Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  The winter swells had arrived, big days in January, peaking at twenty-five feet on the North Shore, and that was a Hawaiian measure, of the back of the wave—the face was close to forty, great blue claws of water closing over tiny defiant surfers. In some places on the coast, at Lani’s and Chun’s, random waves washed over Kamehameha Highway, sluicing it with foaming seawater that drained into the grassy verge on the far side, leaving a surface of sand and broken seashells and twists of brown seaweed, like a warning that the ocean would overwhelm and claim the whole road one day.

  The previous year, lying on the beach with his eyes closed, Sharkey had felt the power of the surf, the slumping sound of it rocking his body, but with a brief pause, and then another slump, like rocks pounding into a ravine in a toppling sequence, one boom burying another and becoming a brief hush, a sudden intake of breath, and sitting up, Sharkey had seen the surfers like flotsam, bobbing in the subsiding swirl of the boil.

  In town, at Magic Island and Waikiki and Diamond Head, the surf had dropped—“flat to a foot,” as Uncle Sunshine put it. But he encouraged Sharkey to look at Waimea Bay and Pipeline, to have an idea of what big surf looked like.

  “I’ve seen it before. Last year.”

  “Dis week is more epic. Big, da wave.”

  “Should I bring my board?”

  “Yah. But be akamai. Dis weekend insane.”

  “I wish you could come with me, Uncle.”

  “More better if you go alone.” The old man studied him for a moment. “You gotta get used to stay alone if you wen’ take this more serious.”

  Alone, Sharkey thought—I’m alone at school, I’m alone at home, I’m alone here with Uncle Sun. I not you friend . . . I you kupuna. I am obviously alone, an obvious haole, with the sun beating down on me, squeezing me small.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Still, he did not feel that he was ready; he wished for company for the forty-mile ride to the North Shore, someone to talk to on the beach, a bit of encouragement perhaps, from a friend he had not seen for a while—Harry Ho. So after school he walked down the road to Punahou School and waited at the gate of the driveway for the bell to signal the end of the Punahou day.

  When the bell rang and the students began to fill the driveway, he had a pang—they were so well dressed, so confident and clean, laughing, yet so orderly, so different from the after-school mob at Roosevelt. They wore shoes and socks. They carried book bags and briefcases. There was a seriousness about them, and even in their laughter a restraint and politeness. Their bags bulging with books, they were going home to study some more.

  Harry was among them. Seeing Sharkey, he walked quickly toward him, and they smacked hands.

  “Surf’s up big on the North Shore.”

  “Yeah?” Harry weighed his sagging book bag by its strap.

  “Come on—tomorrow!”

  “And skip school?”

  “Why not?”

  Harry looked shocked, and then smiled. “Cannot. Maybe check out the waves this weekend.”

  “It’ll drop by then.”

  “Joe,” Harry said, and shrugged, holding his book bag, looking helpless, with no reply, and finally said, “I don’t know.”

  But he knew; he had given his answer. He was a student in a high-pressure school, he took his studies seriously, he was aiming to go to college on the mainland, and though he was a passionate surfer he was purposeful—his schoolwork came first. For Sharkey, studies were no use, they taught him nothing he could apply to surfing. And the school was a battleground. What he learned at Roosevelt was the usefulness of being oblique, of never meeting a person’s gaze, all the Hawaiian evasions, making deference look like humility, not taking sides in negotiation, remembering he was a haole—a minority that was routinely picked on—and all the other public-school persecutions, unknown at Punahou.

  He had earned a reputation as a geek and a loner, just another fucking haole. He was generally left alone, but he knew his place was on the margin, eating in the cafeteria alone, keeping to himself on the playground, vanishing as soon as the last bell sounded, and then off to the beach to surf. His scar had given him status, the death of his father had bestowed a measure of concern and protection, but really he didn’t matter anymore, not even as someone to be bullied, and these days Nalani had a new boyfriend. Sharkey did just enough work to get by and in that way remained inconspicuous, knowing it would be much worse for him if, like Blaine, he was teased for getting high marks.

  But his dreams were lit with the turbulence of breaking waves—no longer unreadable in their turbulence but distinct in their changing forms, rising, cresting, tubing, far from chaotic, showing rideable contours. His dreams proved to him that his ambitions were huge, perhaps too great to reveal to anyone. Better surfers, or nonsurfers, would mock, they would laugh, they’d say, “How?” or “You’re dreaming”—and it was true, he was dreaming. His mother pressed him for his plans. And consumed by plans, he said, “I have no plans.”

  She said, “Because you have no ambition.”

  How wrong she was; yet he would never have been able to explain what he felt. He was now sixteen years old. To say, “I’m going to be a big-wave surfer” was preposterous, something like saying, “I’m going to write a book.”

  “So what will you do about money?” he imagined her saying.

  “I’ll go on the tour. Prize money,” was the reply he did not dare to make. “Maybe get some endorsements.”

  His mother had a peculiar mocking laugh, like a parrot squawk, which she would have used on him, hearing that, her mouth wide open, the roots of her teeth exposed.

  Uncle Sunshine did not mock. He had faith in Sharkey’s ability, but such faith was oppressive too—it was also a burden, it came with high expectations. What was the answer? To dream, to harbor his secrets and keep them pure; to avoid revealing anything of his yearnings or his self-belief. The Colonel had been right: No friends. Keep to yourself. Trust no one. Find your own way down the face of the wave.

  Harry Ho called him. Harry always felt he owed Sharkey a favor, because way back when Dr. Emmett Chock had asked him to name the Punahou boys involved in drugs—the group of stoners that smoked after school—Sharkey had shrugged and said nothing, refusing to cooperate, hardly acknowledging the question. And for his refusal he had been expelled, condemned to Roosevelt High School and the gangs and “fucken haole.”

  “I could ask for the day off,” Harry said. “Something like compassionate leave. Say it’s a family matter. And it’s kind of true. You’re like ohana.”

  It sounded to Sharkey like pity, or an obligation. Sharkey hated hearing it. Harry had plans to surf and was competent, but always put his schoolwork ahead of surfing, and that meant he would never be a great surfer—he was not wholehearted, he’d be a weekend surfer like his father, who was a dentist.

  “I changed my mind,” Sharkey said. “I’m not going.”

  “Really?” Harry was silent a moment, then said brightly, “Okay. Keep in touch.”

  Harry’s tone had changed. He was relieved; he had not wanted to take a day off. Sharkey had spared him—not as a favor; he had decided that he didn’t want to surf with him, he needed to be alone, to concentrate, to make his mistakes without witnesses, or friends, or antagonists.

  He skipped school; he borrowed his mother’s car. Driving along the freeway past the exit sign, FORT SHAFTER, he mourned his father and at the same time was rueful, knowing that being a mediocre student, not aspiring to the academy—he’d never get in anyway—he would have disappointed the man, who had had hopes of Sharkey being a soldier.

  Then he was glad that he had passed the Fort Shafter exit and the off-ramp to Tripler and was heading north, detouring through Waihawa and the pineapple fields and, on the crest of the hill, the cane fields sloping to the shore, to the left the chimney of the sugar mill at Waialua, a plume of smoke borne seaward on the trade winds, and the sight of the sea beaten to foam at Hale‘iwa, and the ocean thickened as far
as he could see, to Waimea and beyond, to the mass of clouds over Kauai. As the surf report had promised, a big day.

  Getting out of his car at the parking lot at Sunset, he heard the loud rollers booming on the shore, and it was like a welcome. He unslung his board from the pads strapped on the roof and carried it on his head to the beach, where a crowd of people watched surfers taking the waves. But their voices were smothered by the waves tipping forward into a noisy boil and riding to the sand with a continuous rub and hush, the ocean brimming against the beach.

  There Sharkey sat, marveling at the small figures breaking out of the froth at the top of the waves and scrambling to their feet and making white trails in the blue as they raced sideways down the face of the wave, some of them to be swallowed, enclosed in the foam, others outracing it, braced upright as the wave diminished. At intervals between sets the sea flattened so completely it was a great blue puddle dotted with bodies, bobbing there like survivors of a sinking—and then the sets began rising again and the bodies were tossed into their troughs, and soon surfers standing on boards exploded through the foamy brow of the waves and raced down their slopes.

  Sharkey studied the posture of the surfers, the way they steered and cut back and slowed, dismounting to paddle through the waves again to ride another. They were all movement, and buoyant, a breed of aquatic creatures, and the best of them rode through foam to the clearer curve of the wave, exulting as they flew toward the beach. One agile surfer in a red wetsuit—a woman, he could see—seemed more resourceful in her bounce than the others, and slimmer—a human sliver—confident on her board in ride after ride, back and forth on the waves, until at last she rode in, nearer the beach, steering her board through a low moving shelf of foaming water that carried her all the way to the sand. And he saw that she was young, a girl, about his own age, yet at a distance, when she’d been on a wave, he’d taken her to be much older and majestic.

  She was a sprite. She lifted her board and hugged it to her side and, head down, gasping, walked past him, treading the soft sand. She could have been his sister.

  That was when he fixed the collar of his leash to his ankle and aimed his board at an incoming wave and flopped on it, paddling, nosing his board out through the low shore break. He drove his hands down hard, propelling himself forward with energy, yet he was anxious—the first time on this wave; he could feel it in his throat like the onset of nausea.

  That’s good, Uncle Sunshine had said of the feeling of uncertainty.

  Good? The sense of unswallowed anxiety that was a sort of disgust that wouldn’t leave him.

  It make you more careful, the man said. You always find what you afraid of. Or it find you.

  But Sharkey thought mainly of the teenager in the red wetsuit who had appeared at the top of the big wave and clambered to her feet on her board and then had stood and ridden in a confident crouch, slipping through the barrel as it narrowed and standing straighter as the wave thinned and chucked her onward, all the way to the shallows, where she stepped off her board and pirouetted onto the sand.

  She was his inspiration as he paddled out, thinking, If she can do it . . .

  Duck-diving under the incoming waves, he could feel their strength, the moving water not like water at all but like muscle—and though he knew he always surfed well at Magic Island and had confidence there, the surf break here at Pipeline was different altogether, a peculiar lift and push, a density that was new to him; and the sense too that a shallow reef lay under him, the solid ledge that formed the wave and was a blur of darkness beneath him.

  When he got to the lineup he followed protocol and kept away from the other surfers, as Uncle Sunshine had told him. “You have no rivals,” the man said, “no enemies. You only compete against youself.”

  He watched the other surfers study the incoming waves, each successive wave in a set rising higher and revealing as it rolled a bulge of blue water like an offering. And so the surfers judged its speed and maneuvered for the best position to gain a place in the lineup, paddling hard to push through the inward-curving face.

  The swell heaved Sharkey up to the height of a housetop, and he sat, as though on the roof peak, and saw the other surfers, one by one, vanish over the edge and become lost in the boil before it. What alarmed him was the way a surfer looked as, wiping out, he flipped above the top of a wave, his leash tangled, twisting down, his board tumbling after him, and both then buried beneath the smothering froth of swirling water.

  When all the other surfers had taken a wave and he was alone on the swell, Sharkey steeled himself and, positioning his board on a rising wave, paddled like mad to stay with it and overtop it. And what he saw astonished him, for as the wave rose the base of it fell away, forty feet or more of its gleaming curve, and as he scrambled to his feet to ride it he slipped and fell forward, and the wave closed over him, an indifferent feature of the sea, vast and implacable, pressing him and overwhelming him and taking him down, burying him—not in fury, not a god or a giant but a dumb sudden stunning bigness that bulked above him and just as suddenly collapsed. Seconds of its colossal wash before another, heavier wave swept over him, past a shaft of sunlight, tumbling him into suffocating darkness, burying him again.

  Bubbles rattled in his ears, his leash tugged at his ankle, he fought the surge—the thick sweep of water—and was dragged down until he reached and slipped the leash over his foot. His board banged across his body and then he was on his back, staring at the sun, the shore break licking at him.

  He knew he was bruised from the thump of his board and being pushed against the rocks, but more than anything he was embarrassed—afraid that he’d been seen. He crawled up the beach on all fours, his knees bleeding, and his arm was sliced—probably by the fin of his board. Before he located his board and dropped to the sand, he looked around. No one had seen him, or if they had, they were as indifferent to him as the wave that had crushed him.

  No—the girl in the red wetsuit sat with her knees together behind him on the beach. She must have seen it all, his wipeout, his struggle, his creeping up the beach. He waved to her, and with a simple flick of her hand she waved back, then averted her eyes—so bold on the waves, so shy on the beach. And perhaps feeling conspicuous, she picked up her board and walked away, treading the sand in a stately way like the strut of a shorebird.

  Uncle Sunshine’s voice was in his head—a stern command to go again, to take another wave. This he did, not at Pipeline but down the beach at Off the Wall, where the waves were breaking left and were smaller. Purely to make a point, for his morale, so that he could tell Uncle Sunshine he hadn’t been defeated, he paddled out and rode a wave halfway in, and then another.

  But the wipeout had exhausted him, and back in his car, shivering, frightened at the memory of what he took to be a near drowning, he put his face in his hands and sobbed for a moment, his whole body convulsing. Breathing deeply, he recovered, sighing, and reversing the car saw himself in the rearview mirror. He was amazed at his tears, that his eyes and cheeks were dirtied by his fingers— a face of suffering and triumph—and that he felt such relief.

  8

  Welcome to the Wave

  Before that first big wave of his life, his wipeout, the hold-down, his near drowning, it had never occurred to Sharkey that he might fail. Was it Uncle Sunshine’s belief in him that made him reckless? Perhaps the man, being a kupuna, had challenged him, knowing the risks, so that he would take the wave and taste fear. You always find what you afraid of. Sharkey had not imagined being swung so high on a wave—balanced on its brow, suspended over the great vertical swoop of its face, looking down at the glittering plow of moving water and, losing his footing on the board, feeling terror, as though he were being thrown into its blade.

  And that was only the beginning of the ordeal. The worst of it had come moments later, when, suffocated by successive waves, he had lost all sense of up and down in the wash. Though he’d gotten the leash off his ankle, he was not saved by quick thinking. What foll
owed had been the result of the churning of the shore break, which had tossed him forward like a splinter of driftwood. He’d been lucky.

  Seen from the beach, the distant sets had seemed smaller and rideable, not the canyon walls and sweeping ravines he encountered when he paddled out. Nothing at Magic Island, where the winter swell was less than head-high, had prepared him for this. Not even Uncle Sunshine’s casual warning had helped.

  “I think maybe you wen’ wipe out,” he’d said, seeing Sharkey’s gashed arm afterward, the bruised flesh of his knees.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s good. Only two kine surfer, da kine wen’ wipe out already and da kine gonna wipe out bym-bye.”

  “It freaked me out.”

  Uncle Sunshine laughed. “Yah! If you say something different I call you a bull liar. Was a big wave?”

  “Da kine,” Sharkey said.

  He saw it again, fierce-faced, a monster, the smooth incurve below him, lengthening, fattening, defying him with an abyss—his feet slipping from his sliding board, falling into the slope of water and being sucked into darkness.

  “Was epic yesterday,” Uncle Sunshine said.

  And Sharkey remembered his face in the rearview mirror, streaked with tears, contorted by what he had just suffered; yet in that ugliness he was triumphant—he was alive. He had no way of explaining this feeling, but Uncle Sunshine seemed to guess it.

  “Was one good lesson for you.”

  Perhaps the experience of fear still lingered on his face, imprinted as a reflex of memory, a twitch of muscles that he overcorrected with a set of his jaw, making the afterimage of his fear more emphatic.

  “You never forget ’um.”

  Nothing could undo that shock, was what Uncle Sunshine was saying, but the failure made Sharkey strong, as no success would ever do. Something had died in him that day of the wipeout—youth and stupidity, maybe. He was older now, and for the first time—in the wipeout, the recovery, his tears, his sobs—he saw what bravery was: not recklessness but facing fear.