Dawn Patrol

6

Ka-boom is good.

If you're Boone Daniels and live for waves that make big noises.

He's always been this way. Since birth and before, if you buy all that stuff about prenatal auditory influences. You know how some mothers hang out listening to Mozart to give their babies a taste for the finer things? Boone's mom, Dee, used to sit on the beach and stroke her belly to the rhythm of the waves.

To the prenatal Boone, the ocean was indistinguishable from his mother's heartbeat. Hang Twelve might call the sea “Mother Ocean,” but to Boone it really is. And before his son hit the terrible twos, Brett Daniels would put the kid in front of him on a longboard, paddle out, and then lift the boy on his shoulder while they rode in. Casual observers-that is, tourists-would be appalled, all like, “What if you drop him?”

“I'm not going to drop him,” Boone's dad, Brett, would reply.

Until Boone was about three, and then Brett would intentionally drop him into the shallow white water, just to give him the feel of it, to let him know that other than a few bubbles in the nose, nothing bad was going to happen. Young Boone would pop up, giggling like crazy, and ask for his dad to “do it again.”

Every once in a while, a disapproving onlooker would threaten to call Child Protective Services, and Dee would reply, “That's what he's doing-he's protecting his child.”

Which was the truth.

You raise a kid in PB, and you know that his DNA is going to drive him out there on a board, you'd better teach him what the ocean can do. You'd better teach him how to live, not die, in the water, and you'd better teach him young. You teach him about riptides and undertow. You teach him not to panic.

Protect his child?

Listen, when Brett and Dee would have birthday parties at the condo complex pool, and all Boone's little friends would come over, Brett Daniels would set his chair at the edge of the pool and tell the other parents, “No offense, have a good time, have some tacos and some brews, but I'm sitting here and I'm not talking to anybody.”

Then he'd sit at the edge of the kid-crowded pool and never take his eyes off the bottom of the pool, not for a single second, because Brett knew that nothing too bad was going to happen on the surface of the water, that kids drown at the bottom of the pool when no one is watching.

Brett was watching. He'd sit there for as long as the party lasted, in Zen-like concentration until the last kid came out shivering and was wrapped in a towel and went to wolf down some pizza and soda. Then Brett would go eat and hang out with the other parents, and there were no irredeemable tragedies, no lifelong regrets (“I only turned my back for a few seconds”) at those parties.

The first time Brett and Dee let their then seven-year-old boy paddle out alone into some small and close beach break, their collective heart was in their collective throat. They were watching like hawks, even though they knew that every lifeguard on the beach and every surfer in the water also had their eyes on young Boone Daniels, and if anything bad had happened, a mob would have showed up to pull him out of the soup.

It was hard, but Brett and Dee stood there as Boone got up and fell, got up and fell, got up and fell-and paddled back out, and did it again and again until he got up and stayed up and rode that wave in while a whole beach full of people played it casual and pretended not to notice.

It was even harder when Boone got to that age, right about ten, when he wanted to go the beach with his buddies and didn't want Mom or Dad showing up to embarrass him. It was hard to let him go, and sit back and worry, but that was also a part of protecting their child, to protect him from perpetual childhood, to trust that they had done their job and taught him what he needed to know.

So by the time he was eleven, Boone was your classic gremmie.

A gremmie is nature's revenge.

A gremmie, aka “grom,” is a longhaired, sun-bleached, overtanned, preadolescent, water-borne, pain-in-the-ass little surfer. A gremmie is karmic payback for every annoying, obnoxious, shitty little thing you did when you were that age. A gremmie will hog your wave, ruin your session, jam up the snack bar, and talk like he knows what he's talking about. Worse, your gremmie runs in packs with his little gremmie buddies-in Boone's case, this had been little Johnny Banzai and a young Dave the yet-to-be Love God-all of them equally vile, disgusting, smart-mouthed, obscene, gross little bastards. When they're not surfing, they're skateboarding, and when they're not surfing or skateboarding, they're reading comics, trying to get their filthy little mitts on porn, trying (unsuccessfully) to pull real live girls, scheming to get adults to buy beer for them, or trying to score weed. The reason parents let their kids surf is that it's the least sketchy thing that the board monkeys get up to.

As a gremmie, Boone got his fair share of shit from the big guys, but he also got a little bit of a pass because he was Brett and Dee Daniels's kid, glossed “the Spawn of Mr. and Mrs. Satan” by a few of the crankier old guys.

Boone grew out of it. All gremmies do, or they're chased out of the lineup, and besides, it was pretty clear early on that Boone was something special. He was doing scary-good things for his age, then scary-good things for any age. It wasn't long before the better surf teams came around, inviting him onto their junior squads, and it was a dead lock that Boone would take home a few armloads of trophies and get himself a sweet sponsorship from one of the surf-gear companies.

Except Boone said no.

Fourteen years old, and he turned away from it.

“How come?” his dad asked.

Boone shrugged. “I just don't do it for that,” he said. “I do it for…”

He had no words for that, and Brett and Dee totally understood. They got on the horn to their old pals in the surf world and basically said, “Thanks but no thanks. The kid just wants to surf.”

The kid did.