Before that first big wave of his life, his wipeout, the hold-down, his near drowning, it had never occurred to Sharkey that he might fail. Was it Uncle Sunshine’s belief in him that made him reckless? Perhaps the man, being a kupuna, had challenged him, knowing the risks, so that he would take the wave and taste fear. You always find what you afraid of. Sharkey had not imagined being swung so high on a wave—balanced on its brow, suspended over the great vertical swoop of its face, looking down at the glittering plow of moving water and, losing his footing on the board, feeling terror, as though he were being thrown into its blade.
And that was only the beginning of the ordeal. The worst of it had come moments later, when, suffocated by successive waves, he had lost all sense of up and down in the wash. Though he’d gotten the leash off his ankle, he was not saved by quick thinking. What followed had been the result of the churning of the shore break, which had tossed him forward like a splinter of driftwood. He’d been lucky.
Seen from the beach, the distant sets had seemed smaller and rideable, not the canyon walls and sweeping ravines he encountered when he paddled out. Nothing at Magic Island, where the winter swell was less than head-high, had prepared him for this. Not even Uncle Sunshine’s casual warning had helped.
“I think maybe you wen’ wipe out,” he’d said, seeing Sharkey’s gashed arm afterward, the bruised flesh of his knees.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s good. Only two kine surfer, da kine wen’ wipe out already and da kine gonna wipe out bym-bye.”
“It freaked me out.”
Uncle Sunshine laughed. “Yah! If you say something different I call you a bull liar. Was a big wave?”
“Da kine,” Sharkey said.
He saw it again, fierce-faced, a monster, the smooth incurve below him, lengthening, fattening, defying him with an abyss—his feet slipping from his sliding board, falling into the slope of water and being sucked into darkness.
“Was epic yesterday,” Uncle Sunshine said.
And Sharkey remembered his face in the rearview mirror, streaked with tears, contorted by what he had just suffered; yet in that ugliness he was triumphant—he was alive. He had no way of explaining this feeling, but Uncle Sunshine seemed to guess it.
“Was one good lesson for you.”
Perhaps the experience of fear still lingered on his face, imprinted as a reflex of memory, a twitch of muscles that he overcorrected with a set of his jaw, making the afterimage of his fear more emphatic.
“You never forget ’um.”
Nothing could undo that shock, was what Uncle Sunshine was saying, but the failure made Sharkey strong, as no success would ever do. Something had died in him that day of the wipeout—youth and stupidity, maybe. He was older now, and for the first time—in the wipeout, the recovery, his tears, his sobs—he saw what bravery was: not recklessness but facing fear.
“I’m surfing today,” he said.
“Not here,” Uncle Sunshine said. “You gotta go back to the North Shore. Catch some big waves. They more less than yesterday, but they still big.”
“I don’t have a car. My mother’s using it.”
“Take the fricken bus like everybody else. Like normal people.” Uncle Sunshine grasped him by the shoulders. “You wen’ learn nothing more here on these manini waves. Go up to the country—you ready now.”
“You sure I’m ready?”
“I think.” Uncle Sunshine was nodding. “You got scared shitless, so yah, I think you ready.”
Then Uncle Sunshine put his face close to Sharkey’s, nose to nose, and breathed the ritual ha, and it was like a blessing and a sacred sendoff.
Sharkey stood out with his shorter board at the bus stop on Ala Moana, and the bus driver smiled at him in exasperation—crazy haole—and told him to sit in the back.
More than an hour along back roads to Pearl City and Kam Highway to Wahiawa; through the pineapple fields and the long descent to Hale‘iwa and the North Shore, to Waimea Bay, where he got off. And ever since the bluff above the pineapple fields he had studied the white ribs of surf and tried to read them, and hoped they were smaller than yesterday.
He was relieved to see that the surf had dropped, though some sets were ten or twelve feet. He carried his board down the beach, fixed his leash, and paddled out to the lineup, where surfers were bobbing on boards—locals, he saw when he drew closer.
“How’s it?” he called out.
No one replied, no one greeted him. All were watching the incoming sets. Sharkey paddled away from the others, so as not to intrude, to show respect; and when in turn they took the well-formed waves and vanished beneath them, Sharkey braced himself and straightened his board and positioned himself to thrust himself over the top—“charge it,” as Uncle Sunshine said.
His legs trembled as he found his footing and they were still unsteady as he rode the wave, breaking right, away from the rocks, at the inside spot they called Pinballs, on the slant of the slipping, diminishing wave to the middle of the bay. Timing his fall, he dismounted and snatched his board and ducked into an oncoming wave and paddled back to the lineup, and rode again, this time with steadier legs.
When he was done—ten rides, two wipeouts—he found his small pile of belongings—his T-shirt, his flip-flops—and took a shower at the changing room and walked to the bus stop with his board. Within minutes a pickup truck stopped, the driver gesturing for him to put his board in the back.
“Was more bigger yesterday,” the man said as he drove away.
“I caught some at Pipeline.”
“Ass good. Was big.”
They rode for a while, the radio playing indistinctly, a whisper vibrating in the glow of the dashboard. The cab of the pickup smelled of wet dog fur and greasy rags.
“You got a name, brah?”
“Joe Sharkey.”
“Sharkey.” The man lifted his head, looking pleased and smiling, and he revealed himself as a boy, not much older than Sharkey, but Hawaiian, with a mass of thick curls and a dark complexion and a blunted nose. “Thass a good name—Sharkey. Maybe a shark your aumakua.”
“What’s yours?”
“My aumakua is a monk seal.”
“Your name?”
“Eddie Aikau.”
He spoke his full name with unusual clarity, like an announcement, and nothing after that, a pause, as though waiting to be recognized—an odd and unexpected formality in the smelly cab of the old pickup truck, passing through Hale‘iwa.
In the extended silence the smell was stronger. Sharkey’s perception heightened, but his alertness gave him only the doggy odor and the rattle of the loose door latch. After the eager greeting—Thass a good name—he was a stranger again, though the young man was still smiling.
He finally said, “I wen’ ween the Pipe last year”—not as a boast but stating a fact.
Sharkey jerked to attention and faced him. “Really? No kidding? That’s fantastic—oh, man.”
And now Eddie Aikau became quiet, gripping the wheel, nodding a little, his mop of hair exaggerating the subtle motion of his head. His expression was a mixture of modesty and pride, pleasure showing in his eyes, his lips pressed together in satisfaction. He had said enough; he was a listener now, he looked receptive—it was Sharkey’s turn.
“How did you do it?” Sharkey asked, but did not wait for an answer. “That’s incredible. Who did you beat? How do you train?”
And he went on gabbling as Eddie Aikau tried not to smile. What excited Sharkey was that he was looking at someone roughly his own age—his own size, though obviously stronger in the shoulders, a boy like him, someone who excelled at the only activity in the world Sharkey cared about—not his equal but superior in skill, a winner, the boy he wanted to be.
Sharkey was still talking, but only to fill the silence and to disguise the eager gaze of his admiration.
“I go out every day,” Eddie said softly. “Even if no got waves I paddle to Hale‘iwa, five, six miles. If got waves, I surf all day.”
“That’s it?”
“I don’t do nothing else. Surfing is life, brah.”
“Yeah.”
“One thing more you need”—and here he tapped his chest.
“Heart,” Sharkey said.
“Heart, yeah. But other ting. Mana‘o.”
Uncle Sunshine had used the word, but Sharkey had been too shy to ask the old man its meaning. Yet with this easygoing boy he said, “What is that?”
“Mana‘o something inside you tell you what’s right or wrong,” he said, the fingers of his free hand resting on his chest.
“Gut feeling,” Sharkey said.
“Eh,” Eddie said in acknowledgment. Then, farther down the road, “Gas, grass, or ass—no one rides for free,” and Sharkey gave him a dollar.
Years later, reliving this experience, describing the ride to people, Sharkey said that it was more of his luck—pure chance—two surfers at the beginning of their careers, riding in the old pickup truck after a big day at the beach. Two young warriors, heroism ahead of them.
The moment was made magical by the passage of time—taking on a glow, a piece of personal history enlarged and given glamour in retrospect, another life-changing encounter, a memory that moved him whenever he remembered it and described it to the people who asked, “What was your first big wave?”
“It was a boy like me in an old truck, who gave me a lift on the road.”
He did not mention wiping out on the monster wave, being gashed by the fin of his board and lacerated on the rocks of the reef, or being choked by the second wave hold-down, or, back in his car afterward, sobbing, his face splashed with tears, amazed and frightened by his own whinnying and the sight of his pitiful face in the mirror. None of that.
He spoke of being dumped by a huge wave, and then, undaunted, paddling out and surfing until he’d gotten six good rides, returning the following day to surf again, and finally standing at the bus stop at sundown with his board, and the pickup truck slowing down—no other vehicle on the lonely road, and only one streetlight illuminating the encounter, the two boys meeting for the first time, the haole and the Hawaiian, and riding into the record books.
“. . . and he said, ‘I’m Eddie Aikau,’ and we drove away together.”
So much had happened since, and he’d told the story so many times, that Sharkey could not say for sure whether Eddie had dropped him in Hale‘iwa or driven into town; whether they’d stopped for a beer or shared a joint; whether they’d met the next day or weeks later. Had Eddie said, “Sharkey—that’s a good name” that night, or had it been later, another day, less dramatic, just a casual remark?
Sharkey could not say. The fact was that he’d met Eddie and they’d become friends. Eddie had encouraged him, dared him, to take bigger and bigger waves, recklessly, because big waves were all that mattered, not the dances and cutbacks and hotdogging on average surf; you made your reputation on the rides through barrels and long steep drops on monster waves.
But when Sharkey looked back on his life he did not see failure or disorder or the tearful face in the rearview mirror. Nor doubt, hesitation, or retreat; he saw only conviction, a strengthening of resolve, a kind of nobility as he faced one wave after another, each one bigger than the last, the story of his struggle simplified in the telling, so much so that it sometimes seemed he could not say for sure who he was, or where he’d been, or how he’d gotten to win the Triple Crown.
And years later, after Eddie was lost at sea, paddling away from the overturned canoe Hōkūle‘a, to seek help, a memorial service was held and Sharkey was not asked to speak. At the time of his disappearance in the darkness and the wicked waves off the Big Island, Eddie was a devout and energetic Hawaiian, risking his life for his fellow crew members on the canoe, and Sharkey was pursuing his ambition to triumph in big-wave surfing.
“I was somewhere else, on a wave far away,” Sharkey said at the time of the Eddie Aikau memorial—the paddle-out, the casting of flowers in the enormous circle of surfers on their boards, slapping the water in honor of their friend.
Was it true that he was elsewhere? He could not remember. What mattered was that as a boy he’d met Eddie, a boy like him.
Big influence, he would say later of Eddie, after Eddie disappeared in the sea and there was no one around to dispute it. He conveyed the impression, one that a nonsurfer would understand, that Eddie had taught him how to move on the big waves, the secrets of Hawaiian wave-riding, consecrating himself to the surf. And for years, in the anecdotal way of North Shore surfers, he was associated with Eddie and won the contest that was held in his name at Waimea, saying in his acceptance speech, “I knew this great soul”—and the story of their meeting on the road, in the golden dusk, two boys headed for fame. “Destiny.”
What he did not say—the simple truth—was that he had always surfed alone. Going out every day, exhausting himself, surfing until nightfall and often in the dark, bobbing in the water, he learned the behavior of waves, their mood and curvature, how they lifted and curled, the ways in which a certain bellying just beforehand suggested slippage and speed. He learned to predict from the swell what a wave would do, by studying a break, reading it thoroughly, the inner life of its push, as if each length of wave were a line of poetry, each set a stanza, with its internal rhythm, so that he could insert himself into it—not waiting for the wave to accommodate him but something deeper, meeting it on his terms, finding harmony, becoming the wave.
Friendship with other surfers helped. The early advice of Uncle Sunshine had given him discipline, but while he insisted that all surfers felt a kinship and learned from each other and were mutually supportive, always spoken of as the North Shore hui—“da braddahs”—they were solitary on their wave and often resented each other, and had taught themselves to surf and become better through repetition, surfing every day, taking the biggest waves, because those were the waves that demanded the most agility and strength, the most nerve.
These young men, he knew—but didn’t say—pretended to be a tight group, and celebrated and drank beer together and preened for the girls. But they were alone—alone in the sea, alone in their lives, like the sea creatures around them, slipping through the ocean, the turtles and seals, the schools of fish and pods of whales you’d mistake for companions, not realizing that they always swam alone.
What mattered most in Hawaii was his being left alone—not embraced but allowed to be himself, as long as he was respectful. From his earliest days in the islands he was aware that he was a haole among locals, and, conspicuous, likely to be persecuted for his difference, or at least teased, and perhaps rejected. The rules were unspoken and arbitrary. He never knew whether he would be challenged by surfers in a lineup or threatened with a fistfight on the beach or simply yelled at—“Get off dis wave, haole!” So he learned to be circumspect, he took nothing for granted, he practiced humility, and this observance of protocol was as important as obeying the mood of the wave itself. After that, as an obvious haole, he needed to succeed on the wave, ride it well and repeat it, because he was watched.
The day that stayed in his mind as the turning point was not the one on which he met Eddie, or the one on which he rode his first big wave, or any day of sage advice from Uncle Sunshine—who was in any case confined to Waikiki with the other Beach Boys, seldom venturing to the North Shore. It was another day, of a random encounter which, looking back on it, seemed like a tribal rite.
The biggest waves at Pipeline broke to the right. Sharkey wanted to ride them but knew from whispers that local surfers kept everyone else away, as though observing an ancient taboo. Being forbidden from that portion of the Pipe meant that he might never learn the skills to ride it and prove himself—which was, all along, the whole purpose of the taboo, an expression of privilege and belonging and exclusion.
It had to have been months after getting to know Eddie Aikau, because he had his own car now, his board on the roof rack, and he routinely skipped school whenever the forecast promised big surf on the North Shore—a beautiful day, to hell with school, a sense of being a runaway as well as a trespasser. He lingered on the beach, watching the sets rise, and then dared himself to paddle out, to take a chance against the cluster of surfers astride their boards in the lineup, becoming more alert as he got closer to them. He heard their low barks over the gulp and dump of breaking waves.
Then, “Eh! Haole!” from one dark tattooed boy sitting on his board.
The others glanced at him, their heads jammed into their shoulders; they were neckless under their wet hair, and dangerous—water dogs.
“Get the fuck off my wave, haole!”
Sharkey prepared to paddle away—looked for a dip in an oncoming wave and began to work his way toward it. He had seen fights in the water, he had heard stories of outsiders being knocked from their boards and the boards themselves smashed. He lay flat and moved fast, and there came another shout.
“Joe Sharkey!”
At first he mistook it for hostility, it was so shrill. But he saw that the boy shouting it was Eddie—the wild hair, the knobby nose and big doglike jaw. He was beckoning Sharkey to the wave and in the same gesture calming the pack of other boys, who backed off.
So Sharkey was welcomed to the wave and allowed to surf it, and later, on the beach, Eddie said to the others, “Sharkey—he’s ohana.”