Surf Lessons
from Vol. 38, Nos. 3 & 4
Lesson One
Kailua Beach is a scythe of powdery, bone-white sand that bisects two worlds—one of jungled volcanic ridges and coconut palms, the other of coral heads and crumbling whitecaps. As I step out onto the low coastal dunes, a stiff onshore breeze whips against the long surfboard tucked under my arm, catching it like a sail and staggering me. I’ve just emerged from a narrow path fenced between two blocks of opulent beach houses, a path from asphalt and concrete and boutiques and private property leading into a vibrant world of windswept sand and salt and waves. An ecotone between the terrestrial and the aquatic, where ghost crabs scuttle over the pulverized remains of coral skeletons, Kailua Beach is also a place that might reasonably be said to punctuate my life; here, my past and my future are like two clauses, let’s say, simultaneously divided and conjoined by a semicolon.
Steadying my new longboard with both hands and leaning into the wind, I trudge toward the north end of the beach that will become my first training ground. The surfboard is a hand-shaped work of art: It’s 9'1" long, 22" wide, 2 ¾" thick; the fiberglass deck is airbrushed with tentacular clouds of neon greens and bloody reds; two interlocking diamonds span its entire length and a devilish black skull, with a single horn protruding from the center of its forehead, grins in the middle.
The board’s tapered rails and narrow tail mark it as a high- performance longboard, or so I was told by the chiseled Hawaiian I bought it from. I don’t yet have any idea what a high-performance longboard is, as this is my first surfboard. Beneath the tail, there’s a 10- inch ultramarine fiberglass fin flanked by a shorter pair of unnecessarily sharp ones. The man who sold me the board offered me the choice between two sets of side fins—I’d gone with the ones he said were “more high-performance,” and that would “turn better.” He might have raised an eyebrow, but he also well knew that surfing is a sport that goads beginners and experts alike into hubris. I remember that when I took the fins from him, I ran my thumb along their edges and felt that I could cut myself if I pressed hard enough.
The only blemish on the board is a strip of gray duct tape midway down the right-hand edge. I’d injured this hauntingly beautiful craft before I’d ever even gotten it wet. I’d moved back to Hawai’i after a decade away and, approaching thirty, I’d bought myself a surfboard as a homecoming Christmas gift, a way to cling to my youth—and, I’ll soon come to find, a way to tempt the demons of addiction with something healthier than booze. Just before my cousin and I were about to embark on our maiden voyage, I leaned my board against the chain link fence beside his house. He swung the gate closed with a jolt, and I watched in horror as my longboard rattled along the fence then cracked to a stop against the metal latch, leaving an inch-long gash in its rail. I could see the absorbent foam core of the board, so I knew I needed to seal the wound before getting it wet. I hadn’t yet learned the fine art of fiberglass ding repair and was eager to get in the water, so I settled for a hasty fix: good old duct tape.
And so it came to be that, upon reaching the north end of Kailua Beach—a spot known as Castles—where a jumbled mess of knee-high waves crumble beneath onshore trade winds, I leash myself to this vengeful, demon-faced, and razor-finned longboard and paddle into the ocean to see what I’m made of.
I’m out of my element. I’ve spent most of my twenties living in the Colorado foothills, scaling cliffs and mountains, testing my nerves on solid ground. The waves, by contrast, are choppy and mercurial, the wind unceasing, stinging my eyes with salt spray. I’ve lost my sea legs, but my chosen arena of Castles is “beginner friendly,” a euphemism for “not particularly dangerous,” for a number of reasons. The waves are small and weak—only cosmic syzygy can summon a chest-high wave here. The bottom is powdery sand with a few sparse outcrops of coral. And, due to the very mediocre quality of the waves, it rarely gets crowded.
I’m the only surfer in the water. After a handful of “lessons” from a friend, I’ve started going by myself. It’s exhausting and frustrating, but even catching a tiny wave is exhilarating enough to get me hooked. I’m straddling my longboard, bobbing and swaying with each passing swell, waiting for something to emerge from the chaotic interference pattern of overlapping waves. White flashes of Newell’s Shearwaters glide above the water, looping in long arcs back toward their nests on Flat Island, two miles toward the southern edge of Kailua Bay. My hips and core are in dialogue with the sea, but it’s a language I don’t yet understand. Balancing on my board is awkward, turning and maneuvering it more so.
It’s not an uncommon sight to see a beginning longboarder lean too far back, lifting the nose of their board into the air and even, on occasion, losing control of it entirely, sending the board springing forward between their legs while they splash backward into the water. This is also probably why most beginning surfers don’t have razor-edged fins on their boards. I’m mesmerized by the rocking of the waves, the warm light of this tropical winter day, the gentle lapping at my waist. A three-foot wave coalesces out of the deep, cutting through my daze. I lean back and swing my board toward the shore. Sure enough, I’ve moved too quickly, too carelessly. The board escapes my grasp and leaps into the air. One of its sharp little fins chops the inside of my ankle as a parting gift, while the wave washes over me, plunging me onto my back. Smirking at myself as I clamber out of the water, a crimson slash across my ankle, not quite to the bone, I tell myself—or have the waves told me?—I’d better be more careful with these fins. The cut hurts enough that I worry about how deep it’s gone. Behind me, a faint pink trail dissolves into the sea as I paddle back to shore with imaginary hammerheads on my heels.
Waves break in sections; at least, that’s how surfers begin to diagram them. Their behavior is completely determined by the unseen—the contours of the seabed, the depth of submerged reefs and rocks, the steepness of the ocean floor. The section then, is a measure of what the wave is passing over. Like a light-year, it’s a measure of distance, but also of time. For the surfer, a section of a wave might be described in terms of the maneuvers one could execute on that particular stretch of the wave’s face.
For instance, a barrel section would be one where the wave is hollow, heaving its lip out over a shallow sandbar or jutting reef. Parking oneself inside the hollows of a wave is perhaps the peak experience of surfing, the barrel: An aquatic cocoon envelops you while you fly beneath a pitching waterfall, until the wave finds deeper water, and your racing speed carries you back into the light of day. If a section is “mushy,” it presents a gently sloped face with whitewater crumbling down from the crest. Here, a surfer could execute a carving turn or a figure-eight cutback, retracing the same portion of the wave so as not to outrun this lumbering hillside. A floater section is one where a long stretch of the wave is folding over all at once, or “closing out,” and the only option is to ride high on the face of the wave and “float” across the top of the falling lip. Each section is like a new clause building toward a complete sentence, a new idea.
Here’s the idea: You dig your rails and fins and tail into the hidden power of the wave, cutting sharp turns high at its crest, standing weightless for a moment while a fan of displaced droplets rains behind you, then you glide down the steep face, breathless with acceleration, winding from section to section until the wave is spent. The last of its energy mumbles into whitewash, fades to a ghostly trail of bubbles, and dissolves into the air, leaving a subtle sloshing as the last whisper of a distant storm. You slow, begin to sink, hop down onto your board, then turn seaward and paddle out to see what message will come next.
Lesson Two
Several months after cutting my teeth—and my ankle, a finger, and a toe on the fins of The Slasher, as I christened my dangerous companion—in Kailua, I’ve graduated to the sprawling reefs fringing Honolulu’s Lē’ahi crater, better known as Diamond Head. I’ve learned the chaotic syntax of Castles: short-period wind swells and a shifting sand bottom taught me to read subtle messages amid protean peaks. Here, from Diamond Head’s clifftop parking lot, the seascape is one of golden sand giving way to channels of turquoise through umber slabs of coral, their edges whitely-laced by passing waves.
A reef break is a different animal than I’m used to: more predictable because it’s not subject to the fickle wanderings of sandbars, but also more dangerous—the seabed hard and sharp, a garden of venomous polyps, the coral itself an animal. Today, the wind is offshore, pushing into the rising waves, encouraging them to stand proud before they roar onto the reef with the punch of a South Pacific tempest, a sharp contrast to the garbled murmurs of Kailua’s tattered wind swells. It’s here that I’ll first realize what I’m really immersing myself into.
You can tell a lot about a wave by looking at it, but until the fins of your surfboard are carving through its face, you can’t fathom the energy it’s carried from thousands of miles away. The waves at Diamond Head, on the right day, are powerful enough to infuse a surfer with such joy that the rest of what otherwise might have been their life will be rewritten to allow a close study of the magic beneath the surface of the sea. By examining a wave while conjoined to it, you come not only to understand the physics of waveforms, thrust, and hydrodynamics, but also to see the wave as a living being, to understand its personality. Not every wave that breaks on a given reef is the same, no matter how consistent the conditions may be, but they share a familiarity, a taxonomy perhaps akin to a species, such that a surf break can be characterized by its dominant traits.
All this is alien to the non-surfer. Coming to understand waves in this way profoundly changes the way that surfers look at the ocean. Where the uninitiated might see rolling suds and “waves,” the surfer, I’m coming to understand, will read peaks and troughs, swell periods, amplitude, steepness, power, speed, lefts and rights, channels and rip currents, glorious walls and un-surfable closeouts.
I don’t yet have all of this figured out and am just happy to measure myself against the wild animacy of the Pacific. Kneeling in coarse gold sand, I circle a block of wax up and down the skull-faced deck of The Slasher, hypnotized by the hollow staccato of wax on fiberglass. Through painful lessons, I’ve learned that keeping my dangerous friend excessively waxed makes it less likely to slide away from me at inopportune moments. By now, I’ve developed a special relationship with The Slasher. It’s asserted its presence as something beyond an object for riding waves; it has personality, almost. It’s cut me on three separate occasions, shaping my relationship to the sea, but I have yet to remove its razored fins— something about surfing is pushing my already intractable stubbornness toward pathology, yet it’s dulling another pathology by making me curse my weekend hangovers.
Satisfied with the wax job, I pull on a black, long-sleeved rash guard, leash the board to my left ankle, and cast off into a glittering spring morning.
The break known as Cliffs is a sprawling parenthesis of coral wrapping around the bulge of Diamond Head Crater at the southern edge of Honolulu. There are enough peaks—spots where waves regularly leap out of the deep and start to spill onto the reef—that, even on a crowded day, a crafty novice can score a few good ones. I’m astride The Slasher, looking up at the cliffs, trying to stay in place.
During a flat spell, I’m lulled into wonder by the antics of a pair of clownfish. They chase each other, threading in and out of crevasses in the reef, circling lobes of brain coral, trading roles of pursuit and flight until a silent mound of green water is nearly upon me, snapping my trance. Pulling myself away from the dancing clowns, I pivot and drop onto my chest.
I reach deep with relaxed hands and bent elbows, sweeping my arms under the centerline of my board. Rising, rising on a wave of energy from a decayed storm telling its last tale, here, thousands of miles across the globe, I thrill at the lurching sensation that comes on when I’m no longer moving under my own power, and the wave has me, and I have it. I push myself up and hop to my feet—burpees and pushups are good training— but I’ve only just caught the wave at the last moment. It’s already starting to break. I fly down its steepening face, slightly out of control and straight toward the trough, rather than angled to the left where the wave is rising along the edge of the reef, as a more capable surfer might have been. The nose of The Slasher punches through the bottom of the wave, my takeoff too late, my angle of attack too steep. As the nose sinks, the tail rises until it catapults me, face first, out into the flats ahead of the wave. It’s called pearling, short for pearl diving: a joke about what it looks like you’re doing—heading straight for the bottom, face first.
The Slasher bobs out of the water and is sent cartwheeling through
the air by the wave that’s now breaking on top of us. I’m rag-dolled underwater, violently tumbled and stretched in every possible direction by the chaos of rapids searching for equilibrium. Lungs bursting, I feel my leash yank against my left leg, stretching it out not unlike the leg of a frog pinned to a dissection table. Then the leash rebounds and goes slack: The Slasher comes in for the cut. I’m still being thrashed about in a cloud of bubbles, utterly disoriented, when I feel a dull thunk on the back of my left leg. There’s no pain, not yet, but some part of my board has just been shoved into me with alarming force. The churning whitewash begins to sizzle away and I cork to the surface, gasping. Another wave washes past before I worm onto the deck of my trusty longboard. An older gentleman witnessing my wipeout decides to offer some helpful advice.
“On those late drops, you gotta angle your takeoff a bit!” he calls over.
I’m on my stomach, legs bent at the knee so my calves and feet are up in the air. I glance over my left shoulder. My left calf grins back at me with a wide crimson maw. It’s a clean cut, deep, surgical. My flesh looks just like raw steak, only more alive. A narrow, four-inch strip of globular orange fat dangles out of my leg.
“I think I’ve got bigger problems right now.”
“Yeah. You’re gonna need some stitches for that one!”
I smirk and give a half nod to this friendly fellow, but my mouth parches with fear. I paddle into the slow churn of a dying wave and, riding prone, angle off the reef into the deeper channel leading to shore. It still doesn’t hurt, which makes me more alarmed. I double-time back to the beach and slide off into the shore break swirling with sand. I tuck The Slasher under my arm, and, the moment I limp out of the water, my left leg below the knee becomes a shocking blood slick.
There’s a couple lying nearby on a blanket, their unmarred calves swaying in the breeze. The guy’s face goes white upon seeing the mess of blood and sand. He stands up and hands me a water bottle to rinse the wound. After doing so, I peel off my rash guard and knot it around my calf, which now screams like it’s been sliced in half.
In the roiling maelstrom of my shock, a flash of anger at myself for not ditching those stupid fins surfaces but is quickly subsumed by the urgency of my injury. I have to get up to my car and my phone. The man, of whom I remember nothing aside from his kindness, offers to carry my board up to the parking lot. I grab my stashed slippers from the bushes and shuffle up the steep switchbacking path, a trickle of blood seeping down my leg.
We cross the street, and the good Samaritan lays my longboard onto the padded roof straps of my white Honda Civic. He heads back down the cliff trail—after I assure him that I’m pretty sure I can drive myself to the hospital.
My then-girlfriend’s dad happens to be at work at Kapi’olani Hospital, where I entered this world thirty years earlier, so I make the short drive across town. I lay face-down on a gynecological chair as Dr. Todd snips the dangling glob of fat from my leg—in my delirium, I’d hoped he would tuck it back inside of me—puts twenty stitches into my bisected calf muscle, and seals the wound with surgical glue. Good as new. I hope The Slasher is satisfied with its inquiry into human anatomy.
You may, at this point, suspect I’m up to something quaint, some type of surrealist personification of an airbrushed slab of fiberglass and polystyrene foam. This brings into question the animacy of the nonhuman. Can an artifact—that is, something man-made—have will or agency? Can it be curious?
Surely The Slasher has capacities: to injure me, for instance, or to attract me in the first place, with its elegant lines and haunting artwork, and, of course, to glide across and carve into the ocean’s waves, to reveal the hidden energies within. Yes, it was shaped by human hands, but weren’t those hands shaped as well? Surely Kekoa Uemura, the man whose signature marks the board as his creation, was inspired by the sea, by the art of surfing—which itself descended from the spiritual practices of ancient Hawaiian royalty. Yet, he surely didn’t create it so that it would slice open my body, so that the sea could taste my blood.
Beyond any authorial intent its shaper had for it, The Slasher carved its way into my story anyway. We are at every moment ensnared within a web of unfolding agencies, a web of unique objects enacting their own roles as storied matter. Each cause is, to some degree, an arbitrary story we tell about an event. Even physics tells us so. Every causal chain links back to the Big Bang; equal and opposite reactions imply a resistance to change; inertia implies agency. The Slasher held the capacity to injure me, to measure my stubbornness and hubris, to measure my attachment to the idea that I should ride a high-performance board—one capable of making much more dramatic turns than I was then able to draw forth from it. That board, thus, had the capacity to alter my story.
Rather than man being the measure of all things, as Protagoras would have us believe, each and every thing is the measure of man. Each thing is in possession of some measure of agency. Had that demon-faced board wanted to cut me open to see what suffering, what pain, what fear I was willing to endure in pursuit of a fathomless understanding of the sea? Well, no. Perhaps, though, the board wasn’t the surgeon, but merely the scalpel.
Lesson Three
Even after flaying my leg open to the tune of twenty stitches, I still didn’t take those bloodthirsty fins from The Slasher. It took one final slash to the arch of my left foot—seven stitches this time, again pro-bono, courtesy of Dr. Todd—before I unscrewed the fins in a seaside parking lot, gritting my teeth while my hot blood pulsed out onto the asphalt.
I moved on from The Slasher as well, or at least relegated it to a supporting role, as my ongoing dialogue with the sea required. I’d found abundant joy by surfing my way into a deeper connection with my homeland, but there was still much to be learned. Just as waves can be described as varying species, so too can surfboards, which are often designed to correspond to a particular type of wave. Longboard waves are, generally speaking, slower breaking. They offer longer rides, and have deep-water channels to safely navigate around. Shorter, shallower, steeper, frightfully powerful waves—where the only way to reach the lineup is to go through oncoming surf by ducking under it—require a smaller board, but offer a much more intense surfing experience, one that I started lusting after.
Lusting after intense experience might well be said to have been the guiding ideology of my life up to that point. What rock climbing, cliff jumping, and skydiving had done to replace the alcohol, pills, powders, and psychedelics I’d abused throughout my teens and twenties, I sought from surfing as well: a thrilling and dangerous pursuit that would let me see my place within the world through fresh eyes—and one that could do so while pushing the right neurological buttons.
If the relatively tame waves I’d surfed with The Slasher had been akin to a smooth Manhattan, say, or a mellow bowl of weed, I’d need a shortboard to hit the crack cocaine of waves: the Banzai Pipeline, the deadliest wave in the world—which, for better or for worse, had captured my imagination. So, I put my trusty, if fiendish, longboard on the shelf and bought a smaller board.
Downsizing to a new type of board resets the learning curve of surfing. You have to learn to balance all over again, you have to paddle harder to catch waves, you have to pop to your feet more quickly, and you have to learn how to turn and steer a much more responsive craft. Ah, but the joys of mobility are unmatched: flying down steep waves, carving tighter turns, dancing on water. I was still far from doing any of these things by the time I started surfing Oahu’s North Shore, the mecca of globe-trotting surf junkies and quixotic dreamers alike.
Tigers is one of several esoteric names for an oft overlooked North Shore reef tucked between several more well-known spots. It’s named for the tiger sharks purported to patrol the area, but also, probably, to scare the crowds away. Either way, it’s usually deserted, making it a suitable place for a kook like me to try to figure out how to surf waves of consequence. My new board is wide and thick, 7'3" long, and has a pointed nose and notched tail. It’s a beater: I bought it on Craigslist for $80 from a guy who advertised it as a “fat-guy shortboard.” It is very buoyant.
The waves don’t look too big from shore. Of course, they’re breaking a couple hundred yards away, gentle blue hills disintegrating into white foam. In the time-honored tradition of surfing, my friend Kepa is shepherding me into a new world that’s likely above my head. He’s a lanky and jovial local, with a mess of curly black hair and a cynical wit. “We have to wait for a lull, then paddle through the longboard channel, ‘kay?” he says to me while waxing up his longboard.
The channel through the reef is shaped like a question mark. Its straight leg is about fifty feet long; it then circles to the left around a massive cluster of coral heads before widening out into deep blue beyond the reef, the operative detail being that if one were to still be in the curved section when a set of waves were to come through, they’d likely get washed backward onto a shallow coral plateau. Hence, the importance of timing. I’m used to surfing easily and safely accessible waves, beginner waves, so I’m more than a bit excited to explore novel terrain.
“Let’s go!”
Kepa jogs a few steps into the water, seamlessly lays onto his longboard, and paddles off with practiced momentum. I’m quick to follow but much less graceful. I splash through the shallows then awkwardly flop onto my board, swaying side to side as I flail away from shore.
Even between sets of waves, the sea is alive with energy. The reverberating and echoing remains of waves bounce back off the shoreline, funnel off the reef and into the channel, agitate the surface, making it seem to flow in every direction at once.
A new set of waves wrinkles the horizon. Kepa’s about thirty feet ahead of me. The first ripple arrives, an undulating mound about three feet high. It’s not big enough to break, but it scatters a thousand shards of sunlight as it rolls toward me, rising up to momentarily obscure what’s coming next. As I crest the would-be wave, my heart lurches at the even bigger one behind. I angle left into the question mark and reach deeper, my entire arm submerged with each stroke. My biceps and shoulders are searing with lactic acid, my breath coming in frantic gasps. I barely clear the wave, which unloads onto the shallow reef a few feet behind me while I watch Kepa scratching up the next incoming wall, looking back with an expression somewhere between pity, guilt, and amusement, as he just barely glides over the steepening lip of the wave. I now understand why he referred to this as the “longboard channel.”
The rising sapphire pinnacle collapses into an avalanche of foam twenty feet in front of me. I’m halfway through the curved channel and there’s nowhere for me to go. My arms are spent, but I try to shove the nose of my board under the massive cascade. Indeed, only a “fat guy” could sink this thing, so the surging sea yanks me backwards onto the reef and rips the board from my hands. Skidding and bouncing across the flat slab, I’m jammed to a halt in a depression the size and shape of a hot tub.
Another surge of bubbles arrives, so I crouch underwater and grab two handfuls of coral. I hold fast, but my knees, shins, and feet are grated and thrashed against sharp coral. When the sizzling cloud passes, I stand up in thigh-deep water to see yet another stern rebuke rumbling toward me. Perplexed and scared, I step up out of the pool onto the shin-deep reef, run fifteen feet—each step punctuated by the pinch of a tiny coral floret snapping off into my foot—and dive headfirst into the channel, my board clattering along behind me.
The question having been answered, I turn my back on the waves and ride their remains to shore. I wince up the beach, blood streaming from my legs once again, and Kepa’s dad, who’s been watching my ordeal, cracks a wry smile.
“Ah, you gave blood!”
Perhaps the ocean itself is alive. Its recurrent role as my surf instructor, then, could be its attempt to understand itself. My giving blood was an act necessary to satiate the curiosity of a lifeform examining its distant descendant, an act required to decipher the increasingly dangerous tongue of the sea. I know not whether these musings are what the ocean intended to impart to me through the language of surfing— whether it was all a grand revelation of the physics of the universe and the meaning of life—but I cannot now see the ocean as anything other than a living being.
For instance, the ocean is organized into layers with different capacities. Its upper layers are analogous to sensory organs that respond to sunlight and wind with movement, generating waves and currents. Its abyssal plains and hadal trenches, both impenetrable to light, perform the processes of metabolism by which dead organisms are catabolized into water and marine snow, tiny flecks of organic matter which supply nutrients to the inhabitants of the deep, not unlike an animal’s digestive system and microbiome.
The ocean seeks homeostasis, another hallmark of life, through the hydrological cycle: It retains a balance between atmospheric humidity, rainfall, surface water flows, glaciation, evaporation, groundwater stores, and sea level.
Considered as a vast ecosystem inhabited by myriad tiny organisms, the ocean is even capable of reproducing itself, most obviously in the form of lakes—but also in animals, for what is a cell if not an ocean in miniature, a tiny sac of water carried from the sea a billion years ago? What is an organism if not a multitude of infinitesimal seas?
We are all made of saltwater on loan, teeming with millions of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and microorganisms. We are each the primordial ocean, transformed and evolving, seeking to understand itself. Perhaps then, as I cut into its waves, not only was the ocean revealing itself to me, but it was studying me, too.
Lesson Four
Beyond the grainy golden remains of shattered coral and seashells on Oahu’s North Shore lies a stretch of waves known as The Seven Mile Miracle—perhaps the densest concentration of world-class surf on the globe. Gas Chambers is one such miracle. Here, winter swells transform into heaving cliffs of froth that pulverize a shallow reef just offshore. The waves hurl out of the deep where the seabed abruptly transitions to a flat slab of coral; fast and powerful, they explode into the shallows, leaving the entirety of the reef boiling with whitewater.
My tongue dries as I watch waves twice my height unleash this ferocious sermon of the North Pacific. If not quite cocky, I’ve become a confident surfer after two years of pious devotion (or has it been addiction?). I think I’m ready—well, ready enough—to see what this particular combination of water and wind and reef and sand have to say, to see if I’m man enough for surfing’s ultimate proving ground.
Crouched in the sand with a lean, 6'3" thruster—a shortboard with a triangular three-fin setup—tabled across my thighs, I rest my elbows on its waxed deck and my chin on my fists. I’m watching the waves, trying to translate the language of the sea.
The only way out is through. We wait for a lull. I’m with two friends, East Coast transplants who’ve found themselves at home far, far away from the frigid Atlantic that taught them how to surf. One of them, Steve, is almost comfortable at Chambers. The other, Jeremy, is pushing his limits. As am I. We follow Steve’s lead and cast off into a seething river of whitewash. There isn’t much of a lull. I’m being swept away by a longshore current while another salvo unloads in front of me.
To pass this test, I have to duck under the oncoming waves by pushing the nose of my board underwater, dipping my head after it with one leg held high in the air to help force me under, then kicking the tail of my board down with my other foot just before each incoming wave reaches me. It’s called a duck dive. You’ve probably seen a duck doing it in a pond—sans surfboard of course. I’m decent at it by now, but it’s still a frantic scramble of constant paddling and diving amid a riverine and frothy current.
Winded, I make it out past the breakers. Including Steve and me, there are maybe twelve guys. Jeremy’s been swept down the shore, his arms windmilling as he struggles to make any progress. I take deep, slow breaths to try to calm down. This is the real deal: massive North Shore waves cracking like thunder onto an unforgiving shelf.
Imagine dropping into a twelve-foot-deep swimming pool on a skateboard. Then imagine that you, your skateboard, and the pool are all drifting and swaying. Add a dozen skaters—all of them better than you— who are trying to drop into the pool before you. And if you blow the takeoff from this high, there will be dire consequences.
I gape at the other surfers—bloodshot eyes, sun-kissed hair, muscled wedges atop spindly legs—paddling into these leaping mounds of liquid fury, knifing down their steep walls, and rocketing out of sight as they’re swallowed whole then spat out with a booming spray.
Barreling waves are the holy grail of surfing for good reason. The experience of being enshrined within a hollow waterfall, racing toward daylight at the end of a spiraling tunnel, churning foam nipping at your heels, is the apotheosis of aquatic language—an exclamation of power, the ultimate gospel of the sea, an offering so unlikely as to be almost mythical. Except, of course, in this seven-mile land of miracles, where most every winter day offers a Sunday service.
Transfixed with awe, for a split second too long, at a roaring dragon snaking by with a steely-eyed surfer in its maw, time dilates when I look toward the horizon.
It is as though the entire ocean is gathering itself into a shimmering cerulean bowl. Its leading edge begins to tip perilously toward shore. The bowl rises and rises, its lip beginning to feather whitely against an offshore wind.
I’m in the worst possible place. I’ve lost track of the conversation, and the sea is demanding a reply.
Do I have your attention now?
If I try to paddle toward the looming peak, to dive under the falling guillotine lip and through the base of the wave, I should escape unscathed.
But are you man enough?
If I’m too slow, though, the lip will cleave into either my board or my spine with force unimaginable.
This is what you wanted, isn’t it?
If I don’t challenge the plunging crest, I’ll be blown backwards by a detonation of whitewater and thrashed against the reef.
Veins thrumming with adrenaline, I scratch toward the horizon, kicking my feet in desperation. Arms, legs, and lungs aflame, pulse bulging in my eyes and temples, the aquamarine mountain topples over.
I don’t make it.
The lip crashes down two feet in front of me as I dive. The shockwave wrenches my board from my hands while thousands of gallons waterfall onto me.
Have you had enough?
The initial blast tries to rip off each of my limbs, then feeds me, cartwheeling, to the surging body of the wave, which lifts me higher and higher, until I’m gripped by the awful sensation of weightlessness preceding freefall.
I consider, for a moment, that this is the end of my life.
And then I fall. The harmony of mathematics and physics—sine curves, wavelengths, amplitudes, hydrodynamics, inertia, gravity—gives way to chaos when a powerful wave breaks. Somewhere in all that chaos, I become one with the breaking wave and together we plummet out of the sky—what surfers call “going over the falls.” I tuck into a ball in anticipation of hitting the reef, but instead slam onto my surfboard with a sickening thud in my inner thigh.
Proprioception loses all meaning as the energy of this colossus transforms into a stampede of white buffalo rampaging across the reef. I’m trampled underwater for ten seconds of ultraviolence before the straining of my leash tells me which way is up. I try to swim toward the surface but I’m just pawing through bubbles. I now understand how Gas Chambers got its name.
After another few eternal seconds during which every cell in my body is screaming for oxygen, my head surfaces, and I gasp in half a lungful of air, along with a mouthful of foam, before the still-raging froth takes me under for another round of dizzying gymnastics. Then it’s over—solid ground materializes beneath my feet. I stand up in waist-deep water, flop onto my board, and ride the next murmuring cascade back to shore.
Had enough?
I slide off the board and, as I lift it, I notice the center of its three fins has been snapped off. I stagger a couple steps up the beach. A maroon tongue snakes out of the black and yellow and orange horizontal stripes of my boardshorts, down my thigh, down the back of my knee, down sun- bleached hairs plastered to my once-bisected calf, down my ankle hashed with white scar tissue, down the stitch-marred arch of my foot, then whispers into the coarse gold sand.
With a nervous laugh on the verge of panic, I bend forward and look between my legs.
I broke a fin off my surfboard. More accurately: I broke a fin off my surfboard with my balls.
The cut across my scrotum, though terrifying, will heal in a couple weeks—during which, despite countless jokes about my “balls of steel,” I’ll be unusually timid, wincing with an exaggerated startle at any surprises or sudden movements. How much more explicitly could the ocean test my manhood? Fearing infection, I’ll clean the wound excessively and come down with a maddening case of jock itch.
Why do I do this? Despite the lacerations, the ragged reef cuts, the near-castrations, the pain of digging coral and sand from beneath my flesh? Despite all the stitches and staples and surgical glue holding me together, the infected wounds, the sun-baked, wind-blasted, permanently bloodshot eyes, the peeling lips and dehydrated deliriums, the near-drownings and primal shock of spilling my own blood over and over again—why, after all this, keep going back for more?
It’s not masochism—not quite. Nor penance. Not exactly anyway.
But perhaps something between the two.
Call it exposure therapy. A forced reckoning with the raw elements of life—to remind myself of the eternal, indifferent will of the nonhuman world; to risk something real amidst an otherwise over-commodified, hyper-productive existence of drudgery devoid of inherent meaning; to chip away at the fear grown from comfort; to return to the source of all life; to embrace the harsh tutelage of forces that demand careful study, forces that demand an active evolution toward a quicker, smarter, stronger version of the miraculous gift that is embodied human consciousness; to befriend and understand and even to love something vast and inhuman and alien, that is at once patient and playful and frightfully powerful; to have my smallness, my insignificance, dissolve into the unconditional embrace of a boundless ocean.
Well, yes. All of that. It’s quite fun, too.
And it gave me purpose. Yes, I managed to extract meaning, salvation even, from something so seemingly hedonistic. I’d never quite found my place in the world of team sports, so surfing offered me a way into my body that, in addition to breaking a host of other, more- destructive addictions, made me fit and confident. I say ‘other’ addictions playfully here because, despite the variable-interval reinforcement schedule of surfing leading to near compulsive behavior—you never know precisely when the waves will be at their best, leading to a high response rate surfers call “the endless search”—it has significantly less life-destroying potential.
But whatever path we take to neurochemical bliss, there are costs. The ones paid to the sea are more amenable to me than those paid to the bottle—the hangovers and headaches, the anxiety and depression and self-loathing. The chaos and heartbreak of drug-stained love. The nausea. Highs that seem cheap but only because the cost is a hidden, fathomless abyss of alienation, the complete annihilation of hope, an actual drowning of the possibility of flourishing.
I’ll suffer through the near-drownings instead, and do so gladly, forever paddling against the current only to ride it back to shore, pushing that goddamn boulder up the mountain, again and again, and doing so with joy.
Lesson Five
Four years into my harsh tutelage, I’d done it. I’d surfed the Banzai Pipeline after slavish dedication to shallow reefs and testosterone fueled lineups. Despite all the injuries, I kept pressing, compelled, at times, more by inertia than desire, the end goal offering such a shining source of meaning to my struggles. But after the climactic moment— walking on water atop the deadliest reef in the world—I learned that, maybe, I didn’t need a cocaine wave. I could instead be satisfied with a pleasant drink from lesser waters.
Mostly, I didn’t like the crowds. Surfing provides a strange arena in which a novice can rub elbows with the best in the world. My near- castration at Gas Chambers quelled any remaining cockiness in my pursuit of surfing, so that by the time I surfed Pipe a few months later, I was over the hyper-aggressive pecking orders that dominate most of the premier Hawaiian waves. I was sick of being bullied by pugnacious caricatures of masculinity.
I was more interested in a dialogue with the sea, anyway. I’d learned to do what the ocean asked of me in order to witness its awesome might: I could joyfully commune with waves more than twice my height—as long as there wasn’t a pack of frothing pros paddling laps around me. And so, the following winter, I returned to a much more playful wave, one frequented by a chummy crew of old guys I’d befriended. From the pinnacle of the surfing world, I retreated to a break known as Piddley’s. When the waves at Piddley’s exceed a few feet overhead, the strong current and frequent closeout sets deter most of the would-be crowd, so on a weekday morning just after dawn, I’m out with only a handful of regulars. Beyond the coconut palms and soaring ironwood pines abutting the beach, puffy lavender clouds filigreed with gold float above the dark bulk of Pûpûkea, the jungled plateau at the northern terminus of the Ko’olau range. A dozen or so wind turbines further inland sweep the sky. The breeze is light and chilly, cooler than the water. I’ve been paddling against the refrain of the treadmill current, waiting my turn for a big one. The skyline begins to ripple and, after hundreds of sessions out here, with practiced triangulation, using the trees on shore and the speed of the current, I track a well-overhead set inviting me to the perfect spot.
Having seen and heard and felt their motion thousands of times through the medium of the ocean, I now understand the primacy of waves: light, sound, neural conduction, consciousness, breath, and even matter itself are all waves. Surfing has taught me that the wave is the fundamental rhythm of existence.
I turn and paddle down a growing malachite pyramid. As I rise with the shoaling wave, sun-bleached locks flailing, the sun crests above the mountains, turning my world into a bejeweled kaleidoscope of jade and topaz and emerald and gold. But I’ve learned to read this wave blind: With two more deep pulls, I’m gliding with the apex of the wave, then effortlessly popping to my feet, tracing an elegant arc along an unspooling verdant canvass—a poem of balance and grace, scrawled in a cursive hand. After the final stanza, swallowed by the shadow of the mountain, I slide over the back of the wave and stroke toward the light.
After a couple minutes of grinning paddling, I’m just about back to the takeoff spot. A big set rolls in and Roy, one of the Japanese uncles with a Santa Claus wedge of a beard and a slick wetsuit top, has it lined up. He’s on a ten-foot longboard and barely has to paddle to catch the monster wave. I’m way out in front of where he’ll make the drop and not in any danger. Then, he winces as the sun catches his eyes.
He turns directly toward me.
With half a second to react, I yell, “Hey!”—the word swallowed in a gurgle as I dip my board as deep as I can. From underwater, I see a massive outline tobogganing toward me. I see a foot-long fin tracing a line toward my face.
The fin hacks into the back of my head, then rakes down my left shoulder blade.
Don’t black out, a voice tells me.
Then the wave breaks on top of me, somersaulting me into a vortex of foam.
Don’t black out.
I surface in an already alarmingly red cloud, gasping, eyes wide. Roy and his board are nearby. His eyes are wide, too. I wipe my right hand over the crown of my head and my palm returns slick with blood. “Oh fuck ”
Another leviathan drains on top of me. I go fetal and cover my head with both arms, lungs now fiery, even the muscles in my legs aching for air. The whole ocean is crimson.
How is it this fucking red? Don’t black out.
I scramble onto my board and sled across the reef on the next avalanching wave. It’s still too early for any lifeguards to be on duty, but Roy’s following me in. So is Kevin, a firefighter who’s seen the collision. There’s a carmine faucet pouring from my long hair as I stumble onto the beach. Another guy, a retired fire chief who’s been watching us surf, comes jogging over as Kevin reaches me.
“Holy shit, brah. You OK?” he asks. “Don’t pass out, OK?”
“OK. I think I’m OK.” Everything looks too bright.
“We gotta get you to the hospital, man. I can drive you, but hold on, I’ll get some bandages first.”
“I’m so sorry. I couldn’t see you… The sun… I just… the older I get, the more dangerous it gets for everyone out there….”
“It’s OK, man. It could have happened to any of us. Maybe it’s not even that bad, head wounds just bleed a lot, yeah?” I tell both of us.
I crack a joke about having superglued one of my friends’ heads back together after a similar incident a few years ago. Hobo surgery skills.
“Nah, you gonna need staples for that one.”
“Maybe I should just stop surfing….” Roy’s despondent.
“Where should I go?” I’m trying to think of the closest hospital. “Kahuku?”
“No! You go Kahuku, you gonna die!” the retired fire chief barks. “Go Wahiawa.”
Kevin returns breathless and presses a pad onto my head and covers it with gauze, wrapping under my chin three times.
I can’t think straight but I tell them I can drive. I guess I’m probably in shock.
Kevin offers to follow me, but I decide it’ll be easier to follow him. Roy won’t stop apologizing. He gives me his number and makes sure I’ll call him from the hospital.
I get stapled back together. They don’t even have to shave my head.
Michael Bishop is a late-emerging writer from O’ahu, Hawai’i. Informed by studies in psychology, philosophy, and literature, and a disability- ended career in environmental work and emergency rescue, his writing often explores the reciprocal determinism between nature and humanity. His publications can be found in The Normal School, About Place Journal, High Desert Journal, Ruminate, Points in Case, Star 82 Review, Coffin Bell Journal, and Honolulu Civil Beat. He is a 2023 Fulbright grantee in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and is an avid explorer of both wilderness and consciousness alike. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho and has been supported by the Idaho Commission on the Arts.