Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  In the end, I teamed up with other desperate Westerners, bribed some Bulgarian border guards, made my way through the Balkans and over the Alps, and, with the help of an American Express office message board in Munich, found Caryn in a campground south of the city. She seemed fine. A little wary. I was scared to ask too much about what she’d been up to. Yes, I said, I’d got my fill of Turkish influence. She accepted the purse. We resumed our rambles: Switzerland, the Black Forest, a supremely strange visit to Caryn’s mother’s hometown on the Rhine. There, old people kept mistaking her for her mother, and then denouncing neighbors in whispers to us as ex-SS. In Paris we spent our first night sleeping on the ground in the Bois de Boulogne. In Amsterdam we heard that Jimi Hendrix would be playing in Rotterdam. We planned to go. But then the show was canceled and, five days later, Hendrix was dead. (The Maui film about him had been shot just a few weeks before.) Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, two more heroes of mine, were also dead by then.

  We flew back to California and camped together, Caryn illegally, in my tiny dorm room in Santa Cruz. It was a funky arrangement, with me stealing food for her from the cafeteria, but we weren’t the only hippie outlaw freshman couple doing it. For me, at least for a while, it was ideal. I was awash in books and great teachers, pacing barefoot through the redwoods, arguing Aristotle, with my beloved never far away. Caryn was auditing classes, hitchhiking here and there (L.A., fornicating Canada), and starting to think about her own college career. Then I got the luminous, numinous idea of Maui, and dragged her there.

  We were bound together tightly, inevitably, during those first months. When Kobatake tried to raise our rent—or to fine us over some imaginary theft of his chickens, or to evict us when he thought he had some suckers on the line willing to pay more—we fought back together. When people we knew talked, straight-faced, about Venusians, we had each other. We were fellow skeptics—rationalists, readers of books in a world of addled, inane mystics. Still, we were quarreling again. It was usually hard to say about what, but arguments would escalate, spin out of control, and one of us would storm off into the night. Makeup sex could be sublime, but that was starting to be all the sex there was.

  The weirdness deepened after Caryn got pregnant. We never discussed having the child. We were still children ourselves. I was also immortal, I secretly believed. There would be time for all that—many lives from now. Caryn got an abortion. In those days, that involved a night or two in the hospital in Wailuku. After the procedure she looked awful, curled in a ball in a ward bed, her face drawn, her eyes injured. We drove back to Lahaina in silence. That, as I understand it now—I was nowhere near understanding it then—was pretty much the end of us.

  • • •

  ONE OF THE FLOWER-CHILD tendencies I retained, even in this period of antiutopianist reaction, was a closet communardism. I wanted, in an ill-defined way, to gather a group of friends in some soulful place and all live happily ever after. Maui, which seemed to be getting sillier and more touristy by the day, didn’t entirely fit the bill, but I enticed a series of friends, including Domenic and Becket, to come stay with us in Lahaina nonetheless. They came, and squeezed in with us for weeks at a time on the floor at Kobatake’s. It seemed clear, later, that I was unwittingly hoping to reconstitute a kind of family circle. I had left home, effectively, at a very young age, and for many years felt a poorly understood compulsion to build myself a new shelter from the world—even as I declined to start a biological family with Caryn and seemed to roam the globe under an opposite compulsion. Still, in Lahaina I made no real effort to find digs more suitable for a bigger group, probably because I knew a communal house wouldn’t really work. Caryn and I were too shaky. Also, she was the only girl.

  Certainly Domenic knew it wouldn’t work. It became obvious, when he stayed with us, that something had happened on his and Caryn’s draft-evasion lark to Canada in the spring. Obvious to me, that is. They already knew all about it. I never asked for details. I was horrified, and furious, but I tried to put the best face on things. Maybe we could comprise a ménage à trois. Hadn’t we all seen Jules and Jim? Sung along with the Grateful Dead, “We can share the women, we can share the wine”? Domenic, with his Senecan grasp of the possible, bowed out and went back to Oahu, where he now had a job working for my father, who was producing the TV series Hawaii Five-0.

  Domenic was a gardener on the show’s set on Diamond Head Road—hot, nasty work—but he and my father seemed to have an understanding. I was vehemently uninterested in the film business; Domenic did not share my antipathy. My father, who admired Domenic’s readiness to work, wanted to help him get a leg up in Hollywood’s tightly closed craft guilds. Domenic took the help gladly. He eventually moved back to Los Angeles, became a film editor, then a cameraman, then a director. Many years later, in a Godfather moment at his wedding, his father, Big Dom, thanked my father with tears in his eyes. He was happy, I think, that his son had not gone into his business. Did young Domenic see the career opportunity when he moved back to Oahu? I doubt it. I know I watched him go with mixed feelings, which included astonishment that he could bear to leave Maui before Honolua Bay had started breaking.

  I should say something here about Los Angeles, moving back to. It was an article of faith among our circle of young ex-residents that L.A. equaled living death. If Ireland was the sow that ate its farrow, L.A. was the John Wayne Gacy of cities, smothering its children with a toxic beach towel of poisoned air, mindless growth, and bad values. Whatever we were looking for—beauty, wisdom, uncrowded surf—it wasn’t there. Or so we believed. (When I later learned that Thomas Pynchon, one of my undergraduate literary heroes, had apparently lived in Manhattan Beach, in the dreaded South Bay, in the late ’60s and had found its grubby, bleached-out vitality inspiring, I suddenly saw it differently. I felt brought up short by my own shortsightedness, my unoriginality. Then again, I loathed the novel that his South Bay research ultimately produced.) The persistent nostalgia that infected most surfers, even young ones—the notion that it was always better yesterday, and better still the day before—was related to this dystopian view of Southern California, the suburban megalopolis that was, after all, the capital of modern surfing and head office of the nascent surf industry. But we took this nostalgia with us wherever we went. In Lahaina my imagination was captured by the news that the town had once contained a great river, big enough for whaling ships to sail up and take on freshwater. It made sense. If Puu Kukui, straight up the mountains, was the second-rainiest spot in the world, where was all the runoff? Diverted for irrigation by the corporations that grew the sugarcane all over west Maui, of course. Modern Lahaina was, as a result, parched, dusty, and unnaturally hot.

  By the time Becket joined us, Caryn and I, exhausted from fighting, were practically on the rocks. She got a room of her own in a collapsing warren of worker housing next to an old sugar mill on the north side of town. Lahaina had a gender imbalance, at least among its young arrivistes—there were way more men than women—and I was certain I saw a lot of the dudes around town taking note that the tasty little dark-haired haole girl from the ice-cream parlor was now living alone. Even Dan, the simpering draft dodger at the Either/Or, started putting the moves on her. I had been writing an epic poem, full of stormy tropical imagery, called “Living in a Car.” Now I turned my hand to a short story about a Filipino canecutter in Hawaii who spends his best years in a single-sex barracks, then falls in love with a blow-up sex doll. My situation wasn’t quite that dire, but I was not happy.

  • • •

  CARYN, WITH HER SOFT HEART, was still intent on getting me a new board. So I settled on a shaper, Leslie Potts. He was the reigning monarch of Honolua Bay, a leathery, soft-spoken surf wizard and blues-rock guitarist. I tried to tell him what I wanted—something light, quick, fast—but found myself tongue-tied. He wasn’t interested anyway. He had seen me surf Harbor Mouth. More than that, he knew Honolua in all its moods, demands, and supreme possibilities. He
was going to shape me a thick, unfashionably wide 6'10" that would handle the drops, carve short-radius turns, and go like the wind. It was not the shape or length I would have chosen, but I trusted Potts. He was the consensus best surfer on Maui, and people said that when he could be bothered, he shaped as well as he surfed. Surprisingly, he delivered my board in good time. And it did look like it might be magic. Something about the arc of the rocker made the shaped blank look alive.

  I had more control over the glassing. Potts’s glasser was a quiet, bespectacled guy named Mike. I wanted a single layer of six-ounce glass on the bottom, six and four on the deck, with a rail overlap. This was considered foolishly light for a Honolua board, if only because of the terrible punishment that the cliff administered to lost boards, but I wanted to compensate for the bulk in the foam. Mike followed my directions. I ordered honey-colored solid pigment for the deck and rails, with a clear bottom. There would be no sticker: Potts was strictly underground.

  Becket and I checked the northwest shore daily. It was now early fall; the North Pacific was starting to stir. Some people said there was never a Honolua swell before the humpback whales arrived in November. We prayed they were wrong. Becket had shown up on Maui looking wan—easily the palest I had ever seen him. He had had a difficult couple of years. A caper in Mexico had gone wrong and left him with amoebic dysentery, ending both his high school and his basketball careers. More recently, kidney surgery had kept him in bed for months. He was now good to go, he said, but he was obviously weak. We surfed around Lahaina, and he slowly seemed to regain strength. He was riding a little pintail only a couple of inches longer than he was tall. He had developed a forward-leaning, dropped-hands style that was new but seemed to work. It wasn’t clear if he was in Hawaii on vacation or intended to stay. He had a few shekels saved, as he put it, and was not yet looking for a job. It was clear, though, that the islands suited him, temperamentally, down to the ground. He would shamble along the Lahaina waterfront, looking in the buckets of fishermen, just as he had as a kid on Newport Pier. The town had yachts and groupies, two of his favorite things, in healthy numbers. More generally, the pig-roasting, ukulele-picking, sea-centered rhythms of rural Hawaii appealed naturally to a child of San Onofre, now pursuing his own PhD in having fun. Like the rest of us, Becket was in spiritual flight from Southern California—Orange County was growing even faster and more grossly than L.A. Domenic had taken to saying that Becket would end up a fireman, like his dad. In fact, he had inherited his father’s woodworking talent, and that would be his trade.

  Honolua began to break, in a marginal sort of way. Becket and I surfed it stupidly close to the cliff, keeping death grips on our boards. I started getting used to the Potts, which snapped smoothly out of the hardest turns I could conjure. Indeed, it turned so sharply off the bottom that in small waves I often wasn’t quick enough to change rails—shift my weight off the inside rail, the toe rail, to my heels—and unintentionally flew out over the top. It wasn’t a big-wave board—the shape was too rounded, too ovoid—but it was plainly built for fast, roomy, powerful waves.

  One day I saw a heart-stirring thing in a surf mag. It was a photo of Glenn Kaulukukui at Pipeline. I had heard nothing about him for years, and now here he was, instantly recognizable in silhouette on a glittering, extremely serious wave. You couldn’t see his expression, but I was sure it contained none of his old irony, no playful ambivalence. This wave was the big time. Very few surfers would ever ride anything comparable. No one could take it lightly. The picture meant that Glenn had grown up, had survived, and was now surfing at a very high level. His stance in the closing jaws of the Pipeline beast was stylish and proud—almost Aikau. Years later, I saw another shot of him in another mag. Again, he was in silhouette, this time surfing Jeffreys Bay, a pointbreak in South Africa. It was a great picture, classically composed, expressively lit, with strong offshores raking an endless wall, and it had a powerful subtext because Glenn, in profile against the backlit wave, looked African, and these were still the bad old days of apartheid. According to a story that accompanied the photo, a Hawaiian team, which included Eddie Aikau, had gone to Durban for a surf contest and had been barred from a whites-only hotel. I showed the Pipeline picture to Caryn, who, with my narration, studied the image closely. “He’s beautiful,” she said finally. Thank you.

  • • •

  SOMETIME IN OCTOBER, Honolua started breaking in earnest. The setup was the same one we had surfed in the spring: long outside wall with warbles and sections, then the big bowling section of the main takeoff, then a roaring blue freight train all down the reef, deep into the bay. It was, once again, a glorious wave, with hues in its depths so intense they felt like first editions—ocean colors never seen before, made solely for this wave, this moment, perhaps never to be seen again. To surf the place intelligently would require long study, clearly, an apprenticeship of years. But the Honolua local guild was no longer taking applications: the spot already had an outsized coterie of devotees. They came from all over Maui and, on big swells, from Oahu as well. The crowd at Honolua had more dark faces than Lahaina lineups did. In fact, not many of the regulars from the town spots appeared out there once the winter season got under way. The surfing was of a much higher caliber. At times, particularly when a swell was peaking, the action in the water felt completely frenzied as amped, excellent surfers pushed their limits, wave after wave, and pushed each other. It was a tough crowd. Nobody gave a newcomer a wave. But successfully picking off sweet ones was less a matter of pure dogfight aggression, I found, than of getting into the rhythm of the sets and of finding the seams in the crowd. The whole scene had the feeling of a religious shrine overrun by passionate pilgrims. I half expected people to start speaking in tongues, to flail and foam at the mouth, or monastery monkeys to bomb us with guavas.

  The top guys were astonishing. Some were big names from the mags, some were local hotshots. I saw Les Potts out in the water only once that fall. He was riding a wide white board the same shape as mine. The surf was midsized, the wind light, the crowd pretty bad, and Potts stayed away from the pack at the main takeoff. He lurked instead on the inside, and used some form of advanced personal marine radar to dodge the sets and slip across the reef at improbable moments to catch large numbers of clean, fast waves that nobody else saw coming. His surfing was subtle and sure, and radical only when he saw the right moment—which did not by any means occur on every wave—to unleash some fierce maneuver. His knowledge of the reef appeared to be encyclopedic, and he concentrated on tucking himself into spiraling barrels over the shallowest inside slabs. I moved far down into the bay to watch him. The usual mob on the cliff, having come out to watch the show, couldn’t even see Potts, I realized. He was down around the corner, basically surfing alone.

  My new board worked well. Watching Potts, I could see what he had in mind with the shape. I would never surf with such precision, but I found I could draw rounder lines, sharper curves, going higher under the lip than I would have thought possible on a racetrack wave like Honolua. Surfing hard, putting my board up on edge, also put other people in the lineup on notice that I was not out there to watch them surf. It was a long trek up the pecking order, and I would never reach the first rank, but I began to take a place in the second rank. On certain days I was catching as many waves as anyone, and people I didn’t know were even hooting me into drops—encouraging me to go hard. If my surfing had plateaued when I was fifteen, it was now on a new upward track. I probably couldn’t ride small Malibu any better now than I had as a grommet, but the size, speed, and soul satisfactions of Honolua Bay were greater by orders of magnitude than any spot I knew in California, even Rincon, could offer. The wave was far more intimidating, for a start, as well as more rewarding. And my obsession with it was well timed, given how badly my life on land was going.

  Caryn took up with Mike the glasser. I couldn’t believe it. She told me to call him Michael. He was nicer, smarter than I knew, she said. Th
ey even turned up at Honolua together, in his shit-brown van. She sat on the cliff while he paddled out. It was windy and big—one of those rip-roaring, high-amp days. I had been in a wave-catching, mindless groove. Now I sourly watched “Michael” paddle cautiously up the bay. A set rolled through and he headed for the horizon. He was, I realized, a kook. That improved my mood. I went back to work, battling the scrum in the main bowl, intent on center stage. Maybe, if Caryn saw me ripping on the board she gave me—or at least surfing competently—she’d come to her senses and take me back. After making a high-line screamer that no one in west Maui could possibly have missed seeing, I looked for her on the cliff. But the shit-brown van was gone. Michael had somehow reached shore alive, evidently. That seemed both improbable and unfair.

  • • •

  TOWN WAS FLAT. The whole island had been flat for a week. I had the day off work; Becket had some acid. We dropped (that was the strange, sinking, truncated phrase people used for ingesting LSD) before daybreak, then stood around a fire in Kobatake’s backyard and waited for dawn. Old Kobatake never seemed to sleep. He jabbed the fire with a crowbar, his face a golden oval against the velvety blackness of his yard. He cackled when Becket joked about the roosters waking up his wife. Maybe our scheming, bewhiskered landlord wasn’t such a bad guy. We took my beflowered car, the former Rhino Chaser, and headed north.

  Our plan was to trip in the country, away from the madding town, until our madness subsided. Out past Kaanapali we saw the sun’s first rays strike, extra-softly, the crenellated battlements of Molokai’s highlands across the channel. There was a faint reddish haze in the air—from cane fires, probably, or maybe it was volcanic smoke drifting up from the Big Island. Maui people called it vog, which seemed such a bad coinage that we laughed ourselves sick. Then Becket noticed, out on the ocean’s surface beyond Napili, a weird corduroy pattern. It was weird partly of its own accord, like everything else that morning, but mainly because it was so unexpected. It was, in fact, a huge north swell, steaming past the west end of Maui. Not a trace of it was showing in Lahaina. I found I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t tell whether I was thrilled or frightened. I put the car on automatic surf pilot. It carried us swiftly down red-dirt roads through pineapple fields to the cliffs above Honolua.