Selya, a true son of the Upper West Side, thinks Jerry Seinfeld is a genius. Seinfeld, who doesn’t need to work, still does stand-up comedy, fine-tuning his bits obsessively, averaging close to a hundred shows a year. He says he’s going to keep doing it “into my 80s, and beyond.” In a recent interview, he compared himself to surfers: “What are they doing this for? It’s just pure. You’re alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You’re always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you’re going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form.”
Selya recently developed arthritis in one hip. He could still dance, he said, and teach, but he couldn’t surf. It hurt too much. He got resurfacing surgery. During the period when his hip wouldn’t let him surf, he still came along on wave runs. While the rest of us surfed, he bodysurfed. It beat being stuck on land, he said.
• • •
TOWARD THE END of my ignominious run as a paying customer on Tavarua, I destroyed the last of my Owl boards. Cloudbreak first bent it, opening hairline cracks across the bottom. Then, while I was riding a wave, it abruptly stripped four feet of fiberglass off the planing surface, all the way back to the fins, one of which tore out. This was in 2008, late in the week, and the swell was building. Selya, as luck would have it, had also brought an Owl to Tavarua that week as his big-wave board. His was blood-red but otherwise identical to mine. After the morning session that trashed my board, a nasty little north wind came up. It would be side-onshore, a terrible direction, at Cloudbreak. The boats stopped running. I wanted to go take a look, at least, but no one else was interested. I was suffering from the mania that Cloudbreak often infected me with. I needed to go. I talked a couple of boatmen into running me out there. Selya loaned me his Owl, in case we found something. During the run across the channel, the north wind quit and the sea went glassy. I was thrilled, though the boatmen remained noncommittal. Selya, I later learned, planted himself in a watchtower, a little shaded platform above the trees on the southwest side of the island. He kept binoculars on us the entire time we were gone.
As we pulled up to Cloudbreak, the waves looked phenomenal, I thought. Some residual bump from the north wind, maybe, but cleaning up fast and pumping. It was a couple of feet bigger than the morning, and the lines of the swell were as long and unbroken as I had ever seen out there. One boatman, a square-shouldered goofyfoot named Inia Nakalevu, jumped in the water with me. His partner, a Californian named Jimmy, stayed in the boat, which he moored in the channel. He might join us later, he said.
My first two rides were warm-ups, testing the board, testing the wave. The board was perfect—stable but loose, familiar, fast. The waves were meaty, double-overhead, bending far down the reef, extremely fast. I rode them carefully, made them easily. Inia was paddling, I noticed, extra-hard after his waves, shaking his head. I knew the feeling: this was too much, too good. There was still a little chatter on the face, but it only increased the sensation of speed. My third wave was bigger, more critical. I rode deeper, under the shadow of the lip, doing long-radius speed pumps, going as fast as I knew how to go. It was not a complicated, technical barrel. I just had to keep the board going flat-out and stay away from the bottom, where the lip was landing with a continuous loud crack. I finally raced out into sunlight far inside, and did one last S-turn to exit before the wave shut down on shallow reef. Coasting to a stop in the flats, I tried to remember the last time I had ridden a wave that good, that intense. I couldn’t. It had been years.
Pride goeth, and I took my next wave far too lightly. I drove extra-hard into my first bottom turn, not bothering to look over my shoulder to see what the wave was preparing to do but concentrating on my unusually all-out turn. The nose of my board must have caught a stray bit of north chop that I never saw. I went down hard, and so quickly that I didn’t even get an arm up to protect my face. The side of my head struck the surface with such force that it felt like I had hit, or been hit with, a solid object. The wave shrugged me off; it did not suck me over. I had managed this high-speed splat before the wave was even ready to break. I reeled in the board, started paddling, head ringing, stunned. I coughed and saw blood. It was pooling low in my throat. It didn’t hurt, but I had to cough it out to breathe. I reached clear water and sat up. I kept coughing blood into my hand. The ringing in my head diminished. Now it just felt like I had been slapped.
“Bill!” Inia had seen the blood. He wanted to head for the boat. “Can you paddle?”
Yes, I could paddle. I felt fine except for a headache and the urge to cough. I was okay, I said. I wanted to keep surfing.
“No, you cannot.”
Inia looked frightened. It was his job to look after guests. I felt bad for him.
“I’m okay.”
Inia looked into my eyes. He was in his late twenties—a man, not a boy. His gaze had surprising weight. “Do you know God, Bill?” he asked. “Do you know God loves you?”
He wanted an answer.
Not really, I murmured.
Inia’s frown changed. Now it was my soul, not my cough, that concerned him.
We made a deal. We would keep surfing, but he would stay close to me—whatever that meant—and I would be careful, whatever that meant.
The swell was getting bigger, the lines even longer. We paddled over a very big set that looked, from the back, like it closed out. Inia studied it. Another worry.
My head felt fine now. I wanted a wave. There was a great-looking wave coming, already cracking far up the reef. “No, Bill, not this one,” Inia said. “It closes out.”
I took his advice and paddled over it. The next wave looked identical. “This one,” Inia said. “It’s good.”
So this was what our deal meant. I would rely on Inia’s judgment. I turned and dug for the wave. His judgment was extraordinary. The wave I caught peeled down the reef. The wave before it, identical to my eye, had in fact, I could now see, broken all at once. I surfed conservatively, just heading for the greenery. When I pulled out, I saw that Inia was on the wave right behind mine. So this was how he was going to stay close to me. He was surfing hard, right at the edge of his ability—the opposite of conservatively. His expression was ferocious, his eyes like searchlights. Inia, I saw, had it bad.
As we paddled back out together, I asked, did God love everyone?
Inia looked delighted. The answer was an emphatic yes.
Then why did He allow war and disease?
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
Inia was a lay preacher, with a mind full to the brim with scripture. He was grinning. Bring on the theological debate. He would convert me yet. This was a double reverse Hiram Bingham, I thought, with the dark-skinned evangelist surfing his brains out.
And so it went. Inia called me off some waves, called me into others, and he never got it wrong. I couldn’t understand what he was seeing, couldn’t see the distinctions he was making. It was a supreme demonstration of local wave knowledge. It was also keeping me safe. I tried to surf prudently, and I didn’t fall off once. I saw Inia, going for broke, get a huge barrel. After he pulled out, he said it was the best wave of his life. Praise the Lord, I said. Hallelujah, he said.
Selya later told me that all he could see, from a mile away, were the takeoffs, his tiny red board bright against light green waves. After that, as the waves bent onto the reef, there were only our wakes: thin white threads unspooling down the line.
The waves kept pouring through, shining and mysterious, filling the air with an austere exaltation. Inia was on fire, as a surfer, as a preacher. Did I still doubt? “We will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam.”
I continued to doubt. But I was not afraid. I just didn’t want this to end.
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