The Wave

by Susan Casey

  But something was up this morning. I could hear it in his voice. I rushed along the north shore to find out what it was.

  Ilima’s place was hidden from the road, accessed by a narrow, unmarked opening in a head-high field of sugarcane. Red mud caked my tires and my feet as I jumped out to unlatch the gate, then parked in the shade of a royal palm. Hamilton’s black pickup was pulled off to the side, a trailer unhitched beside it. Several more trucks and Jet Skis dotted the lawn, which quickly merged into Baldwin Beach, a windward-facing, mile-long crescent of pale sand. Spreckelsville lay offshore just west of here; to the east Hookipa broke and a few miles beyond that, Jaws. Standing on the beach now, I saw that on the water things were nowhere near as tranquil as they’d looked from afar.

  The ocean pitched and surged from the incoming swell, distinct layers of green and blue, light and dark, confused and choppy and frothy with whitewater. It was a bit of a haul to get from Ilima’s to Pe’ahi by water, but launching from the beach was vital when there were waves: Jet Skis did not fare well when dropped into heavy seas next to rocky cliffs. Most tow teams put in at Maliko Gulch, a partially sheltered bay just up the coast, but even there the swell and backwash could make it impossible to pull a trailer up to the water. On the biggest days, Lickle had told me, one of the most daunting challenges at Jaws was getting out to the wave in the first place.

  Not surprisingly, there was no sign of Hamilton, but down at the water’s edge I saw a tall, lean figure wrestling a Jet Ski into the shallows. It was Don King, the Oahu-based cinematographer who had filmed most of Hamilton’s movies. If you’ve ever watched stormy ocean footage shot from a fish-eye view in a major motion picture—the scary moments in Castaway, for instance, when Tom Hanks is flailing in heavy surf during a lightning squall—you’ve seen King’s work. A former champion water polo player at Stanford, King could swim his camera into any kind of liquid mayhem and remain calmly in control. After having one of his photographs published on the cover of Surfing Magazine at age fifteen, King went on to pioneer the practice of popping up inside a wave to get unusual shots. The maneuver changed surf photography for good, though less adept swimmers attempted it at their peril.

  I ran down to greet King and help him shove the two-thousand-pound machine off the beach. He was headed out, he said, strapping his camera case onto the rescue sled, and I could ride with him. “What’s going on out there?” I asked. “Do you know?” King reached into the pocket of his surf shorts and pulled out his iPhone, which showed the latest readings from Buoy One, just north of Kauai. “Thirteen feet at nineteen seconds,” he said with a nod. For all his daring, King was an understated guy. He had a compassionate face, his aquiline features framed by a mustache and glasses. Even in the most intense situations, King always had a gentle way of speaking and of carrying himself.

  Pulling on my vest, I climbed onto the Ski. The wind had picked up a little, shivering the palm trees and blowing a fine spray back on us as King steered through the shore break. Immediately I felt the effects of the swell; triple overheads lurched in front of us, and farther out the entire ocean seemed to be heaving in giant, gulping breaths. “Hang on,” he said, with a quick backward glance, and then he opened the throttle, racing straight at a menacing wave, cresting only a half second before it broke. I tightened my grip on the Ski.

  “You’ve done this before, right?” King yelled, his voice muffled by the wind and surf. Before I could answer, he pulled a hairpin turn and ran back in the direction we’d come, a calculated retreat to escape another breaking wave. They were everywhere, the size of houses, rising from the left and right. As we wove through the patchwork reef, it was like we were running a gauntlet in some deranged ocean video game; the more successfully we dodged one wave, the quicker another sprang up.

  King ricocheted through the shorebreak, darting forward and back, and I clenched every available muscle to make sure I stayed on the Ski. I’d heard stories from Mike Prickett, Sonny Miller, and others about being ejected in situations like this, vaulted through the air in a position that Lickle referred to as the “full Superman.” Eventually King and I made it to deeper water, where the colors darkened from aquamarine and emerald to a fathomless navy, and the chop settled into a rolling swell. It was lumpy but, as yet, unthreatening. Making ten-knot progress up the coast, we motored on. Overhead, the pale sky filled with enough clouds to keep things interesting, puffy and regal with gray-tinged bellies.

  “Have you seen Exploding Rock?” King asked, easing up and veering toward an area where a jagged lava formation created a dramatic surf break, spray geysering into the air. I knew the place—in fact I’d swum around in there, but under far calmer conditions. Today it was going off. A wave would sweep beneath the Jet Ski with the silky power of a baseball pitcher’s perfect slider; when it connected with these rocks, all of its energy was blasted skyward. Sun glinted through the fifty-foot curtain of water, casting a scrim of tiny diamonds. At the edges, circular rainbows called glories shimmered like haloes. It was a spectacle as dreamlike as it was dangerous, an immense rush focused in one small spot.

  We drove on. The ocean was alive with little peaks. No wonder the scientists were confused, I thought. This was anarchy. Every swell was born in a different place, made from a specific recipe of wind, time, and water, and as Hamilton had pointed out, each wave was unique as a fingerprint. It had its own provenance and its own destiny, clashing against its neighbors or merging with them, leaping out of the seascape or dissolving back into it.

  When we rounded the last bay before Jaws, the sun hit my eyes and turned the people lining the cliff into toy-soldier silhouettes. So much water was moving, sucking the Jet Ski forward on a sloping trajectory toward the channel, and so much spray misted the air, that it was easy to become disoriented. My heart rate soared on adrenaline. I could hear the baritone booms, and I could smell the odd, faintly electrical scent that arose when water and storm energy met—but for some reason I couldn’t see the wave. In the next second I realized why: King had come up on Jaws from behind. The roaring face was directly in front of us, but we were looking at its backside. The wave first emerged from the sea as an immense bulge—a perfectly rounded hillside that happened to be moving at about thirty miles per hour. When it tripped on the reef it sprang up and lunged open, detonating into whitewater when everything came smashing down. We were just outside the lineup where a dozen tow teams jockeyed for position, Jet Skis flashing in the glare. Standing as he piloted the Ski through the surf, King looked nonchalant, as though he were cruising through a parking lot.

  Another Jet Ski approached us; Sierra Emory was driving, towing Hamilton. They didn’t stop. As they passed I saw a look in Hamilton’s eyes that I recognized, and it didn’t allow for a midmorning chat. He was dressed in ninja black, no cheery yellow rash guard or flashy red flotation vest, and the muscles in his legs and back and forearms strained visibly against the rope, as though spoiling for battle. Realizing that Hamilton was about to ride a wave, King hightailed it back to the channel.

  We pulled into the so-called safe zone, next to a pair of tow teams that had sidelined themselves, and as King reached past me to untether his camera case and assemble his housing, I stared at Jaws. At about forty feet, this wasn’t the biggest day on record, but somehow that diminished nothing. The wave was breathtaking. As it rose, its face opened up to the cliffs and its lip curled over a full-bellied barrel. Except for luminous glints of turquoise at its peak, the wave was sapphire blue, gin clear, and flecked with white. If heaven were a color, it would be tinted like this. You could fall into this water and happily never come out and you could see it forever and never get tired of looking. Jaws did not permit its spectators to daydream about being someplace else, to feel bored or irritated or jaded. Watching it was an instant antidote to petty problems. There could be no confusion about who called the shots out here, at this gorgeous, haunted, heavy, lush, primordial place, with all its unnameable blues and its ability to nourish you and kill you
at the same time. There was unspeakable power at Jaws, but it was the beauty that got me.

  As though reading my mind, King said, “It’s so rare to find water this clear next to a big wave.” The clarity made for stellar imagery, and as Hamilton dropped onto the wave, King raised his camera and began to film. Now I was looking at a picture I had seen before: Hamilton, crouched in his distinctive solid stance, slicing through the barrel, brushing Jaws’ molars as far back as fate would allow. He carved a few turns, slingshotting himself forward, and then as the wave snapped shut he raced back up the shoulder and launched, flipping a backside aerial, framed against the clouds. Emory zoomed in for the pickup; with barely a pause Hamilton grabbed the trailing rope and they raced back to the lineup. A minute later Hamilton appeared on another wave.

  They did laps like that for hours, trading off every six waves or so. King and I skirted the perimeter, while he shot from various angles. For all I’d heard about the bad behavior and clogged conditions that had plagued Jaws in recent years, things seemed controlled. This swell wasn’t remarkable enough to win anybody a prize. It was simply an unexpected gift from the weather gods.

  I was sitting sidesaddle on the Jet Ski, content to watch wave after wave until the sun went down, when Hamilton drove up. “Jump on,” he said, indicating his Ski.

  I wasn’t sure what he had in mind but I climbed on behind him, and we motored back to the lineup, where Emory waited in the water with his board. Hamilton turned and examined my flotation vest, checking that it was cinched tight and fully operational. Then he threw Emory the tow rope, nodded at a set on the horizon, and hit the throttle. “Let’s get a wave,” he said, and made straight for the takeoff zone. I tensed my legs, hugging the Ski, and I tightened my grip on a seat strap that suddenly seemed very flimsy. Hamilton stood, looking over his right shoulder at Emory and at Jaws building behind us, the Jet Ski pinned at full speed. Emory cut back through the wake and snapped away from the rope, dropping it. Now we were on the wave itself, near the top of the face as it began to stand up, and I knew that any second Hamilton would exit stage left and peel off the back, circling around the side for the pickup.

  Except he didn’t.

  Instead, he held the line. I realized with a shock that we were soaring straight down the face of the wave: in effect, surfing Jaws. Emory was so close I could see him looking at us, his eyes wide with surprise. In a spasm of violence, the wave jacked up. It pressed us forward as we dropped down a wall so steep that I felt sure I would get pitched over Hamilton’s head. Emory veered right and Hamilton glanced up at the lip that now towered above us, calculating exactly how many seconds we had before Jaws swallowed. The G-forces made it hard to turn my head, but at the edges of my vision I saw spray and froth and the blood beat hard in my ears as the wave bellowed only yards behind us. We’d gone left—Hamilton and Kalama’s specialty. Hamilton shot forward in a burst of power and we outraced the falling lip, rocketing into the impact zone, heading directly for the inshore rock field.

  He whipped the Ski around, avoiding the obstacles and neatly swinging across to where Emory had exited. “You don’t need a surfboard to surf, you know,” he said, smiling. “Up for another one?”

  It was a rhetorical question and Hamilton, above all people, knew that. Every cell in my body vibrated. Did I want another wave? I wanted another ten, and then another ten after that. Though it would be weeks before I fully processed the feeling of riding Jaws, nothing I had ever done or seen or been through had made me feel so alive. Intellectually, I had always known that big-wave surfers were addicted to their pursuit. Now I knew why.

  “The swell energy was good on this one,” Hamilton said, opening up a dashboard compartment in the Ski and extracting a granola bar. “Long interval.” King and I sat in the channel with him as the afternoon wound down. The waves still had plenty of bounce, but the surfers were done for the day. Their eyes were bloodshot, their throats were raw from shouting, and they could hear that inner voice reminding them, The worst injuries happen when your guard is down. Emory had gotten a lift back to Maliko, and King was interviewing Hamilton on camera. This was the best possible time for questions. After a thirty-wave run, Hamilton was relaxed and at his most voluble.

  Every swell came in with a different tempo, Hamilton continued, explaining how sometimes the energy was clean and organized while at other times the waves were dangerously erratic. They could build from different angles that acted at cross-purposes: “When that happens it’s really easy to get yourself into a situation where if you fell, another wave would be right on top of you.” Reading the ocean’s nuances was a key skill for big-wave riders, and it took years to develop the highest levels of sensitivity. Waves that looked alluring from the cliff could turn out to be fraught with quirks and pitfalls and the kinds of surprises you really don’t want to encounter on a fifty-foot face. By comparison, today’s waves had been quite well mannered.

  If you were truly in touch with the elements, the riders claimed, you could not only see the waves’ rhythms but feel them. “Your senses can get attuned to the most minute things going on in the water,” Dave Kalama had said. During the Halloween swell in Tahiti I had tried an experiment along these lines, slipping into the water and swimming toward Teahupoo’s shoulder. I wondered if it was possible to pick up its energy as it blasted through the sea. My venture was abruptly halted by the captain, Eric Labaste, who’d gestured angrily for me to get the hell back in the boat. “Non, non, non!” he said, shaking his head as I climbed on deck. “NON.”

  “I wanted to see if I could feel the energy of the wave,” I had explained sheepishly to Sonny Miller, standing nearby.

  “Well,” he said, with a snort. “I think what would probably happen is that you wouldn’t feel it at all—and then you’d feel it a whole lot.”

  Hamilton, Kalama, and Lickle had studied the Polynesian tradition of wayfinding, the art of using one’s senses to navigate long ocean journeys. “The Hawaiians were in tune with everything,” Lickle said. “They saw it. They felt it. They charted it.”

  Hamilton agreed. “They could watch the swell come in and say, ‘Okay, the storm that generated this lasted three days.’ They could see the different rhythms, the multiple beats, all the weird little characteristics. They looked at a wave and saw a complete story. They could see organization even within the chaos.”

  It was strange but true: in the same way an individual had his moods and habits, so did storms and waves. Thinking back on the most memorable waves I’d seen, I realized that the surfers were right—each one did have a distinct character. Jaws was the Grand Empress, it was that entrancing and fierce. True to reputation, Teahupoo was a wood chipper. Mavericks was a trapdoor to the dark side, and Todos Santos was a rollicking weekend in Baja, fun that could turn bad in an instant. Ghost Tree was a jagged chunk of glass, glittery in the sun, but if you handled it the wrong way it would cut you badly. Cortes Bank was a moon landing, exotic and alien, and Egypt, it seemed, was a sphinx on the prowl. They were an all-star cast in Nature’s great drama, but for every wave that anyone recognized, there were infinite unknowns. We might lay eyes on them only rarely, but I knew now that giant waves were the opposite of singular events. They sneaked up on ships and hurtled by in the night and sprang to life on the far side of nowhere, seen only by satellites. In the vast, unsurveyed oceans they were always out there, racing toward an uncharted finish line, as uncountable as the stars in the sky, as present as your next breath.

  “So this is Egypt?”

  Hamilton and I floated, two miles offshore. The sea was a van Gogh painting from the later agitated years, livid brush strokes of blue and green and white. The sky had filled with clouds, their colors deepening to dark gold, rose, and gray. Against them, on the horizon, a frothy line of waves seemed almost to glow. I had asked him to drive me out here on the way back to Ilima’s, and so we had passed Baldwin Beach and continued out beyond Spreckelsville, across the shallower reefs with their trickster jabs and quick
furies, skirting the open ocean until Hamilton slowed to a crawl and said, “This is it.” The Ski rocked in the swells. There was a thicker, more muscular vibe out here, a distinct frontier. Today’s conditions weren’t big enough to make Egypt break, but I could still get a feeling for the place. And it made me uneasy.

  Hamilton gestured at a stretch in front of us. “This is the takeoff zone,” he said. Trying to gauge distance, I looked toward shore, at the needle peaks of the Iao Valley brooding. A jet lifted off from the airport, making a graceful arc as it lofted into the sky. “So you fell just inside?” I asked. He nodded. “Probably four hundred yards. I’m not sure. I was so focused on making the drop—it was so long and so steep—that I didn’t have a chance to see what the wave was doing. I couldn’t even look down the line to make a turn. I was just trying to keep everything together to go straight.”

  I stared at him. Considering what Hamilton had done in his career, the waves he had ridden and the seeming invincibility that went along with that résumé, it was jarring to imagine him pushed to the edge, and to think about how far out that edge must have been. To have challenged him that much more intensely than Teahupoo at its most freaky or Jaws at its most mammoth, Egypt’s waves must have been surreal. I mentioned this. Hamilton nodded, his face serious. “It was everything I could do,” he said, speaking slowly. “The thing I think was the most surprising, the most different than anything I’ve ridden, was the speed. It was just so much faster.”