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I check out the way the waves are breaking, how good their shape is, what kind of shape—Barrels? Peeling into long rides?—and where I can paddle out and catch waves no one else really sees. I check out the bottom at places I haven’t seen as much. Rock reef? Coral reef? River mouth? Sand bottom? Shallow? Deep? A point break? Every type of bottom produces a different wave. I look at how the wind is moving the water around, what the currents are like, if there are rocks sticking up [out of the water], and how the waves are going to hold up once I take off. I don’t really think about what I’m going to do until I take off, but I have an idea when I’m studying the surf. Sometimes you just have to get out there and know that you’ll do the right thing when it’s time.
Clay’s surf sessions often begin long before he paddles out. Sometimes they start a night earlier, when he hops on his computer and logs on to Surfline.com, Weather.com, and the official NOAA website to study wave forecasts and marine readings, particularly the buoys positioned off Kauai, the Big Island, Maui, and Oahu. Located miles out to sea, the buoys indicate the strength of incoming swells by their size and interval.
Whenever he sees wide, consistent intervals on the screen, Clay’s face lights up: it is a sure sign of good waves. His energy surges, he rubs his hands, and the pure joy of surfing and being at one with the sea rushes through him, a joy countless people rarely feel in their lives or occupations. It is the joy of connection, between a man, his most primal instinct, and his element—water. All of this, with hours left until the session itself. Can it get any better?
Clay pores over the other data like a crazed scientist to determine direction, tidal and wind conditions, and what breaks will best receive the swell. Then he shifts into professor mode. “On Maui, you always have to watch the easterly trades; they blow all the time. They make it choppy in a lot of places. You might get six-foot surf, but it’s sketchy because of the wind,” he says.
He runs the information through the virtual computer of his mind, which remembers every good wave, break, swell direction, and environmental circumstance that created all of the above. This unfettered brilliance is something that those outside Clay’s tight nest of friends and associates rarely, if ever, see, but it is a brilliance to behold. “I check out the way the waves are breaking, how good their shape is, what kind of shape—Barrels? Peeling into long rides?—and where I can paddle out and catch waves no one else really sees. I check out the bottom at places I haven’t seen as much. Rock reef? Coral reef? River mouth? Sand bottom? Shallow? Deep? A point break? Every type of bottom produces a different wave. I look at how the wind is moving the water around, what the currents are like, if there are rocks sticking up [out of the water], and how the waves are going to hold up. I don’t really think about what I’m going to do until I take off, but I have an idea when I’m studying the surf. Sometimes you just have to get out there and know that you’ll do the right thing when it’s time.”
“Clay has the ability to read waves like someone that has been surfing for a lifetime,” notes Les Potts, a surfer since the late 1950s and a longboard legend to three generations. Adds Mitch Varnes, “I’ve spent many evenings at Clay’s house when he’d be fixated on the Internet, and marine charts and Surfline and buoy readings and winds. He pours his brain into the ocean. Clay’s as smart as or smarter than any surfer when it comes to breaks, how waves work, and how the conditions will be on any given day.”
He’s also as happy as any person alive when he’s working it out—and even happier if he sees big surf approaching. Anyone seeing him in this space can’t help but ask: What can possibly be a better guarantor of lasting happiness than living in the moment like this, all the time? Especially when playing in the seventy-five-degree ocean?
The next morning Clay departs from his usual habit of sleeping till midmorning and rises at daybreak. An exquisite spinal tingle courses through his body. He taps his hands on the steering wheel to blaring music as he races toward the Pacific. He talks a mile a minute, his voice rising and arcing like one of his aerials. He’s amping, stoked beyond containment. It’s going to be a great day. On days like this, his performances can change the way people view surfing, including their own abilities.
“When I see Clay surfing—and keep in mind, I’ve seen a lot of surfing, all the contests with Cheyne, with Clay, my own parents when I was growing up—I am in awe,” Jill says. “Even the way he walks into the water, even walking on the rocks. It blows me away. It’s not just the way he anticipates the wave, but before he gets wet; just the way he gets ready. He’s probably already in the water and ripping in his head. You know how you see surfers who say, ‘Oh, it’s breaking over there, I’ll just paddle over’? Clay processes in such a different way.”
Carolyn Jackson has observed his routine plenty of times as well, and she remains as amazed as Jill. “Prior to him getting in the water, you can see the enthusiasm in his body. He’s getting ready to be part of it. What I noticed is that Clay reads people, which is so unusual with people with Asperger’s. He can go into a room, and he is taking in how you think of him. He’s picking up your vibe. He has this ability to energetically feel what somebody is thinking about him. He does the exact same thing when he goes into the ocean. He’s reading the ocean.”
Reading the ocean. The phrase surfers commonly use is “checking out the surf,” but that description is woefully inadequate when it comes to Clay’s genius-level perception and encyclopedic knowledge of ocean conditions. He reads the sea with the expertise of a lifelong oceanographer, the intuition of a magician, the instinct of an athlete, and a laser-sharp eye for the slightest nuances in movement.
This became readily apparent while driving along the Maui coast one day, as Clay studied a ten-mile stretch in his search for quality waves. His approach is somewhat reminiscent of an Arctic peregrine falcon, which spends the short Arctic summer constantly hunting for hares, lemmings, and other small prey to feed its ever-hungry young. Likewise, Clay hunts for waves to feed a mind and spirit that will starve without its regular allotment.
“When it’s small on Maui, I look at the wind,” he explains. “I can kind of tell from the wind direction and buoy readings what it’s doing on all the islands. If it’s a north wind, then I know Ho’okipa will have something. That’s the most consistent spot on the North Shore [of Maui], where I surfed a lot of contests when I was a kid. It picks up north swells. Even Hana catches a north; since it’s so far southeast, it catches the north straight on. Hana catches east and south too. It doesn’t get the west, because west of Hana is land . . . but we don’t get the west either, and we live on the west coast! It sucks. Molokai and Lanai block it. We get all these little pop-gun waves. It has to be a humongous west swell to even get in here; you have to go to Oahu. But Kauai gets everything; I think it’s the best island for surf, the most consistent every day. It’s bigger than anywhere else too, because it’s the furthest island out [in the Hawaiian Islands chain], and it faces the open ocean. There’s a lot more to choose from.
“On Maui, north is the best direction. Once swells get past Molokai and hit the north-facing breaks, it’s good. We get good north and northeast swells. We’ll get the north swells first, and sometimes the east, although the Big Island can get those first. I have a friend who lives near Hilo, on the Big Island, all rainy and green, and he calls me and tells me about these slabby waves that break into really shallow water, waves that only boogie boarders would normally ride. I like those kind of waves.”
“Clay is part oceanographer, part fish, and part meteorologist. He’s beyond what most people think of as wave knowledge,” Adam Klevin says. “He’s got it mapped out. He’ll go, ‘I’m going to get up at nine, and I’m going here because of the tide, then I’m eating lunch . . .’ He’s got it down to a science.
“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve gone to film, and I look out and say, ‘This is crap, it’s all wind chop, there’s nothing to shoot,’ and Clay says to me, ‘I see something; just start filming.’ I go through the footage later, and he’s gotten a half-dozen tube rides no one else would ever have seen coming. He reads the ocean better than any surfer I’ve ever known—and probably better than anyone they’ve ever known.”
When Clay was being interviewed for the Little Tikes “Not So Bored of Directors,” he elaborated on his relationship with the ocean. “Yeah, I definitely see the ocean as a playground for me, because I read waves and that’s what surfers do, we’re like artists, we paint pictures on waves,” he wrote. “We’re artists. We read waves like a book. It’s just like a book on a playground, we look at the waves and the waves are our playground but we read them like books.
“I’m probably just so comfortable because that’s where my comfort zone is, in the ocean. That’s when I’m having the most fun. I’ve been in the ocean since I was little and I’m a Cancer, which is a crab and I used to run rocks and find seashells on the beach for years before I surfed. I was always right on the ocean, so I knew one day I was gonna go out there and that would be my playground, and it truly is.”
For years, many have wondered how Clay so consistently slots himself in sections of waves no one else can access, how he perceives those shelves, folds, creases, pulses, pockets, ledges, striations, and “slabs” that pop up out of nowhere. He views crappy blown-out chop as an opportunity to find a hidden nugget. These nuances are surfing’s equivalent of the minutest cracks on a sheer rock face, unrecognizable to all but the most expert.
“I’d say Asperger’s has something to do with it,” he points out. “I focus a lot more and go off feeling. With Asperger’s, you have a lot more sense of feel with the one main thing you like to do, and my thing is surfing. It has definitely helped me because I’m so critical about it.
“The waves work with me. They know I have to be out there; I can’t handle it when I can’t get in the water. When I get out there, we’re together again. My friends look at me like I’m weird, but when I feel the ocean and the ocean feels me and we start working together, well, then the waves come to me and I ride with them.”
“He’s not going in there to catch a wave. He’s going in there to be part of a wave,” Jackson adds. “If you take a long look at how he approaches surfing, and how he gathers and uses his knowledge, then you will see the magical side of Asperger’s open up before your eyes.”
The legion of admirers continues with his girlfriend. “His connection with the ocean is beyond anything I’ve seen before,” Jade says. “One thing me and my dad always trip out on is when he is paddling back out for another wave, and there’s waves breaking past him, he tends to stop and sit on his board and get the view from the barrel. Then the wave just breaks straight over him and he goes right through. Anyone else would be getting sucked over the falls and smashed. He always knows where to be and is so fast to jump to his feet and already be standing in the barrel.
“Even in small, sloppy surf you wouldn’t even think twice about going out in, he paddles out and gets five barrels. I watch him with his GoPro camera, mounted to his board or a helmet, in one-foot shorebreak. The way he sits in front of the wave, studying the face of it to see what it’s going to do, he will end up nailing a shot!”
Mary Anna Waldrop Enriquez believes that Clay’s superior perception of ocean and wave conditions and his interactions with them are parts of a larger gift he possesses: living completely in the present. “Clay sees the world around him in 360 degrees,” she says. “When it comes to the ocean, he sees it from the other side of where we do, and he feels himself in it. When you’re talking about reading the ocean, he is superior, because he sees and anticipates the subtlest things about water conditions and waves. Not only anticipates, but he knows where and how to look.”
In his book Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child, author Thom Hartmann describes the 360-degree mind in both primal and current terms as he seeks to dispel the prevailing notion that ADD and ADHD kids are problematic and need to be medicated to be in a classroom. “It’s completely unnatural to be stuck in a classroom chair for five or six hours a day,” he said in a 2002 interview with Robert Yehling. “Deep down, we’re hunter-gatherers. Our ancestors had to be constantly alert and aware of everything around them. It was a matter of survival. If they thought too far ahead, or worried about what happened yesterday, they could die of starvation or be killed. Kids are naturally like that; when they play, they play with the mind-set of a hunter. When we start forcing them to sit in a classroom for four, five, six hours a day, as young as four years old, they grow fidgety and their attention wanders. Then they’re diagnosed with ADD or ADHD and put on Ritalin. Truth is, they’re just being true to their instinctual hunter’s mind.”
Clay’s ability to recall every significant wave he has ridden over long stretches and utilize the lessons he learned on subsequent rides in similar conditions calls to mind the second half of Hartmann’s description: gatherers. Attwood, Enriquez, and Jackson concurred in separate comments that the Aspie mind has a penchant for collecting and possessing items that pertain to a particular fascination or interest. Or, in Clay’s case, collecting waves. “His ability to recall reminds me of Rain Man,” Enriquez says. “It is such a powerful, powerful gift. First and foremost, we need to honor it. I think it’s sacred; absolutely sacred. Clay’s recall happens every second of every wave, along with the 360-degree view he uses to see and feel how everything feeds into that moment—and to anticipate it. Snap of the fingers. That instantly.”
“He does remember almost all the waves he’s ever surfed,” Jackson adds. “Many surfers do that, but with him, it’s a lot more detailed, and the knowledge is fully retained, like data in a computer, to be used later. He’ll have people filming him, and he’ll watch it over and over and over again. He’s connecting with the rhythm. He doesn’t think like some people, who are going to do different kinds of freestyle maneuvers. He’s really getting into the motion. That’s why so many people really want to watch him, because of that connection.”
Another sunrise. Another day. Another surf inspection. Clay heads off to Scorps outside the south end of the Kapalua Resort, the steep, fast-breaking wave that he thoroughly enjoys surfing . . . when it’s breaking.
“Scorps is kind of fun, because it’s a little slab,” he says. “It’s kind of far out there, but it’s a short little barrel wave, a steep little takeoff. It throws out and hits this shallow reef, and breaks real quick, so it’s this quick little barrel. Then it kind of dies out, so you just cut back and . . .”
A smallish wave hollows out and breaks, a welcome sight during a week when Maui bore a better resemblance to the Gulf Coast. His eyes jump and gleam. “See that little right? Spit—spit—see that? You can cut back on that, and carve it . . . see how the next wave slabs up? Then it spits you out on the reef and you’ve got to watch yourself to not get cut up. It doesn’t have to be very big to have fun out there.”
He mentally departs from the grassy hillside on which he’s standing, his entire focus situated 200 yards offshore. “There’s a set! Look at the set coming! Look at the first one barreling . . . here comes one—look at this one, dude! See how you go underground when you’re in there, then it throws you into the shallow? Sometimes there’s a little left that goes into the bay, a re-form that happens when it gets really big—but you’d rather surf somewhere else . . . you don’t want to surf out here when it’s bigger than five or six feet. It gets too gnarly, closes out, and throws you on that shallow reef. This is a small wave spot. It’s the steepest small wave around. It’s best when it’s glassy, but the wind’s coming from a weird direction . . . see how the wave is balling up?”
On the daily ritual goes: stop at one location and read the waves. Study them and visualize the next ride, then study some more. When the waves prove insufficient, move on. All for a purpose. “In the water, it’s all about tuning in to what the wave is giving me,” Clay says. “When I get out there, the rest of the world is gone. Now I’m in my world. I feel and see the ocean in my head, everywhere inside me. I sweep it with my hands, and when I do that, I feel the push of the water. Or maybe the wind changes, new movement. Then I study the horizon and watch the bumps and look for little pockets where waves pop up.”
Clay’s former team manager at Quiksilver, Strider Wasilewski, is no stranger to riding waves of all shapes and sizes. He spent years as a professional surfer, surfing at hundreds of locations throughout the world and learning the ins and outs of surf conditions at a level few can approach . . . let alone exceed. Clay, he says, would “be reading waves and taking lines I’d never seen before. He does a lot of tactical surfing I’ve never seen anybody do. He does this no-paddle turnaround, takes off sideways, and makes it. He reads things in waves none of the rest of us can see. Sometimes he even reads these things from land.”
Clay could be considered surfing’s version of an expert reference librarian. He knows an entire collection on his chosen subject, from cover to cover, and can dispense insightful, helpful information whenever asked. While not the Dewey Decimal System, his mental cataloging is very proficient. Like reference librarians, he appreciates some “books” more than others and focuses even more intently on them to read between the lines. For Clay, those “books” are barrels. Tubes. Slabs. Shacks. They are the “promised land” for surfers everywhere. Since 2005, he has been regularly listed among the world’s top five tube riders by magazines on four continents, and with good reason. Clay is a first-chair maestro when he slots himself inside waves, dropping into them from all points of the compass.
“I always look for barrels. When I’m in the barrel, I feel like I’m in heaven. I don’t hear anything except the whoosh of the water. When I find a slab and get shacked, I never want to come out. Every time I do come out, I know I have to get back in there. So no matter what, I scratch around to find barrels. I have to.”
“He can see a barrel like nobody,” Klevin says. “He can read a barrel like nobody. And he can make a barrel—I mean, there’s not a day that goes by, no matter how shitty the waves are, that he doesn’t get barreled. I’ve seen him on one knee and one foot . . . he can make himself so little in the barrel. Clay is six-foot-one, and he squeezes into barrels that five-foot groms don’t get into unless they’re lucky. Clay’s big, but he’s got short legs. I’ve seen him knee-board through barrels. Unbelievable barrels. Just rising, falling, weightless, weightless, driving, driving, driving, on his knees.”
Another Asperger’s characteristic is his ability to focus until exhaustion sets in. He spends more time in the water than the average wave rider. Much more. World champions, peers, videographers, sponsors, photographers, and longtime friends all tell stories of epic Clay Marzo sessions when six, eight, or even ten hours passed without him offering any indication that he was done surfing. Three times he’s been rushed to the hospital for saline solution IVs after becoming dehydrated from prolonged sessions. The others might surf, ride to shore, drink or eat, paddle out again, return to shore after tiring, fuel up, make their way back into the lineup . . . and there would be Clay, focused on his next ride. “I sometimes sit out there until I can’t catch any more waves because I have to be out there and I can’t miss any good waves.”
“Clay knows where to be and when to be there,” Varnes says. “You see some of his sideways takeoffs in the tube, and even for me as a longtime surfer, it’s some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen. You can’t even think of stuff like that. He takes off sideways, he takes off under the lip, he free-fall drops, he stands up in the barrel, he’s just got this way . . . in his eyes, the waves come to him.”
While in Indonesia, Clay asked Slater about his apparent communication with the open ocean, how it seemingly delivers waves to him at critical times. “Clay, you already know,” Slater replied.
Klevin has seen and filmed more of Clay’s rides than anyone on the planet, especially in the past ten years. As an obsessive-compulsive himself, Klevin has meticulously organized and cataloged all of the footage, all of the rides. Just when he believes he has witnessed everything, something else emerges from the way Clay reads the slightest wrinkle in an oncoming wave.
“I’ve probably seen 40,000 of his moves—no exaggeration—and I know when there’s a really radical, full-rotation, fast, high one coming. Then he’ll see something in it and surprise the hell out of me,” Klevin says. “But you know what’s amazing? He can remember those clips, no matter when they were shot, and he plays them over and over so they become part of his muscle memory. So when the next chance sets up, when his wave knowledge kicks in and he positions himself, his instinct and body take over. Anywhere.
“The thing that impresses me about Clay is that he’s a reef warrior. He just doesn’t get hurt much, which is really rare for someone who takes the risks he does. That’s knowledge of the wave and the ocean bottom. I’ve seen him get hurt on the reef maybe three times. The kid can get dry-docked on the reef and then laugh about it. He’s like Houdini. He really is. Nobody can go unscathed like that, throwing himself into big airs over dry reef. Nobody! You would have cuts every day. That’s all the evidence you need as to how Clay has this sixth sense, how he knows when to pull in, when to get out, and where on the reef to bail, better than any surfer I’ve ever seen.”
Once, after yet another ride left his jaw flat on the rocks, Klevin asked, “How do you do that, Clay? Where you get in there, and it’s not even an open tube, and you’re feeling your way in there, and everybody thinks you went down and all of a sudden it flaps open again and you come flying out?”
“You gotta trust the wave.”
As Clay navigates through his midtwenties and he and Jade bring their lives closer together, it has become evident that his path forward again resembles the purity of a good surf session after years of confusion. There are very few road maps for how to handle global sports fame as a teenager, let alone a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome. His gift took him to the top of the world, but the constant demands for his time, the travel requirements, and the pressure of remaining a hero and idol to millions of kids took a toll, primarily because Aspies are not wired with any mechanisms for coping with constant attention and outside expectations. And the higher anyone’s star rises, the greater the expectations.
When Clay couldn’t cope anymore, he tumbled, but out of it emerged a man who knows his talents and limitations much better, who understands what makes him happy and what doesn’t, and who has found lasting love in his life, along with growing skills in expressing it and reciprocating it—a rarity for anyone on the autism spectrum. He’ll always have trouble coping with some mundane functions of daily living, but that comes with the territory. Now, as he adapts to the new direction of his career, he again finds purpose in personal appearances, whether he’s showing up for a four-day fashion photo shoot on a cold California beach in winter, visiting young surfers, or talking to autistic kids and their parents touched by his story.
Will Clay ever return to the competitive surfing arena on a regular basis? Probably not. When he’s finished with something, he proclaims to everyone that he’s over it, and that’s that. Finis. Will he continue to dazzle the media and surfers around the world with his displays of wizardry on the waves of the world? Absolutely. He will move forward as a proud free surfer, an alluring lifestyle that copped, among others, three-time world champion and current folk rock musician Tom Curren off the pro tour when he still had one or two more titles in his fuel tank. It’s happened before.
Most of all, Clay finds happiness and contentment to be his regular companions. Sure, he “redlines” in bursts of anger sometimes, but he has also come to understand where his frustration spikes and how to deal with it. He may not talk about it—especially not with those he doesn’t know, and even sometimes not with those he does—but all you have to do is watch the tall, blond figure cut his tracks on a wave to recognize what purity of joy and expression look like in the flesh. Of the many story lines that converge to form Clay Marzo’s young life, that might be the greatest of them all. Most of us, whatever our age, can only hope to feel that way someday.