by Peter Heller
I didn’t need an attorney, I needed backup. I noticed that when I went with Michael, Jr., or Bruno, out at the Cliffs, or some of the breaks south of the Huntington Beach Pier, the locals were less likely to mess with me. One guy I must have cut off—okay, I did; it was a split peak, meaning the wave humps up and one surfer can go one way off it, the other surfer can go the opposite direction. I thought this shaved-head fortyish longboarder was going right, so I took off left, but he changed his mind at the last minute and came down fast on me and wiped out. Honest mistake, I really didn’t mean to get in his way. When he paddled past me he bumped me hard with his shoulder. I blinked. I couldn’t believe it. M, Jr., saw it and it was like letting out the dogs. The chain broke. He lunged, paddled fast, halfway to the guy and started yelling.
“What was that? You better back off, man! You mess with him, you mess with me!” I was touched.
The guy started to splutter something about me dropping in on him and Michael went wild. “He’s just a beginner. He was gonna split the peak with you, what’s wrong with you? Whyn’t pick on someone your own size? You mess with me, you mess with the U.S. Marines.”
I felt like a pretty girl in the middle of a bar fight. Also I wanted to pummel the guy into a pulp for being such an asshole. He backed off. He went north and found his own peak.
With Bruno it was the same. We met at the Cliffs early in the morning. He was a dedicated believer in the medical properties of fine red wine, preferably French, so sometimes it wasn’t that early. Whenever we went out there, though, we got respect. We’d sit on our boards a few feet apart and bob on the swell and watch the oil derricks up on the bluff nod their own rhythm and watch the light move down the steep bluffs and Bruno would tell me more about the composite spheres he wanted to build to solve the land shortage on the coasts.
THE SHACK. THE FORGE OF THE SEA
This felt, Huntington Beach in August, like the summer of our lives. Kim was still having a blast with M&M. She was starting to get strong enough to catch her own waves, and she had the balance of a ninja. Once she was up, nothing could knock her off. She loved Michael, Jr., and he would yell out his excited corrections. I could hear the call, “Kiim! What did I say? Is the beach between your feet? Where are you going to look?” She was still in the protective cocoon of the M&M Surfing School, hadn’t had to deal yet with a real lineup. Where she was was like childhood, a good childhood. All of the play, none of the conflict.
Bodies humming from a whole morning of surfing, we’d make our way through the midday crowds. The animal beauty of so many of these young surfers—it was like moving through herds of delicately limbed ibex. Sleek, ripple-flanked, glossy.
The shell shops and T-shirt shops, the waxed cherry ’57 Chevies rumbling in the street, the ’48 woodie wagons, longboards sticking out the back. Salty skin, lactic acid waning in the limbs, relaxed fatigue. Images of the morning session returned like slivers of a dream: the one long fast ride, the sheer luck of it. Edging through the doorway of the Shack, finding our little table against the wall.
I was happy. I can say that. Happiness like a tumbling of surprises. I loved Kim. Her simple appreciation of every day, how she applied herself to this process of learning—with laughter and gratitude, without fear. At night, parked now on a quiet backstreet of Seal Beach near the library, she even peed in a bucket.
“I’m always on four-wheel drive with you,” she said with mild accusation. I winced. I knew that peeing in a bucket in the middle of a prosperous neighborhood had not been in her life plan.
“Where else are you going to pee? We’re on a residential street and it’s the middle of the night. Unless you want to go in someone’s hedge.”
Aggravated sigh. “Oh, all right, I’m going down. You better not jump into it in the morning.”
We pushed our own limits every day and I think that was a big part of the joy. I was beginning to understand that what I loved most about learning to surf was the sheer beauty of wild ocean—turn from the shore and it was wild—wild, capricious, untamed. It might be dying by degrees, but the pelicans still plunged, the sardines still skipped the surface in panic, the wind still blew the spume off the breaking waves. It thundered and heaved and shuddered. The immense geologic force of the sea was undiminished. Every morning that I waded into the heavy whitewash and jumped onto the board and paddled out into the waves, I felt honored and humbled to take my place among the fishes and the birds.
Timmy took our order. Loose-limbed, thin, mid-twenties, boyish. There was a remarkable picture of him in a frame by the door. This was not a surfing picture; it was a close portrait. His shaved head turned, looking straight into the camera, calm, resolute, charged with a knowledge whose depths no normal person would plumb. He looked like he’d just come back from hell. Two feet away, level with his face across a polished surface that turned out to be the roof of a car, was a skull. His own.
I better explain.
Timmy never did anything like anybody else. He grew up surfing, biking down to the pier before school in the middle of winter to catch storm barrels with his buddies. When he was seventeen he went to Indonesia with brother Ryan and a friend and began to surf the fastest, biggest, cleanest barrels on earth. A few years later, he and two buddies got dropped off by some fishermen on a remote, deserted island in West Java with only the supplies they could carry in sacks on top of their surfboards. They ruined half of their provisions paddling through the shore break. The fishermen promised to return in a month. So for four weeks these kids from California camped in the jungle of this tiny island, spearfishing to supplement their meager rice, sleeping in hammocks, trying to keep their matches dry, catching fresh water from the rain. They suffered bouts of diarrhea and fever. They got cut and Timmy patched them up with Super Glue. They had no link to the outside world. No satellite phone or radio. They were on their own. This would be remarkable enough, a story of real survival for a few young guys from OC in a novel and alien world. But they weren’t there to survive, they were there to surf.
Every morning, in the dark, they hiked along the shore for miles. They waded over reef, climbed through mangrove, shoved their boards through jungle, to arrive at a perfect, clean, powerful, sixty-second barrel. It jacked up and sucked the water off the reef, so that if they wiped out, they were hurled and battered in water three feet deep. Like the Banzai Pipeline but not—because there was no medical help for weeks.
They wore wetsuits and helmets for some protection and they surfed their asses off and managed to take off on these barrels with cameras in their hands. All morning. One private, double-overhead tube after another. One version of paradise.
Timmy made an award-winning movie of the epic called Second Thoughts. His narration of all this was straightforward, modest, and humble to an almost painful degree, and unsparing in the details of their trials. It reminded me of stories I’d heard from cowboys—real working cowboys, not the puffed-up, combed-mustache rhetoric of professional cowboy poets. And this narration was in contrast to the high-adrenaline, ecstatic footage of the wave.
When the tsunami hit, devastating many of the islands he had loved to surf, he immediately got a crew together—including a doctor and medical supplies—and flew over with tons of relief aid, chartered a boat, and set sail to see whom they could help. His mother Michelle accompanied him. Everywhere they landed, at villages wiped off the map, with stranded survivors injured and starving, his team brought the first help. He made a movie about the trip called Tsunami Diaries, which Kim and I watched on the laptop in the Beast.
Now in the Sugar Shack I studied again the portrait of Timmy and his skull. It was one of the most startling photographs I had ever seen. Timmy had contracted a staph infection while surfing in Indo or Huntington Beach, he wasn’t sure. It had eaten into his skull and threatened his brain. He went into a coma. The doctors operated. They gave him almost no chance. Million-to-one, something like that. They took out portions of his skull and facial bones, replacing them with sy
nthetic bone. He slept on.
Maybe it was his long-trained ability to relax and ride inside of devouring forces that saved him. One day at the lunch counter Timmy had described to us what it’s like to be inside a big barrel. Dropping in, weighting back a little, slowing the board, waiting for it, getting covered up, the long tube forming ahead; accelerating, looking for the end, knowing you were going to make it, and blasting out the end before the whole thing closed out and collapsed.
“Yeah, you can feel the spit on your back. You’re out in the sunlight. There’s nothing like it. Coming out of it, not a better feeling.”
On the hospital bed, inches from death, he was riding his own tunneling barrel. In a series of seven operations the doctors took out three-quarters of his skull. He had been in and out of a coma for weeks. His mother Michelle prayed. She prayed with the force of someone who has practiced prayer her whole life, who has made a discipline out of learning how to talk to God.
He listened. After three weeks Timmy Turner woke up.
You’d never know what he’d been through, watching him hustle out the orders, punch the keys of the register, call out to the kitchen. He was a handsome kid, no noticeable scars. As soon as he could, he got right back on his board. He went back to Indo and surfed the big fast waves.
Michelle and her daughter Holly sponsored me and Kim. I was so proud. We belonged in one of those photos up on the wall, with the middle schoolers, standing with our boards and a shy smile. Every day after surfing we went up to the café for a big lunch, salad to milkshake. And, of course, for a good dose of advice on what we should do next.
One topic that was always a source of conversation was what kind of board Kim should get next. Kim asked Bruno to make her a longboard, 9–0. The Michaels were skeptical. They were log-centric, meaning the bigger, the fatter, the better. Bruno scoffed. He took one look at Kim, his calibrated eye measuring her shoulders, the length of her limbs, gauging the easy way she moved, and said, “Paw.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“She needs a board she can grow into. If I make what Mike wants, in a month it will be no fun.” He turned to Kim.
“Do you catch your own waves?”
“Yes. Starting this week.”
“Puis. Alors. Something like this will be good.” He pulled a shapely 9–0 off the rack. “You see, not too wide. The tail, it is a squash tail, pulled in, so it will release, turn faster.” He turned the bottom outward. “You see the concave, the scoop in the nose? That is so it won’t purl. The nose will come up in the drop. It forms like a bubble underneath. Yah, yah, something like this.”
Kim was thrilled. Her own Bruno board. It was like being given permission to get better.
We were collecting surfboards. We now had:
1. 6–4 quad. My slightly fat shortboard with four fins in the tail, placed like so: The evolution of fin placement is a book in itself. The condensed version goes like this: The first boards in the U.S. had no fins. They were long and heavy and surfing was mostly about taking off down the wave and going straight. Then somebody attached the first keel-like single fin to the back. Depending on who you talk to, this pioneer may have been Tom Blake in 1934, who got the idea from talking to a speedboat skipper about the skeg on his boat; or it may have been invented in the mid-Forties by Woody Brown, who was a glider pilot and sailor in Hawaii and knew a lot about fins and wings and fluid dynamics; or it may have been his friend, surf legend Bob Simmons. In any case, the evolving fin revolutionized surfing. Suddenly you could make a fast bottom turn, with the fin both stabilizing and propelling the arc. You could go down the line and turn. The thing about a single fin is that to turn fast you need a lot of speed, and thus bigger waves. Then in the late seventies a competitive Australian surfer named Mark Richards began to use a twin-fin setup—a fin on each side—and blew away the surfing world by winning four world championships between ’79 and ’82. The twin fin makes a lot of sense: when you weight one rail of the board, one fin digs deeper on the inside, encouraging the turn, while the other lifts out of the water and frees up the outside edge. Turns now could happen really fast, and surfers could have fun turning on a small two- to four-foot swell, because the fin on the side would prompt a turn at much lower speeds. A variation of this setup that became popular in the eighties and is lately experiencing a resurgence is the quad fin. Two fins on each side, the inner pair a bit back of the outer pair. This allowed for even looser turns on smaller waves, because with twice the fin you could get the same turning power with shorter fin length. Thus, to dig in the fins on one side, and get the outer fins out of the water, the surfer needed less input, less muscle, less speed. Now you could rip on your average SoCal knee-high swell.
Then came the Great Change. The fin development that was like giving fire to a caveman: the three-fin thruster. Two side fins, and a center fin the same size and set back. The problem with the twin-fin setup was that while it was awesome for turning quickly on small to medium waves, on big, steep, fast waves it was subject to instability, a sort of “speed wobble” like you’d experience on a skateboard with loose trucks, or short, fast-turning skis when you really start to haul ass. The twin fins were so sensitive to inputs that at speed they exaggerated the slightest shift and got squirrelly. It could make for a wild ride. Simon Anderson, a surfer and shaper from Australia, decided to solve this problem by building the first production thrusters in 1980. The third fin stabilized the ride without sacrificing nimbleness. Now boards could be fast and incredibly loose. Surfers could drop in on giant barrels with a light, fast shortboard that fit in the hollowest part of the wave, and still have stability and still turn like a bat. Surfers haven’t looked back. Well, that’s wrong; surfers are a very nostalgic bunch, and they love to go retro. The quad setup, especially as coupled with the stable but fast fish board design, is popular again, as are single-fin longboards—for those who miss the sheer speed and the big, sweeping, classic turns.
2. 7–6 egg, single fin. Bruno wanted my quiver to march me through the natural history of surfboards. So he included a 7–6 single-fin egg. That’s right, egg. This was nothing like Egg, sweet hapless ivy-covered Egg. This was a mini-longboard, good for days with smaller, slower waves when shortboarding would be frustrating. Also, oddly, good on very big, fast, hollow waves. Rounded on both ends, stable, could hold a straight line and zoom away from the apocalyptic explosion.
3. 7–6 gun, single fin. A big-wave machine. Narrow, arrow-fast; one fin for going fast and straight. Straight rails for holding hard to the curved face. Turned only with a will. A little rocket for getting yours truly straight out of trouble. Bruno told me that this was for really big waves. I noticed the defensive emphasis—get the Destroyer (me) up, make the drop, then get him the hell out of there. Struck me that this was like giving a cavalryman a really fast horse—for running away. Again, I was touched.
4. Aforementioned 9–0 longboard thruster, three fins. The one I cracked at San Onofre, first ride. Bruno patched the nose with a large graphic of a screaming torpedo, a warning to other surfers. Always in surfing there has been a tendency toward retro, a yearning backward, a nostalgia. Fin configurations come in and out of fashion like bell-bottoms and short skirts. In the nineties, as the first generation of shortboarders paddled into middle age, there was a resurgence of the old longboard. But young surfers with a flair for classic styles also love longboards. Mine was made originally for Bruno’s twenty-something son, who is a billboard underwear model in France. Rounded and buoyant in the nose for ease in making the steep drop, and pulled into a pintail for easier release, easier turning. I loved this board. It was very easy and fast to paddle, the nose rode up on the drop, and it was quick to turn for a board its length, but also stable in a straight line.
5. 6–7 shortboard. Standard three-fin thruster, tapering quickly to a sharply pointed nose, thin enough, and narrow. Low volume for its length, quick turning, made to tear it up on the wave.
6. 5–8 fish. Short, fat, thick, ugly. Qua
d. A design made popular in the eighties and one of Bruno’s specialties. This is the board that can do everything—though short, it had enough volume in its other dimensions to float high and paddle fast. Turned easily. Stable. Good on smaller, slower waves, but could handle big waves, too. This board was all Bruno used when he went to New Caledonia to surf big hollow waves. Many advantages of a shortboard, but didn’t require the same crisp quickness. Used by surfers young and old. On the wave, driven by someone who knows what she’s doing, the fish does possess a certain charm. It is like a fat woman dancing salsa. I didn’t get it. I tried it once at the Cliffs and found that while it did catch waves easily, turning required a heavier weighting of the back foot and then the board skidded rather than carved. Being a kook, I was not the best board tester, but I knew what I liked. I liked beautiful things.
We had all these, plus Kim’s new longboard and the old, chunky 8–6 funboard I’d bought from Scotty. Eight boards. I felt rich. It was way too many.
Veteran surfers said, “Take them all. Boards break in Mexico. You’ll be glad you did.” It was good advice, but it meant that we had to put the four longer boards on the roof, and the others inside the van in our living space. The four boards on the roof made the top heavy. At night, to pop the top for sleeping, we had to simultaneously lift up on the roof and shove a hinged bar forward and up until it locked into place. It required a weight lifter’s jerk, but with a vulnerable, arched posture, and day after day it killed our backs. Finally we went to Home Depot. We bought two construction-worker black Velcro back belts with shoulder straps. Kim and I pulled into a dark spot near the Seal Beach Library, looked around to make sure no one was watching us, then suited up with our weight belts. We cinched the belts tight as tourniquets.
“You look great in a corset.”
“Yeah? You look like a mover from Brooklyn.”