Desperation Reef

36

Sunrise without sun.

Jen powers Thunder from the Pillar Point launch toward the breakwater and Mavericks beyond, Casey seated behind her. Brock and Mahina are out ahead of them, a plume of ski spray rising in their widening wake.

The sky above is gunmetal gray, and the water here in the harbor is the same color, but shiny. Up on the bluff the old Air Force tracking station globe presides over the harbor, a World War II relic.

Behind Jen trails the rescue sled. When she speeds past the breakwater into the open ocean, she hears Casey’s ritual war-whoop invocation behind her: “God save us all!”

The sea is rougher outside the second breakwater. Thunder bucks into the chop, her engine whining with the dips and drops. Jen cuts diagonally to lessen the impact, half of her attention already on the waves that she can see coming in a half a mile northwest. They’re very big — thirty-foot faces breaking right — nicely formed and spaced at lazy intervals, crowned by twenty-foot plumes of spray suspended by a light offshore breeze. Jen’s last Surfline forecast this morning had the brunt of FreakZilla hitting Mavericks between 10 and 11 A.M., carrying forty-foot waves with sixty-foot faces. Surfers measure waves from the behind, she knows — a Hawaiian tradition — and faces from the front. Two helicopters — a red San Mateo County rescue chopper and a black-and-white ESPN machine — weave high above, awaiting action.

Aboard Amiga, Jen helps Casey choose his board. Brock and Mahina are trying to sleep in the little cabin, still pounded by three days at the Flagstaff fire, which claimed two lives. Reno holds his boat steady in the current and swell, chattering away about his new granddaughter, but his eyes keen on the waves, which here at Mavericks are prone to sudden changes of size and shift of direction when they hit the reef below.

Jen watches her son waxing his board — an eight-foot-ten, orange-and-black thruster with three of the five available fins deployed. Casey moves like his father, she thinks, deliberately and calmly, on his knees, pushing the wax block across the deck with one hand, rocking with the swell.

He looks up at her. “Hey, Mom.”

“These are good waves, Casey.”

“These are beautiful waves.”

“Don’t try to win this thing on the first one.”

“Never. Easy does it.”

“You have to make it. Then on the next one you do more.”

Jen sounds just like her mother, always the coach.

“You sound like Grandma,” Casey notes with a smile.

With his thick yellow hair tousled Casey of course reminds her of John. More than reminds her. Is John, in one of those rare, exact genetic handoffs from father to son.

“I’ll be there if you need me.”

“I know, Mom. I got this.”

Sitting on the deck, he zips on his booties, pulls on his hood and gloves. Clamps the leash to his right ankle, takes up his gun, stands, and slips overboard.

Jen climbs down Amiga’s folding ladder and onto Thunder, which starts up with a throaty blast of white smoke.

Casey hits the lineup — first heat, six men. Jen joins the other five tow skis, buzzing around like noisy wasps, all keeping well away from the big walls of water marching in. Pipedream, the judges’ boat, rocks steadily inside, allowing good binocular views of the rides. The ESPN chopper drifts low, while the county rescue copter stays higher for the macro view.

Through the raunchy smoke of the outboards and ten jet skis — four of them for rescue — Jen tows Casey into his first wave.

It’s a twenty-five-foot beauty queen with a smooth face, a thick lip, and an inviting right shoulder. Casey drops the rope and Jen makes a quick escape, circling out wide so she can see him.

Casey drops in and makes the bottom turn easily, tucks into the barrel, runs his right hand along the cylinder, then accelerates up to the lip again from where he drives a straight fast line out ahead, then launches his board and himself into the sky and over the mounding wave to safety.

Jen watches with a hitch in her breath and a smile on her face, Thunder rocking under her. She picks up Casey on the lee side of the wave, hears the boom of it over her snarling ski. She steadies Thunder while Casey straps his board to the sled and climbs on.

They’re back in the lineup a minute later. Casey sits behind her on the ski, for elevation, his still-leashed board stowed for now in the rescue sled.

“Beautiful work back there,” she says.

“Perfect tow, Mom, but I need bigger.”

“You’ll get it.”

But, as if a switch has been thrown, the morning goes small. Jen watches the breakers come in, like five-foot Little Leaguers wanting their pictures taken.

“This fully sucks,” notes Casey.

But if the Surfline oceanographers and meteorologists and wave prophets are right, Jen thinks, those first sets were just a preview. The main attraction is still to come.

“They’re on their way, Case.”

“That first one will get me good points, but Tom Tyler’s was better.”

“Be calm.”

“I know, because Dad was always calm. I think Brock got tired in the fire.”

“He looks pretty whupped,” says Jen.

“But he’s got that energy in him, like, when you least expect it.”

She sits astride the ski, holding in gentle water, clapping her gloved hands together to break the cold. Watches the men in the lineup, some sitting on their boards and others seated behind their drivers. Even through the ski noise, their voices carry across the water. Occasional nervous laughter — nervous because the sets are only an hour and fifteen minutes for your best five rides. There are ten boats in the water, including Pipedream. Plus the four rescue skis, hired by the contest organizers. All bobbing in separate, uneasy syncopation. When the big waves come marching in and towering up, all the watercraft and the people on them look like a tiny village perched at the foot of a moving mountain. We’re all so small, Jen has always thought. A band of tiny crazies. “Start Me Up” and “Iron Man” slug it out from boats bobbing at opposite ends of the lineup.

Abruptly, the breeze changes direction and gains force, coming from the northwest now, with the swell. Jen shoots an energy drink and it’s kicking in. She angles for view, trying to gauge wave direction and speed, trading observations with her son.

Everybody watches and waits as a couple of nice fifteen-footers lope in and break, breeze lifting spray off their backs. The waves are more temperamental now, the lips pouting and collapsing earlier.

The fifteen-footers become twenty feet, then twenty-five. Like they’re just warming up, Jen thinks. She’s seen this before on the big open-ocean breaks, where a mid-set wave jumps up much higher than the others, suddenly, and for no apparent reason.

Tom Tyler, the favored nineteen-year-old phenom from Santa Cruz, ditches his tow rope and paddles into a twenty-five-foot wave that lurches to almost forty just as he’s trying to launch. Tyler is thick and strong, and Jen watches him dig for all he’s worth to catch this wave as it towers up and starts to break over him. Tyler makes a miracle drop — heavy as an anvil, so vertical and fast is his descent — then jams on the brakes with a knee-rattling bottom turn, sprints through the massing whitewater, then races up the face, over the top and out.

Jen and Casey holler for Tyler, and offer up neoprene-muffled applause.

“Big points, Mom.”

“Focus on yourself, son. Focus on the job.”

Pure Mom again, thinks Jen. At forty-six she knows she’ll never outgrow her mother’s indomitable will to win.

Jen rocks on her jet ski, well to the side of the Pit, the Cauldron, and the Boneyard — three of the most lethal rock formations at Mavericks. They’re impossible to locate precisely until the waves inhale and rise up, suddenly exposing the rocks just a few feet under the cold, clear water. Jen glimpses the Cauldron — an undersea grotto — just before a furious six-foot wall of whitewater crashes over it.

A hideous place. Where John went down.

She glances at Casey, a blade of fear cutting through her.

“He’s all around us, Mom.”

“He always is.”

The waves arrive bunched closer now, eager as bulls entering a ring. Thirty-foot faces, Jen figures, as she watches a local fisherman — Sal Stragola, tall, thick, and barrel-chested — being towed into a wave six times taller than he is. He makes the drop but not the turn, has to surrender to the whitewater, then prone out on his gun. The wave crests and crashes over him with a stout boom. Sal broncos along in the wall of suds and sand, clambering his way inside, holding on with all he’s got. This bailout will keep him from getting held down by any of the next five waves of the set, which might save his life but will probably cost him the heat, scored by judges on Pipedream. Jen sees that Stragola is in water too heavy for a jet ski, so by the time he waits out the set and gets back in the lineup, he’ll have lost a waveless twenty minutes.

The next wave is Casey’s, a wobbly thirty-footer that puffs out early and leaves him with a frothy short shoulder and an easy exit. No points for this one.

Tom Tyler is towed into a forty-foot wave. No sooner has he dropped the rope when the lip splinters ahead and knocks Tyler off his board, then grabs the boy by the neck from behind and takes him down.

Jen hears the shouts and cries, and joins the jet ski fleet making the big semicircle to water that’s safe, but as close as they can get to where Tyler went down.

No sign of him. Her stomach tightens.

Engines whine and blast smoke into the air.

A driver she doesn’t know gets in too close to climb over the wall of whitewater, which hurls his ski across the water. He crashes, holds on with both hands as his machine lurches in tight circles, sputtering exhaust and seawater into the air. He manages to climb back on, right the ski, and close in on Tom Tyler, who has surfaced just out of the impact zone, holding on to half his board for flotation.

“No worries!” he yells.

Rene Carrasco gets pitched from a twenty-five-foot wave that jumps suddenly, shaking him off like a flea. Jen sees him dive, his tethered board plopping out in front of him. Carrasco’s tow partner circles out after him.

Flip Garrison shreds a clean, thirty-five-footer that barrels over him mid-wave and leaves the man hidden inside the tube for three full seconds — only the tip of his gun showing — before Garrison, crouched, shoots out like a ball from a cannon. Clean exit.

Wave of the day so far, Jen thinks.

Ted Kaiawalu purls on his takeoff and flies, arms out, his board midair above him. He lands hard, scrambles, disappearing under six feet of whitewater churning with pieces of driftwood and shreds of kelp.

Jen watches the ESPN helicopter hovering out in front of the impact zone, and the rescue chopper below it — so low its blades whirl just above the breaking waves. Looks like one could jump up and grab it, she thinks. The skis slash and the boats scramble for safer water in the heaving sea.

Over the din: “Outside, Mom!”

Jen guns seaward for the next wave, a lumbering forty-footer. She swerves out and away from the still-forming crest, and onto the rising flank.

From where she looks back at Casey, his rope in both hands, lining up with the forming peak, pointing his big board down for the drop.

At once: the wave stops forward motion, and it’s face rises up — fills from below — the same reverse hydrology Jen has seen at Jaws and Cortes Bank, when wave and bottom hold still while the wave swells higher, as if taking a huge breath — the strange stall of time when a big wave decides to become a very big wave.

Casey lets go of the rope and drops in.

Elbow down, Jen flogs the throttle and grinds Thunder far along the rising shoulder, then over it, getting air before landing on the kinder backside sea.

She swings down and around to the edge of the impact zone to see Casey make the drop, body and board vertical, arms out, head cocked calmly, measured and methodical like John would be.

Fifty feet, thinks Jen. Sixty? It’s the biggest wave she’s seen anyone ride and her son is on it, and she’s towed him into it. She’s bone-deep scared, for everything that can happen, for everything that has.

Casey makes the bottom turn, his legs strong and true as pistons, and the wave breaks top to bottom over him with a concussive finality.

He’s gone.

Three seconds. Four. Five.

In Jen’s mind, even the jet skis and outboards and helicopters seem to have gone silent, but she isn’t thinking about that, she’s watching the four-story cement mixer in which Casey’s future is being formed, and plotting the best way to get down and around to the impact zone if this wave won’t let go of him.

Casey bursts out of the barrel, already aiming for the top of the wave, toward which he climbs with calm deliberation. The wave coughs a cloud of spray after him, as if trying to knock him down, then follows with another.

Jen watches her son bank the lip and hold high for a horizontal glide, then tuck in for a fast run back down the wave face. Fast indeed.

A beautifully carved bottom turn.

Then a graceful, arms-relaxed, palms-out, head-cocked, leaning-back-at-the-waist glide up onto the shoulder. Where Jen feels his joy, and, smiling, watches Casey shoot over the black wave and into the sky, disappearing into the windblown spray on his orange-and-black magic carpet.

Next heat, Jen watches from Amiga as Mahina tows Brock into his first wave. It’s just after ten — the beginning of Surfline’s witching hour for the biggest waves of the swell — and the gray sky is dissolving into sun and blue. The offshores have picked up a little, spangling the water with light and lifting white spray off the incoming waves.

Jen’s heart — pounding steadily since the ski ride out some two hours ago — has settled into a calm, steady thump. She’s finding that place outside herself, from which she can observe and calculate. Finding her “detachment,” as her mother used to say. Clear the mind, she thinks: behold the wave, sense its intent, see the future. Pro-act, as Brock likes to say. She watches the waves staggering in, black and windblown, imagines her attack, her drop, her turn.

Mahina pulls Brock into a forty-foot pyramid that, by all measures, appears to be a perfect wave.

He drops in, board straight as a spear, his body lean and ropey, his head a forest of spiky dark dreads.

Jen watches her son, frankly awed — for the how many hundreds of times — by his instincts, daring, and reflexes.

He carves the bottom turn so deeply it slows him, allowing the smooth-faced monster to swallow him back into its maw, then he snakes down again for another turn.

Jen swears her heart skips a beat.

“Fudge, that’s massive,” Casey observes. “First wave, man.”

From the bottom Brock shoots forty feet back up the face — Jen thinks it takes him about one second — then suddenly banks off the lip, his airborne body and board so horizontal it seems they have to free-fall, but Brock mocks gravity, riding the gun down and across the great, ribbed wave.

Which now peels off in a long section so fast that all Brock has to do is draw a straight line. But he doesn’t; instead, he works the huge flank with a series of goofy tail pumps, like when he was a kid, eking the last few yards out of a little wave in Laguna.

Then a straight race to the top, up and over the exhausted beast, and out.

“Oh man!” yells Casey. “He’s gonna win it with that!”

“Your wave was bigger, Case. Don’t count yourself out.”

Brock’s next two waves are thick and heavy, breaking with a random, hard-to-read violence, but still nothing like Casey’s freak giant.

Brock unleashes all his aggression on them, pushing the limits of balance and speed, teasing the monsters with the small-wave precision he mastered as a twelve-year-old.

Jen studies him, feeling her old pre-heat confidence building.