by Bill Bryson
Thick, dark-blue peaks seemed to jump up out of deep ocean, some of them unnervingly big. The lefts were short and easy, really just big drops, but Roddy said the rights were better, and he paddled farther east, deeper into the break. His temerity seemed to me insane. The rights looked closed-out (unmakable), and terribly powerful, and, even if you made one, the ride would carry you straight into the big, hungry-looking rocks of outer Black Point. If you lost your board in there, you would never see it again. And where could you even swim in to shore? I darted around, dodging peaks, way out at sea, half-hysterical, trying to keep an eye on Roddy. He seemed to be catching waves, though it was hard to tell. Finally, he paddled back to me, looking exhilarated, smirking at my agitation. He took pity on me, though, and said nothing.
Roddy was transferred, for some reason, to my typing class. Listening to him report to the teacher, I was stunned. He abandoned, briefly, his normal pidgin and spoke standard English. Glenn, I learned later, could do the same thing. The Kaulukukui boys were bilingual; they could “code switch,” as we would say now. There just weren’t many occasions in our daily rounds—indeed, almost none—when they had to drop their first language.
But keeping my two worlds separate got suddenly trickier. Roddy and I started hanging out at school, far from the In Crowd’s monkeypod. In the cafeteria, we ate our saimin and chow fun together in a dim corner. But the school was a small pond. There was nowhere to hide. So there should have been a scene, a confrontation, perhaps with Mike himself—Hey, who’s this moke?
There wasn’t, though. Glenn and Ford were around then, too. Maybe Glenn and Mike hit it off over some shared laugh, nothing to do with me. All I knew was that, seemingly overnight, Glenn and Roddy and Ford were showing up not only at the In Crowd’s schoolyard spot under the monkeypod but also at Mike and Edie’s house in Kaimuki on Friday nights—when Mike’s uncle supplied the Primo (local beer) and mod Steve, one of the gang’s cooler kids, supplied the Kinks. The In Crowd had been integrated, with no visible fuss.
This was at a time when the Pacific Club, the leading local private club, where much of Hawaii’s big business was conducted over cocktails and paddle tennis, was whites-only. The Pacific Club, apparently unmoved by the fact that Hawaii’s first U.S. representative and one of its first two senators were Asian American (both were also distinguished veterans of the Second World War; one of them, Daniel Inouye, had lost an arm), still formally excluded Asian Americans from membership. This sort of bald discrimination wasn’t exactly un-American—legal segregation was still in force in much of the country—but it was badly out of date in Hawaii. Even the low-rent haole kids in the In Crowd were more enlightened. They saw that my friends were cool guys—particularly, I think, Glenn—and, at least for gang purposes, just let the race thing go. It wasn’t worth the trouble. It was radioactive crap. Let’s party.
Not that kicking it with the In Crowd was the fondest ambition of Glenn, Ford, or Roddy. From what I knew, which was a lot, it was no big deal to them. It was only a big deal to me. In fact, after Roddy got to know a couple of the girls I had been telling him about—In Crowd girls I had agonized over—I could see that he was unimpressed. Roddy had been suffering his own romantic torments, which I had also heard much about, but the object of his affections was a modest, notably old-fashioned, quietly beautiful girl whom I would never have noticed if he hadn’t pointed her out. She was too young to go steady, she told him. He would wait years, if necessary, he said wretchedly. Looking at my erstwhile girlfriends through his eyes, I didn’t like them any less, but I began to see how lost they were, in their delinquent, neglected-child glamour, their sexual precocity. In truth, they were more sexually advanced than I was, which made me timid.
And so I developed a disastrous crush on Glenn’s girlfriend, Lisa. She was an older woman—14, in ninth grade—poised, amused, kind, Chinese. Lisa was at Kaimuki Intermediate but not of it. That was how I saw her. She and Glenn made sense as a couple only because he was a natural-born hero and she was a natural-born heroine. But he was a wild man, an outlaw, a laughing truant, and she was a good girl, a good student. What could they possibly talk about? I would just wait, impatiently, for her to come to her senses and turn to the haole boy who struggled to amuse her, and worshiped her. I couldn’t tell if Glenn noticed my hapless condition. He had the good grace, anyway, to say nothing off-color about Lisa within my hearing. (No “Spahk dat”—which boys were always saying to one another, popping their eyes at girlish rumps and breasts.)
Lisa helped me understand Ford. She knew his family, including his hardworking parents, who owned a gas station. I knew that Ford was considered unusual for a Japanese kid. Glenn sometimes teased him, saying things about “da nip-o-nese” and what a disappointment Ford, who cared for nothing except surfing, must be to his family. But he rarely got a rise out of him. Ford had a powerful inwardness about him. He could not have been more different, I thought, from the kids in my academic classes. They looked to teachers, and to one another, blatantly, fervently, for approval. I had become friendly with some of the funnier girls, who could be very funny indeed, but the social wall between us stayed solid, and their brownnosing in class still offended my sense of student-teacher protocol. Ford, on the other hand, was from my planet.
My father’s Hawaii was a big, truly interesting place. He was regularly in the outer islands, herding film crews and talent into rainforests, remote villages, tricky shoots on unsteady canoes. He even shot a Pele number on a Big Island lava field. His job involved constant battling with local labor unions, especially the teamsters and the longshoremen, who controlled freight transportation. There was abundant private irony in these battles, since my father was a strong union man, from a union family (railroaders) in Michigan.
My dad gained enough sense of local working-class culture to know that the streets of Honolulu (and perhaps the schools) might be a challenge for a haole kid. If nothing else, there was a notorious unofficial holiday called Kill a Haole Day. This holiday got plenty of discussion, including editorials (against) in the local papers, though I never managed to find out precisely where on the calendar it fell. “Any day the mokes want,” Mike, our In Crowd chief, had said. I also never heard whether the holiday had occasioned any actual homicides. The main targets, people said, were off-duty servicemen, who generally wandered in packs around Waikiki and the red-light district downtown. I think my father took comfort in seeing that my best friends were the local kids who kept their surfboards in our yard. They looked like they could handle themselves.
He had always worried about bullies. When confronted by bigger boys, or outnumbered, I should, he told me, “pick up a stick, a rock, whatever you can find.” He grew alarmingly emotional giving me this advice. My dad seemed scared of no one. Indeed, he had a cantankerous streak that could be mortifying. He wasn’t afraid to raise his voice in public. I found his combativeness intensely embarrassing. He sometimes asked the proprietors of shops and restaurants that posted signs asserting their right to refuse service to anyone what, exactly, that meant, and if he didn’t like their answers he angrily took his business elsewhere. This didn’t happen in Hawaii, but it happened plenty of times on the mainland. I didn’t know that such notices were often code for “whites only.” I just quailed and stared desperately at the ground as his voice began to rise.
Now, in Hawaii, I felt myself drifting away from my family. My parents knew me only as Mr. Responsible. That had been my role at home since shortly after the other kids began arriving. There was a substantial age gap between me and my siblings, and I could usually be counted on to keep the little ones undrowned, unelectrocuted, fed, watered, rediapered. But I resented my babysitting duties, and the snug fracas of the family dinner felt vestigial. Mom and Dad knew less and less about me. I had been leading a clandestine life, not only at school but in the water. Nobody asked where I went with my board, and I never talked about good days at Cliffs or my triumphs over fear at Kaikoos.
The surf changed
as spring progressed. There were more swells from the south, which meant more good days at Cliffs. Patterson’s, the gentle wave between wide panels of exposed reef out in front of our house, started breaking consistently and a new group of surfers materialized to ride it—old guys, girls, beginners. Roddy’s younger brother, John, came out. He was 9 or 10, and fantastically nimble. My brother Kevin began to show some interest in surfing, perhaps influenced by John, who was about his age and kept his board in our yard. I was surprised. Kevin was a terrific swimmer. He had been diving into the deep end of the swimming pool since he was 18 months old. Pigeon-toed, he had a piscine ease in water, and was an expert bodysurfer already at 9. He had always professed indifference to my obsession, though. It was my thing; it would not be his. But now he paddled out at Patterson’s on a borrowed board and within days was catching waves, standing, turning. He was a natural. We found him a used board, an old Surfboards Hawaii tanker, for $10. I was proud and thrilled. The future suddenly had a different tinge.
But one day at Patterson’s I heard people calling me from the shore. “It’s your brother!” I paddled in, frantic, and found Kevin lying on the beach, people standing around him. He looked bad—pale, in shock. He’d been hit in the back by a board. Apparently he had got the wind completely knocked out of him. Little John Kaulukukui had saved him from drowning. Kevin was still breathing heavily, coughing, crying. We carried him up to the house. Everything hurt, he said. Mom cleaned him up, calmed him down, and put him to bed. I went out to surf some more. I figured he would be back in the water in a few days. But Kevin never surfed again. He did resume bodysurfing, and as a teenager became one of the hotshots at Makapu’u and Sandy Beach, two serious bodysurfing spots on the eastern tip of Oahu. As an adult, he has had back trouble. Recently, an orthopedist, looking at a spinal x-ray, asked him what had happened when he was a child. It looked as if he had suffered a serious fracture.
I eventually learned to like the rights at Kaikoos. The spot was often empty, but there were a few guys who knew how to ride it, and, watching them on good days from the Black Point rocks, I began to see the shape of the reef and how to avoid, with a little luck, catastrophe. Still, it was a gnarly spot by my standards, and when I bragged in letters to my friend in Los Angeles about riding this scary, deep-water peak, I was not above spinning tall tales about being carried, with Roddy, by huge currents halfway to Koko Head, which was miles away to the east. My detailed description of scooting through a big tube—the cavern formed by a hard-breaking wave—on a Kaikoos right contained, on the other hand, a whiff of authenticity. I still half remember that wave.
But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around.
Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world. At 13, I had mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development, and it had left a hole in my world, a feeling that I’d been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.
And yet you were expected, even as a kid, to take its measure every day. You were required—this was essential, a matter of survival—to know your limits, both physical and emotional. But how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed a test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning. As a kid, too, your abilities were assumed to be growing. What was unthinkable one year became thinkable, possibly, the next. My letters from Honolulu in 1966 were distinguished less by swaggering bullshit than by frank discussions of fear: “Don’t think I’ve suddenly gotten brave. I haven’t.” But the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back for me.
That was clear on the first big day I saw at Cliffs. A long-interval swell had arrived overnight. The sets were well overhead, glassy and gray, with long walls and powerful sections. I was so excited to see the excellence that my backyard spot could produce that I forgot my usual shyness and began to ride with the crowd at the main peak. I was overmatched there, and scared, and got mauled by the biggest sets. I wasn’t strong enough to hold on to my board when caught inside by six-foot waves, even though I “turned turtle”—rolled the board over, pulled the nose down from underwater, wrapped my legs around it, and got a death grip on the rails. The whitewater tore the board from my hands, then thrashed me, holding me down for sustained, thorough beatings. I spent much of the afternoon swimming. Still, I stayed out till dusk. I even caught and made a few meaty waves. And I saw surfing that day—by Leslie Wong, among others—that made my chest hurt. Long moments of grace that felt etched deep in my being: what I wanted, somehow, more than anything else. That night, while my family slept, I lay awake on the bamboo-framed couch, heart pounding with residual adrenaline, listening restlessly to the rain.
My parents were dutiful, if not particularly enthusiastic, Catholics. Mass every Sunday, Saturday catechism for me, fish sticks on Friday. Then, around my 13th birthday, while we were still in California, I received the sacrament of confirmation, becoming an adult in the eyes of the church, and was thunderstruck to hear my parents say that I was no longer required to go to mass; that decision was now mine. Were they not worried about the state of my soul? Their evasive, ambiguous answers shocked me again. They had been fans of Pope John XXIII. But they did not, I realized, actually believe in all the doctrine and the prayers—all those oblatios, oratios, frightening confiteors, and mealy-mouthed acts of contrition that I had been memorizing and struggling to understand since I was small. It was possible that they didn’t even believe in God. I immediately stopped going to mass. God was not visibly upset. My parents continued to drag the little ones to church. Such hypocrisy! This joyful ditching of my religious obligations happened shortly before we moved to Hawaii.
And so, on a spring Sunday morning, I found myself slowly paddling back from Cliffs through the lagoon while my family was sweating it out at Star of the Sea, a Catholic church in Waialae. The tide was low. My skeg gently bumped on the bigger rocks. Out on the exposed reef, wearing conical straw hats, Chinese ladies bent, collecting eels and octopuses in buckets. Waves broke here and there along the reef’s outer edge, too small to surf.
I felt myself floating between two worlds. There was the ocean, effectively infinite, falling away forever to the horizon. This morning, it was placid, its grip on me loose and languorous. But I was lashed to its moods now. The attachment felt limitless, irresistible. I no longer thought of waves being carved in celestial workshops, as I once did. I was getting more hardheaded. Now I knew that they originated in distant storms, which moved, as it were, upon the face of the deep. But my absorption in surfing had no rational content. It simply compelled me; there was a profound mine of beauty and wonder in it. Beyond that, I could not have explained why I did it. I knew vaguely that it filled a psychic cavity of some kind—connected, perhaps, with leaving the church, or with, more likely, the slow drift away from my family—and that it had replaced many things that came before it.
The other world was land: everything that was not surfing. Books, girls, school, my family, friends who did not surf. “Society,” as I was learning to call it, and the exactions of Mr. Responsible. Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even in passing, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment
would take me where it chose.
ALICE GREGORY
Climb Every Mountain
FROM T Magazine
The only hiking I’ve ever known or half-enjoyed has involved flat terrain, a swimmable body of water as a destination, and at least one parent to whine to along the way. But in September I found myself 5,000 feet up a mountain, lost, alone, without a working cell phone, not even close to where I was supposed to be going, and completely happy. As I gnawed my way up the Dolomite peak of Kronplatz mountain, I had to stop every 100 yards and catch my breath. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the trek would be difficult or that I should bring water. But whatever panic and thirst and lung-burn I experienced was mitigated by the frosted clover and edelweiss and enzian, which I could see the sun thawing in real time as I walked. The air smelled sweetly of manure and cut grass; the tinkle of cowbells and the call of actual cuckoo birds echoed through the valleys.
I was promised, via translated emails, that waiting for me at the top of the mountain would be Reinhold Messner, who is, at least in the glaciated, barely oxygenated part of the world where he was born and still lives, extremely famous. South Tyrol, the autonomous, Austria-bordering province of Northern Italy where Messner scaled his first mountain in the mid-1940s at the age of five, is plastered with blown-up pictures of his leathered face. In the decades that followed his first kindergarten ascent, Messner went on to climb another 3,500 peaks and in the process became one of the most celebrated and sport-advancing, and correspondingly wealthiest, mountaineers of the 20th century.
