Desperation Reef

37

The klaxon for the women’s heat blares just after noon.

The waves are the biggest of the day — routine forty-five-foot faces — staggering in, deranged and urgent.

There’s a brief, bucking huddle around Pipedream, during which the contest organizers offer to postpone the women due to wave size. They greet the idea with curses and raised middle fingers.

Jen’s up against five surfers she doesn’t know, all younger by at least one decade, all ranked in the World Surfing Tour ratings, with much better odds to win, place, and show here at the Monsters of Mavericks. She’s a walk-on, a big-wave footnote hanging on by her now ancient reputation. And, of course, John Stonebreaker’s long-reaching legend.

She plops overboard, last in the lineup, unties her board from the rescue sled.

“You can do this, Mom,” says Casey. “God Himself is going to be there with you. So’s Dad. Listen to them.”

“Got it, Case,” she says, sitting on her board now, lifted by a rising swell. “I like what I’m seeing out there.”

“I’ll get you where you need to be.”

She watches the first woman, Ruby Peralta, drop into a marauding forty-foot face. She free-falls and lands staunchly mid-wave, but digs her rail. With the nose of her board trapped vertically, the wave shrugs forward, flipping Ruby into the air, where she’s already swimming as the whitewater plants her.

The four rescue sleds scream in, boiling around the impact zone, their drivers calibrating rescue and disaster. A capsized jet ski is a deadly thing. Jen watches Ruby’s board — leash attached — hurtling toward one of the rescue skis. The driver ducks and guns his craft toward Ruby, now aloft in the whitewater, stroking hard, head up, helmet long gone. She lunges for the pausing sled, grabs and hangs on as the driver carves a wide arc away from the zone.

Jen watches her climb onto the sled and raise a fist.

“Oh, Mom, look at this!”

Casey nimbly tows her in, waits for her to drop the rope, then guns Thunder to safety.

Jen’s first wave unfolds in front of her. She makes it, glances at the three-story drop in front of her, then focuses on a narrow section of it — the upwelling flank down which she must slice. The world reduced to this. Lets her feet obey her eyes, feels the wild slide of her board as she flies across the face and down, ankles chattering, feet locked in the straps.

The g-force of her bottom turn tries to telescope her legs, but Jen hasn’t been carrying iron weights in the Laguna Beach High School swimming pool just for the fun of it. She feels the change of direction shuddering up into her back and shoulders as she leans forward, pivots, and makes the turn into the first section.

Which is already starting to break, high above and well ahead of her, a heavy, black-and-white lip, wavering with menace and ready to pitch.

Terrible news.

She can’t outrun it from down here, so she races up the face, banks into its power, crouches, hangs high, and holds on for her life as the barrel takes her.

The sound is like nothing else, a percussive roar she feels in her bones.

Two. Three. Four and...

Out she blasts, an orange-and-black comet in a dark sky.

Cranks up and off the lip, down and across, speeds through a long section without Brock’s dillydallying shtick, then up the face, over and off.

Midair, Jen reaches out both arms and screams as hard as she can.

No words, no thoughts, just the wail of fear banished, of a soul in joy.

Casey bucks through the chop like a bull rider, and picks her up — his smile like the one he had as a four-year-old, looking at his very own first surfboard in the Castle Rock living room twenty years ago, Christmas day.

Back in the lineup, helmet and hood off, Jen chomps an Abba-Zaba, feeling the warm seawater slowly oozing from her ears.

Casey can’t shut up: “...you killed it, Mom! I saw the photog boat right out in front of you, so they got some awesome vids and shots. Off that lip, oh man, that was rad! This is, like, the best day of my life.”

She watches Phyllis Kaiawalu — Ted’s sister — shred a thirty-five-foot face with the grace of a figure skater, and make a clean exit.

Maya Abeliera rides a beautifully formed forty-foot face in a straight, hundred-yard sprint that brings her to the faltering crest that knocks her off her board. Maya dives like a seal and dolphin-kicks herself back into the wave, dropping a shoulder and bodysurfing the slowing giant. Her board trails along behind her, like part of her pod.

Jen watches her surface, where she whoops twice, then yells with the breeze: “Don’t try that at home!”

Jen’s second wave is a thick-necked peak. She barely makes it, rides the elevator down, manages the bottom turn, then goes rocket-woman and zooms up the uprising face as the lip breaks behind her. When she glances back and up, it seems to be snarling.

She works the section back down, sees her exit route as the wave seems to snag on the rocks, climbs fast as she can for the soft spot and launches high for the other side.

She lands with a splat on the heavy black water. It’s like wet asphalt, and she hears the crack of her helmet and the wrench of her neck. Gets tangled in the leash for a moment but struggles out and climbs back onto her board and paddles hard for Casey.

Who makes a perilous pickup look easy, Jen climbing onto the rescue sled, reeling up her board with the leash. She looks down into the hideous Cauldron again — why does it keep me coming back, she thinks — then she feels Thunder’s power as Casey pulls her away.

They join the lineup, from the relative safety of which Jen sees the next set coming in, a dark, horizon-blotting platoon of killers. It’s like they’re looking for her. The ten-minute klaxon warning blasts across the water.

“You don’t have to ride another one, Mom,” says Casey. “You’ll get the women’s wave of the day, for sure. That’s, like, two thousand clams and a cool trophy.”

“I want to win the whole thing, Case.”

Jen hardly recognizes her own voice. It’s not the one she’s been speaking in for all these years, the one driven by fear and hung on regret. Right now, with the almost warm sunlight on her face, she feels that she is a different being. She’s grown. Evolved. Time to move into the world again, she thinks.

Hasn’t felt that way in twenty-five years.

John, that sun feels good, doesn’t it?

“You know what Grandma Eve would say about winning,” says Casey.

“Yeah — it isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!”

“Mom, remember why we do this. Or the Breath of Life, as Brock calls Him.”

“All metaphor, Casey. I want to win. It’s just the way I am.”

“This set is big, Mom. Real big.”

Jen watches Odile Bertran, pitched off her board before she can even stand up. The barrel takes her down and the rescue skis scream into action.

“They’re huge and fast, Mom. I’m going to put you way high up, so you gotta be fast.”

Odile pops up on the edge of the Pit and climbs into her tow partner’s sled just as he guns it away, Odile dragged through the exploding whitewater.

Maya Abeliera holds the tow rope, looks down, and lets the charging wave go past her.

Holly Blair makes the wave and carves an impossible bottom turn, only to be crushed by the suddenly collapsing peak. The wave elevators her back up, high, then slams her down again, her board tombstoning on its leash.

Jet skis throw up wakes and exhaust.

Jen watches the photographers’ boat rollicking just outside the impact zone, and the two helicopters hovering close together, their blades whirling not twenty feet from a breaking fifty-foot face.

Holly pops up in the whitewater, trapped in its churning fury, whirling and flailing, board trailing, snapped in half. It looks to Jen like she’s slugging the water with her fists.

Then, as a voice squawks down, she strokes hard for the red life buoy dangled by the rescue chopper.

“Swim left, Holly! Swim to your left!”

Jen’s third and likely final wave of the contest is her biggest. It’s the cleanup, nothing behind it but a waveless, heaving ocean.

She nods at Casey, whose expression is uncharacteristically puzzled. Feels Thunder’s torque and strength.

Throws the rope and drops onto a galloping, fifty-foot thoroughbred that suddenly raises his great head behind her.

The breeze lifts a white plume but Jen can’t look up or back, only down, half-blinded by the spray, letting her feet obey her eyes, trusting her stung vision to take her where she needs to go.

Too vertical and she’ll unfasten.

Too horizontal and she’ll get pitched.

Two one-way tickets into the impact zone. To the Cauldron, the Pit, or the Boneyard.

She’s all in because there is no choice.

Rarely on a drop, the nose of a surfer’s gun pops off the surface for a split second — a small rise or a hidden dip — and the speeding board takes a gulp of air. At forty miles an hour, the nose rides up, and the body of the board follows, lifting off and away from the wave until the board is vertical. Physics and velocity push the tail out and away, and the surfer comes off the wave and descends — head down, feet above, and arms out — her board behind her like a cross on which she is crucified upside down.

Which is Jen Stonebreaker, an orange-and-black figure falling headfirst into the violent whiteout of the impact zone.

The county helicopter lowers for her, Holly Blair safely aboard and the life buoy still dangling. The rescue skis all go banshee toward Jen, with Casey, Brock, and Mahina out ahead of them already.

The wave drives Jen to the bottom, mashing her against the reef, the tonnage of water holding her down. She clamps her hands over the rocks to keep from being dragged, feels the pull of the leash on her ankle as the wave takes her board toward the surface.

Lifting Jen off the rocks, and into the fury of whitewater.

Rag-dolled and tumbling, eyes closed, she pulls three of her inflation-vest pull tags. Nothing happens. Yanks the fourth, and feels the loop come off in her hand.

Is this my sentence for John?

Her terror peaks and tries to flood out of her, but it can’t get out. She’s got it trapped in there and she feels the nerve-curdling fingers of panic up high in her throat.

She’s got breath left, but can’t believe so much of it is gone after only a few seconds. The cold weight of the water, and ten feet of pressure here near the bottom, are wringing the air right out of her.

And the wave won’t let her go. Like it knows there’s no backup wave behind it. Like it’s going to eat her here and now. Like Jen belongs to it and it alone.

She thinks she’s facing shore. Pulls herself along by the rocks, but the wave lifts her feet and flips her over, then presses down hard again. She’s pinned on her back, eyes open now to the dim underwater twilight of Mavericks, while sharp white flashes shoot through her vision. Her leash goes slack.

She rights herself, the wave shoving her head against a boulder. The rocks around her creak and scrape. She feels the spined urchins and limpets slicing through her hood. Clamps the rocks again, draws her knees to her chest, and pushes off with all her might.

Then the whitewater claims her again, rushing fast.

Toward land, one quarter mile away.

She’s dizzy now from lack of oxygen and near panic. Not sure what’s up or down, really, just clawing her way toward her next breath.

Breaks the surface and swills the miracle of air — which turns out not to be air at all, but a mouthful of brine that scalds her throat and sinuses and lungs.

And turns her world white, as the ocean folds her under, splayed across the reef, faceup again.

God help...

Breath of...

She struggles over and gets her feet under her again.

Takes hours, while the rocks creak and scrape.

Jen takes a breath — it’s reflex and she can’t fight it — and shoves off for the surface. Reaches up and pulls her outstretched arms down as hard as she can. Then again. She has to make that bright white light. Has to get the air that’s in it.

But she’s not going up; she’s tumbling again, pounded by the rocks. Hears them laughing.

Thinks:

John, Casey, Brock...

Mom, Dad...

Brightwhitelight

Kickagain

Breatheagain

Kick!

Then sudden black, and only black.

Casey and Brock are already there, searching the surface, then diving to work the rocks, like crabs, pulling themselves along the bottom, through the half-light, waiting to see their mother somewhere in this hard, dim place.

The wave has passed and the sea heaves around them, smooth and powerful.

The rescue and ESPN choppers clap overhead, and the jet skis rooster-tail through the sea, and the boats pitch awkwardly on the outskirts of the impact zone.

Casey and Brock forage halfway between the Pit and the Cauldron with the help of an eastward, post-set current where she went in, buried by the breaking wave.

They search through a sheltered grotto, bits of seaweed and broken kelp swirling, a finning rockfish backing deeper into its cave. Gravel rises from the bottom in a small tornado.

Eyes alert, Mahina waits on her jet ski, Thunder tethered to her rescue sled.

Casey, big and strong and eight feet underwater now, pulls himself along the floor of this dark world, squinting for a sign of her. An occasional ray of sun penetrates. He’s looking for the orange of her wetsuit, or a glimmer of her helmet, maybe, or a zipper, or the yellow pull handle on her inflator, or the pale luminosity of her face.

Brock crabs along six feet to Casey’s right, hoping for something soft against his gloves, a flicker of color in the near dark, the bump of her body against his. The smaller rocks click and pop around him. Mahina’s jet ski irritably idles above.

Even this close, they can barely make each other out. Three times they surface together for breath, then submerge again: the Stonebreaker twins, born seconds apart one afternoon, twenty-four years ago, now searching for the woman who gave them life.

Then, there she is, right in front of them.

Suspended in the gloom, arms and legs spread like a skydiver, helmet gone and hair lilting in the current.

She is looking at them very calmly. But does she see?

Casey gets under her left arm, and Brock under her right, and they bear her from the water to the rescue sled.

Eyes closed and not moving or breathing, but a distant pulse.

Casey does chest compressions in the rocking sea, and talks to her.

Brock breathes for her, and gently pats her cold white cheeks.

Mahina chants in her native language, words that sound welcoming and hopeful.

Casey, as he pushes and pauses: “Mom, come back. Like, be here.”

Brock, between breaths: “We gotcha, we gotcha.”

Mahina: “Aia ‘oe ma ‘ane’i. Kakou. Kakou.”

Casey: “Ah come on, Mom! Mom!”

Brock: “Breath of life! Coming in!”

Then a brutal silence as the living assess the dying.

Broken by Jen, who full-body spasms and blows a storm of seawater into the air.

And another.

And again.

She’s still spitting up and moaning as they get her into the helicopter rescue basket, and the deputy latches the gate.