The Wave

by Susan Casey

  A fine mist hung in the gold morning light and when the wave broke, spray showered over us. Wind was minimal, giving the water the greasy, glassy texture that surfers love. “It’s gonna be a show of power out there today,” Hornbaker said, hefting the waterproof housing for a Super 16 movie camera onto his shoulder. Directly in front of us, as though engaged in some avant-garde stage performance, a Brazilian surfer dropped onto a wave. He wobbled in the barrel for a few seconds before being pitched into the air backward; the effect was of a bowling pin blown off a balance beam by a fire hose. We saw his board rocket into the sky, and the flash of a leg that looked like it was bent in the wrong direction. “There’s a scenario,” Miller said. “A bad one.”

  As the wave hit with grenade percussion, the surfer disappeared into the maw. His partner darted by for the rescue, and as he passed you could see in his face that Teahupoo’s impact zone was the last place he wanted to go. Steering into the whitewater, he looked frantically for the surfer’s head to pop up, but there was no sign. The driver circled, still searching, but the next wave was already bearing down. He was out of time. He was also out of luck: when he hit the throttle to speed away, his engine quit. “He’s cavitating!” someone yelled from a boat. Jet Skis were notorious for this, for stalling in the churning foam, their motors grasping for traction from the water only to end up stuttering on air. Now, instead of a rescue vehicle, the driver was out there with a thousand-pound problem. Lacking other options, he dove into the whitewater.

  Noticing the trauma, several teams rushed to the edge of the impact zone, ready to help. One of them corralled the abandoned Ski, while another managed to get the driver onto their rescue sled. As a third wave reared up, the surfer’s head was spotted at the far side of the lagoon. He’d traveled more than five hundred yards underwater, shot like a cannonball across the reef. Someone plucked him from the water, sparing him further beating.

  Five minutes passed, and then ten, and still the Jet Skis clustered at the bottom of the lagoon. In the channel, people speculated about snapped necks and missing limbs. Then the surfer appeared, splayed out on a rescue sled, grinning and waving as if he were in a ticker-tape parade. Blood dripped from his elbows. As he went by he flashed us a shaka, the Hawaiian hand sign for “things couldn’t be better.” “Oh, God is merciful,” Hornbaker said. Miller lowered his camera and stared in disbelief: “He doesn’t have any idea how fucking lucky he is.”

  Hamilton drove up to us on a red Jet Ski. From every boat, photographers trained their lenses on him. He wore a white, long-sleeved rash guard over an armored flotation vest, giving a kind of Ninja Turtle effect, and knee-length neoprene shorts. “Tickets on the fifty-yard line,” he said, smiling. For Hamilton, this really was a day when things couldn’t be better. His family and friends knew it well: the more waves Hamilton rode, and the greater the degree of difficulty of those waves, the happier and easier to be around he became. “If I scare myself once every day, I’m a better person,” he had said. “It helps to have that little jolt of perspective that life’s fragile.” Few places made that point more clearly than Teahupoo. Out of respect for his host, however, Hamilton had begun the day driving, not surfing. He had just towed Van Bastolaer into an enormous wave, and now they were headed back out for the sequel.

  Weaving between the vessels in the channel, a dozen tow teams motored back to the takeoff zone, which was known as the lineup even though nothing out there was orderly as a line. The area was so called because it provided visual alignment with a landmark on shore (in this case, a notch between the steep volcanic peaks), a cue the surfers could use to position themselves correctly. It was important local knowledge, a precise sense of where the wave would break.

  For this and other reasons, eagle-eye vision was a critical part of the game. To have any hope of catching one of these stampeding giants, the riders had to spot it from afar. This wasn’t an easy skill to acquire. When it first appeared on the horizon, a promising wave was merely a subtle shadow in the water, like a blurry strip of corduroy. As the energy neared the break, the water would rise into a lump. Some lumps, meanwhile, were lumpier than others, and those were the ones that everyone wanted. Often a half-dozen teams would end up gunning for the same wave, though only one man could ride it; to have multiple surfers tearing around at forty miles per hour on a giant face was undesirable and perilous. To determine who would get the wave a furious game of chicken ensued, played through a scrim of considerations that included who was best positioned, who let go of the tow rope first (placing himself deepest into the belly of the wave), how many waves each rider had (or had not) already caught, whose driver was most aggressive, who was higher up the big-wave food chain—in a few quick seconds all these things came into play. Tow surfing was not a sport for the timid or the excessively polite.

  “This is a hell-raising group,” Miller said, surveying the teams. “There’s Garrett McNamara. G-Mac. I saw him get his leg sashimied here. Whole thigh ripped open, right to the knee. They called that day Bloody Sunday.” McNamara, forty-two, was a highly skilled surfer with a wild streak the size of Interstate 10. His combination of talent and audaciousness drove him to do things that few others would attempt. Shortly before coming to Tahiti, for instance, McNamara had surfed the wave kicked up by a calving glacier in Alaska, dodging falling hunks of ice the size of city blocks. On another occasion, for a promotional video clip, he let an eight-inch-long centipede crawl out of his mouth.

  McNamara’s Don’t Try This at Home persona also—quite regularly—led him to endure wipeouts that not everybody could survive. I watched him as he drove by on a camouflage-painted Jet Ski, wearing a camouflage-patterned rash guard and a black baseball cap. Though he was almost always smiling, there was a dark intensity to McNamara’s presence. His hair was close-cropped and jet-black, his eyes were a color deeper than brown. Like many of the best riders, he grew up on Oahu’s north shore and was forced to fight his way into that brutal surf fraternity. But his tough Hawaiian neighborhood of Waialua looked like a penthouse at the Four Seasons compared to his tow partner Koby Abberton’s hometown.

  Abberton, twenty-eight, came from Maroubra Beach, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Maroubra was a feisty slice of coastline known for its challenging surf, vast sewage-treatment plant, maximum security jail, and dense population of heroin dealers and addicts, which included Abberton’s mother and her boyfriend, a bank robber. It was a snake-eyed roll of the dice, Abberton’s youth, so filled with violence and obstacles and, ultimately, surf salvation that even as he cruised through the channel at Teahupoo, his life story was being made into a documentary narrated by Russell Crowe. When Abberton was fourteen, he and his older brothers Sunny, twenty-one, and Jai, nineteen, had started a surf gang known as the Bra Boys. (A double entendre: Bra is short for Maroubra and surf-speak for “brother.”) The gang, now four hundred strong, gained notoriety in 2003 when Jai Abberton was charged with the shooting murder of a Sydney man (he was later acquitted on the grounds of self-defense); Koby was accused of helping him dispose of the body (a charge for which he received a nine-month suspended sentence).

  “Watch Koby’s wave,” Miller advised. “He won’t even be on one unless it’s totally insane. Bust the wall down or nothing.” Sitting behind McNamara on the Ski, Abberton—who bore a striking resemblance to the actor Mark Wahlberg—looked pretty mellow for the moment, an impression that was undercut by his heavily tattooed neck.

  As the morning progressed Teahupoo pumped out one snarling wave after another, but the swell had a distinct rhythm. It pulsed lightly and then heavily and sometimes convulsively. An extra-powerful set of waves would rush in, only to be followed by a relative lull until the next blast of energy arrived. “Every wave’s different on the same day,” Hamilton had explained, describing how minute changes in swell direction, wind, and interval—the number of seconds that passes between two waves—add up to endless variations. “It’s never the same mountain.”

  There had already been one w
ave, ridden by a twenty-four-year-old surfer from Maui named Ian Walsh, that was freakishly bigger than the rest. This wave just had more of everything: more height, more girth, more foam and chop, more lunacy. It was as though Teahupoo had hated the taste of this one and spat it out in disgust. Collectively, people gasped. Walsh’s wave was more like a wave and a half, and he knew it, throwing his head back in joy as he made a clean exit, and then bowing it in relief.

  The wind came up, whipping spray and adding a toothiness to the water. Hamilton took a wave; immediately I could see the distinction between him and the others. Many times this morning I’d seen surfers straining to hold their own in the barrel. The wave sucked so much water up its face that unless the rider had the proper reserves of momentum and mass, they were quickly outmuscled. With his power and size, Hamilton didn’t fly across the wave so much as he carved a trench through it. But his most startling move was to remain in the barrel for several beats longer than anyone else. Instead of racing ahead of the falling lip, he toyed with it, exiting at the last possible second as though stepping over a building’s threshold the instant it collapsed. When he kicked out of the wave in a signature 360-degree flip, the channel erupted in cheers.

  During the afternoon conditions got rougher. Clouds snaked around the base of the sheer peaks behind us, and the continued pounding of the waves churned the water so much that the ocean changed color from a clear azure blue to a muddy, foamy green. A log the size of a telephone pole floated into the channel. Before it could inflict any damage, the great Tahitian surfer Poto zoomed in on a Jet Ski and removed it. Although he wasn’t riding on this day, Poto (whose given name is Vetea David) was royalty in these waters, Tahiti’s first pro on the world-cup circuit. In person, Poto was a guy you’d look at twice. His movie-star features were toughened by a pugilist edge; think Polynesian Ken doll crossed with South American mobster. The image was completed by the stunning woman in a snip of a bikini who sat behind him on his Jet Ski, glossy black hair cascading down her back.

  More rides, more triumphs, more wipeouts. “Bye-bye!” one of the French photographers said in his charming accent, as a surfer’s legs buckled beneath him. Watching him bounce down the face of the wave, I could only wonder what was going through his head at that moment, what desperate prayers he was uttering. On the boat beside us one rider had stripped down to a loincloth, his upper body and hips raked with gouges and covered in blood. His board, broken into pieces, lay on the stern.

  After a while Teahupoo spat out another superwave, caught by Shane Dorian, thirty-five, a veteran surfer from Hawaii’s Big Island. As it reared up, everyone in the channel leaned back reflexively. Though he was one of the strongest riders around, Dorian seemed caught off guard by the behemoth and teetered on the brink of a fall. He managed to stay upright until the end bowl, the wave’s exit, when he was blown out on his back. It was a near miss of a high order. “He was close to disaster on that one,” Miller said. Dorian agreed: “I thought I was too. I was correcting the entire time.”

  Hamilton rode more waves, and so did Van Bastolaer, including one that he ended up sharing with Garrett McNamara. McNamara, however, had gone kamikaze, dropping in so deep he was doomed from the start. He bit the dust spectacularly. “I went toward the reef at like, 100 mph,” he told Surfing Magazine later. “… I’m talking to God going, ‘Please, please don’t make this one too bad.’ ” McNamara escaped in one piece but not before taking “about ten” waves on the head due to his position in the center of the maelstrom. When Abberton was finally able to reach him, McNamara recounted, “I checked my cuts, hugged Koby, and went ‘Thank you! That was insane! I feel alive!’ ” Later he would find shards of coral embedded in his helmet.

  The day was winding down. The surfers looked spent, the spectators were thoroughly sunburned, the photographers rifled the coolers for cans of Hinano, the local beer. Only Labaste, still scanning the horizon, vigilant, and Teahupoo itself, continuing to grind out giant waves, maintained their energy. By sunset just about everyone had headed back to shore.

  Mommy and Poppy’s yard had a celebratory air, the riders high on relief and testosterone. They milled around attending to their gear, rinsing it, packing it, winching Jet Skis back onto trailers, drinking beer, and asking the photographers to show them digital images of their rides. When you’re actually on a giant wave, they told me, you don’t get the full measure of the animal. The experience is more like a collage of sensory impressions. There may be a flash of white spray, a sudden jolt, a feeling of energy surging beneath your feet, the suspension of time so that ten seconds stretch like taffy across a violent blue universe. Inside the barrel, a place that surfers regard with reverence, light and water and motion add up to something transcendent. It’s an exquisite suspension of all things mundane, in which nothing matters but living in that particular instant. Some people spend thirty years meditating to capture this feeling. Others ingest psychedelic drugs. For big-wave surfers, a brief ride on a mountain of water does the trick.

  I sat at the table listening to a group of them trade stories about the day, all of their tension and pre-swell fears burned off in the waves. Across from me Miller was talking to a Tahitian surfer named Teiva Joyeux. I’d met Joyeux, thirty-one, the previous day and been struck by his quiet, elegant manner. That, and his tattoos. They were done in the traditional Polynesian style and covered much physical real estate. Joyeux had inscribed patterned bands, swooping curves, and sinuous animals onto his arms, legs, back, stomach, chest—he and his wife, Nina, had even tattooed wedding bands onto their fingers. It might not be a look you’d want to adopt if you worked at McKinsey, but on Joyeux it was natural and striking. I knew that for him, days like this one were bittersweet. On December 2, 2005, his younger brother Malik Joyeux, then twenty-five and one of Teahupoo’s star performers, had died in a fall while surfing at Pipeline, in Oahu. The two brothers had been close, and the loss was shattering. And so while a major swell brought friends from around the globe to Tahiti, for Joyeux there would always be one rider who was missing.

  The yard began to empty out. Some men had planes to catch later that evening—on to the next wave. Leaving the pipsqueak rental car to Miller and Hornbaker, I climbed into the backseat of Van Bastolaer’s truck behind Hamilton, in the passenger seat. He was relaxed, wrung out in his favorite way, and his voice was shot from yelling all day over the roaring waves. Both men’s eyes were so bloodshot that they were painful to look at. (For obvious reasons, tow surfing does not involve sunglasses.) As we pulled out of the driveway, a rider I didn’t recognize dashed up to the driver’s side window and thrust his arm into the truck, trying to shake Van Bastolaer’s hand. He was a small guy with long, matted hair, and he was beside himself. “Thank you! Really, THANK YOU!” he said, and then paused, searching for words. “That was … REAL.”

  “Real,” Van Bastolaer repeated with a laugh. “Yeah, brah. No faking over here.”

  We headed down the road, leaving Mile 0 and all its magic behind. A filmy night descended on the water, the sky settling into layers of apricot and rose that slowly deepened to a violet-tinted black. Hamilton, eating a tin of smoked almonds, offered them around. “No,” Van Bastolaer said. “I want to kiss my wife, and I want the real taste.” He turned to me in the backseat. “Happy wife, happy life!”

  Hamilton looked at him. “You could wash your mouth out with soap and she’d still be able to taste the beer.”

  Tahiti’s not much on artificial illumination; no streetlights or flashing signs or lit-up office buildings drown out the blaze of stars overhead. I could still hear the waves crashing nearby, but the near darkness gave me a chance to process the day’s sensory overload.

  Teahupoo, with its timeless power, brought to mind the age-old philosophical quest to distinguish between beauty and its twisted cousin, the sublime: for the merely pretty to graduate to the sublime, terror was required in the mix. “The Alps fill the mind with a kind of agreeable horror,” wrote one seventeenth-century thinke
r, summing up the concept. And while humans were capable of creating the lovely, the dramatic, the sad, or the inspiring, only nature could produce the sublime. It was a concept both comforting and disturbing: there are many things out there more powerful than we are. No one was more aware of this than the men who’d ridden Teahupoo on this day (except, perhaps, the ones who had fallen on it).

  “Everyone’s going to have Post Big Wave Syndrome,” Hamilton said in a hoarse croak. This was his name for the inevitable low that followed an endorphin high. The body had squandered all of its good drugs in a single binge. Now a resupply was required—and that could take weeks of dragging around, feeling excited by nothing. “Sometimes it doesn’t hit for three or four days afterward,” he said. “Before I knew what it was, it used to hammer me.”

  “Ah, brah,” Van Bastolaer said, “we’re gonna have another big swell here before New Year’s. I have a feeling. I’ll be calling you.” He mimed a dialing motion and laughed. “You’ll be back.”

  PENETRATING SO MANY SECRETS, WE CEASE TO BELIEVE IN THE UNKNOWABLE. BUT THERE IT SITS NEVERTHELESS, CALMLY LICKING ITS CHOPS.

  H. L. Mencken

  KAHUKU, OAHU

  The north shore of Oahu is a lovely, blustery place that attracts a smattering of tourists, residents looking to escape the rush of Waikiki, and just about every serious big-wave surfer on earth. If the wave kingdom has a Hollywood or a Mecca or a Harvard, they are all here. “They call it the seven-mile miracle,” Hamilton told me. “It’s the proving ground. If you’re a surfer and you’re coming up—and you’re serious about doing anything—you gotta go to Oahu and show what you’ve got. It’s unbelievable how much surf there is in such a small area. And every wave is a great wave.” Along the north shore there were lefts, rights, point breaks, perfect tubes, giant walls; there were inner reefs and outer reefs and on the truly massive days, waves would break on the outer outer reefs, where Hamilton and Darrick Doerner had first experimented with tow surfing and where Jeff Hornbaker had once filmed in waves so savage that in their aftermath dead sea turtles floated to the surface.