Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  “What’s going on in here?” My mom stood at the door to my room. She’d heard the sawing and smelled the resin from the living room. I dusted off my thighs and stood up. The room was a disaster. Pearls of foam from the board’s interior littered the shag carpet, and I’d tossed the discarded middle section onto my unmade bed.

  She puffed on her cigarette and I showed her how I’d shaped the tail so that it angled toward the fin. Without knowing it I’d made myself a rudimentary stinger. Say what you will about our mom—and everyone who knows her and the way we were raised has already said it—but she didn’t mind a bit that I was shaping my own surfboard in my bedroom. She said cool, nodded her head, and told me to put down some newspaper so I wouldn’t ruin the shag carpet.

  FATTIES

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE other haole in my sixth-grade class at Waialua Elementary School, a girl named Tina. (Conveniently, we had a fierce crush on each other.) Every white kid who moves to Hawaiʻi has stories about getting pounded by the locals. In the cafeteria on the first day a Filipino kid took notice of me. He pushed me, hard enough to send me stumbling. I caught myself, pushed him back. I wasn’t a big kid. Normal-size, maybe a little on the skinny side. But I’d been sparring with black kids and Mexican kids at Malcolm X and LeConte since I was six, so I knew my way around a fight. In Berkeley, when someone pushed you, it wasn’t “let’s see where this leads.” It was game on. When the Filipino kid shoved me the second time I cracked him and took him down in about thirty seconds.

  After the fight the tough local guys took notice and we decided to form a gang, identifiable by our (mostly) matching leather jackets. I have no recollection where my jacket came from, which suggests either I stole it or my mom bought it at the Salvation Army. For about seventy-two hours we were the coolest kids at Waialua Elementary. Then the principal got wind of it, called us into his office, and said there would be no gangs in his school. Then he took away all the jackets. Back to puny haole misfit status for me, but luckily I was easygoing and got along with people.

  The setup at Waialua was such that Liam and I couldn’t just walk in the front and out the back like we had in Berkeley. The school was smaller and Waialua was a tiny rural town. We couldn’t just lose ourselves at a big university or out in the streets. The only real way to stay out of sight was to hide in the cane fields, which we did when we weren’t sitting in class or surfing till dark.

  After Darryl took off we moved to a falling-down house on Haole Camp Beach. It was a one-story Hicks Home, a type of predesigned house popular in Hawaiʻi back in the day, smaller than the apartment, surrounded by a chain link fence and shrubby overgrown koa trees. Mom rented rooms to help pay the bills. One of our roommates, Norman Winter, opened Jelly’s Bookstore in town.

  The beach could be reached through a sandy path that ran along the carport, but most of the time the water was choppy, the waves an oily, kelp-colored brown from runoff. The North Shore faces true north from the western tip of O’ahu at Ka’ena Point to Hale-’iwa, where it takes a turn and runs northwest. Haole Camp Beach was maybe a mile due west from Hale-’iwa. From there, on a good day, we could see the waves pumping as far up the coast as Lani-ākea and sometimes even Wai-mea.

  One night after Mom had gone to bed and Norman was still working in town, I pinched her car keys from the kitchen counter and drove her old Plymouth Satellite around the neighborhood, looking for bikes that had been left unlocked. We needed bikes and we were pretty sure our mom didn’t have the money to buy us any. We’d seen guys steal bikes in Berkeley and saw that it was easy to ride one while wheeling another alongside you.

  The next night Liam and I snuck out and went back to where we’d spotted bikes, mostly propped up by the side of a house or left on a porch. We also snagged some pot plants. There was a huge market for marijuana on O’ahu. The kids on the corner whose parents were known growers—you could see a forest of lush starter plants from the street—had the nicest bikes, the nicest clothes, the nicest boards we’d ever seen. We didn’t touch their bikes, but we were inspired.

  Our mistake was riding down the same street three times. The sky was black and starry, immense. Midnight in rural Hawaiʻi must be among the darkest on earth. The little houses were all dark. The only sound was the trade winds softly rattling through the palms. We supposed the overgrown mango trees and kaiwe shrubs and koa trees would help conceal us. Down the middle of the street we rode one bike and ponied another, holding it by the handlebars, then returned and grabbed two more. On the second run we also stopped along the way to stuff some pillowcases with pot from a number of backyard plots. By this time we knew what good pot was, and this was the best stinky skunk hash we’d ever smelled.

  Our yard was overgrown so we stashed the bikes in some bushes, tiptoed inside to our room, threw ourselves on our beds, and fell asleep, exhausted.

  The next morning we awoke to pounding on the front door. We thought nothing of it. Could have easily been Darryl back from town for good, or one of Mom’s other boyfriends or friends.

  Sound of the door opening, a deep voice identifying itself as a police officer. “Are your boys here?” I sprang to my feet. Liam was still asleep, his arm thrown over his eyes. Our closet door was open, the pillowcases of pot tossed in on top of the shoes. I slid the door shut, put my ear to the door to listen.

  “They’re not here. They slept at a friend’s house last night,” said Mom.

  There was some back-and-forth. Some woman whose bike had been stolen recently saw us through her kitchen window. She wanted us investigated, thought we were possibly the ones who took her bike. I shook Liam awake just as our mom opened the door. She took a big sniff, smelled the skunk of North Shore weed.

  “The cops are out there. I told them you weren’t here.”

  “We didn’t steal that lady’s bike,” I said.

  “You’ve got bigger problems than the bikes, mister. Come on.” On the Big Island weed was an accepted part of life, like milk in the fridge. Mom, dad, son, daughter all growing weed and smoking weed together. On O’ahu it wasn’t like that. A lot of sneaking around was involved, a lot of avoiding the authorities.

  We were still dressed in the clothes we’d come home in. She dragged us out into the living room. The cop was a big Hawaiian, his partner a small Filipino lady with a perfect bun at the back of her head. “Officer, I didn’t realize they were here. They’ll show you where the bikes are.”

  We went outside with the cops and showed them where we’d stashed the bikes. They were Stingrays, BMX bikes. Kids’ bikes. The big Hawaiian cop asked us where the other bike was, the one that belonged to the woman who’d called them out.

  “We didn’t take it,” I said again.

  He sighed, traded a glance with his partner. I have no memory of what happened after that: what they did with the bikes, how they got them back to their rightful owners, or whether they took us in.

  Whatever punishment we received, we were unrepentant. It took me a while still to figure out that what goes around comes around, and that it was a jerk move to steal other kids’ bikes. We did learn one lesson—instead of relying on the weed of others, we should be growing our own. We dropped a few plants into the front yard along the property line we shared with our neighbor between a row of shrubby koa and huge monkeypod trees that had probably never been pruned. Our neighbor’s name was Mike Saguirdo, and we cracked ourselves up just saying it aloud. Our budding plants grew happily, well hidden beneath their leafy crowns and gnarled branches.

  It was probably pot-fueled logic that inspired the tree house. One of the monkeypod trees overlooking the neighbor’s house had limbs perfect for supporting a tree house, so we built one over a long weekend when the waves were flat; no point in getting wet. From our perch in the tree house we could see into Mike’s windows. The first time we saw him he was at the kitchen sink, popping open a beer. He looked up and we waved.

  He was pissed. He said we were invading his privacy. He was kind of a psycho about it, as if he w
as doing something he shouldn’t have over there—maybe he had his own illegal operation. Who knew? He told our mom to tell us to dismantle the tree house and she said she didn’t see what harm it did. Didn’t all boys build tree houses? Then he told us to take it down, and we just laughed our asses off—probably stoned—hopped on our bikes, and sped away.

  Time passed. Mike never came over to complain again. We sat up in our tree house and smoked fatties and read surf mags. We fantasized what our next boards would be. A neighbor back in Cement City gave Liam his old board, and now we didn’t have to share anymore. Every once in a while we peeked over the wall just to see what Mike was up to, but we never saw him.

  Mom supported our mania for learning to surf. She took us to nearby Army Beach, so called because there was a military recreation center and the entrance to Dillingham Airfield was across the highway. It sat at the eastern end of Ka’ena Point State Park, pretty and nonthreatening with its azure water, part-sandy and part-rocky bottom, and curving yellow-sand beach. In the winter the swell might hit fifteen feet, too big for me at the time, but mostly it was chest to head high, three to five feet, perfect for enthusiastic learners. We developed our skills in the shore break in half-foot white water.

  One day we came back after a day at Army Beach to see that Mike had gotten his revenge. He had cut down the overgrown koas between his house and ours. The only one still standing had our tree house in it. He had carefully trimmed the stumps level with the ground, and also cleared away all the branches and debris, leaving our fat, glossy marijuana plants, now several feet tall, in full view of the neighbors and every passerby. That night in the dark our mom told us she didn’t want any more trouble with the police. She shone the flashlight while we pulled them up and threw them out.

  LOST AT THREES

  THE FIRST CHANCE WE got Liam and I joined a Little League team. Waialua Little League was the oldest league in Hawaiʻi, and every pro scout who came to Hawaiʻi came to Waialua to watch the best teams play. Mom was thrilled. Every kid on the island surfed and it kept us from getting in too much trouble, but there was no future in it. Professional baseball—now we’re talking some real money.

  Aware of the league’s status, our coach was humorless and strict. His first rule, issued the first day of practice as we stood sweating our asses off in the midday tropical sun at Pu’uiki Park, was to give up surfing. I laughed out loud. There was no way. But Liam was a good player and a tough competitor. Now that we were getting older, our personalities were starting to emerge. It wasn’t just Garrett-and-Liam, joined-at-the-hip McNamara boys. Liam was more emotional than I was; he took things to heart. He also knew he was a much better player than I was, and that made him try even harder.

  As for me—I kept surfing and kept lying to our coach about surfing. Then one day during warm-ups, as we were running around the diamond, I saw him get into some altercation with his son, who was also on the team. Coach lost his temper and gave his own kid a hard cuff on the ear. I thought, You know what? I am outta here.

  I quit that day.

  Liam kept on for the next three or four years. I would ride by the field on my way to Hale-’iwa, board under my arm, and I’d see him doing push-ups, sweat running down his nose onto the dirt, or jogging around the field, or up at bat. He was the star of whatever team he was on, and also made the All-Stars every year. He was convinced he was destined for the pros. At home he’d taunt me mercilessly: “You’re going to be a surf bum and I’m going to be a pro baseball player.”

  Meanwhile, I would hang out every day with some of the guys I knew from the lineup at Hale-’iwa, where I now surfed most days. This was a big step up for me. At Cement City and Army Beach, Liam and I rode the tiny white water that curled onto the beach. We would watch the guys paddle outside to the lineup and we thought they were crazy risk takers. Hale-’iwa broke anywhere from a fun three feet in the summer to a scary thirty feet during the winter. When it was pumping I stayed inside and rode the white water like usual, but when it was small I paddled out. This was the first time I paddled out to the lineup proper, like a real surfer.

  The lineup was crowded, and dozens of amateur contests were and still are held there. Along with Pipeline and Sunset, it’s one of three breaks that comprises the Triple Crown of Surfing, something I couldn’t even imagine participating in then, but I was having fun, and that was enough for me. More than enough. I didn’t need to have professional baseball dreams, or any dreams aside from getting to spend as much time in the water as I possibly could.

  MY BEST friend was named Kui Aki. He’d been surfing his whole life. He happened to live next door to Roy Patterson, who glassed surfboards in his backyard shop and who also rented rooms to make ends meet—everyone did on the North Shore, it seemed. We called Roy’s one-story shack the Wave Cave. It was covered in vines, huge brown centipedes crawling around everywhere, a block away from the surfboard factory in Hale-’iwa town. He rented to some military guys and also to Ed Barbera, an awesome underground shaper who was generous enough to shape a blank for me for fifteen bucks. Roy glassed it for free; this was the first nice board I had. It was time to abandon, in the bushes for someone else to find, the Frankenstein stinger I’d cobbled together.

  It was summer after eighth grade. I almost never went home and Mom never came looking for me. Instead, I pretty much lived at either Kui’s house or the Wave Cave. We would hit Hale-’iwa in the morning for a session then spend the rest of the day smoking fatties.

  One day a guy named Mike strode into the Wave Cave and started passing around opium-dipped Thai sticks. He’d just flown in from Thailand. Roy knew lots of different kinds of people, and on that day there were a bunch of military guys there. We lay around philosophizing about the injustice of being stuck on the North Shore when it was so flat that a wading pool had more waves. Someone heard Threes (so called because it was the third named break off Waikiki) was breaking. We thought about that for a while, and then someone, maybe Roy, decided we should go and check it out.

  I piled into his truck with the military guys. For some reason Liam and Kui stayed behind. Should have clued me in to my mascot status, me in the bed of the truck with the boards. It’s an hour’s drive, longer in traffic, straight through the middle of the island, green hills choked with ferns so big you can’t distinguish them from the rest of the forest at eighty miles an hour. I lay back, closed my eyes. Felt the vibration of the wheels on the road. The sense of going, my favorite thing.

  It was my first time surfing in town. Since we’d moved to O’ahu I’d only ever surfed the North Shore and this felt like city surfing. We had to drive around in search of a place to park. The crosswalk to the beach was crowded with tourists with boogie boards and towels flung around their necks and little children with plastic shovels and pails. Haole tourists, but also a lot of Japanese with their fancy sunglasses and cameras.

  Threes was a break featured in the movie The Endless Summer that a lot of the older surfers, including Roy Patterson, liked to joke about. He said if it was a real surf movie it would be called The Endless Winter, because everyone knew there were no real waves in the summer. He meant on the North Shore. I laughed every time he said that.

  We paddle out. Way out, farther than I’m used to. Threes was a right break—really fast and really steep. I am so high. Salt water on my skin. Sun on my back. New friends in the lineup beside me. So stoked to be on an adventure with the Wave Cavers.

  I feel myself lifting, paddle like a maniac, and pop up quick to keep from pearling. I catch a medium-size right and I whiz off toward shore. I paddle back out, catch another one. This goes on for hours. Sun slides down the back of the sky. I catch more waves in a row than I ever have before.

  One by one the guys all rode in. I didn’t pay too much attention. The lineup was crowded, and it took me a while to realize none of my friends were in it with me. I sat on my board and searched the beach, but saw no one I recognized. I rode the next wave in on my belly. I walked one way up Waikiki
Beach, then the other.

  They were gone.

  I’m calling it a combination of the Thai stick, the stoke of the session, and the unfamiliar surroundings, but I freaked out. How was I supposed to get back to the other side of the island? All I had on me were my trunks and surfboard. No shoes, no change, no nothing. The sun set. I wandered around Honolulu until I found a phone booth and tried to call my mom collect, but the operator wouldn’t put the call through. I started to cry.

  There my memory ends. I obviously got home somehow. My mom has no recollection of the event. I’ve decided that Roy, who I always looked up to as a father, drove around the corner in his truck just as I was losing my shit, leaned over and opened the passenger side door for me, then smiled and said climb in.

  THE DREADED 7

  FOR A WHILE I crashed with a guy named Jensen and his brother Striker, who glassed surfboards, and they hung out with Fielding Benson and Jasper Warren. Together we were the Six Feet and Under boys. Anything above that scared the crap out of us. Or me, anyway.

  I had no illusions about going pro or being an especially hard-charging ripper. Most of the guys I was getting to know had learned to surf not long after they’d learned to walk. Jason Majors, Brock Little, Kolohe Blomfield—guys I came to know at school or in the lineup—surfed circles around me, but I didn’t mind. If there was one thing I excelled at, it was the ability to be in the moment and have fun.

  Hale-’iwa was my home, my break. It wasn’t super gnarly by North Shore standards, a semi-monster that could pump during the winter and was, in the early eighties, the site of the final event for the pro tour’s World Cup. At three to five feet it was still a wave with a little mercy and offered a little something for everyone—nice walls, lefts and rights, and a good barrel.