by Susan Casey
Globally there had also been brutal heat, extended droughts, raging floods, runaway wildfires, and swooning fluctuations in temperature. Europe had been scoured by wind and deluged with rain. So much Arctic ice had melted that the Northwest Passage, historically impassable, had opened. Hurricane Noel, the sixth and deadliest hurricane of the season, hit Canada’s maritime provinces on November 4, a late-season tempest that announced itself with eighty-mile-per-hour winds and fifty-five-foot waves. The waves swept away piers, toppled boats, flipped cars, tore up hunks of pavement, washed out roads, and tossed large boulders far inland.
One of the year’s most dramatic incidents had occurred only days before, on November 11, the first day of this conference. As if to remind the scientists why their work was important and what could go wrong in the waves, a storm near Russia’s Black Sea had sunk four bulk carriers and split an oil tanker in two, causing a three-thousand-ton oil spill. Foundering in seventy-mile-per-hour winds and thirty-foot waves, the bulk carriers had also tipped seven thousand tons of sulfur into the drink. Another six cargo ships ran aground and more than forty vessels were evacuated from Port Kavkaz, 550 miles south of Moscow. Three sailors were confirmed dead, with fifteen missing. As rescue helicopters searched the waves for survivors, warnings of a second storm were issued. Interviewed for TV, a port official was beside himself. The cameras rolled as he lamented the loss of tourism in the area, the chemicals in the water, the oil-slicked seabirds, the madness of the storm. “The ships weren’t meant for these kinds of waves,” he said, wringing his hands. “They shouldn’t have gone out.”
A WAVE IS A COMMUNICATED AGITATION.
Jack London
PAIA, MAUI
Days of rain had given way to a breezy and clear Sunday morning, palms tossing, mauve clouds slinking away on the horizon. By seven-thirty a.m. Hookipa Beach Park was already crowded, the surf breaking large and steady. An offshore wind lifted the waves as they charged toward shore, holding them open, it seemed, just a little bit longer, letting them growl and spit and lunge for an extra second or two. They were double overheads, aligned in perfect formation. Instead of closing out suddenly in crashing clumps of whitewater, they peeled neatly from top to bottom. White feathers of spray streamed off their peaks. Truck after truck pulled into the dirt parking lot, bumpers hard at the sand, and when the surfers jumped out and stared at the ocean and took in the waves, the wind, the perfect day-ness of it all, they moved with the urgent energy of kids on Christmas morning, bee-lining for the tree. Boards were slung down from racks and hauled out of pickups and zipped out of cases and waxed and examined for dings and then tucked under their owners’ arms as guys loped across the beach. It was as if a silent signal had gone out, a kind of dog whistle for surfers, and summoned them to the water.
Hamilton arrived in his black Ford 250 pickup, windows down, Pearl Jam providing the sound track. As he rolled through the parking lot, he flashed a couple shakas and yelled a few “howzits” to friends. There was nothing so obvious as a huge grin on his face, but if you spent time around Hamilton, you learned to sense his moods. His energy was the high-octane sort; along with the extra power, there was a heightened risk of detonation. When Hamilton was frustrated or upset, his whole presence signaled it. His eyes flashed a duller color than their usual sea green and hardened into a disconcerting stare, his movements tightened, his voice became lower and flatter, his muscles flexed as though spoiling for a fight. He was known for this aggression, and for its flip side too, for ease and generosity and humor. “Laird can be extremely everything,” Dave Kalama had explained one time. “He can be extremely kind, extremely patient, extremely irritating, whatever. I mean he’s not your standard person.” You have to remember the context, Kalama added. “People who aren’t used to being in situations like we are don’t understand—that intensity is part of what helps you survive.”
But today Hamilton was happy. The waves were here. Even though these were little canapés for a big-wave rider, they were tasty, and in time the main course would arrive. With Thanksgiving only a week away, the winter wave factory in the Aleutian Islands was open for business; any day the weather radar might glow with the pulsing magenta blob that meant a serious storm, spidering down from Alaska. Some of the most memorable swells in history had shown up along with the turkey and stuffing.
Hamilton drove to the far end of the beach, parking in the shadow of the sunny yellow lifeguard tower in front of a sign that said: “Warning: Strong Current. You Could Be Swept Away from Shore and Drowned.” Next to it stood another sign: “Mai huli ‘oe I kokua o ke kai!,” Hawaiian for “Never turn your back on the ocean!” On top of it someone had plastered a sticker of a red circle with a slash through the middle, the universal symbol for “no more of whatever’s inside the circle.” In this case it was a drawing of a standup paddle surfer, atop a scrawled warning: “Stay out of the surf breaks!” Hamilton got out and unloaded his thirteen-foot standup board, propping it against the sign as he reached into the truck for his long Kevlar paddle.
Standup, as surfers refer to it, is a twist on the sport that Hamilton, Kalama, Lickle, and others had taken up several years ago to challenge themselves on the days when sixty-foot waves weren’t available. While the entire surf industry was gravitating toward shorter, quicker, thinner boards for doing flashy aerials on smaller faces, Hamilton was showing up on enormous planks that ranged from ten feet to more than sixteen feet long, and carrying what looked like an eight-foot outrigger canoe paddle. At first no one could quite figure out what he was doing, but once they did the sport exploded in popularity.
“We call it ‘the ancient sport we’ve never seen but we know existed,’ ” Hamilton said, hoisting the forty-pound board on his shoulder. “It looks simple, but it’s not.” Unlike in regular surfing, the standup rider remains on his feet at all times. There is no steering around on the stomach, no hands in the water. Instead, the paddle is the means of propulsion. To catch a wave the trick is not only to stay upright (about as easy as balancing barefoot on a basketball) but to maneuver the hulking board into the right position on a dime (about as easy as performing dressage moves in a school bus).
As the sticker made clear, regular paddle surfers viewed standup surfers with varying degrees of annoyance, mostly near the high end of the scale. One complaint was that when a standup surfer fell, his outsize board became a runaway wrecking ball. Every surfer I met had been nailed numerous times by his, or someone else’s, surfboard, and the aftermath was never pretty. Exhibit A was Hamilton, his body a wound map of punctures and divots. “I got my Pe’ahi gun through my face last winter,” he had told me, describing how the surfboard’s sharp tip had “exploded” the inside of his mouth. “It was like a fourteen-foot, sixty-pound spear gun right behind my teeth, through the gums,” he added. “If it had hit me in the temple, it would’ve been game over.” Then there was the cross-shaped scar on his left thigh, a gift one Christmas Day on Kauai when someone’s loose board hit “like a pick ax to my femur.” Or the time a surfboard T-boned him in the forehead at Pipeline: “134 stitches to my frontal lobe.” I knew one surfer who’d had his eyeball split open, and another who’d been pierced in the C-2 vertebra, an encounter that left him temporarily paralyzed. When you considered the damage even a snappy six-foot swallowtail could inflict, a thirteen-foot missile knifing through the surf became a justifiably terrifying notion.
The other reason for resentment at a crowded surf break—and likely the more significant one—was simple: standup riders caught all the waves. While the other surfers, sitting on their boards, eyeballed the incoming sets from what Hamilton referred to as a “worm’s-eye view,” standup riders could see clear to the horizon. They identified the best waves early, and then used their paddles to accelerate past any other takers. I sat on a picnic table and watched Hamilton slicing his way toward the Point, a break about three hundred yards offshore, to demonstrate the practice.
A moment later Dave Kalama arrived in his white picku
p, pulling up next to Hamilton’s. His cousin Ekolu Kalama, thirty-one, a tall, regal-looking Hawaiian, was in the passenger seat. They got out, and took down their standup boards. Waving a quick hello as they crossed the sand, both Kalamas disappeared into the surf.
I spotted Hamilton through my binoculars, stroking past dozens of bobbing heads in the lineup, paddling farther out and snagging waves before anyone else had even noticed them. He was doing laps in perpetual motion—paddle out, surf in, paddle back out—as though trying to set a record for waves surfed within a period of time. Kalama soon joined him. For most surfers, this was the day they had been waiting for; for Hamilton and Kalama it was only training for that day, a chance to log some miles and experiment with technique and press the boundaries of their endurance.
As the morning progressed, the waves strengthened, kicking up more spray and breaking with a heavier, rounder sound. The air vibrated with energy. It smelled of water and salt and earth, with a slight fish tang. I watched as people tried, and mostly failed, to catch waves, their bodies gobbled up by the whitewater. A lifeguard shot to the beach on a Jet Ski and deposited a jangled-looking guy with a broken board. The surfer tipped off the Ski and staggered onto the sand, while the lifeguard pivoted a quick U-turn to avoid getting caught broadside. He gunned the engine, racing full tilt up the face of the incoming wave, barely clearing the crest as it broke. The Jet Ski took vertical air, almost flipping him over before landing precariously on the backside. Standing next to me, taking it all in, pulling hard on a cigarette, a snaggle-haired rider with a furrowed brow seemed to reconsider his plans. At the far end of the break I saw Hamilton and Kalama shooting down a wave while having what looked like a conversation; they faced each other because Kalama was riding his board backward.
Just down the beach Brett Lickle exited the water, so I walked over to talk to him. Few riders had spent as much time along this stretch of ocean. From Spreckelsville, an unruly, windswept area six miles down the coast, to the breaks here at Hookipa, to Jaws, five miles up the road, Lickle knew Maui’s entire north shore with the kind of familiarity that enables a person to walk around his bedroom in the dark without knocking things over. I wanted to ask him why so few surfers were making their rides. “Oh, that’s typical,” he said. “Usually you’ll see about six people doing all the surfing. The others are pulling into closeouts, with no idea of where the wave breaks or how it breaks. I call it reckless abandonment.”
A wave’s first appearance was subtle, more like a jot note on Nature’s to-do list than a tangible thing. “A lot of the time you’re reading shadows,” Lickle said. “You know there’s energy, but you don’t know exactly where. But then you see that a certain shadow is deeper to the right. You’ve really got to be in the pole position if you want to catch one.”
Like Hamilton, Lickle’s passion for waves inspired him to constantly invent new ways to ride them. The garage at his house in Haiku was a dense maze of tools and parts and old boards, a mad jumble of possibilities. Surfboards, standup boards, tow boards, snowboards, skateboards, wakeboards, windsurfing boards, kitesurfing boards, even an ungainly contraption called a surf bike—Lickle had them all, in profusion. It is a matter of which toy was right for the moment and how the gear could be adapted for extra fun or difficulty. “You have to understand,” he said, gesturing at Hookipa. “For us this is like trying to get a buzz on the kiddie roller coaster. You have to stand up or be upside down or something.” He shook the water out of his hair and reached for his towel. “You have to tweak the variables or you’ll die of boredom.”
Fun, in other words, required a hard squirt of adrenaline—or it wasn’t really fun. Lickle had described a game they used to play called Sky Pilot, a variation on tow surfing where the driver would slingshot the rider up the face of the wave, so it served as a moving launch ramp. “You would jump the wave,” he explained, “go as high as you possibly could, do as many rotations as you could, and then land out back on the flats.” He laughed. “We’d go thirty feet in the air.” What eventually happened to Lickle while playing Sky Pilot goes a long way toward explaining why today it is no longer on the menu: “I landed one time and everything just gave; I literally brought my heels to my butt. It blew out all the ligaments in both knees. Another time the lip of the wave hit one knee and buckled it backward, and then I hyperextended the other in the opposite direction.”
Throughout his career Lickle had endured the standard amount of trauma, horrifying to the average person, par for a big-wave surfer. He’d been over the falls at Jaws, held down beyond all reason in the pre-flotation-vest days, rammed in the groin by a Jet Ski. He’d had his share of bone breaks, contusions, and near misses, and at forty-seven, with a wife, Shannon, and two daughters, McKenna and Skylar, he still remained in the center of the action even on the craziest days. The key to this longevity, he believed, was knowing when not to go out. “There are days when I think, ‘No. Scrap me today.’ If you don’t feel it, you don’t want to push it.”
Fearlessness might seem like a basic requirement for big-wave surfing, but in fact the opposite is true. “Just to sit in the channel and listen to Jaws unload is enough to scare you out of the water,” Lickle said. “If you can see something like that and not be scared, you gotta have something missing. Or you’re terminally ill. You got something you don’t care about.” I knew Hamilton felt the same way and even took it a step further. “Fearlessness is ignorance, and it’s lack of respect,” he said when the subject came up. “Fear is powerful. You get a lot of energy from fear. Without fear, humans wouldn’t have survived. Maybe I’m the most scared.”
But if fear was healthy, panic was dangerous. A famous saying in big-wave surfing was: “Everything’s okay until it isn’t.” When things go wrong on a seventy-foot wave, Lickle said, “you’ve got issues.” He chuckled knowingly, nodding at the skyline as though he expected trouble to come from that direction. “The key is not to freak out. You freak out, you expend your resources.” Personally, I found it hard to imagine relaxing in the middle of an underwater bomb blast, but apparently this was the trick to survival. If you kept your cool, you had a far easier time down there. Most of the time during a big-wave wipeout, I’d been told by Hamilton and others, the experience unfolded in a frightening but fairly predictable way. Once a rider had weathered the wave’s impact, shaken like a rat in a dog’s mouth for fifteen or twenty seconds, the energy eventually released him and he could make his way to the surface. The important phrase, however, was “most of the time.” While some waves were forgiving, others seemed to have a distinct malicious streak. “It’s the one-in-a-hundred wave you’ve got to watch out for,” Lickle said. “The one that pins you on the bottom, stuffs you in a cave, and tells you, ‘son, here’s a little lesson.’ ” Every big swell offered a chance to learn humility, to understand that what allowed a rider to go home with his spine in one piece was an easily blown cocktail of fate, skill, and attitude, with a twist of luck. Kalama had summed this up in the most straightforward way: “There is no guarantee that you’ll be fine. You are completely at the mercy of the wave.”
Lickle asked for my binoculars, and I passed them over. “There goes Larry,” he said, using Hamilton’s nickname with affection. I looked out and saw Hamilton riding the nose of his standup board, twirling 360s and 720s. Dave and Ekolu had paddled so far offshore they looked like ants. Everyone else sat on their boards in the lineup, in much the same place they were the last time I looked. “Have you ever tried standup?” Lickle asked. “When it gets really gnarly out there, only Laird can do it.” He handed the binoculars back. “He’s not slowing down, you know,” he said. “He’s always gonna find something bigger and better.”
“Bigger than Jaws?” I said. “What do you think it will be?”
Lickle was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was lower. “We rode a wave one year down the coast,” he said. “Solid eighty-footers. You always say, ‘Is the hundred-footer ever gonna come?’ Well, this thing was getti
ng really close. And the bigger it was, the better it was. For years we never knew it was there.”
“Where is it?”
Before he could answer, an exquisite seven-year-old girl walked up to us. It was Lickle’s youngest daughter, Sky, a sweet-tempered kid with long chestnut hair, enormous eyes, and a splash of freckles across her nose. “Dad, are you going to be much longer?” she asked in a plaintive voice. Lickle ruffled her hair. “Just a minute, Sky-Pie. I’ll meet you at the truck.”
Sky wandered off and Lickle hesitated, as though he would prefer not to reveal the location. But then he told me. “When Spreckelsville is closing out, there’s this thing going on outside of it,” he said. “There’s a wave out there that will literally hold the biggest swell of all. We call it Egypt because it looks like the great pyramids. Above a certain size, Jaws just gets thicker, like Teahupoo. So it will never hold the tallest wave in the world.” He paused, and looked out at the ocean. “Egypt will.”
Hamilton paddled his board all the way onto the sand, picked it up, and headed for the rusty outdoor shower to rinse everything off. A pack of kids trailed after him. In surf-speak these skinny, mop-haired urchins of the waves are known as grommets, or groms for short. Hamilton had a lot of time for them. Any older guy who bullied a grom in the surf wouldn’t be doing it for long if he was around.
He stood washing the salt from his gear. On the sidelines, people circled with camera phones. “Maybe now the rest of us can get a few!” one surfer yelled as he walked by, laughing. “Hey,” Hamilton said, smiling, “there’s gotta be some reward for doing this for forty years.” Two boys who looked like brothers hovered nearby, trying to summon the courage to speak. “That wave you surfed at Teahupoo is the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,” one finally blurted out. “Yeah, sickest thing ever!” the other echoed. Hamilton looked up from rinsing his board, his eyes bloodshot from the sun. “You should go there,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
