Boat

by Michael Baughman

  BOAT

  OTHER BOOKS BY MICHAEL BAUGHMAN:

  The Perfect Fishing Trip (1985)

  Ocean Fishing (1985)

  Mohawk Blood (1995)

  A River Seen Right (1995)

  Warm Springs Millennium, with Charlottle Hadella (2001)

  BOAT

  A MEMOIR OF

  FRIENDSHIP, FAITH, DEATH,

  AND LIFE EVERLASTING

  MICHAEL BAUGHMAN

  Arcade Publishing

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Baughman

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or arcade@skyhorsepublishing.com.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-493-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  for Hilde

  From Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing it in the Sandwich Islands, Hawaii in the 1860s, published by Mutual Publishing, Honolulu, 1990. The quote is excerpted from Twain’s brief introduction.

  No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and walking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear ... in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

  —Mark Twain, on Hawaii in the 1860s

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  PART ONE

  First Break

  Prologue

  Fear

  Boat

  Underwater

  Haoles

  First Break

  Wild Birds

  Shark

  Sons of Beaches

  Alexander Young

  Mighty Doug Young

  Deep Water

  Iwa

  Number One

  Aloha

  PART TWO

  Hawaii Calls

  Dimeys

  Southern Yankees

  This Dance

  Buicks and Blondes

  The King’s Pastrami

  Love and Death

  Capri

  Epilogue

  Hawaiian Words

  Foreword

  This narrative begins with a confused and troubled boy at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game and ends six decades later with a content old man experiencing a miracle in Mexico. A Hawaiian beachboy named Boat holds everything together. Boat accepted me as a friend soon after I moved to Honolulu at age ten. After I left the islands seven years later, our friendship endured. Some people have what is known as a photographic, or eidetic, memory, and I have a pronounced ability to recall the spoken word. I remember, virtually verbatim, every significant conversation I’ve taken part in since the age of eight. Boat taught me first about surfing and spearfishing, and then about life and death. He spoke Hawaiian Pidgin English, with its unique constructions and inflections, and I’ve transcribed his words just as he said them and spelled and punctuated Hawaiian words according to the accepted usage of the day.

  PART ONE

  First Break

  “Look in at that beach, bruddah. In a hundred years everybody there be dead. Everybody walking the beach, everybody in the Outrigger Club, all those rich ones in the Royal and Moana. Don’t you forget, we be dead too. Dust and ashes. Ashes for us Hawaiians. Dust maybe for you. These dolphins out here going to be dead too. Everything, everybody, in a hundred years. Only two things stay here forever, the ocean and the sky up over it. But us Hawaiians, even when we ashes we be out here after we dead. We be out here with the fish and dolphins and the sharks and the morays forever in the ocean underneath the sky. Think about that, bruddah. Think how lucky us Hawaiians are. I’m one happy man!”

  Prologue

  On a hot summer day, climbing a long, crowded ramp with my father to get to our upper-deck seats, I overheard the loud, gruff voices of nearby men:

  “The son of a bitch shouldn’t be here.”

  “You mean the nigger shouldn’t be here.”

  “Goddamn right he shouldn’t.”

  “Branch Rickey, nigger-lover.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Branch Rickey, nigger-lover.”

  “This country ain’t what it used to be.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Branch Rickey, nigger-lover.”

  When we reached our seats I asked my father what the men had been talking about, what they had meant.

  “There’s a Negro playing baseball for the Dodgers against the Pirates today. Jackie Robinson.”

  “Those men are mad about it.”

  “Yes they are.”

  “Why?”

  “Baseball should be a white man’s game.”

  “Why?”

  “It just should be.”

  “Why though?”

  “You’re too young to understand.”

  They were in the living room and hadn’t heard me come down the stairs from the bathroom to say goodnight.

  “Bitch!” screamed my father.

  I heard my mother crying.

  “Bitch!” screamed my father again. From his voice I knew he’d been drinking. “Goddamn bitch!”

  I heard my mother crying.

  “You’re disgusting, you stupid goddamn bitch! Why did I ever marry you? Stupid bitch!”

  I snuck back up the stairs and went into my bedroom and closed the door quietly behind me.

  Lying in bed, I read the final chapters of Robinson Crusoe.

  My father, a businessman, drank at his club, the Belvedere Literary Association. He often joked that no one had ever seen a book in the place and nobody ever would. Pennsylvania had blue laws that kept bars closed on Sundays, so private clubs had been created as a subterfuge. The Belvedere Literary Association consisted of a main room filled with wooden tables and upholstered chairs with a long dark-wood bar lined with padded stools at the back. Along the bottom of the bar were a brass rail and many shiny spittoons. My father, and most of the men who went there, drank shots of Old Overholt rye with beer chasers. In a smaller back room were green felt-covered poker tables and slot machines lining the walls. When my father took me there, beginning at age eight, I was allowed to drink draft beer and play the nickel slots.

  My mother was a quiet woman who often had reason to cry. She had been born to an unmarried teenager named Willa Brant, a direct descendant of Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, who, because the British offered the Mohawks a far better future than the settlers did, fought with the redcoats during the Revolutionary War. Willa died hours after childbirth, and the father, a man named Miller, abandoned the infant. My mother often took me to visit John Brant, Willa’s father, my great-grandfather, on his farm in the western Pennsylvania hills.

  The night I finished Robinson Crusoe I had a remarkably vivid dream: a large dark man, a giant of a man, stood near the water on a lonely beach, shading his eyes with both h
ands as if looking intently at something, or for something, far away.

  Fear

  Barefoot in sand for the first time in my young life, I stood transfixed in unfamiliar early-morning winter warmth. To my left, a long beach curved away toward a dark mountain. Small waves broke a few yards in front of me, their foamy water ascending the glistening slope of sand and hissing back to softly collide with the next incoming breaker. Out beyond the shorebreak a vast sea stretched to a long line of hazy clouds piled across the distant horizon. This new world was utterly silent except for the pulse of the waves.

  December at Waikiki Beach.

  Until a few days before, I had lived all ten years of my life near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an area, I would later learn, that had once been described by H. L. Mencken as the ugliest place on Earth. After I saw more of the world I knew that Mencken’s assertion, applied to the time I lived there, was probably true. December in Pittsburgh meant foul air spewed from mills and morning blankets of new snow turned filthy-gray with soot by lunchtime.

  But, thanks to Granddad Brant, I had learned about birds and animals, quiet forests and clean streams, about forty miles away from the city, at his farm. He had taught me to love the trout in spring and summer, pheasants in fall, the hemlocks, maples, and red oaks in their brilliant mid-October foliage, animal tracks in fresh snow—and now I’d lost all that was good.

  My father, determined to move west for more money, as so many Americans did in the years after the war, told my mother and me he had found work he wanted in Hawaii. My imagination had little more to go on than if he had named another planet, and I feared leaving the only place I knew.

  The final leg of our westward journey was a ten-hour DC-6 United Airlines flight from San Francisco. Despite extreme turbulence a lavish duck dinner was served, and ten or fifteen minutes after eating I vomited into a paper sack.

  A rattletrap taxi carried us from the airport along dark streets to the Edgewater Hotel, where, exhausted, I fell asleep at once.

  I awakened at dawn before my parents, pulled on my pants, snuck out the door, and walked thirty or forty yards toward the strange yet identifiable sound of waves.

  My mouth tasted foul, my throat was sore, my head ached, my queasy stomach remembered the duck, and never in my life had I felt so lonely. Then, at the end of a paved walkway, I saw the beach and the sea. My physical symptoms vanished, replaced by a peculiar blend of exhilaration and fear.

  I stood rooted there on the beach for a quarter hour or more, until my worried mother finally found me and took me back to our room.

  Half an hour later we ate breakfast on the seaside lanai at the Halekulani Hotel, a short walk from the Edgewater. My appetite hadn’t returned and I barely touched my hotcakes. Our table looked out to sea and I watched some surfers riding waves far offshore. Occasional low clouds floated seaward in warm wind and the air smelled of flowers. Close to us, in shallow water, dark patches of coral and channels of white sand were visible through the iridescent blue-green surface.

  Outdoors at night at Granddad Brant’s I had looked into the starry sky and wondered at the mystery there. The sea, so close at hand, seemed an even greater and more fearful mystery to me.

  Not far from our table, a brown old man wearing khaki pants and a white T-shirt and carrying a burlap sack walked slowly along the hard sand collecting fragments and strands of seaweed. Soon after the old man passed a brown-backed boy about my age waded across the bottom through waist-deep water in front of the hotel. As I watched, he pulled on goggles and began to swim toward deeper water. My father explained that the boy was swimming out to spearfish, and he asked me if I thought I might like to learn to do that, but I didn’t answer.

  We were barely back in our room before I had to vomit again.

  Boat

  We moved into a rented house in Manoa Valley, about a mile up the road from Punahou School, where I would begin attending sixth grade in January.

  My father enrolled me as a junior member at the Outrigger Canoe Club, located at the heart of Waikiki, and a few days after we had settled into the Manoa house he dropped me off at the club to spend the day.

  I went there nearly every day through the rest of December, but the boys my age ignored me and I made no friends. In the mornings I swam in the safe, shallow water, then sat on the beach and watched the distant surfers ride their waves toward shore.

  After lunch at the snack bar I sat in the shade of the surfboard lockers and watched the doubles volleyball games on the rope-lined sand courts.

  On the beach one morning after about a week of this I was startled by a loud, deep voice close behind me.

  “Hey, kid!”

  When I turned, there he was, a Hawaiian, the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life, walking straight toward me, a wide smile on his broad face. Everything about him— arms, legs, abdomen, chest—was abnormally thick, yet with very pronounced muscular definition. This man exuded tremendous physical power. I was both frightened and glad to see he was smiling.

  He stopped a few feet away and smiled down. “I see you out here every day,” he said. “You new here on the beach?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mike.”

  “I’m Boat. Everybody calls me Boat. Where you from, Mike?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  “Pennsylvania! Plenty far away! You like it in Hawaii?”

  “I haven’t been here long.”

  “I can tell. You like it on the beach?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Listen, bruddah. You come with me. We’ll pick you out a surfboard. You want to learn to surf, right?”

  “I could try.”

  “Sure you can try! Sure you can surf! Why not? Come.”

  He turned and walked away, and I got to my feet and followed him to the rows of surfboard lockers behind the canoe shed.

  “This here is a good board,” he said as he slid it out of a locker. “This one got strips of balsa and redwood all covered up tight with fiberglass. This one is yours. I got plenty boards. Back in small kid time I learned to surf on my mama’s ironing board. But I work here at the club and I got plenty boards now, so this one here is yours. Just your size. Okay?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure. Okay?”

  “Thanks, sir.”

  “Call me Boat.”

  “Thanks, Boat.”

  “Take it,” he said. “Get the feel. Lift it up. Not so heavy with the balsa. You like it?”

  “I don’t know much about surfboards. But I do.”

  “Put the board on your shoulder, Mike. Hold it with your right arm. That’s it. You got it, bruddah. Come.”

  The board on my shoulder, I followed Boat back out to the beach and down to the water.

  He waded through the shorebreak and walked out over the sand bottom until the water was up past his waist. He turned and beckoned with his hand. “Come,” he said.

  I waded in, dropped the board, and pushed it nose-first out to where he was waiting.

  “I show you how to wax ’em up,” he said. He took a small block of white wax from the pocket of his shorts. “You rub the wax on so you don’t slip when you stand up,” he said.

  When he was finished applying a coat of wax he smiled at me again. “You look scared, Mike. I saw it ever since I been watching you. What you scared of? The ocean?”

  “I guess so. A little bit at least.”

  “It’s new for you, bruddah. I understand. You look at me. I been on the beach all my life. Been in the ocean all my life. Nothing to be scared of. All you got to do is learn. All you got to do is know the ocean is like home. I love the ocean. I love the sharks, the morays, the big waves, everything. All life comes from the ocean, Mike. Us Hawaiians know it. Our gods know it. All you got to do in the ocean is know what you doing. Climb on top the board now.”

  I climbed onto the board.

  “More in back,” he said.

  I slid back.
>
  “Now I show you how to paddle. You only got to do four things to learn to surf: You got to paddle, you got to catch waves, you got to stand up, and then you got to ride the wave. It’s easy, bruddah! You listen to me!”

  That morning Boat spent at least an hour with me. First he taught me to paddle. Then he took me to the small second-break waves about fifty yards out in front of the Moana Hotel. He began by pushing me onto the waves. Every time I was on one he yelled to me, “Stand up! Stand up, bruddah!”

  I found myself desperately wanting to earn his respect.

  After several falls I managed to keep my balance and ride a wave twenty-five or thirty yards.

  After that Boat taught me to paddle and catch a wave on my own. You couldn’t get on one until it was just about to break, and you didn’t want to get on one after it broke. Soon I was able to time them correctly, and before long I was catching them on my own, standing securely, and riding them nearly all the way to shore. Once toward the end I noticed a family at breakfast under the banyan tree at the Moana, watching me ride.

  “Way to go!” Boat said when we started back for the club. “You like to surf, bruddah?”

  I was smiling too by now, “Yes!” I said. “It’s great!”

  “You got your board,” he said. “All you got to do now is practice. The big waves come at Waikiki when summer starts. The North Shore, way across the island, that’s where the big waves come now. You practice and you can catch the summer Waikiki waves! Next winter the North Shore waves! You still scared of the ocean?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Not as much as I was.”

  “You think you going to love the ocean too?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks, Boat.”

  “In Hawaiian thanks is mahalo.”

  “Mahalo,” I said.

  “We go out again, Mike. We go out any time you want when I’m not working.”