while we paddled in circles, chasing mediocre waves. Selya is a connoisseur of cringe. He loves the ingenuity of desperate efforts to maintain dignity in the face of humiliation. “I identify,” he explains. Toward the end of the trip, I came down with an apparent malaria relapse. I’ve had them, infrequently, over the years. Fever and severe chills. There were no thick blankets on board—we were anchored at six degrees south. So Selya loaned me, when the chills got bad, a velour leisure suit—black, with red piping—that he’d brought for the plane rides. I curled up in my bunk, freezing, groaning, dressed as a Jersey wiseguy. I sweated through the leisure suit. It was okay, Selya said. We could burn it if we ever got back to land.
Peter Spacek was on that trip. When I got sick, he kept an eye on me. He hardly surfed—the waves weren’t worth it—but he did a lot of sketching: close studies of reef life, boat life, and the many species of fish he caught. He and I collected broken chunks of bright blue and red coral for our daughters.
• • •
MY FATHER SAILED HIS BOAT to Florida for the winter. It wasn’t necessary—most boat owners in the Northeast just haul out—but he was mostly retired now, he had the time. I joined him in the spring for a northbound leg, starting in Norfolk, Virginia. We sailed the length of the Chesapeake Bay, then down the Delaware River, around Cape May, and up the Jersey Shore. Rounding Cape May, coming out of Delaware Bay, we had our traditional near disaster. A large fleet of small white-hulled fishing boats appeared to be working the shoals off the cape. It was a cold, clear morning. We wondered what could be running, to attract so many boats. The “boats” turned out to be breaking waves. We were nowhere near shore, but the depth sounder started reading twenty feet, fifteen, ten, and suddenly the breaking waves were all around us. I was at the helm, dodging waves, frantically trying to find deeper water. That boat drew six feet, and I saw the sounder’s reading drop to five, four, three. At that stage, I had the boat heeled hard over, wallowing in the troughs just to keep the keel out of the sand. The waves weren’t big, but they weren’t whitecaps—they were breaking waves in chest-deep water. We could see the bottom. It was pale. It would have been a very bad place to run aground, in forty-degree water, miles from shore. Somehow, we got off the shoal. We motored out to sea, reviewing our charts. Yep, there they were. Horrendous hazards. The shipping channel hugged the Delaware shore. After a week of sailing carefully through shallow bays and narrow canals, we had seen open ocean and, idiotically, relaxed. We were too shaken to laugh. We sailed slowly to Atlantic City, tied up the boat, and took a Greyhound bus to New York.
Bill and Pat Finnegan, Yosemite, California, 1990s
It had been a sweet week. Nosing up the Chesapeake, we put into hamlets you would never find by road. We ate hard crabs, soft crabs, blue crabs, she crabs. Shot the breeze with waitresses and tackle shop owners. My father and I had always shared an affection, bordering on compulsion, for checking out obscure places. Each of our wives kidded us about all the aimless detours taken on family trips. My dad’s favorite part of making movies and TV was location scouting. My favorite part of my work is following my curiosity around the bend, over the next ridge, into the souk, hunting facts and asking questions, going where the story seems like it might be rich. One evening, moored to a can under an oak-covered bluff, sipping the one vodka tonic he allowed himself, Dad asked me about Somalia. He had read my piece about it, but he wanted to know what the place looked and felt like, how ordinary people got by, what they ate, how I got around. So I told him, and he listened so hard, in the deepening shadows of that peaceful cove, to my descriptions of bombed-out Mogadishu, and the long scarves the women wore, and the teenage gunmen I had to hire as bodyguards, and the heavy-weapon battlewagons known as “technicals” that they drove around and fought from and slept on at night. He took in the tragedy and every detail of this far-flung world with such unfeigned wonder, I felt honored to bring him the news. It was a place he knew he would never go, and I had gone, and he wanted to hear about it. If he had any worries about my safety, he kept them to himself. We had always been lucky—dumb but lucky, he liked to say. We had this unappeasable curiosity in common.
The strangest place we found that week was called Delaware City. It was a small town at the Delaware River end of a canal that once ran to the Chesapeake—connecting Philadelphia and points north to Baltimore and Washington—before it was supplanted by a bigger, deeper canal built on a different route. Delaware City’s sleepy main street was a monument to its heyday: an impressive row of big, brick, nineteenth-century buildings. We ate dinner at a grand hotel built in 1828. We were the only customers in the place.
That whole sail felt like time travel, down through layers of an older country, down through our own shared and not-shared history. I asked my dad if he had stayed in touch with anyone from Escanaba, his hometown. He shuddered, literally, at the thought. No. But wouldn’t it be interesting to turn up at, say, his sixtieth high school reunion, which would be coming up? No. He would rather cut off his right arm, he said. Why? “Because I would have to account for myself,” he said. “And what am I going to say, ‘Hollywood producer’?” I didn’t see what was so terrible about that. But I’m not from the Upper Midwest.
At one point, tacking out of Annapolis, he said, “You’ve got the habit of leaving things unsaid, of shoving things under the rug.” I was startled, unnerved. “Maybe it’s inherited,” he added.
I wondered what things he had in mind. He seemed to mean resentments. Did I have so many? Once upon a time, I had secretly blamed him for my miseries, for the anguish that plagued me through my college years after Caryn left. My notion was that his devotion to my mother, his emotional dependence on her, had set me a bad example, had given me a model for love that ended up devastating me. But I had abandoned that idea, that ludicrous resentment, long ago. There were plenty of things I was actually glad I had left unsaid. Still, the comment haunted me. It haunts me today. All the things I wish I had said when I had the chance.
A moment recurs. We were motoring through the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal—the big one that does not come out at little Delaware City. A tremendous oceangoing tugboat thundered past us, pulling a barge. Dad, in a hooded slicker, stood at the rail, arms straight down at his sides, staring up at the boat as it passed, seemingly transfixed by the towering bridge and its red-and-white brightwork. I remember the boat’s name, Diplomat, gilded on its stern. On the aft deck, a brawny redheaded sailor was smoking, a young guy, with enormous arms folded across his chest. He seemed to be striking a pose as his gaze flicked across us. Dad seemed frozen in awe. I was struck by his raptness. Amused, touched. I admired his unselfconsciousness. But there was also something alarming about his motionlessness, his arms straight down like that.
• • •
TAVARUA HAD A LONG RUN as a dream wave. It was famous—famous in surf world, anyway—for its near perfection, but also for its exclusivity, for the fact that it was private. It was the one great wave on the planet that did not succumb to the tragedy of the commons. It didn’t become hideously crowded, effectively ruining it for everyone. The American-owned resort prospered. To surfers who objected to having a wave reserved for paying customers, the arrangement was a travesty. In principle, I sided with them. I had reported on privatization in different contexts, including municipal water in Bolivia and the maintenance of the Tube in London, and I was generally against it. I also had my own feelings about the resort, rooted in those prelapsarian days on the island with Bryan.
As a surfer, however, I was as susceptible as the next fiend to the fantasy of great uncrowded waves. We all live in a fallen world, I rationalized. I yearned to surf it again. As things turned out, the Fijian government, by then a military dictatorship, killed the Tavarua fantasy in 2010 when it abruptly canceled its long-standing “reef management” agreement with the resort. The waves were thrown open to the public, which meant, in effect, surf-tour operators. Boats packed with surfers soon began racing to Tavarua from nearby hotels and marinas on any hint of swell, turning the lineup into the familiar Malthusian feeding frenzy.
Before that happened, though, I became a regular resort guest. It started in 2002. The way the resort worked, groups of about thirty rented the whole place for a week, with most groups returning year after year, and that year a California-based group invited me to fill a spot. I didn’t think too hard about it. I was turning fifty, and Tavarua called to me from well outside the range of my convictions, such as they were, about privatization. I wanted to surf it again while I still could.
The resort was low-key. Sixteen bungalows, communal meals. It seemed that the owners had done some blasting on the reef to open up the boat channel, but the wave out front was the same. Same rifling, too-good-to-be-true left flaring down the reef at hull speed. Surfing it was a sense-memory barrage. The blue swell breaking far up the reef, the intricate scrollwork on the face, the unforgiving coral. The critical moment that seemed to go on forever, the sensation of impossible abundance. I had lost a step or two in the twenty-four years since I last rode it, and the wave, particularly the takeoff, was as quick as ever. But I was crafty from long experience, and I could still make the wave, still ride it respectably. The lineup was no longer empty, of course. One had to share with fellow guests. But that was easy enough. The takeoff spot, which we had once found by using a crossed pair of extra-tall coconut trees, was now established by the reflection of a bar mirror in the resort’s restaurant.
On the island, I gravitated to our old camping spot. The fish-drying rack where I had slept was gone, but otherwise the spot was unchanged. The view into the wave, the islands beyond. The rough sand, the soft air. The deadly snakes, the dadakulachi, were a rarity now. I felt delivered to a pampered new world. There was cold beer. There were chairs. There was a helicopter landing pad where the fishermen had once stacked dry wood for signal fires. I wondered what little Atiljan, who had slept in a nest of green leaves, was doing now. Was he a fisherman with kids of his own? Most of the workers at the resort were villagers from Nabila, but only one or two were ethnic Indians. Fiji’s democracy had been smashed by a series of military coups mounted by ethnic nationalists from the Fijian side. Ethnic Indians had been turned into second-class citizens. The Tavarua resort had curried favor with the military regime by staging a professional surf contest at a time when Fiji’s sporting links to the world had been largely severed by international sanctions. When I asked a gentle young bartender from Nabila what she thought about the government’s moves against democracy and ethnic Indians, she shyly said that she supported the government. “They are for the Fijians,” she said.
After I asked around about Bob and Peter, our onetime ferrymen—I learned nothing—a couple of older fellows from Nabila, now working on Tavarua, figured out who I was. They treated me like a long-lost cousin, and they had a good laugh at my expense. I was the American who had failed to start a hotel. Each week, the resort put on something it called “Fiji Night,” with drumming and kava and speeches in Fijian by village elders for the guests. I found myself threaded into these speeches, made part of the history of the island and the coming of surfing. None of my fellow guests noticed, but the Fijians in the show all nodded knowingly, chuckling, and then gave me sympathetic pats on the shoulder when we met on the island’s trails. I imagined that they knew at a glance that I really didn’t have the right stuff for starting and running a business in Fiji. One of the American surfer-founders had apparently provided the capital. He had long since withdrawn, selling out to other investors. The other founder was the tough guy, responsible for building this little empire in the tropical wilds. He now lived in California and visited only occasionally. He had a big house carved out of the jungle on the south side of the island.
I dreaded writing to Bryan about my visit. He was waiting for a report. As it turned out, he did not object, as I thought he would, to my availing myself of the resort’s privatized, commodified, and expensive waves. (Room and board ran about four hundred dollars a night.) He didn’t even seem to retch at my description of Fiji Night. What disgusted him most, strangely, was an image of a volleyball game between staff and guests. “I imagined ‘smile on face’ and pure venom inside,” he wrote. But his reaction to my report was complex and thoughtful, full of anger, jokes, jealousy, awe, and, as always, self-criticism. He vowed to make more frequent trips to the Oregon coast, where he occasionally went to surf.
The resort’s owners had discovered a second wave, also a long left, out on an open-ocean reef about a mile south of Tavarua. They called the spot Cloudbreak, and it was actually what made the resort viable. The island wave, though world-renowned for its flawlessness, was too fickle to support a carriage trade with a one-week turnaround. It could easily go a week without breaking properly. (The owners had dubbed it, unforgivably, Restaurants.) Cloudbreak, which caught every passing swell, was far more consistent. Boats ran out there all day long, anchoring in the channel while guests surfed. Cloudbreak was bigger, shiftier, more rough-edged than the island wave, with many more imperfections. It had a number of different takeoff spots, and plenty of unmakable waves. But Cloudbreak had its own magnificence. I started rising in the dark, catching the first boat, and riding Cloudbreak at dawn, slowly figuring out lineup markers. The hills of Viti Levu, five miles east, could tell you, once you got some basic triangulations, where on the long, flat, brilliant reef you were.
Author, Cloudbreak, Fiji, 2005
I snapped a brand-new Owl out there that first week. The pieces went onto a large pile of broken boards rotting in the jungle behind the boatmens’ shack on the island. All those boards, I assumed, were Cloudbreak wreckage. The wave had bottomless reserves of deepwater power. It was like Madeira that way. But it didn’t scare me like Madeira did, partly because it was far more mapped out by other surfers in all conditions, but mostly because it had no rocks and cliffs. You could hit the bottom, particularly on the inside section, where it got as shallow as the island wave, but when you wiped out or got caught inside, you could always wash in across the reef. The violence dissipated, as it does most places, the farther you were swept in. At extreme low tides the reef came out of the water and you could actually stroll across it to a likely jumping-off spot. For that matter, there were lifeguards—the boatmen, who kept an eye on the guests. On big days they ran Jet Skis in the channel, swooping into the impact zone to pick up people in trouble. During that first week, a ski came for me twice. I waved it off both times—I was fine. I took Cloudbreak seriously, but my decade of Madeira trips, surfing places where washing in was often not a survivable option, had inured me, I realized, to more normal ocean perils.
I would never spend the kind of time on Tavarua that I had on Madeira. With Mollie now the center of our lives, I had no wish to. We could barely afford the trips I did take. Still, I became a regular, hitting it year after year, spending six, eight hours a day out at Cloudbreak. The groups I went with were a mix. There were Republican contractors from Florida, with their hard-charging sons, and film-business people, with their hard-charging sons. Young hotshots from Hawaii traveling on their sponsors’ dimes. Some of the world’s top pros were frequently there. Domenic came a couple of times in the early years. He was living in Malibu, in a happy second marriage, with four young children. He still cackled at my self-mockery, and it was dreamy to trade waves with him in the South Pacific. Surf-centric trips without his family soon stopped making sense for him, though. Bryan and I never even broached the idea of his going back. I made some friends on Tavarua, notably two Californians, Dan Pelsinger and Kevin Naughton, who were nearly my age and, like me, still could not get enough. We started taking lower-budget surf trips together—Mexico, Nicaragua, Indonesia. But the trips I trained for, saved for, lived for, were Fiji.
• • •
“PEOPLE I KNOW in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from.” Thus A. J. Liebling, in “Apology for Breathing,” a short, terrific essay. Liebling was pretending to apologize for being from New York, a city he loved lavishly and precisely. Now I’m one of those New Yorkers incessantly on the point of going back where I came from. But with me it’s not a matter of packing up or staying on, but rather of being always half poised to flee my desk and ditch engagements in order to throw myself into some nearby patch of ocean at the moment when the waves and wind and tide might conspire to produce something ridable. That cracking, fugitive patch is where I come from.
Indeed, this is a book about that myth-encrusted place.
A Web editor at the New Yorker, having marked my many sudden desertions of my post, suggested I try a blog about surfing around New York. I thought that sounded good. Truancy and production shortfall could be turned into salty copy, introducing readers to, as a deck-line might put it, an underworld of urban wave-chasers. Our queer devotions, frustrations, little triumphs, and large peculiarities, plus a few waterfront characters, plus photos, could probably keep a blog burbling along. I saw myself mentally composing pithy, arcane posts while straggling home, half-frozen, on the Van Wyck Expressway.
As a courtesy, I ran the blog plan past the guys I surf with most. “No,” said one. “Absolutely not,” said another. They didn’t want our spots exposed. They didn’t want to be outed as my sidekicks. Blogs were lame. Objections sustained, plan shelved.
I generally let people know when I’m working as a journalist. Memoirs are morally blurred that way. Most private citizens don’t expect to be written about, particularly not by their intimates. I’ve always, more or less, kept journals. But the notion of a book about my surfing life, particularly about the unsuspecting people I’ve chased waves with, is relatively recent. Few of my companions were warned.
Already embarked on the writing, I ran the idea, expecting the worst, past my New York surf crew. We were crawling home on the Van Wyck. They were surprisingly enthusiastic. For some reason, a book was to them less objectionable than a blog—less present tense, perhaps, less inherently privacy betraying.
“Will John be in it?” asked the Lobbyist.
He meant Selya, who was driving.
“I am a mere footnote,” Selya said.
Not true, as it turns out.
But here’s a true footnote: Barack Obama didn’t believe me when I told him where I went to junior high school. This was in early 2004, before he was very famous. I was writing a story about him and I had been teasing him about his having gone to Punahou School, which is the top prep academy in Hawaii. We were sitting in a Caribbean-themed restaurant in a small shopping center in Hyde Park, Chicago. “No effing way,” he said, laughing. (He didn’t actually say “effing.” But we weren’t on the record.) I did, of course, go for a while to Kaimuki Intermediate. But nobody there knew that I would write about them. Our lives were off the record. That’s the tricky part. Facts are easy.
• • •
MY DAD’S RAPTNESS at the boat rail wasn’t just raptness. It was Parkinson’s. The symptoms came on slowly, then not slowly. The disease carried him away from us, mentally. His life became a torment. He didn’t sleep for a year. He died in November 2008, in my mother’s arms, with his children around him. They had been married for fifty-six years.
My mother was flattened, as I had never seen her, by my father’s final year. Always thin, now she was gaunt. She resumed going out—to concerts, plays, movies—with friends, with me. She was still an enthusiast—I remember how intensely she liked Winter’s Bone, how thoroughly she hated Avatar—but her lungs began to fail her. She had bronchiectasis, a respiratory disease. It causes, among other things, shortness of breath. It sapped her strength. A lifetime of Los Angeles smog was implicated. We took her on vacation to Honolulu, renting a house in the old neighborhood near Diamond Head. Her room looked out on the water. Her three granddaughters curled up on her big bed with her. She could not have been happier, she said.
She and I had a funny moment the following summer. It was the last time she went to the beach—a cool, sunny afternoon on Long Island. She was so frail that we bundled her in blankets and tucked her in a sun trap, out of the breeze, overlooking the waves. Her granddaughters were tucked around her for extra warmth. I mentioned that the waves, though terrible, looked ridable. The west wind was kicking up a running, waist-high right just off the sand. “Go surfing,” my mother said. I didn’t have a board with me. But Colleen had a longboard in her truck. It was an enormous, ancient log, bought at a yard sale for purposes undetermined. Caroline, though rolling her eyes, gave me the nod. I ran out and caught a few waves. The log was ideal for racing the shorebreak, and I flew down the beach, throwing old-school moves on the ratty little waves till I crashed on the sand. I ran back to our little encampment in the dunes. My mother’s blue eyes were bright. I felt about ten years old—showing off for Mom—and she said, grinning, “You looked just like you did when you were little.” It was the antique longboard. Everyone else was chatting and laughing. Had they seen my waves? “No,” my daughter said. “Go get another one.”
As my mother became less steady on her feet, she walked faster. She had always walked fast, but this was different: a headlong tottering rush that made you want to run after her to prevent a crash. When she finally did fall, I blamed myself. We were coming home from the pulmonologist, and I left her alone, unsupported, for a few seconds on East 90th Street. I turned and saw her trying to negotiate a step that was too much for her. She toppled backward before I could reach her, cracking her pelvis. With that, she was bedridden. Mollie and I started spending nearly every evening with her. Old friends from California visited. Michael, who was now at the Los Angeles Times, came as often as possible. So did Colleen and her family. Kevin and his partner.
Most nights, though, it was just us—Caroline was stuck on a long federal trial. We were a cozy trio: Moll curled up with a book, my mother and I reminiscing, or watching TV, or solving the world’s problems. My mother retained a keen interest in my projects, and she did not euphemize when I showed her drafts that she found sluggish. Her wryness was intact. She had always made wicked fun of clumsy savoir faire, and one of her bits was to stick her tongue in her cheek, bob her head, toss her hair, and say, “See ya tomorrow.” That was what people who didn’t have much going on, whose worlds were small, said to each other, airily, on parting. One night, as we gathered our things to go, she gave me the old head bob and, to my amazement, said it—“See ya tomorrow”—with an extra crinkle of sad amusement. So we were that family now. Our world had certainly shrunk. My mother was changing. She could look right through me now. Fearless love, unwavering. She and Mollie seemed to be, if possible, even more deeply in tune. My mother didn’t believe in the afterlife. This was it.
Chronic nausea got her. It killed her appetite, and she wasted away. Her forward-lookingness faltered, finally. We scattered her ashes, and my father’s, at sea, off a place near Sag Harbor called Cedar Point, which they had often sailed past in their boat.
• • •
YOU HAVE TO HATE how the world goes on.
• • •
I FOUND MYSELF getting more reckless, even before my parents died. In Dubai, chasing a story about human trafficking, I stepped on the toes of Uzbek slavers and their local protectors and had to leave the emirate in a hurry. Reporting on organized crime in Mexico, I edged further into the lion’s den than I should have. This was the sort of work I had sworn off when Mollie was born. The same impulses were showing up in my surfing. I went to Oaxaca to ride Puerto Escondido, which is generally considered the heaviest beachbreak in the world. I snapped two boards and came home with a perforated eardrum. I wasn’t turning into a big-wave surfer—I would never have the nerves for that—but I was pushing into places where I did not belong. On the bigger days at Puerto, I was the oldest guy in the water by decades.
What did I think I was doing? I liked the idea of growing old gracefully. The alternative was, after all, mortifying. But I rarely gave my age a conscious thought. I just couldn’t seem to pass up even a slim chance of getting a great wave. Was this some backward, death-scorning way to grieve? I didn’t think so. A few weeks after my sixtieth birthday, I pulled into two barrels, back-to-back, at Pua‘ena Point, on the North Shore of Oahu. They were as deep and long as any tube I had ridden since Kirra, more than thirty years before. Both waves let me out untouched. Being adjacent to that much beauty—more than adjacent; immersed in, pierced by it—was the point. The physical risks were footnotes.
For obsessive before-it’s-too-late wave-chasing, Selya made an excellent companion. He turned forty and the leading-man parts started to dry up. He could still leap, and lift and catch his partners, and perform as well as he ever had, he said. But younger faces, younger bodies, were preferred. He had a big role in a 2010 Twyla Tharp show built on Frank Sinatra songs. The best number in the production, I thought, was his solo dance set to “September of My Years.” It was restrained, almost meditative, elegant, and nobody could miss the symbolism. “I wanted to make the solo very John,” Tharp told the Times. After 188 performances on Broadway, Selya took the show on the road as resident director, while still dancing in it. He was choreographing, teaching, writing a screenplay. And yet things were winding down for him as a dancer. I overheard someone at a party ask him about his upcoming projects. Selya mentioned an asteroid that was in the news; it was alarming people by coming too close to Earth. He was hoping for a direct hit, he said. That was his best-case career scenario.
He channeled his fury into surfing. He turned days of Long Beach dribble into skatepark-style clinics, milking waist-high waves for every ounce of juice. Was it possible that he was still improving? His attention to the finer points of technique was unblinking. He was driven and endlessly patient, both. Smoothing out his style, making it look easy, while also pushing harder. He saw performance subtleties that I had been missing all my life. West Coast guys, after a successful wave, ran a hand through their hair on the pullout, according to Selya. Australians, in the same situation, made the same claim by wiping their noses. This seemed too silly to be true, but, watching a surf video, he would say, “Nice! Now wipe your nose,” and, right on cue, the rider would do it. “Stylin’.”
Every nor’easter, if he wasn’t stuck in Denmark or Dallas, Selya was ready to run east or south, depending on the winds. He got subtle tips about which bars and jetties might be working from the Instagram posts of certain local pros, and they rarely steered us wrong. When Jackie was working out of town, Selya would go keep her company, but if she was anywhere near the coast he would take boards. He was in Boston for a series of swells that seemed to light up every cape in New England. His text messages were ecstatic.
One of those swells was Hurricane Irene. I caught the front edge of Irene at Montauk. It was excellent. Then I ran home to spend the night of high winds with Caroline and Mollie. In the morning, with the storm passed inland and tearing up Vermont, the winds swung west and I, with my family’s permission, drove alone to New Jersey. East Coast surfers have a ghoulish relationship with Atlantic hurricanes, panting eagerly as they rain destruction on Caribbean islands and, occasionally, the U.S. East Coast itself. Irene was bad that way. (Sandy was far worse.) New Jersey hadn’t been hit hard, but when I arrived the beaches were still closed, pointlessly, on the governor’s orders. (Chris Christie to the public, pre-Irene: “Get the hell off the beach . . . You’ve maximized your tan.”) The surf was big and clean, the wind dropping. I parked a few blocks inland, tiptoed to the coast, and surfed for hours. My favorite wave in the East, a wailing right off a jetty, started to work in the late afternoon. It was almost too big, but I was alone in the water, which meant I could pick my waves carefully from the groomed, multitudinous sets. I picked the ones that tapered to the north. They were dark and throaty and ridiculously good. There were police lights flashing, red and blue, in the gloom on shore. The whole scene had the flavor of a dream—except my surfing dreams are always marked by frustration or fear or a special brand of anguished almost-remembering, never by great waves actually ridden. I didn’t know if the cops were waiting for me, but, to be safe, I stayed out till dark, and then paddled two jetties north and slipped ashore there.
• • •
I USED TO THINK of my work as the antithesis of show business. Now I’m not so sure. Seeing my dad on the set, or out on location, when I was young, was like seeing his other family. A movie crew is a world, full of emotion, purpose, big personalities. People thrown together, getting intricately, tempestuously involved, temporarily. Let’s get this thing made. Most of my projects—long narrative pieces, certainly—have a similar arc. I lash myself to people I want to write about. We knock around together, talk our way through their world. Then, at some point, it’s published, the story’s out, we’re done. Strike the sets. Sometimes we stay in touch, even become friends, but that’s the exception. Selya lives his version of this with every show. I’m lucky: I have a home team, the magazine where I’ve worked for decades. Most of my friends, now that I think of it, are writers or surfers or both. I’ve always disliked mirrors, but when I catch my own eye in a reflection nowadays I often think I see my father there. He looks worried, even ashamed, and it pains me. He had so much drive. He once told me that it was all just fear of failure. When he was older, waking up in the hospital after a knee operation, he looked at me indignantly and said, “When did your hair go gray?”
Mollie has our attention in a way that’s different from what my parents paid me. She is adored, included, closely attended, carefully listened to. I used to worry that we were overprotective. When she was five or six, she and I were diving under waves on Long Island. I misjudged a bigger wave and lost her little hand. The moments after I came up and she was not in sight were for me a solid wall of panic. She surfaced a few yards away, looking scared and betrayed and crying, but no, she didn’t want to go in, thanks. She just wanted me to be more careful. I was more careful. I remembered my fetal meditations under the booming brown waves at Will Rogers, before I could even bodysurf. Was anybody watching for me to come up? I never thought so. Certainly you only learned your way around waves by getting your ass kicked for every mistake. But I couldn’t imagine letting my darling take her lumps that way. Luckily, although she likes to porpoise around, she has no interest in surfing. She does have, allaying my worries, a wide streak of independence that needs no encouragement. When her parents drop her at summer camp, they are the forlorn ones. She started riding the crosstown bus to school, alone, at twelve, with quiet joy. We’ve drawn the line, for now, at the subway.
Do I not think of my daughter when I take stupid chances? I do. In March 2014, I ran out of air, unexpectedly, under two waves at a once famous break called Makaha, on the west side of Oahu. It was a rainy, windless day. I had just finished a teaching gig in Honolulu and had a few hours before my flight home. Makaha was big, the reports said—ten to fifteen feet—but it sounded more manageable than the North Shore, and so I headed there. From the beach, all you could see was whitewater and mist. The ridable waves were outside somewhere, beyond the foam curtain. I hadn’t brought my gun to Hawaii, which was a mistake, I now saw. There were a few guys paddling out, angling through a wide, easy channel to the south, but they were all on massive big-wave boards. I had a thin, four-finned 7'2" that I loved—it was the board that had carried me through those two barrels at Pua‘ena Point the winter before, with the inside fins holding the scooped-out lower face like lancets—but it was obviously not the right board for today. I paddled out anyway. I figured I would regret not going out more than I would regret going out—and regret it in the corrosive, self-hating way that I still recalled from not paddling out at Rice Bowl when I was fourteen. It would be different, of course, if I could see the waves. At Puerto Escondido, on the biggest day I saw there, I never considered paddling out. People were surfing, but I would have drowned. I could see that plainly. At Makaha, a less fearsome break, I at least had to see what was out there.
It turned out to be weirdly beautiful. The channel, which was just big, smooth, well-spaced swells, felt momentous, orchestra-warming-up. The lineup, when it came into view, was an unexpectedly spacious field, quite uncluttered, at least during a lull, with a small clump of guys out at sea and another, smaller clump of guys maybe two hundred yards farther up the point. The near clump was gathered to ride the Makaha Bowl—an enormous end-section that was constantly featured in the mags and surf movies of my youth. The far clump was for Makaha Point, a rarely photographed wave. The two spots are connected, on big days, by an extremely long, hard-breaking wall that is rarely, if ever, makable all the way across. The Bowl lost its cachet long ago to hollower big waves that break closer to shore. The Point retains a strong underground rep. I took a cautious route to the Bowl, staying out in deep water to the south. Smaller waves, which were not small at all, were steadily breaking across the inside, obscuring the shore. I kept a wary eye on the horizon. The rain was light, the sea surface glassy and pale, almost white—the same pale gray as the sky. Approaching swells were darker. The darker they were, the steeper they were. It was all on an unusually precise black-and-white scale.
The group at the Bowl was, on average, old. A couple of guys were at least my age. Nearly everybody was on a gun. The mood was both giddy and serious, not unwelcoming. I got the impression that these guys, most of them West Oahu locals, lived for these waves. I followed the pack, moving out as big sets approached. When the swells turned dark far out at sea, I sprinted for the channel. As waves got ready to break, the faces turned practically black. My board was completely inadequate. There were only two or three guys who really wanted the biggest waves. An older Hawaiian on a huge yellow gun stroked calmly into several monsters. I caught three waves in three hours. I made all three, but each drop was late, and exceedingly sketchy, my board fluttering under my feet. On all three drops, despite myself, I screamed. My waves weren’t especially big, and I didn’t surf them especially well.
There were a couple of cleanup sets: twenty-foot walls breaking way outside, in deeper water. We were all caught inside. I stayed calm, diving early and deep. One of those tore off my leash. A lifeguard on a Jet Ski, idling in the channel, dashed into the impact zone when boards or leashes broke. He retrieved my board from inside. As he handed it over, he gave me a long look, but all he said was, “You okay?” I was half-ecstatic, thanks. I was scared, and on the wrong board, but I was seeing things out there that I would never forget. On the black wave faces, the colors of boards became important. The guy on the red board is not going. The guy on the orange board is going. See his orange board stuck on the black face, trying to get traction to make the drop. The old Hawaiian on the yellow board was painting the most brilliant, passionate strokes across the tallest, blackest walls. Some waves, just as they broke, went cobalt at the top, under the lip. Others, the big set waves that barreled in the peak, went a different, warmer shade of navy blue in the shadowed part of the maw. It was as though, at that point, the gray sky was no longer part of the color scheme, as if the ocean was providing its own submarine hues.
Then there were the guys at the Point. They were shortboarders. The waves up there were not quite as big as the Bowl behemoths, but they were long, long, roping gray walls, with these tiny figures falling out of the sky, pumping down the line, deep in the shadows under the lip, ripping huge, heaving waves with a kind of respectful abandon, surfing at the very highest level. Who were these guys? I was too scared to paddle up there, and I would never in this life surf like that, but seeing these things filled me with joy.
My little fiasco at Makaha came partly from impatience, partly from watching those shortboarders, and partly from a deeply foolish leap of faith. I was like a somnambulist, regressing. I left the channel edge of the Bowl, where I had been hunting last-second on-ramps, and paddled deep into the impact zone. Big gorgeous waves, coming down from the Point, were regularly roaring unridden through there. They looked catchable, possibly, on my board. They were empty because their takeoff point was in a no-go area, inside the Bowl and upcoast—the absolute wrong place to be when a big set came. I snuck over there on a little bet with fate: that I would snag a great wave before the next big set came. It was a bad bet, a lazy bet, and I lost. The waves that caught me inside were mountainous. I thought I might be okay because the water still felt deep. I swam down hard, but couldn’t escape the turbulence. Great columns of violence fired downward and pummeled me. I didn’t panic, but I did run out of oxygen. I had to climb my leash long before I thought it was safe to do so. It was difficult to catch a breath when I surfaced—there was too much foam and whiplashing current. But I only had time for a couple of breaths because the next wave was bigger and already breaking, preparing to obliterate me. That was when I had a very clear thought about Mollie. Please. Let this not be my time. I am needed.
It was age, I later decided. My quick calculations, my solid intuitions about my own lung capacity were off. I survived that second wave, obviously, but again ran out of oxygen many seconds before I expected to. The interval that day was long, which helped me avoid a two-wave hold-down, which I would probably not have come up from. As it happened, the third wave was smaller. I scrambled back to the channel. I felt peaceful afterward. Ashamed of myself, deeply exhausted, but newly decided not to do this again—not to bend my neck, not to commend my soul to the ocean at its most violent in the hope of some absolution. My nose was still dripping seawater in the taxi home from Newark.
• • •
IF I’M NOT on the road or surfing locally, I try to swim a mile a day now in a basement pool on West End Avenue. This humble routine, and the dry-land workout that goes with it, are my surf salvation. Back when I could get away with it, I subscribed to Norman Mailer’s view that exercise without excitement, without competition or danger or purpose, didn’t strengthen the body but simply wore it out. Swimming laps always seemed to me especially pointless. But I can’t get away with that attitude now. If I don’t swim, I will be a pear-shaped pillar of suet. My regular slog through the chlorinated cross-chop of the water aerobics class is all that stands between me and a longboard-only existence. Forget big-wave-level lung capacity. I just want to be able to paddle, and pop to my feet. When I first felt too old to surf, whipped and discouraged in Madeira in the ’90s, I had never swum a lap or touched a barbell. I’m more physically fit now than I was then. But the pop-up still gets trickier, more effortful, every year. This isn’t even maintenance, as Selya would say. It’s just trying to slow the rate of decline.
Selya, a true son of the Upper West Side, thinks Jerry Seinfeld is a genius. Seinfeld, who doesn’t need to work, still does stand-up comedy, fine-tuning his bits obsessively, averaging close to a hundred shows a year. He says he’s going to keep doing it “into my 80s, and beyond.” In a recent interview, he compared himself to surfers: “What are they doing this for? It’s just pure. You’re alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You’re always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you’re going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form.”
Selya recently developed arthritis in one hip. He could still dance, he said, and teach, but he couldn’t surf. It hurt too much. He got resurfacing surgery. During the period when his hip wouldn’t let him surf, he still came along on wave runs. While the rest of us surfed, he bodysurfed. It beat being stuck on land, he said.
• • •
TOWARD THE END of my ignominious run as a paying customer on Tavarua, I destroyed the last of my Owl boards. Cloudbreak first bent it, opening hairline cracks across the bottom. Then, while I was riding a wave, it abruptly stripped four feet of fiberglass off the planing surface, all the way back to the fins, one of which tore out. This was in 2008, late in the week, and the swell was building. Selya, as luck would have it, had also brought an Owl to Tavarua that week as his big-wave board. His was blood-red but otherwise identical to mine. After the morning session that trashed my board, a nasty little north wind came up. It would be side-onshore, a terrible direction, at Cloudbreak. The boats stopped running. I wanted to go take a look, at least, but no one else was interested. I was suffering from the mania that Cloudbreak often infected me with. I needed to go. I talked a couple of boatmen into running me out there. Selya loaned me his Owl, in case we found something. During the run across the channel, the north wind quit and the sea went glassy. I was thrilled, though the boatmen remained noncommittal. Selya, I later learned, planted himself in a watchtower, a little shaded platform above the trees on the southwest side of the island. He kept binoculars on us the entire time we were gone.
As we pulled up to Cloudbreak, the waves looked phenomenal, I thought. Some residual bump from the north wind, maybe, but cleaning up fast and pumping. It was a couple of feet bigger than the morning, and the lines of the swell were as long and unbroken as I had ever seen out there. One boatman, a square-shouldered goofyfoot named Inia Nakalevu, jumped in the water with me. His partner, a Californian named Jimmy, stayed in the boat, which he moored in the channel. He might join us later, he said.
My first two rides were warm-ups, testing the board, testing the wave. The board was perfect—stable but loose, familiar, fast. The waves were meaty, double-overhead, bending far down the reef, extremely fast. I rode them carefully, made them easily. Inia was paddling, I noticed, extra-hard after his waves, shaking his head. I knew the feeling: this was too much, too good. There was still a little chatter on the face, but it only increased the sensation of speed. My third wave was bigger, more critical. I rode deeper, under the shadow of the lip, doing long-radius speed pumps, going as fast as I knew how to go. It was not a complicated, technical barrel. I just had to keep the board going flat-out and stay away from the bottom, where the lip was landing with a continuous loud crack. I finally raced out into sunlight far inside, and did one last S-turn to exit before the wave shut down on shallow reef. Coasting to a stop in the flats, I tried to remember the last time I had ridden a wave that good, that intense. I couldn’t. It had been years.
Pride goeth, and I took my next wave far too lightly. I drove extra-hard into my first bottom turn, not bothering to look over my shoulder to see what the wave was preparing to do but concentrating on my unusually all-out turn. The nose of my board must have caught a stray bit of north chop that I never saw. I went down hard, and so quickly that I didn’t even get an arm up to protect my face. The side of my head struck the surface with such force that it felt like I had hit, or been hit with, a solid object. The wave shrugged me off; it did not suck me over. I had managed this high-speed splat before the wave was even ready to break. I reeled in the board, started paddling, head ringing, stunned. I coughed and saw blood. It was pooling low in my throat. It didn’t hurt, but I had to cough it out to breathe. I reached clear water and sat up. I kept coughing blood into my hand. The ringing in my head diminished. Now it just felt like I had been slapped.
“Bill!” Inia had seen the blood. He wanted to head for the boat. “Can you paddle?”
Yes, I could paddle. I felt fine except for a headache and the urge to cough. I was okay, I said. I wanted to keep surfing.
“No, you cannot.”
Inia looked frightened. It was his job to look after guests. I felt bad for him.
“I’m okay.”
Inia looked into my eyes. He was in his late twenties—a man, not a boy. His gaze had surprising weight. “Do you know God, Bill?” he asked. “Do you know God loves you?”
He wanted an answer.
Not really, I murmured.
Inia’s frown changed. Now it was my soul, not my cough, that concerned him.
We made a deal. We would keep surfing, but he would stay close to me—whatever that meant—and I would be careful, whatever that meant.
The swell was getting bigger, the lines even longer. We paddled over a very big set that looked, from the back, like it closed out. Inia studied it. Another worry.
My head felt fine now. I wanted a wave. There was a great-looking wave coming, already cracking far up the reef. “No, Bill, not this one,” Inia said. “It closes out.”
I took his advice and paddled over it. The next wave looked identical. “This one,” Inia said. “It’s good.”
So this was what our deal meant. I would rely on Inia’s judgment. I turned and dug for the wave. His judgment was extraordinary. The wave I caught peeled down the reef. The wave before it, identical to my eye, had in fact, I could now see, broken all at once. I surfed conservatively, just heading for the greenery. When I pulled out, I saw that Inia was on the wave right behind mine. So this was how he was going to stay close to me. He was surfing hard, right at the edge of his ability—the opposite of conservatively. His expression was ferocious, his eyes like searchlights. Inia, I saw, had it bad.
As we paddled back out together, I asked, did God love everyone?
Inia looked delighted. The answer was an emphatic yes.
Then why did He allow war and disease?
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
Inia was a lay preacher, with a mind full to the brim with scripture. He was grinning. Bring on the theological debate. He would convert me yet. This was a double reverse Hiram Bingham, I thought, with the dark-skinned evangelist surfing his brains out.
And so it went. Inia called me off some waves, called me into others, and he never got it wrong. I couldn’t understand what he was seeing, couldn’t see the distinctions he was making. It was a supreme demonstration of local wave knowledge. It was also keeping me safe. I tried to surf prudently, and I didn’t fall off once. I saw Inia, going for broke, get a huge barrel. After he pulled out, he said it was the best wave of his life. Praise the Lord, I said. Hallelujah, he said.
Selya later told me that all he could see, from a mile away, were the takeoffs, his tiny red board bright against light green waves. After that, as the waves bent onto the reef, there were only our wakes: thin white threads unspooling down the line.
The waves kept pouring through, shining and mysterious, filling the air with an austere exaltation. Inia was on fire, as a surfer, as a preacher. Did I still doubt? “We will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam.”
I continued to doubt. But I was not afraid. I just didn’t want this to end.