“We’ve got it set,” Ty said. “We have to get moving, though. Tommy says he’s done.”
“He’s good to go, then,” I said.
“You should bring your things, so that I can run you up to San Francisco after. Either the hotel or the airport.”
“How long does the shoot take?”
“A couple hours, maybe. It depends on the light and what the waves are doing. We do mostly handheld shots, so we can film in all conditions. We’ll see.”
“I’ll get Tommy,” I said.
Ty and Little Brew did one last check of the gear while I rounded up Tommy. His color looked bad. Part of it might have been the television light, but he looked jaundiced and thin and it took him a second to find his voice after I unstrapped the vest. I pushed back his hair and looked at his eyes. He felt warm. He jerked his head to one side to get my hand off. He tried to get up, but the couch cushions were too deep.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked Tommy. “You feel warm.”
“Yes, Bee’s Knees,” he said. “I’m fine.”
I got him onto his feet. He clicked the remote at the television. He had to click a couple times before it finally hissed closed. He tossed the remote onto the couch.
“I’m doing this,” he said. “Nothing’s stopping me.”
“No one is saying you can’t. We just have to be smart.”
He shrugged. And because he’s Tommy, he slowly nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “I know you’re a little worried.”
“You have to promise you’ll be honest and tell me if it feels like too much, okay? No one’s going to judge you. These guys like you just the way you are.”
He nodded again. I told him Ty had promised to drive us back to San Francisco later. Then he helped me collect our things. We didn’t have much. By the time we had shoved everything into our backpacks, Little Brew and Ty had finished with the equipment check. The sun threw hard shadows straight down at us.
“Thirty-footers!” Little Brew said when he saw Tommy. “The surfing Snow Pony.”
Tommy struck a pose as if he were surfing. It looked ridiculous.
“We’re ready,” Ty said, closing the rear doors to the van. “You guys all set?”
“We’re set,” I said.
I helped Tommy inside. Watching him climb into the shot gun spot—lift the leg, organize his weight, rock for ward, miss, rock forward again, then semicollapse inside—I had a moment of doubt. The whole idea seemed crazy. I pictured him out in the waves, or worse, below, down in the swirl of water and sand, his frail body beaten and turned every which way. I wondered if I wasn’t being irresponsible. Of course Tommy wanted to surf. Of course he thought it would be cool and fun and only a little dangerous. But I was supposed to keep an eye on him.
“Let’s roll,” Ty yelled.
Little Brew hopped in, his skin already coated with sunblock. He reached forward and tapped Tommy’s head. Tommy turned and tried to fight back, but his movement was impossibly slow, a frog tongue after an insect that had already darted off.
“Perfect day,” Ty said, pulling things out of the back as I helped Tommy down from the shotgun seat. Ty used a small plastic wagon to carry stuff. He filled it quickly.
Water sparkled blue and sharp everywhere to our west. The sand on Half Moon Bay State Beach looked dry and crisp. A clutter of people had erected their umbrellas a little farther down the beach. Now and then, depending on the wind, we heard them yell and scream. Someone hit a baseball with an aluminum bat and the odd plink carried better than anything else. The sea and waves rolled in, rinsing back through the sand.
A sign next to the parking lot warned surfers.
ATTENTION
Mavericks Break requires advanced water skills. DO NOT attempt to surf or Jet Ski these waves unless you are experienced. Possibility of drowning is real and present. In case of emergency, call 911.
“Mark Foo drowned here,” Tommy said, spotting the sign and walking over to inspect it. “He was a world-class big-wave rider from Hawaii. He got trapped underneath, they think, but no one really knows. He might have been knocked unconscious by his board.”
“Don’t be putting any mumbo jumbo on us,” Little Brew said, loud enough for Tommy to hear. “Get over here and give us a hand. You two need to put on some wet suits.”
“Where are the Jet Skis?” I asked, putting my hand up to shade my eyes.
“They’ll be here,” Ty said, still off-loading equipment. “They launch a little ways north and ride in. We have two of them. You and Little Brew can go on one.”
“And the cameras?” I asked.
“Some are with the Jet Skis.”
Unloading took a while. Ty made Little Brew ferry the equipment in the wagon to the edge of the water. Meanwhile, he scrambled up onto the van roof and unhitched the surfboards. After we squeezed into wet suits, Tommy and I helped him place the boards on the beach. Dunes and headlands rose to the north. By the time Little Brew arrived back at the van, Ty had everything ready. I smeared sunblock on Tommy’s face. He hated me for it.
“Stoked?” Ty asked Tommy. “You ready to ride some mad barrels?”
“I’m stoked,” Tommy said. “Definitely.”
“I saw Ollie and Honey,” Little Brew said. “They’re already out on the Jet Skis.”
“What about Florence?”
“She’s not coming,” Little Brew said. “Honey said she sprained her ankle.” He looked at me. “Florence is an awesome surfer,” he explained. “Ty has a crush on her.”
Then a strange moment arrived. Everyone turned to Tommy. It seemed to occur to all of us that he could easily be in over his head. It was one thing to consider putting him in the water when we had proposed it on land, but now with the water a hundred yards off, the sound of the surf chucking against the beach, it was difficult to believe this made any sense at all. I glanced at Ty. Little Brew stood with a funny grin on his face. Tommy didn’t notice. He began marching toward the waterline, his gait clumsy and slow, his small back fragile and no wider than a baseball glove.
TOMMY SHARK FACT #8: In the spring of 1961, three surfers, Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson, and Dick Knott-meyer, decided to try the distant waves off Pillar Point on the Northern California Coast. A white-haired German shepherd swam out with them, but the conditions were too rough for the dog. The dog, who belonged to Matienzo, was named Maverick, and the surfers eventually brought him back in and tied him to the bumper of their car. The dog gave his name to the huge waves that broke over a reef nearly two miles out to sea. No one else surfed “Mavericks” until Jeff Clark came along. He was a local kid who surfed alone on Mavericks for fifteen years. He didn’t purposely keep the waves a secret, but few people imagined that waves of such power existed off Pillar Point.
A fisherman once pulled out three great whites off Pillar Point in a single day. An article written by Ben Marcus in Surfer described Mavericks as “gloomy, isolated, inherently evil. The reef is surrounded by deep water, and lies naked to every nasty thing above and below the Pacific: Aleutian swells, northwest winds, southeast storms, frigid currents, aggro elephant seals and wilder things that snack on aggro elephant seals.… Mavericks radiates danger.”
I had a weird moment as we carried stuff to the beach. I felt light-headed and slightly out of my body. I could see myself performing the task of lifting a bag and setting down my end of the surfboard, but I couldn’t sense myself experiencing it. It’s hard to describe. Mixed in with it was a feeling of déjà vu. Somehow it felt as if I had done this exact thing before, that I had been to Mavericks, that I had sat on the high headland to the north and watched the waves break and shatter on their run in from Alaska. Even the squawk of the gulls, just for an instant, became garbled and melancholy, like someone talking through a curtain at me. I could nearly make out what they were saying, but the words scrambled away just on the verge of my understanding. The sun beat down and the sand felt warm under my feet, which only made things more confusing. I should hav
e been happy to be in the sunshine, but instead I felt as though a phone was ringing somewhere, an important call coming in, and I couldn’t get to it. Things moved too slowly, or appeared magically, and I wondered if I had eaten enough, if my blood sugar had dropped somehow. And then for a second, I experienced clarity.
My mom had once made a kaleidoscope out of quartz and glass, and I used to like looking through it before Tommy broke it by accident. Anyway, there was something sliced and jagged about the way the world appeared. Tommy noticed my glazed look and asked me twice if I was okay, and I said yes, but I didn’t feel that way. Then I put my hand on Little Brew’s shoulder, and his skin felt so warm and smooth. As he turned to me and smiled, the world came back into focus and the sun became merely the sun again, and the ocean began making sound again. I was on a beach in California, and I was hot and probably thirsty, and the day felt peaceful.
Little Brew pulled my hand around until he had me directly in front of him. And he kissed me.
Water. Mounds and mountains of water. I sat on the Jet Ski behind Little Brew and watched the swells roll slowly toward the Maverick break. I had never seen anything like it. I had never felt anything like it. On a boat the sea is another road, a path, a surface. But when I was sitting behind Little Brew, the Jet Ski bubbling and impatient to get going, the ocean was no longer abstract. It was undeniably here, all around, above and below, melted to the sky and angry at the land. The sun reflected light everywhere, scalding and bright, and far away, back near land, the scent of trees and dirt and rocks came to us every now and then. The five surfers—Ty in the middle—sat on their surfboards, their bodies half turned, their faces expectant and nervous and intently fixed on the advancing water.
When all was said and done, the waves did not approach thirty feet. They might have been ten feet, maybe less, but they still rolled toward us with an urgency and power that made me feel small and insignificant. Ollie—a guy about Ty’s age, but shorter and stockier with black hair that curled and fell every which way—rode on a second Jet Ski. Tommy rode behind him. Ollie held a camera and acted more or less as a director. He and Ty had already discussed the shoot and knew what they wanted. I wondered, though, how anyone could believe in a plan in the face of so much water.
“We ready?” Ty yelled to Ollie.
Ollie nodded and held his thumb up. It was one o’clock, maybe one-thirty. I looked around Little Brew to spot Tommy. Tommy wore a bright orange life jacket over his wet suit. The jacket looked too big for him. He appeared even smaller than usual in the swell of the ocean. His expression hadn’t changed since we left the shoreline. He smiled at everything. I had never seen him smile so much.
I caught his eye and raised my eyebrow to ask if he was okay. He looked away without responding.
Then, suddenly, Little Brew gave the Jet Ski gas, and we darted fifty feet in toward shore, parallel to the waves but removed from their force. I kept my arms tight around his waist. One of the surfers, a teenager named Willy, had paddled to the ledge. He was in position to catch a wave. The other guys watched.
It was beautiful.
For a minute or two, Willy sat on his board studying the waves. Then, at a point that made sense to him, he lay out on his board and began paddling hard. I saw his target wave. It had arrived from Alaska, a trillion molecules colliding and shivering with energy, the form determined by forces nearly unimaginable. The bottom of the ocean caused the wave to bulge. That was something I had never understood before, not as I understood it now, because I watched it push up as surely as a balloon expanding and lifting, pressure from the bottom exerting force, cutting the lower sections of the waves away so that the top became heavier and heavier. A single thread of water, frayed and delicate, flickered at the top. The gut of the wave, though, pushed its belly forward and for a second it didn’t seem as though it would break. But it had to break, and Willy, sensing the speed, feeling his board lift, paddled harder, kicking, too, until he achieved a moment’s balance where the wave, more than he, had to decide whether to carry him forward or release him. Watching him, I wondered what was going through his head. What did he think—or did he think at all?—as the water lifted him, sped him forward, his board becoming a torpedo, his hands moving to the gunwales and gripping. I heard the wave begin to hiss and moan, and then whatever was about to happen had to happen. Nothing could prevent it, because the wave had pushed up at the sky, glinting and formidable, the taste of open ocean suddenly in the air, oxygen everywhere, and then Willy popped.
He popped.
With one motion, his arms and legs two halves of a pair of tongs snapping shut, his waist the anchoring point, he shot up onto his feet. Quick. Smooth. He teetered for a second and nearly went over, but then he aimed the board down, down, and I realized that the wave had grown without my seeing it. It had built to ten feet, the size and width of a tree falling, and suddenly, in a sort of New Hampshire way, I comprehended that the energy of a wave was similar to the energy of a tree falling through space, the bottom pinned, the top branches building in speed as it approached the earth. The water had tripped on a stone beneath it and was falling recklessly forward.
Little Brew made a whooping sound as Willy shot down the wave and cut right.
He came toward us. For an instant we saw him inside the wave. His knees flexed, his hands out for balance, he rode in the barrel, sun turning the water above him tea-colored, the white rip of the wave sending damp sparks into the air. Joy. I saw joy pass over his face; he had nailed the wave, caught it, and the board cut across the slope of the water, faster and faster, the wave no longer angry or intent, but simply following physics. Joy and grace. Then, in a quick shove, he stuck his feet down, rocked backward, and the board cut up the front of the wave and shot him off its back. Willy flew into the air, peeling back over the wave, and the board and his body exploded into space. He went seven feet, ten feet into the air, drifting like a cartoon character, and before he landed we were buzzing forward to his landing spot, shooting in to pluck him out before the next wave could begin to stumble.
“You’re next!” Little Brew yelled.
It took me a three-count to realize he meant me.
“I don’t think so,” I said, but Little Brew didn’t listen.
Willy had been fine. He had paddled off by himself, skirting around the center of the waves when another surfer, Honey, came gliding down the face of a ten-footer. Honey didn’t have it, though. I knew it as soon as I saw it. He leaned a little forward once he gained his feet, and the nose of the board traveled too fast. It traveled and bucked and pretty soon he dove off the front, dangerously, and the board flipped and followed him. Then the wave caught him, crushing and rinsing, and we lost sight of him altogether. The wave continued to grind and Little Brew expertly navigated the white wash, swooping in to check on Honey. He had to be mindful of coming in too fast, of barging over a surfer in the water, but he had a good eye and by the time Honey rose to the surface, his wet suit glinting, his face turned in a frown momentarily, we idled fifteen feet from him.
“Okay?” Little Brew yelled.
Honey nodded and hoisted himself back onto the board. Another wave began pouring down on us, its gallop of white and foam pushing forward and already rebuilding into a wave that would eventually break on the shore.
Under all this, sharks. Under us, the great white swimming and eyeing the seal-shaped boards.
TOMMY SHARK FACT #9: No one knows how long a great white shark lives. Some biologists think thirty years. Others—on the margin among researchers—say a great white can live as long as seventy years. Besides questions about their longevity, biologists also know little about the great whites’ sex life. When sharks return to the Farallon Islands, for example, the females often have bite marks near their heads. Whether that’s part of the mating ritual, no one can say for sure. No one has seen a great white mate. Tagging records suggest that the Farallon sharks spend the winter off Mexico in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific, and it’s possibl
e that the mating takes place in the deep blue waters of the tropics. The round trip from the Farallones to the deep Mexican waters is approximately two thousand miles. Several things about this behavior astonish scientists. First, the pure distance involved is impressive, especially because it appears the fuel needed for such a journey is captured in a small window of time very close to shore during the late-autumn seal run. The energy efficiency of the sharks’ swimming and navigation must be extraordinary in order to carry off such a trip. Further, it’s peculiar that a creature that feeds so close to shore disappears into the deep and does not seem to feed in a sustainable way until it returns to the Farallones. The sharks appear thin and hungry when they make it back, and the seals suffer decapitation and constant attack until the sharks fill their stomachs once more. Rapacious, Tommy has said, liking the big word. Rapacious.
“You’re up,” Little Brew yelled. “Hop in and swim over.”
“I’m not feeling it,” I said. “It wasn’t part of the plan. I don’t think I can do it.”
“Sure you can. Just go with the flow. We have you.”
It seemed like a crazy idea. It seemed like the worst idea in the world to jump into the water in the middle of the ocean.
“Bee,” Tommy shouted, his voice hardly loud enough to carry over the sound of the waves. “You’re holding things up. We’re on a schedule.”
So I jumped. Clumsily, but I did it. Beneath me, a thousand feet, a million feet of water stretched and ripped and pulled. Besides the fact that it was embarrassing to have to climb onto a guy, it also meant that for a moment I became a seal. All the abstract shark information Tommy had fed me over the years suddenly felt concrete. A shark could be underneath us, at least theoretically. We resembled a pod of seals sitting out beyond the breakers, and I could imagine the shark swimming below, its body twisting just a shade to let its black eye peer up at us through the shimmering waves. Food or not food? Correct shape or incorrect shape? A mammal in a slick black wet suit or a piece of marine junk?
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