Desperation Reef

2

They filmed the deadly 1999 Monsters of Mavericks, and they wrote about it and talked about it, but they never got deep into the barrel of what happened, and why.

How could they? Fifteen dead in Columbine. War in Kosovo. Bill Clinton impeached. Y2K, when the world’s computers would crash and the economy along with them.

The world was a busy place then, but crazy surfers riding giant waves weren’t exactly a crucial part of it.

That day, there was a shifting cast of fifty or so people near or in the water for the spectacle of a freakishly large northwest swell: contestants and their tow partners, boatloads of reporters, photographers, videographers, and a famous novelist, all trying to do their jobs but keep out of the impact zone, where the waves break; also rescue teams, and three contest “officials” in a helicopter circling overhead.

There were a few hundred spectators up on the cliffs above Ross Point, using binoculars and giant-lensed cameras for a view of the action.

The day was cold and bright, and the visibility excellent except for the impact zone, which was a churning cauldron of whitewater overhung with a dense cloud of sea spray.

So, there are many accounts of the same sequence of events, many points of view of how and why what happened, happened. Much video and many pictures.

There is some truth in most of them. So why should I add another voice, twenty-five years later?

I’ve taken questions from various media, but never answered beyond what was asked, never gone into detail.

From the beginning there was a lot of speculation, some by investigators and reporters, some by family and friends, some by strangers and opportunists telling half-truths and lies in those early days of the Internet.

Why not write about all this until now? After all, I learned how to do this in college. How to put words down. It’s much easier than riding a fifty-foot wave. Or raising two sons. It isn’t rocket science, to write a firsthand report of an event you were a part of.

But my husband’s death was too sudden and too unlikely for me — his twenty-one-year-old wife — to understand at that time.

I did not understand.

I understood his broken bones and fractured skull and the seawater in his lungs, and the leash caught on the rocks and still strapped to his ankle.

But I did not understand the why of it.

I’m forty-six, and that is what I am hoping to do now.

John Stonebreaker was my new, five-doors-down neighbor when I was twelve. His big family had just moved onto our street, Alta Laguna Boulevard, in Laguna’s Top of the World neighborhood. He was seventeen and the second oldest of the Stonebreaker kids.

We Byrnes were a longtime Laguna family. My grandparents owned a restaurant on Coast Highway that I eventually inherited, redesigned, renamed the Barrel, and still operate today. My dad became Laguna’s chief of police. He was a tough cop but a cuddly bear at home. He believed — still does — that a cop should serve and protect. An oath he took very seriously. He believed that Laguna’s citizens and her thousands of summer visitors were his responsibility. His flock. My mother — an Olympic swimmer in the Montreal summer games of 1976 — was a Laguna Beach High School girls’ PE teacher, and coach of the swim, water polo, and surf teams. She believed that an athlete should win. And a coach should make that happen. Trophies, medals, ribbons, scholarships. Win or stay home.

Don and Eve Byrne, née Braxton.

Mom was my inspiration and my belief.

Dad was my idol.

I was their only child.

John Stonebreaker at seventeen was thin, blond-haired, and blue eyed. A little dip-shouldered (the left) which made him seem casual and unconcerned with his appearance.

I first saw him on a hot July evening, wheeling a trash can from his house to the curb. He had just moved in. He seemed purposeful and focused, fitting that trash can flush with the curb, making a few small adjustments to get it right.

That night I asked Mom and Dad about the new family, trying to press them for information without spilling my curiosity about the boy.

Mom told me the Stonebreakers came up from San Clemente. They were renting here. The dad was a preacher who had just opened his own church in Laguna Niguel, in a storefront that used to be a donut shop. Mrs. Stonebreaker was going to be a counselor at the high school, so we’ll be working together, Mom had said.

“They have four kids and they all surf at the San Onofre Surf Club. Even the preacher. They’ve got some Irish in them, like us. Or so says Marilyn Stonebreaker. Nice woman. Pretty and sweet.”

The next day I saw John surfing Rockpile, north of Main Beach.

I was on the beach with my best friend, Belle Becket, pressing our boogie board leashes tight around our skinny, twelve-year-old ankles.

John rode the wave like he took out the trash, measured and confident, as if there was one perfect way to do it, and he knew that way.

This was back in 1990, when short-board, quick and nimble surfing had long taken over the Beach Boys days of nose-riding. But on one wave John went retro, sidled forward, and rode with his toes on the nose of his board. Not easy on a short, fast, fish-style wave rider.

I loved his grace, his nonchalance, his cool.

John Stonebreaker didn’t just look cool, he was cool — the body and form of it.

I’m going to be that someday, I told myself. I’m going to be him.

I still see that boy and that wave in my mind’s eye, as clearly as if it had happened just this morning.

We watched him awhile, and rode a few of those nasty Rockpile waves on our body boards. When we were done we headed straight to the Thalia Surf Shop, where I gave up my boogie board and a twenty-dollar down payment on a used twin-fin Infinity that the shop owner said was the right size and shape for Laguna. Eighty-five bucks.

Belle got a surfboard, too, a new Town & Country made in Hawaii that cost her dermatologist dad a small fortune.

We surfed all the next morning at Rockpile.

Rough stuff. Didn’t catch a wave. Stand-up surfing isn’t boogie boarding, not that we thought it would be.

Didn’t see John Stonebreaker until almost a week later, when I cruised past his house again on my skateboard and saw him in the garage, doing I knew not what under strong lights.

I hopped off, flipped my board into my hand, and walked back.

Squeezing in between the cars in the driveway — an old hippie van and a newer VW Westphalia — I stood just outside the entrance.

John was taller than he looked from shore the week before. He was dressed in red surf trunks with a baggy, white, long-sleeved T-shirt. He had a tool in both hands, bearing down on a white surfboard blank on sawhorses.

“Hey, I’m Jen Byrne. I saw you surf. I’d like to join your team.”

“There’s no team.”

“When there is one. I’m learning.”

He straightened and looked at me, goggles and face misted with foam dust, hair tucked into a Dodgers cap, knees and feet knotted from hours on surfboards.

“Paddle hard and don’t take off too early.”

“I’ve got a six-two Infinity.”

Another blue-eyed once-over. “Sounds about right.”

“I’ll be the best female surfer in Laguna someday. Soon.”

“I’ve seen a few okay ones. Only been here a few weeks, though.”

“How long have you been surfing?”

“Since I was ten. The San Onofre waves are a lot easier than these beach breaks here in Laguna. Slower, more wave.”

“Is that going to be your board?”

“If it comes out right.”

“What color?”

“Haven’t decided.”

“What kind of waves is it for?”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Bigger. Blacks. Huntington. Malibu and Rincon.”

“I don’t know those.”

“All six of us pile into the vans. Takes two, for the bodies and the boards. Well, back to work, Jan.”

“Jen.”

He nodded and turned to his blank.

Five years later Belle and I were the best chick surfers in Laguna. John was already away from home a lot, surfing the big waves of Steamer Lane and Ocean Beach, and a much-rumored break just south of San Francisco, Mavericks. Of the four Stonebreaker surfer kids at Top of the World, John was the most driven and skilled, and his parents were able to give him a worldly surfing education. Summers in Hawaii. A week in Fiji. A month in Australia. I got a few postcards. Thumbtacked them to my wall, over the Surfer Magazine covers.

In those five years, Mike Stonebreaker’s Hillview Chapel in Laguna Niguel had taken off, gradually then suddenly. As a high school teen busy with watersports and grades, I was only vaguely aware of John’s dad’s growing new church.

Then, suddenly, no more donut shopfront.

Pastor Mike and his new Hillview Chapel were everywhere, in full-page ads for Sunday services in the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, and the several small papers published in Laguna Beach. Posters in shop windows, too, billboards on Interstate 5 and the big inland boulevards in Santa Ana and Huntington Beach, and on Coast Highway from San Clemente all the way north to the LA county line.

Pastor Mike was everywhere you looked.

The ads and the posters and billboards all used the same graphic: Mike Stonebreaker in a white robe, arms raised, his back to you as a bright white light washed toward him like a wave from the sky. There was darkness all around the light and the man. I thought it was dramatic but overblown.

Not long after I befriended the Stonebreaker girls — Kate and Robin — Mike and Marilyn took me under their generous wings. They had room in their vans for an only child, her surfboard, wetsuit, and a duffel for food and water, a towel, tubes of sunscreen, and a wide-toothed comb to get through her sun-and-salt-blasted copper helmet of hair.

John and his older brother Raymond pretty much ignored us girls, all three of us at least five years younger. Which, when you’re twenty-two, is a lot. Especially if the women your own age are more than a little interested.

On the Stonebreaker family caravans, I’d find a way to get seated in the old hippie van, which John always drove, and I’d watch him secretly. From the right angle, I could see his eyes and part of his face in the rearview mirror. I never got more than a quick glance back. Even though he was sitting just a few feet from me, shoulders hunched over the big steering wheel in the slow, straining van, John always seemed to be miles away. Already there, I thought, in the barrel.

In the lineup at Blacks or Salt Creek or Trestles, I’d position myself medium distance to John, so I could study his technique and just basically gawk at how beautifully he handled these — now, to him — little waves.

I don’t remember John saying more than just a few sentences to me over those five years, mostly surfing pointers, weather and swell forecasts, tides and wind. He didn’t say much to his girlfriends either, as I observed.

On my eighteenth birthday we had an island-themed party in the backyard. Dad manned the barbecue for burgers and hot dogs; Mom made a couple of giant salads and a pot of fettuccini steeped in olive and truffle oil.

Forty or so people showed up on that chilly winter Sunday afternoon, mostly my friends and their parents. They came early and stayed late. Belle got a little more than tipsy and Raymond drove her home.

John showed up well after dark, red-eyed from the ocean, and dressed in bright orange shorts and a blue-and-orange hibiscus-blossom Aloha shirt. He raised a hand to Dad at the barbecue, who raised a hand back.

John seemed preoccupied when he wished me happy birthday but ate mightily, as surfers do.

“For you, Jen — it’s all yours!” he said, and handed me a little wooden box.

I was collecting his empty paper plates for the trash can. Set them down and took the box. It felt empty, but inside, wrapped in a cutting from the Sunday LA Times funny page, was a pair of earrings — irregular pieces of sea glass strung with copper wire.

“I found it,” he said. “The glass, not the wire.”

I held them up to the nearest tiki torch: pale greens, soft browns, sanded clears. Even a cobalt blue, all glowing roughly in the light.

“I like them, John. Beautiful.”

“It’s just broken beer bottles,” he said, almost apologetically. “Jen, I’m leaving before dark tomorrow for Imperial Beach, down on the border. South swell ten seconds, strong, and a rising tide. It’s going to be big and fast. Just you and me. Interested?”

So much in that question.

“You can do it. I’ve been watching you.”

I knew my answer but didn’t know what words to use.

“I talked to your dad and he’s okay with us going just ourselves.”

John’s face was serious and beveled in the torchlight. Another picture of him I’ll carry forever.

I felt like I was midair, letting go of one trapeze and reaching for another.

“What time?”

“I’ll come get you at five.”