Going out in the waves with these kids was so emotional it was overwhelming, every day on the beach a roller coaster of tears of joy and tears of sorrow and feelings of giving and receiving. One sunny day I took a big seven-year-old named Jason out at one-foot Hale-’iwa and while we were riding the white water in together he shouted “I surf! I surf!” His parents heard this and wept. They said it was Jason’s first spontaneous expression of pure joy.
The first time I worked an event it wasn’t obvious to me that this was a great idea. Most of the kids don’t want to go in the water, and they really don’t want to lie down on surfboards. I watched while the more experienced guys wrestled with the kids, who yelled and kicked and sometimes bit. But the guys steadied the boards in the shore break, held the kids in place, and once they got past the white water something amazing happened: the kids would calm right down. Their world had become defined by the curved boundaries of the surfboard, and the rolling water and shushing of the shore break were comforting. Something in them settled down enough so that the other parts of their personalities could emerge, the part of them that was a kid in the water with a surfer and a board, about to have the ride of their lives.
As we caught a wave and pulled the kids to their feet, they’d gurgle and shriek with joy, and their parents, standing together on the beach, would be in tears.
At a clinic in Montauk a mother came up to me and said her son had been in “training” for weeks. She’d bought him a belly board and had been in the water with him every day, floating him back and forth between the lifeguard towers. This was a kid who, despite his disabilities, was eager to try to surf. After the clinic was over I worked with him until dark, until he could pop up by himself. After that, I made it my goal at every clinic to try to find the one child who was truly interested in the sport. I knew that for most of the kids this was just a fun day away from the usual difficulties and frustrations of their lives. But if there was a remote chance of making a surfer for life, I would take it.
I SHOWED up at Jobos Beach, on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico, where the Surfers Healing gala was to take place, in a new pair of camo cargo shorts, a V-neck shirt, and a new, signature driver hat I’d designed with Peter Grimm: dressed up, for me. I was early and standing around the bar with a few others when I saw her.
Across a crowded room, just like the song says. Well, semi-crowded.
She was dressed in a flowy sundress with her hair half-up, half-down, and I thought to myself, whoa. It wasn’t as if I had never appreciated a pretty girl during my travels, but normally if I spied one I’d direct my friends in her direction. I’d never cheated on Connie and wasn’t looking to now.
Then someone I recognized approached her. They talked a little and she laughed and it looked as if they knew each other well. It was Ernie Alvarez, a well-known Puerto Rican SUP champion. Maybe he was her date? Ernie moved off, headed back across the room, but I intercepted him.
“Ernie, who’s that?”
Ernie grinned, clapped me on the arm. “Oh ho ho!” he said. “Nicole Macias. You should meet her.”
He gestured over to the young woman. She came over and I now saw that she also had a beautiful smile. Warm eyes, lovely skin, gorgeous smile. I think that was probably the moment I fell in love, but it moves around a little in my memory. No—the truth is I was in love the second I spotted her.
“Nicole, this is Garrett McNamara.”
She smiled politely. I could tell my name meant nothing to her. Turned out Ernie was not her date, but a friend of her father’s. I gave her a chaste little peck on the cheek, which is a thing I do when I meet a woman. I don’t know where I picked it up. She accepted the kiss, but was looking at me like who’s this old guy giving me the once-over?
I lost sight of her during the sit-down dinner and the speeches and the auction and all the rest of the gala business. Afterward, there was a reggae band and I saw her again, standing alone near the bandstand. There was an empty couch near where she stood, so I went and sat down.
“So, hey, do you surf?” I called to her. So smooth.
“What?” She had to sit down next to me to hear.
“Surf. Do you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Do you?”
“Yeah, I surf,” I said.
She told me how she was there for a stand-up paddle race, and was helping out at the gala as a favor to a friend of her father’s.
I asked her what she did. When she said she was a teacher I fell a bit harder. Beauty and brains and a desire to serve. I told her I actually surfed for a living. She didn’t believe me.
I went to the bar and brought back some tequila shots. We danced. That is, we sort of bobbed back and forth, side by side. I told her about an after party I’d heard about. She said she thought we could get a ride with Ernie and his girlfriend in his florist’s van—that’s how Ernie supported himself and his surfing, delivering flowers. But when she excused herself to go to the restroom, I ran away—out the front door and down the driveway. The night sky was thick with stars and the air was still. It was humid but cool. Problem was, I was staying at that hotel, so where did I think I was going? I had no clue. But I knew if I didn’t get out of there quick something was going to start that I would have to see all the way through, and it would be amazing and cataclysmic and bring joy and pain and rearrange a lot of people’s lives and open up new vistas and I was scared and didn’t know what else to do.
“Hey, where are you going?” It was Nicole. That sweet voice. Calling after me.
I sauntered back up the drive as if fleeing into the night was a normal thing to do. We stood in the glare of the yellow lights beside a potted plant. All the guests from the gala had pretty much cleared out by then. Except for a few guests coming and going, we were alone.
“You know what? I’ve got to tell you something. You’re a nice girl and a nice person but I’m married.”
“I am too,” she said.
“I know you’re not,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I am.”
Then she launched into a speech about how she believed that everything happened for a reason, and that she had a feeling we were meant to be in each other’s lives, but maybe just as friends, probably just as friends. I took this all in and then we said good-bye, and I thought that was the end of that.
The next morning I started my long trip back to California, where I was involved with a charity event for the Red Cross. I landed in Fort Lauderdale, my connecting flight to Los Angeles was oversold, and the gate agent was asking for volunteers to get bumped to a later flight. The night before, Nicole had told me that she lived in Fort Lauderdale. Her parents also lived there and her dad, Carlos, was a SUP distributor. Since I was now selling my own paddleboard line it felt like a wise decision to try to meet him and discuss my boards. Also, my own dad lived in Lake Worth near Palm Beach, and I hadn’t seen him in a few years.
I hadn’t had much contact with him during my late teens and early adulthood, but after my kids were born we began to rebuild our relationship. After my mom took Liam and me to Hawaiʻi he and Nancy circled the drain together, locked in a crazy relationship built on drugs and alcohol and their inability to call it quits. Finally, after maybe a half dozen years together, they split up. He moved back to New York and got a job managing the bar and wine cellar at the legendary French restaurant Lutèce on East Fiftieth Street. The only way he could succeed at his job—and he was determined to succeed—was to go cold turkey. No booze, no pot, no hard drugs. The one thing he and my mom had in common was a loathing of cold weather. He hated New York winters and would grab a flight south for a hundred bucks. Little by little he started investing in real estate in Florida. After September 11 he moved there for good.
On impulse I volunteered to rebook my flight. I congratulated myself on my excellent business sense. That’s what this was, business. And Nicole Macias was a good contact to have. I’d traded phone numbers with Ernie the night before, and texted him about a half dozen times, tryi
ng to get her number. She had her paddleboard race that day so I didn’t expect to hear back from her. I called Ernie this time and he picked up. My heart was pounding as I asked for Nicole’s number. He was driving. I heard his girlfriend say something in the background, and then suddenly I was talking to Nicole.
I asked her how her race went, told her I’d been bumped off my flight and would love the chance to meet her dad. She gave me his number. Then an hour later I received a text from her. She was sitting at San Juan Airport and had missed her own flight back to Florida. I was frantic. We texted back and forth like hysterical teenagers. We could both feel how heavy it was.
“I’m scared to see you,” I wrote.
“I’m scared to see you too,” she wrote back.
THE NEXT twenty-four hours were easily the most emotionally fraught and awkward twenty-four hours in my life. And I say this as someone who grew up in a commune and wandered the country in a white robe when I was in grade school. I was desperate to see Nicole, but I called my dad and he picked me up at the airport. We sat on his couch in his house in Lake Worth and drank espresso. Nicole texted me that she’d managed to get on a flight standby.
Turns out there’s a version of the coconut wireless in south Florida, because by the time Nicole landed, word had gotten out that Garrett McNamara was in town, planning on hitting the lineup in Fort Lauderdale. I’d had no intention of doing anything but angling it so that I could be with Nicole for even just a little while. But she wanted to go surfing, so we went surfing. Her dad, Carlos, showed up and seemed genuinely happy to meet me, and I tried not to hope too much that this was a good omen. There were a few other dudes in the water, too. The swell was—well, who can remember? Nicole wore her hair in little pigtails and had a white bikini—I’m going to say the swell was shoulder high, the water warm and Atlantic green, and Nicole was the only one who caught any decent waves.
Rory, one of the local known guys in the lineup, was married to the director of the floor show at a Polynesian restaurant. He decided that they needed to take me there. The Mai-Kai is a Fort Lauderdale institution, with tiki torches and tropical rum drinks and chicken teriyaki. We are shown to our table and Rory sits across from his wife, Ui. Carlos and Rose, Nicole’s parents, sit across from each other, which leaves Nicole and me to sit across from each other. It feels now like a triple date. I wonder where Nicole’s husband is. I don’t ask.
Carlos knows a lot about surfing—turns out Nicole has a younger brother who surfs—and we pretend to talk swells and boards and wipeouts but all the while Nicole and I keep eyeing each other. My mouth opened and words came out and food went in, but really, no one existed at that table but her. After dinner Nicole and I went to an Irish pub for a nightcap. Then she drove me back to my dad’s house in Palm Beach.
Neither of us said a word about seeing each other again.
“There’s a good chance I might be at this charity thing in Las Vegas next weekend.” I was being as cagey as I could possibly be. We were both married. I couldn’t ask her to meet me out there. At that moment I would have given anything for a centipede to crawl up her leg, so I could snap it in half and fling it away and make her jump into my arms.
The air conditioning whirred. I looked out the window.
“My best friend in the whole world lives in Vegas, actually,” she said. “So let me know if you go.”
I went. She met me there.
NAZARÉ, MEU CORAÇÃO
AFTER OUR WEEK IN Las Vegas, Nicole and I knew we wanted to be together.
Nicole stayed in Las Vegas for a few weeks after I left thinking things over. She really was married, to her college sweetheart, and even though they’d been having trouble, she wasn’t sure she could leave him. She thought of herself as being responsible, and she was responsible. She told me stories about playing teacher when she was little, and how her joy was making her friends write papers that she would then grade. She never went through a wild period in high school. Running off with me didn’t fit in with her image of herself.
And yet.
My plan was to sit down with Connie and have a heart-to-heart talk about how things just weren’t working out and hadn’t been for a while. That wasn’t just an excuse for my actions, although of course it was that, too. We’d become completely disengaged with each other. She always thought I was cheating when I was away, which I wasn’t, and I didn’t have a clue as to what she got herself up to when she wasn’t home. I’d stopped asking years earlier. Still, I never thought we wouldn’t be married. Years earlier I was flying the red-eye to a wave somewhere and watched a movie about a Boston mob boss. Matt Damon played an Irish criminal who one night tells his girlfriend, “You know, if this isn’t gonna work you’re gonna have to be the one to leave. I’m Irish and we can live with things going wrong for our whole lives.” I laughed out loud in the middle of the dark cabin, flying over the ocean. I thought, That’s me.
I hoped to ease into the conversation with Connie, who had already sensed that something was wrong. I hoped it wouldn’t hurt too much. I hoped and prayed it would go smoothly.
It didn’t.
Does it ever?
NICOLE AND I spent the summer in LA. The more I got to know her the more I realized that she was a rare woman, that there was God blessing me again when I didn’t deserve it. She had worked her way through both undergrad and graduate school, sometimes holding down two jobs—she has a bachelor’s in health science and a master’s in environmental education—and also worked for a time as an environmental educator for the Fort Lauderdale chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. She taught science to gifted middle schoolers and was chosen from a thousand candidates to participate in NOAA’s Teacher at Sea program. She is also a surfer herself, routinely placing in the top three in stand-up paddle contests.
I say all this so you’ll know that when she asked if she could help organize the business side of the Gmac operation I couldn’t say yes fast enough. One day when the surf was nonexistent she watched me “work”—shooting off single-word answers to e-mails, writing haphazard to-do lists on my laptop that I then deleted rather than saved, losing track of where I was supposed to be and when for some big meeting about something or other—she couldn’t stand it another minute, deciding that she needed to do us both a favor by managing things. She was a visionary, like Lowell Hussey, but whereas Lowell focused primarily on succeeding in business, Nicole believed that you could be happy and fulfilled and live your passion while devoting yourself to giving back to the world.
Nicole’s first order of business was reading my e-mails to catch up on everything I had going on. There she found a five-year-old thread between a Portuguese bodysurfer named Dino Casimiro and me about a big wave that breaks on the beach of an ancient fishing village called Nazaré. He’d attached some pictures—huge thick-looking A-frames. I’d written back and said it reminded me of Jaws. There the exchange had stopped. I’d never been to Europe, and can honestly say I’d never given the waves of Portugal a thought.
“What do you think about this Nazaré place?” she said. “You want to go?”
All surfers dream of discovering a wave, pioneering it, and putting it on the map. There are two types of discoveries. Waves no one has heard of before in some crazy, tough-to-get-to spot in Ireland or Tasmania or Brazil or Micronesia; and waves, usually on outer reefs, thought to be completely unrideable. Before Laird Hamilton, Darrick Doerner, and Buzzy Kerbox towed into Jaws in 1995; before Jeff Clark paddled out at Mavericks in 1974; before Greg Noll proved to even the locals that twenty-five-foot Wai-mea could be ridden in 1957, those waves were part of the great unknown.
We thought it looked as if this Nazaré place might be both.
Nicole worked her magic—everyone I know is jealous not only because she’s beautiful, smart, and kind, but because she’s a genius at making stuff happen—and within a few months we received an invitation from the Portuguese government to fly over and check it out.
Before we left for Portugal,
Nicole and I met Alan, Bill, and Michael for dinner. Before the waitress even passed out the menus we were reliving the past. We argued about who decided to introduce our parents and which was the best, most gnarly bike ramp we’d ever built, and about that day Benet the Rastaman caught us spying on him and Nabia having sex in his backyard canopy bed. They accused me of being the instigator, the one who always wanted to climb up things and jump off.
Alan is still Sir Lancelot, tall and lanky, now a father of three and one of the higher-ups at Guitar Center. Bill is a fast talker, articulate and smart. He was working as a restaurant consultant and has writing aspirations. Michael is a successful BMW salesman, with a full team working under his guidance. We joked that he really was the golden child. We’ve all had our troubles, but against all odds we seem to have turned out okay.
NAZARÉ IS an hour’s drive north of Lisbon on the central coast of Portugal, an old fishing village and local tourist destination, one of those little coastal towns packed with vacationing families in the summer and stone-cold empty in the off-season. There are whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs, narrow cobblestoned streets, a broad yellow-sand beach, wooden frames loaded with mackerel, and sardines drying in the sun. The town is most famous not for a monument or historical landmark or cathedral, but for the women, who still wear the traditional seven layers of petticoats under black knee-length skirts. No one knows why seven. The reasons are lost to time. Some say each skirt stands for the number of waves a fishing boat must crest before it is safe.
When we drove into town on a stormy day in November, the streets were empty. We were told to be prepared for the widows with rooms to rent. During July and August they line the streets in their lawn chairs, cardboard signs advertising the size and price propped on their knees. But we saw only a few of the hardy ones, or the desperate ones.
Hound of the Sea Page 19
