Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  By the time I started ninth grade Sunset was where it was happening. It was known to be a complicated, frustrating, completely addicting break. Framed by the Sunset rip to the west side and the Backyards rip to the east, there were Backyards and Outside Backyards, the Point, North Reef, Middles, West Peak, Inside Bowl and Val’s Reef, Second Reef and Outer Reef, an amusement park full of quick waves that change direction on a dime, pumping even when conditions are poor on the rest of the North Shore. Everyone was up at Sunset, all the good shapers and all the cool guys: Ronnie Burns, Mike and Derek Ho, and Jason Majors, among others.

  At Hale-’iwa we were light-years behind, with our ten-foot 50-pound boards, riding straight in on the white water. This didn’t prevent me from riding my bike the few short miles up Kam Highway to check out the killer waves at Sunset. One day on the beach I met a friend from school, Matt Esnard, there with his sister.

  Michelle was my age, blond and tan, and pretty in that classic beach girl way. We became boyfriend and girlfriend defined as . . . we held hands. I don’t think I ever kissed her, way too shy. Way too backward when it came to girls and socializing with girls and making the moves on girls and getting involved in that way. With girls you couldn’t have a friendly little skirmish, then smoke a fatty and go surf. Which was pretty much the range of my social skills. Our relationship consisted of me riding or hitchhiking up to Sunset and sitting on the beach with her.

  Maybe I felt like I needed to up my game to get things to move to the next level. One day I rode to Sunset with my board under my arm. I had no intention of surfing Sunset. It was summiting Everest, it was a walk on the moon. I pretty much thought the paddle out alone would kill me. And yet here I was. With my board, a little light-as-a-potato-chip board made for me by Dick “Rozo” Rosborough, 6′2″ maybe, perfect for my daily sessions, but not for Sunset.

  The wind was offshore, swell coming from the northwest. I guessed it was five feet Hawaiian, a little over shoulder-high, an eight-to-ten-foot face. Part of the surfer’s credo is always to underestimate the size of the wave. To do this they rely on the Hawaiian style of calculation, which measures the back of the breaking wave. It’s about half the size of the face, the part that the rest of the world is interested in.

  I ignore Michelle as I gaze out at the waves, studying them like the pros did. The peaks are coming more from the west now. I think. The peaks are shifty, with crumbling wind-capped lips. I couldn’t believe I was really going to do this. I was a Six Feet and Under boy. My heart is pounding in my head, the adrenaline already surging, and I hadn’t even gotten wet.

  As I paddle out I realize I’m in the so-called Dreaded 7 situation. There are two good waves at Sunset. The six-foot-and-under wave breaks nicely at the point. The eight-foot-and-above wave breaks outside and offers three different takeoff spots, at Middles, Inside Bowl, or West Peak. The Dreaded 7 breaks between the two zones and is frustrating even for hard-core Sunset lovers. The Dreaded 7 wave is neither here nor there, and leaves you pretty much screwed. That was why I was alone out there. Surfers who knew better were out at other breaks that day.

  Michelle sits on the beach, watching.

  I say a prayer, paddle into position. At Sunset you are always paddling into position. So much paddling at Sunset. The water is dark blue out here, and so fast. One swell rises up and another is right behind it. I let a few waves pass and decide I can’t just float out here all day. I paddle until my triceps and shoulders burn. As I feel the wave lift me up I pop to my feet. The wave jacks beneath me and I find myself sliding sideways down the face. Over I go, shoulder hits first, heels in the air. The water mountain looms up behind me. It’s roaring and rumbling, and over the falls I go. I am pounded. The wave is so fat, pressing me down. My ears fill with water. I tumble past a reef head, try to grab on; pointless. I climb my leash and pop up for a breath of air before the next pounding, enough time to vow never to do this again.

  HURRICANE

  DURING LIAM’S OFF-SEASON WE hung together like old times, surfing every day, riding up and down Kam Highway checking the waves. Liam wasn’t about to give up on baseball anytime soon, but he never lost his stoke.

  I was fifteen and he was thirteen. A few days before Thanksgiving, Liam, our friend Dennis, and I were walking down a cane field road near our mom’s house in Waialua. It was harvest season, and they’d been burning some of the fields. When they burned the fields the air smelled like someone was making caramel, and tiny ribbons of ash fell from the sky. It was windy. Dark blue clouds were moving in from the north. We were in high spirits because we’d been let out of school early for some reason we seemed to have missed, most likely because of the pot cookies.

  That day I’d been up since dark for an early morning surf session. I didn’t have time for breakfast but smoked my usual fatty in the bushes, and went to class. Lunchtime comes and a kid in our grade is offering around a shoe box lined with tinfoil, filled with pot cookies. Chocolate chip with walnuts. We ate them with milk at lunch. So wholesome, milk and cookies. Two or three cookies in and I sort of forgot they were pot cookies and ate until I felt full.

  I was in a special English class for slow readers with Mrs. Wee, last class of the day. I didn’t mind English per se. It was my favorite class after agriculture and woodworking. But if Hale-’iwa was breaking I cut out a lot. So when I was there with my butt in the chair and my book open on my desk, Mrs. Wee was glad to see me. Maybe she thought she was getting someplace. She was patient with me, knew I didn’t care too much about her special class and all her efforts, and yet she was still kind. So when she told me to turn to page—who am I kidding, I don’t remember the page number or the book—when she told me to start reading from the top, I really wanted to make her happy. I wanted to show her that she wasn’t completely wasting her time. I looked at the first word, saw it was the, and felt helpless in the face of it. The? The? The. The. The. What in the hell kind of a word was the? I squinted at the sentence, but no words came out. The chocolate chip and walnut pot cookies had broken my ability to talk.

  Also in my class for slow readers was a budding young psycho who lived on my street. He made Liam and me look like Boy Scouts. He broke into cars, marched into people’s houses and took their stuff, dealt in hard drugs. A troublemaker, not just a regular wild North Shore kid.

  “He’s stoned, he’s stoned,” said Budding Young Psycho.

  “It’s okay, Garrett. You don’t have to read today,” said Mrs. Wee.

  I hung my head, curled into myself a little. I’d let her down, and here she was giving me the benefit of a doubt I didn’t deserve.

  ON THAT dark windy day we hurried through the cane fields toward Changes, a secret spot with an excellent left. The wind picked up. There was the loud applause of palm fronds and the leaves of all the tropical foliage. We grabbed our boards and took the sandy path between two hedges of koa to the beach. I led the way, then Dennis, then Liam. Just as we emerged from between the hedges, a gust of wind caught Dennis’s board and spun him around in circles and straight into the bushes.

  Now it’s awesome. Now we are excited. The clouds on the horizon are dark and the sets are rolling in at a quick clip. The waves are not too big, not yet, and thanks to a heavy offshore wind that’s forcing them to hold their shape, they are neat and perfect. That wind has got to be 20 miles an hour, 30 miles an hour, and as we sit on our boards I hear a strange sound, wah wah wah, and I wonder if maybe I’m just hearing things. It goes on, it gets a little louder. Wah wah! Wah wah!

  “Hey!” I call to Liam. “Hear that?”

  “What is it? Whales?” he calls back.

  A swell passes under us. We look toward the beach and there’s a little yellow figure jumping up and down waving its arms. Our mom. Screaming her head off. She’s wearing her yellow raincoat. We take the next available wave in. She’s never been a woman to get panic-stricken, especially when it came to our safety. But as we slide off our boards, she stands over us wagging her finger. “A hurricane’s
coming! Don’t you know any better?”

  We laughed our asses off as she chased us home. Hurricane Iwa made landfall just in time for Thanksgiving. Kaua’i suffered the worst of it. The storm surge flooded the streets around Waikiki. In our neighborhood on the North Shore, big branches were sheared off the trees and some trees were pulled straight out of the ground. When our gas main broke we were forced to run to a friend’s house, where we stayed until it was fixed a week later. The TV news said that President Reagan had declared a state of emergency. We were outraged that we had to go back to school on Monday.

  DA KARMA

  WHEN I WAS GROWING up in the commune, people talked a lot about karma, the you-reap-what-you-sow kind of thing. Were they talking about real seeds or something else? It was one of those things adults went on about, like the war and the Man and the establishment and whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. It was a part of everyday life, but didn’t have a thing to do with me.

  But it did, eventually. During the winter of my sophomore year, when it seemed that every sketchy thing I did—jacking some guy’s bike or stash, cheating on a test, lying to my mom—was answered almost immediately with some bad wipeout, some head-bashing trip over the falls. I was also practicing my aerials and turns and wound up with stitches from head to toe. Even on small days. Even on ho-hum, waist-high waves, I kept getting hurt.

  My surfing was improving rapidly, probably because of my skateboarding. But in skating the ramp isn’t a fast-moving mountain of water shifting and changing beneath you, chasing you. It took a while for me to automatically factor in the moving water mountain and to accurately read a wave, to know what it was going to do by how it felt as it began to rise up beneath my board. I knew where exactly to take off and where to make my bottom turn. At Hale-’iwa, my home break, I’d memorized where the submerged rocks were, and how the waves broke depending on what direction they were coming from and what direction the wind was blowing.

  I’m saying I knew what I was doing, so I shouldn’t have been racking up so many stupid injuries, and yet I was. One day at the end of the winter, I pulled into a barrel and the lip crashed on my front knee. Just before I tumbled off the board, I heard a loud pop. The knee swelled to as big as a grapefruit, so after a few days I went to the doctor. He took some X-rays, checked out my ligaments and tendons, and could find nothing wrong. I could walk on it, but the swelling refused to go down. He told me to come back in if I heard it pop again. I switched from surfing to boogie boarding. For no reason at all one day I was sliding off my board and it popped again. I didn’t return to the doctor, but I stayed off the knee all summer. During that time I started thinking about why this was happening to me. I thought about how I was raised, recalled the principle of karma. Was I paying my karmic debt for all the bad things I’d done? Was it because I didn’t care what kind of person I was?

  Truth was, I did whatever I wanted when I wanted, without considering anyone else. Liam and I stole from people who didn’t need what they had as much as we did, or so we imagined. But then I got to thinking that perhaps that was an asshole thing to do regardless, and that karma had employed the ocean to slap me around a little, show me that what goes around really does come around, just like my mom said.

  I stopped stealing other guys’ bikes and tools, stopped shoplifting, stopped trading pot for test answers, stopped pinching the stray twenty from my mom’s purse. Stopped doing things I knew I could get away with, even though they were wrong.

  It came down to this, I thought: change your actions, change your life.

  A few months passed.

  There’s a community center in Hale-’iwa that used to show movies once in a while. One night they were showing a Christian surf movie, Shout for Joy, about how Ricky Irons won the US Invitational Surfing Championships, then found Jesus. Liam and I stopped by after a long session at Hale-’iwa. The waves that day had been only waist high, but there was a long sweeping left and Liam and I didn’t get out much together. We had stayed until it got dark, practicing our cutbacks, dropping in on each other, messing around in a way you get away with on a small day when most of the guys we knew from the lineup couldn’t be bothered to get wet.

  It was crowded, maybe two hundred people sitting shoulder to shoulder on folding chairs in front of the portable movie screen. Before the movie, the organizer lady passed out raffle tickets. After the movie a winner would be chosen. Throughout the movie Liam pestered me. “Hey, wanna trade tickets? Let’s trade tickets.”

  I said no way. One in three hundred chances of winning, but I knew I was going to win.

  The movie ended. The audience applauded politely. Someone turned on the overhead lights. I was standing at the back in my surf shorts, no shirt, no slippers, hair on end. Suddenly the girl who pulled the winning ticket was reading off its number. The one I refused to trade with Liam for no good reason at all. I won!

  The prize was choosing a brand-new board by one of a bunch of top North Shore shapers. I chose one by Bill Barnfield, who was shaping boards for all the big Sunset boys, with a Shaun Tomson airbrush.

  Shaun was my out-of-the-water hero. He was one of the hard chargers who showed up on the North Shore from South Africa and Australia during the 1970s, and won the IPS World Championship in 1977. I wasn’t necessarily a fan of the way he surfed Pipeline—even though a six-foot face was my limit, I had lofty opinions about the methods of the guys up at Pipe. But he also ran a surfing clothing company called Instinct. He was the only guy who would come to Hale-’iwa Beach. Most sponsors and promoters focused on the big, showy, pedigreed breaks farther east—Wai-mea, Pipeline, Sunset—and the big surf stars who surfed them. We were the undersung, mostly unrecognized mutts of the North Shore. But Tomson showed up on the beach with free stickers and free shorts and T-shirts. My mom was a single mom, raising two kids. It wasn’t easy for us. We just barely got by. His generosity made a huge impact on me.

  From a garage sale board to the board I sawed into thirds in my room to the $15 blank given to me by Roy Patterson to this.

  It was the first great board I’d ever owned.

  GUSTAVO THE PERUVIAN

  JUST AS I WAS starting ninth grade, we moved from Waialua to Sunset into a four-bedroom apartment that cost my mom $400 a month. Sunset is due east on Kam Highway from Hale-’iwa. Calling it a highway makes it sound grander than it is. Really, it’s just a two-lane road that threads through the tropical jungle. The Sunset Beach Store was the lone outpost when I was growing up there, a little side-of-the-road grocery with two gas pumps.

  The houses along the highway to Sunset are hidden by the trees and brush, as is the ocean. On big days the sound of the waves thunders. Sometimes you can feel the steering wheel vibrating in your hands. You make a sudden left into the dirt parking lot and there’s Sunset Beach. Postcard Hawaiʻi. Azure water, frothy waves breaking on the yellow beach, palm trees swaying in the breeze. Standing in the parking lot looking out to sea, you can look back up toward the direction you’ve just come and see Kammieland and Rocky Point. Straight out from the lot there’s Sunset’s Inside Bowl, more treacherous than the usual monster because it often doubles up on itself; two waves become one, creating twice as much energy and a terraced step in the middle of the face, producing either the barrel of your life or cause of death. On a good day, looking farther to the right, you see the middle peak connecting all the way through the inside bowl. There’s an outer peak that is completely dependent on the direction of the swell. When the swell arrives from the west, it just breaks and crumbles all the way in. When the swell arrives from the north it rolls in big and nice, and there are three to four good takeoff zones. Same with a swell from the northwest. On a perfect north or northwest day the waves start from way outside and you take off, and you can just ride forever from the outer peak through the middle bowl to the inside bowl.

  From the parking lot Sunset looks like a bunch of disorganized mush, challenging but not too heavy. If you walk up the beach to the right, to the point, you
can see the waves as they roll in. From that angle the waves look massive, heavy, hellish. It looks like you’d have to have your head examined to paddle out in that shit.

  WE NOW lived within walking distance from the most epic power breaks on the North Shore. Velzyland became my new Six Feet and Under spot. Named in the midfifties after surfboard manufacturer Dale Velzy, V-land was a wicked right at the northeastern end of the island. Turtle Bay is technically the last break on the North Shore, but it’s not considered part of the North Shore’s Seven Mile Miracle. V-land, my new home break, was the last stop.

  Mom enrolled Liam, now in seventh grade, at Kahuku, the neighborhood combo middle school/high school, but I was still at Waialua, and I took the bus there in the mornings. I didn’t mind, because it gave me a chance to check out all the breaks on my way. Liam and I didn’t see each other at all now during the school day, but I started seeing him on the beach. He wasn’t going to classes that I could tell. His deep commitment to baseball and pursuing a pro ball career was a thing of the past. Suddenly, my little brother was hard-charging, getting his education at Rocky Point and Pipeline.

  On the North Shore, when you’re not surfing, the main activity is hanging out. Actually it’s the only activity. No malls, movie theaters, bowling alleys; not too many bars, and anyway, drinking at a bar cost money. We didn’t have any. We started hanging out with a big, charismatic, and largely insane Peruvian guy named Gustavo. He was tall, black-haired even after all the time he spent in the sun, loud and passionate and sweaty. He loved to surf and loved to talk about loving to surf. He was also one of the North Shore’s most successful dealers of cocaine.

  Like Roy Patterson, he was another father figure, and we loved him.