Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  Liam was pissed. Liam was back.

  JEFF CLARK, the big-wave legend who discovered Mavericks when he was a teenager back in the seventies, invited me to a contest there. I’d never been to that legendary Northern California break and never wanted to go. Everything I’d heard about the place scared me to death. The irony of being so fearful while riding for No Fear did not escape me. Mavs is a heavy, spooky wave in every sense of the words. It felt like a break that had intent, and that intent was to kill you. The water is cold and khaki green, and the visibility is nil. There is no beach, only dark, jagged rocks. The outer reef is a jigsaw, which in turn makes the wave complex, with a hollow opening section that roars into a near vertical bowl, then slows and flattens, then gets steep and fast again. Merciless. On a December day in 1994 the great North Shore pro Mark Foo drowned there on a nothing-special fifteen-footer. No one knows quite how he died, but most people think he was held under multiple waves by his leash, snagged on a rock.

  My childhood fear of roosterfish had evolved into a fear of sharks that had only been heightened by watching Jaws. (For years after that I didn’t want to take a bath at night for fear a shark might find its way into the tub.) There are sharks in Hawaiʻi, obviously, but I’ve never given them a thought. In my mind, they only bit surfers elsewhere. Mavericks, just north of Half Moon Bay, is also only about thirty-five miles from the Farallon Islands, one of the world’s most active great white shark breeding grounds. So no. Had no great need to surf Mavericks. Except that now I’d become a fool for giant waves, the bigger the better.

  People often ask me what it’s like to surf a seventy-foot wave. At the rare times when the conditions are calm, when the sea is glassy and there’s no wind, it’s like cutting butter with a hot knife. When Liam and I were little we used to draw tiny cartoon characters squiggling all over a wave that was as big as the paper. That’s what it’s like on a glassy, windless day. You rip across the face with complete freedom, the sound of the wave wooooshing behind you, and it breaks.

  But smooth and glassy is the exception. Normally you have wind, and a lot of it. So there’s wind, there’s chop, there’s usually a little bump left over from the day before. Add to that your speed. You’re going so fast. Everything is rattling—your board on the chop, your teeth in your head—and your feet feel always on the verge of sliding out of the straps.

  The go-to comparison is snowboarding down a black diamond run studded with moguls while being chased by an avalanche. It’s even trickier than that: if you want to get barreled, your goal is not to escape the avalanche but to taunt it. To wait for it, let it get just close enough so that you can tuck yourself inside its breaking curl. It’s a flirtation, a dance. I used the word taunt here because it’s the best one that comes to mind. I don’t mean it to sound disrespectful of the power of the ocean, because no one knows better than me that the ocean will always win.

  I can’t recall how that contest went, but I fell in love with Mavericks. It was at Mavericks I came to terms with fear. One cold sunny day I was floating on my board and I realized that if a shark was going to cruise by me and mistake my gamey human ass for a turtle or seal, then so be it. At that very moment I was doing what I loved and there was no shark in sight, so why ruin it with worry? Fear is something we create, because we’re stuck in the past or envisioning the future. If we stay in the present there is no fear. It’s a challenging task. We have our memories, we have our active imagination, but as long as you stay in the moment, there is no fear.

  I would go on to get myself to Mavericks for the next decade, every time that huge, complex wave decided to show up there. Mavs never loved me back. Once, on a foggy, windy day of twenty-foot plus swells I took off on a monster, attempting a snap beneath the lip to set up for the upcoming steeper section. The lip crumpled and I cartwheeled down the wave, and as my board flew past me, the fin slashed my arm. Through the gash in my arm you could see white muscle. Went to the local emergency room and sixty stitches later I was good to go.

  Early in 2016 I paddled into a sixty-foot El Niño bomb—what Outside magazine dubbed “one of the heaviest waves a human being has ever attempted paddling into”—and suffered a wipeout that nearly killed me. I hit the wave and suddenly everything got brighter, a sign something was broken. I’d smashed my shoulder into nine pieces. Two surgeries later, and a handful of titanium pins later, I’m still recovering as I write this.

  GLACIERIZED

  I SAT ON MY board in thirty-five-degree water staring up at Childs Glacier, 190 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska, as the crow flies. It was the summer of 2007. My tow-in partner Kealii Mamala and I wore 6-mm wet suits, booties, gloves, and hoods. We’d been floating in the brown, ice-strewn Copper River for five hours, waiting for the glacier to calve. It was forty stories tall and—depending on the light—white, gray, or an aqua, and threaded with brownish veins of dirt, rock, and debris. When it calved, the thunderous crack could be heard from miles away. Up close, I could feel the crack and boom in my chest.

  Our boneheaded idea was this: After a gargantuan pillar of ice neatly calved, separating itself neatly from the glacier and slid into the river, it would produce a rolling tsunami-style wave whose ride would be long and sick and life-changing. No one had ever done it before. It would be epic.

  While I was at Teahupoʻo in 2002 I met a photographer named Ryan Casey. His father, George Casey, was a documentary filmmaker who directed some of the first IMAX movies. He was nominated for four Oscars, including one in 1998 for Alaska: Spirit of the Wild. Ryan was a gofer on that production. He was a kid, maybe fourteen. One of the locations was Childs Glacier, fifty miles up a middle-of-nowhere river called the Copper, where wild black bears and brown bears coexist and bald eagles are like house sparrows. Ryan said the local Alaskans liked to joke that they’re so common the native Alaskans eat them for dinner, and like so many other things they taste like chicken.

  Ryan and I worked together for several years, trying to develop TV shows and shooting footage for future documentaries. He showed up at a lot of the big swells at Mavs and Jaws and Teahupoʻo. He was easygoing and professional and I grew to trust him, trust his judgment. One night he called me at home, off-season, out of the blue.

  “Garrett, Garrett,” he whispered. “I’ve got a great idea.”

  I said okay. I didn’t have to be in the room with him to imagine the lightbulb clicking on over his head.

  “Are you alone? Anyone around over there?”

  “Kids are asleep and the wife’s out; well, I’m not sure where she is but she isn’t here.”

  “You can’t tell anybody this, this is top secret. Promise me you won’t say a word.”

  “Okay.”

  “Give me your word.”

  “You have my word.”

  “I have a wave for you, a new wave no one’s ever surfed before.” He went on to tell me about when he was with his dad in Alaska back in ’95 and when they were filming Childs Glacier, he noticed that when the giant hunks of ice crashed into the river they created a nice rolling right, really clean, that went on forever. His brother Sean was the camera operator and Ryan, who had just discovered surfing himself, kept telling Sean to sneak some shots of the breaking wave. IMAX film is stupid expensive, and you don’t just shoot off some footage for fun, but Ryan pestered Sean until he gave in and rolled camera for maybe fifteen seconds.

  I said sure. Within five minutes a QuickTime media file dropped into my in-box. The pale green glacier was a wall of ice rising up behind a chocolatey wave that reminded me of Hale-’iwa when it’s big and perfect. I was intrigued and excited and liked thinking outside the box. I’d heard of surfing in the Great Lakes and surfing the long wakes of giant cargo containers and thought, Why couldn’t this be like that?

  I assured Ryan that my current tow-in partner Kealii Mamala could keep a secret, and that I wanted to ask him to join the team. When it came to issues of safety, Kealii was conservative and reliable and the perfect guy for this kind of mission.<
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  I got out a piece of paper and made a blueprint. First we needed a scouting trip to see the wave up close. Make sure the footage Ryan’s brother had shot reflected something that happened on a regular basis, not once a decade. Also scope out the terrain, figure out where we would stay, where we would wait in the river on the ’ski, and where we might catch the wave, and feel for ourselves how freaking cold the water was. Then we had to figure out how to get everything up to Cordova, 160 miles southeast of Anchorage, then up the Copper River to Childs Glacier.

  My main concern was the water temperature, which turned out to be the lesser of our eventual challenges. Kealii and I outfitted ourselves with 6/5/4-mm Xcel wet suits and 7-mm high-top booties and gloves and we flew up to Alaska. We drove a rental truck to the Miles Glacier Bridge, also called the Million Dollar Bridge—when it was built in the early 1900s it cost $1.4 million—and stood there with our boards, fully suited up, and looking down at the brown river with its hunks of ice floating by.

  The clearance seemed about sixty feet, so we jumped in, just to get a sense of what it was like in the water. It took us about ninety seconds to realize this was a dumb move. The current was strong and pulled us straight toward the glacier. We floated downstream and caught up to a big flat grayish chunk of ice, maybe 10′ × 10′. It was drifting slowly, an invitation to climb aboard. There we were in our thick wet suits, our surfboards beside us, riding an iceberg. We joked about how there could be a caveman in this berg. We started to laugh—was this sick or what?—when it snagged on the bottom and started to spin while also breaking apart. We leaped off.

  CHILDS GLACIER is the most active calving glacier in Alaska. We stood on the riverbank just opposite and watched while boulders of ice crumbled near the top, followed by a massive slab or pillar that would crack off and plunge into the water. True to Ryan’s promise, a smooth peak, right and left, with maybe a twenty-foot face—it was hard to tell from that distance—would peel off and roll away. We consulted with a guy named Luke Borer, owner and operator of Copper River Cruises, who we’d been told knew everything there was to know about the glacier. We grilled him for one long afternoon, asking him every question we could think of about how it behaved under various conditions. How different sizes and shapes of ice affected the river and the waves, where the peaks of the waves formed, and so on. I was gung-ho and optimistic. Putting a positive spin on the situation was a long-time habit for me. I didn’t stop to think of the negatives of the venture.

  Once we were back on the North Shore I contacted my sponsors. We needed underwriting. No one was particularly interested. Some didn’t think we’d actually be able to do it, and others just didn’t get it. To show their support of Gmac, Fearless Big-Wave Rider, they gave a little. Not too much. Ryan and his dad, George, came up with some of the money. And Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate Technology, had become a friend. After a tough personal time he’d discovered surfing, which changed his life, and he was also a guy who possessed a charitable aloha spirit. So I pitched him the idea, told him we needed about thirty grand, and that we’d also give him some points in the movie.

  After the financing was in place, we assembled our gear and flew to Alaska. We talked two race-car drivers we knew in California to trailer up the jet-skis. Took them two days, all the way up from San Diego.

  We camped at the recreation area. On the first morning we put our ’skis in the river and drove toward the glacier. In the weird early light it was aqua-colored and rose up and up and up. It towered over us, a many-blocks-long skyscraper of shifting, unstable ice, groaning and creaking like it was alive.

  After an hour or so there was a loud crack and a mass of ice slid down the face into the river. Kealii gunned the jet-ski as the white water exploded and the wave began. But he hung back, trying to place me on the wave without getting any closer to the glacier than we needed to be. It didn’t work.

  We sat in the water for another hour or two. I’m still warm but I can feel the cold of that water around me, feel it encroaching. Next time the glacier calves—thunderous sound of the giant slab crashing down—Kealii drives closer and the moment I drop the towrope I finally and fully see the reality of the situation: I’m surfing a few yards away from a four-hundred-foot-tall glacier and I’m attached to nothing. I remember something Luke Borer said that hadn’t registered at the time. Sometimes the ice “books”—a slab just falls off the face of the glacier like a book falling off a shelf. I envision myself squashed like a tomato. I imagine my family wouldn’t even have a body to bury; I’d just be pulp at the bottom of this freezing river.

  Even though I’d lost friends to the ocean, and had endured my own hold-downs and torn ligaments and stitches, waves were like familiars. You could learn a wave, understand how it worked, predict its behavior, know it like you knew a friend.

  Now I was staring at death. If that thing calved on me I was dead.

  It was the heaviest rush I’d ever experienced.

  After what seemed like the longest ride of my life—probably three seconds—Kealii picked me up and I lost my shit.

  “We’re out of here! I’m over this!” I wanted to pull the plug that minute. For once I didn’t care about my sponsors or the generosity of Ryan’s dad and Steve Luczo, or even if Kealii wanted a shot. I made Kealii take me back to shore and I called Connie on the satellite phone. I was sobbing.

  “This is too much, I’ve got to get out of here. It’s not worth it. What am I doing? What am I doing?”

  I don’t remember whether Connie talked me off the ledge or I just calmed down on my own. But eventually I collected myself, and Kealii, who is level-headed and usually drives me a little crazy with his caution, patted me on the shoulder. “No worries, Garrett. We can do this. No worries at all. It’s all good.” Then he started a fire and cooked some chili and we ate it and I calmed down.

  For the rest of the week I was like a cat in the water. The river is littered with ice, everything from cubes to chunks the size of a mini-fridge. Also debris and rocky pinnacles on the bottom, and sandbars and rock bars and icebergs that for whatever reason have submerged and have attached themselves to the bottom. It was a nightmare. If any of that—cubes, mini-fridges, debris, sand, icebergs—gets stuck in the impeller, the ’ski’s useless. The current was completely unpredictable. In some spots, it sucked you toward the glacier.

  Kealii ended up getting the best ride, a solid ten-footer. For a native Hawaiian he sure felt at home in that godforsaken place.

  I wanted to get barreled—because when do I not want to get barreled—and after sitting on my board up to my neck in frigid brown water for seven hours I got a big floater, then pulled into a tiny barrel, actually kind of just a little head dip, shampoo job.

  I was stoked. Kealii was stoked. Shakas and high fives and happy as hell and we were never, ever going back.

  I WAS now forty, and I’d learned a lot about myself that week. About risk versus reward, and how risk for risk’s sake wasn’t worth it. Also, about my level of deep comfort in the ocean, even among the monster waves, maybe particularly among them, and the true measure of my passion for surfing, that old and glorious pasttime of Hawaiian royalty.

  But something else happened, too. The massive adrenaline dump of that first day, when I thought I was going to be killed, had ruined my capacity to feel the big rush. Rocketing down those long, near-vertical faces felt as exciting as a drive into town. Someone suggested I was simply desensitized. That I had ridden so many huge waves for so long that my perception of danger had been somehow recalibrated, so what the nervous systems of others viewed as a fight-or-flight situation was, for me, just another day at the office.

  This was a turning point. I always surfed for the rush but now the rush was gone. Every once in a while, flying out of a giant, smooth barrel at Teahupoʻo, I’d feel a little tingle up my spine, but nothing compared to the full body Woohoo!-claiming-arms-raised-thank-you-God-life-is-good rush of years gone by.

  After I got glacierized I was never
the same. Surfing, I knew, would take on a different meaning. I just had no clue what it would be.

  ENCHANTED EVENING

  IN APRIL 2010 IZZY Paskowitz invited me to a Surfers Healing camp in Puerto Rico. It was a tough time to get away. Connie didn’t want me to go and I couldn’t say I blamed her. We had an eleven-month-old baby, Tiari, born April 23, 2009. I’d also just signed a deal with a surfboard company to design a signature line of stand-up paddleboards (SUPs) and was also working on developing some rental property on the North Shore—another effort to secure some financial stability for the family—so dryland life was more chaotic than usual.

  But I never said no to Izzy. Volunteering with Surfers Healing was pure and uncomplicated and it offered its own kind of rush. Izzy was a longboarder I knew from my early days on the tour. He was the son of Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, who founded Paskowitz Surf Camp back in the seventies, one of the first schools dedicated to teaching beginners. Izzy’s upbringing had been as crazy and dysfunctional as mine—he and his eight brothers and sisters lived with their parents in a camper and followed the waves, a pure bohemian existence with no schooling, lots of punishing health food, and enforced togetherness. Now Doc was in his nineties and had passed on the directorship of the school to Izzy.

  Surfers Healing came about when Izzy and his wife Danielle’s middle child (they have three), Isaiah, was diagnosed with autism. The only place Isaiah seemed calm and happy was in the ocean, and the only time Izzy and Isaiah truly bonded was during a surf session. It occurred to Izzy and Danielle that maybe this wasn’t unusual, that perhaps there was something about the buoyancy and rhythm of the ocean that was therapeutic. Add the chance to ride a wave or two and that’s a peak life experience for everyone—kids, their parents, and the surfers who are lucky enough to be able to help.