Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (20 page)

Go for it,
my adolescent brain whispers.
Yeah . . . why not?

I’m about a hundred yards away before any of the lobster-red tourists see me closing fast. Now it’s final-decision time. Shall I really grandstand? Accelerate hard and sail right in front of the boat? Or should I take their stern now, waving as I go by, then jibe and shoot across their bow, waving again? I opt for the full showboat route.

I zip by their stern with my bald head gleaming in the afternoon sun. Senior-citizen-at-the-attack mode. But as I start to pull off a clean jibe and cut back, my tired, old body remembers that it was run over by that eighteen-wheeler today. Everything hurts, and nothing works.

I perform a rare, Olympic-style, nine-point-five catapult and plant myself facedown with a splat. Right in front of the audience.

Amidst the hoots and hollers of the Kansas catamaran crowd, I manage a water start and slink away in the direction of the Lahaina shore. Glancing back, I can now see two small yellow dots in the distance. Don and Barbara’s sails. Good. I relax, knowing that my friends are not dead after all. I couldn’t go back if I tried.

But will we make it in time to call off the Coast Guard? We had left instructions at a local office that if we hadn’t called in, safe, by 5:30
P.M.
, the Coast Guard should be notified. It’s already ten minutes after five, and I still have a hundred yards or so to get to the shore. Suddenly, there’s no wind, so I’m swimming my rig in and it’s taking forever.

Finally onshore, I start a desperate, dead-run hunt for a pay phone. Slipping and sliding, I lope through the lobby of the closest hotel, a quaint, pink, eleven-story high-rise. I find the phone after recovering my dignity from three consecutive butt slides on the ivory-slick, fake-marble floors, but the Hawaiian phone operator won’t take my Colorado calling card. Swell. I’m beat, still harness-clad and disheveled from all day in the water and probably look like a homeless old bum or a mental-hospital escapee.

Swallowing what little dignity I have left, I somehow manage to panhandle a quarter from a passing senior-citizen type in a polyester dress and nurse shoes. The call gets made.

Too tired to even clean up, I remember the ten-dollar bill in my pocket and lurch to the expensive convenience store, buy a six-pack of Diet Coke and a six-pack of ice-cream sandwiches, and collapse on the beach to wait for Don and Barbara.

Ten minutes later, the three of us are sitting by our rigs, feeling the wind drop fast and watching as the sun slips into the sea. Don and Barbara look as bad as I do. And we all hurt. All over. Everything on our bodies hurts.

We can hardly talk, but Don mentions, matter-of-factly, in a quiet voice, “You know, Warren, for awhile out there today I thought we were committing geriatric genocide.”

“Yeah . . . probably . . .” I say, “but where else but on the ocean could three senior citizens pull a stunt like that without getting arrested just for being too old? Not on the road. Not in the sky. Thank God there’s still someplace where you never get your license lifted just for being ‘over the hill.’”

Warren Miller

A Shot at the Title

Ninety miles off the west coast of Sumatra, the tiny Indonesian island of Nias is heaven for professional big-wave surfers. Twenty-foot waves wrap around a submerged rocky shelf and zipper evenly closed over a distance of nearly half a kilometer. The raw power and consistency are hypnotic.

I had never surfed when I arrived on the island two weeks earlier, but I liked the title “Surfer” better than my current one, “Punk.” The transition was simple. I splashed benignly about on waist-high waves falling off a surfboard I rented for a dollar. The only two “rules,” as I was told by a pro from Melbourne, were, “No more than one person per wave and never turn your back on the ocean. But it’s surfing, mate,” he winked. “Just have fun.”

And dangers? What if you hit the bottom? “Impossible,” said the Melbourne pro. “It’s forty feet deep out there. If you’re held under, just remember: There’s a flotation device—your surfboard—tied to your ankle.” He referred to the leg-rope, or leash, surfers use to remain connected to their boards. “Just grab the rope,” he said, “climb it to the surface . . . and you’re saved!
Tidak ada masala!
” He grinned, patting me reassuringly on the back.

Tidak ada masala
means “no problem” in Bhasa Indonesia, the national language. It’s something of a countrywide motto. Everyone says it. I said it all the time myself, almost continually even. “No problem” was a good attitude, I reasoned, for the experienced, veteran traveler I was so quickly becoming. Road washed out by landslide? Well,
tidak ada masala.
Typhoid? Hey, a little typhoid never hurt anyone,
tidak ada masala.
It would still be another six weeks before a compassionate teacher in Java corrected my pronunciation. I had not, evidently, been saying “no problem” but something more closely approximating “not smelly” or “not unanimous.”

The ocean reveals itself gradually. Spend half an hour just fifty feet offshore and it’s clear a different paradigm exists. Terrestrial prevailing logic no longer prevails. In an ocean rain shower, “Not enough sense to come in out of the rain” is a senseless proposition. If you’re in the equatorial ocean when it rains, there is zero incentive to be elsewhere. You were warm and wet; now you are warm and wet. Often in Nias it rains daily, and when it rains the ocean becomes an instrument. Drops strike still water, and the sound is bells. Syncopated, atonal—an aquatic gamelan orchestra. Surfers, we sit motionless on our boards, rain falling through us into the sea, willing conduits, lulled to trance, grateful in the serenade.

Lagundri is unique among the world’s big wave surf spots. Usually, large surf carries a self-regulating feature. Paddling a surfboard out from the beach through the break or impact zone is generally only capable for those who have the skill to be out there in the first place. It’s a life-saving filter on days with big waves. Weaker surfers and punks are left to flail about in the shallows.

But in Lagundri there is something called “the keyhole.” The keyhole is a rocky shallow reef, which juts out perpendicular to the shore providing the point for the famous Nias “point break.” To access the surf all you have to do— all anyone has to do—is walk out to the keyhole at the end of the point past where the waves are breaking and hop in,
tidak ada masalah.

But such a hop is irreversible, resolutely irreversible— tragically irreversible—because you then have to make your way back to the beach the only way possible: through the surf. The keyhole allows any punk at all to jump in right next to the pros.

For weeks the surf has been small, playful even, and a hop into the keyhole has resulted in no great threat. But overnight a swell arrives. Waves explode offshore with a force that shakes the bamboo
losmen
high on the beach.

Surfing a twenty-foot wave might be compared to jumping off a burning two-story house, landing square on your feet, and then having the blazing house chase you down the street.

For the experience level necessary to be in the water today, my two weeks of small-wave frolicking leaves me, by a conservative estimate, a decade shy. But with a mindless hop from the keyhole, I’m in the water.

The ocean is sentient. The messages it sends are often whispered, indirect, carried on a current or suspended in mist. Other times, however, the sea’s communiqués are harder to miss, even charitable. This is illustrated by my first wave today, which neatly strips me of my shorts and what feels like most of my body hair.

“Go home, punk,” is seldom more clearly articulated.

I heed the warning, whimper audibly either “not smelly” or “not unanimous” and paddle crazily for shore—not merely turning my back on the ocean, but mooning it as well. So much for the second rule of surfing. The universe, evidently, takes a dim view of repeated transgressions.

Victims of violent crime often cannot describe their attackers. Similarly, I have no memory of the next wave itself, only what follows: I’m alternately dragged and bounced along the seafloor, which, thankfully, is forty feet deep and out of reach. Obediently, I pull the rope that tethers the surfboard to my leg, anticipating sweet ascension. Instead, I’m soon holding the severed and decidedly surfboard-less opposing end.

Eventually, I am washed up onto shore. Sensitive travelers careful to learn the customs of their host country please note: Few gestures are more universal than a freshly lacerated naked man trailing rope from one ankle and lavishing the beachfront with bile.

When you are violently disrobed, you may, like many, find yourself reflective. You may consider, specifically, if you still have the right to declare “not unanimous.”

Merely floating on a surfboard in high seas does not make you a surfer, any more than running into a burning building with an ax makes you a fireman. To some degree, both activities are all the accreditation you need for the title “idiot.” Much of the distinction of “surfer” or “fireman,” for that matter, is awarded with one’s ability to exit the situation gracefully. Or at least with your shorts. Fools may indeed rush in, but only surfers and firemen sashay out.

Jim Kravets

Father Time

My father gave me a lot of things: my awkward gait, exceptional eyebrow coordination, a balding head (maternal grandfather, yeah right). He gave me his love for arguing and sense of righteous indignation. And while Dad wasn’t a believer in handing his kids their every wish, he also gave me my first surfboard.

It was the summer of 1981. My brother and I were spending our annual court-appointed and parent-approved two months in Texas. Most of these days consisted of hanging at my dad’s on Galveston Bay— nowhere near the island surf spots—the flattest portion of a notoriously flat body of water, with none of the excitement of our beach life back home. Pops must have predicted our postpartum depression, because when we arrived he unveiled a pair of new toys for my brother and I. They weren’t the best-made boards, but we thought they were perfect. And late that summer we spent a week in Florida, where I discovered the full realm of first-time surfing experiences—and where, just a few years later, my father would embark on a life-changing mission of his own.

My dad never joined in on that first surf trip. And I doubt we even stepped out of our narcissistic playground to invite him. But I know he tried surfing at least once before I was born when my parents lived in Del Mar. He had borrowed my uncle’s ’68 “Hawaiian V,” caught a couple waves, and on the way back out stepped on a stingray, which pierced his ankle straight through. As boys, my brother and I would constantly ask him to repeat the story and marvel over the scar and how bad it must have hurt.

Of course, Dad didn’t find the story nearly as entertaining. And I’m sure his pride hurt more than his ankle. Pops wasn’t used to setbacks. From his youth he excelled at everything, from grades to football, ending up at the Naval Academy where he became an aviator, eventually flying jet aircraft and, ultimately, the space shuttle.

By the time Dad’s first mission came along in 1984, I’d been surfing for a few years. In fact, I’d already replaced the board he’d given me with one I proudly paid for myself. And while the focus of our family’s Florida adventure was my father’s maiden voyage into space, it was also my first surf trip. And with two weeks of waiting between launch and landing, I was frothing at the thought of surfing what were surely some of the best waves in the world. My mom had barely put the car in park before I hit the water, and when the waves died I toured around the various Cocoa Beach institutions to continue my surfing education on land.

I paced the maze at Ron Jon’s almost daily, getting a permanent crick in my neck from checking out the hundreds of boards hanging on the ceiling and keeping an eye out for hot pros like Matt “Kech Air” Kechele. I catalogued all this information for a later date, intent on wowing my friends with these strange, wonderful discoveries upon my return. Meanwhile, my dad floated weightless above the Earth, concentrating on launching and retrieving satellites, never considering the chain of events he’d set in motion miles below.

Over the next ten years, I surfed each return trip to Cape Canaveral to watch my dad catapult into the unknown. And during his final mission in 1995, I even crammed my board onto a visitors’ bus so I could surf in front of the astronauts’ beach house. Dad, of course, was unable to participate for fear of endangering the mission. But when he retired the following year and took a job closer to Earth in San Diego, he immediately expressed interest in learning to surf. And I was eager to comply. I arranged to have a longboard shipped to his house and gave him the inside tip on what kind of wetsuit to buy. Then I waited patiently for his first post-surf report.

“Well, son,” he told me, “I’ve just been so busy. I barely get time in an airplane anymore. But next time you visit, we’ll go.”

When my winter vacation finally clocked around, I dutifully scheduled two weeks in San Diego. And when the pilot reported it was raining in Southern California and would be for another week, I never even unpacked my board bag. Two days later I was in sunny Hawaii.

Dad didn’t blame me a bit. He may not have surfed, but he understood what it was like to have an all-consuming passion. And he had sacrificed plenty to push his personal flying limits. Nonetheless, when he moved back to Texas the following year and sold the surf gear, I couldn’t help but hear the closing chorus of “Cat’s in the Cradle.”