The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Sucked over the falls, the most disastrous place to be, he caught a flash of blue sky before being slammed down and driven thirty feet deep. Panicking burns oxygen, so he tried to stay calm, tucking in his arms and legs as the wave released its energy, then making for the surface. He was inches from getting a breath when the next wave hit, pinballing him back into the depths. Two wave hold-downs were serious. This might be it, Kalama thought, but let’s see.

  When the second wave released him, he broke the surface and saw Lickle nearby. Kalama grabbed the rescue sled, but another mountain of water was already upon them. When it hit, the Ski was sucked backward into a whitewater hole, and Kalama was ripped off the sled and thrust down again, even deeper this time: “I could feel it by the pressure in my ears.”

  Whitewater blocks out the light, so below the surface everything was black. Kalama, exhausted and disoriented, didn’t know which way was up. He began to convulse, his body straining to take a lungful of water while his mind was still barely able to prevent it. Later, he would be told that this is the first stage of drowning.

  By luck or skill or grace he resurfaced, and again Lickle was there. Kalama made a desperate lunge for the sled. But Jaws wasn’t done with him yet—another wave exploded on top of them and sent the Ski tumbling. “We were rolling underwater,” Kalama said. Lickle’s feet smacked Kalama’s head, but both men held tight and in thirty seconds they were back in calmer waters. “Kind of a rough way to start the new century,” Kalama said. “It was baby steps to build my confidence back up. It took me three years to feel like I was in control again.”

  “That’s Jaws beach,” Hamilton said, treading water and pointing toward the shore.

  I could make out a small, crescent-shaped indentation about eight hundred yards away, filled with rocks. More than that, I could hear it. As the waves swept in and out, the rocks rolled forward and backward, making a sound like an avalanche of bocce balls. It was a rasping, raking noise that was frankly terrifying. I’d read that the ancient Hawaiians considered this a sacred place and held ceremonies on the cliffs above. I could see why. They believed that every last stone and leaf and flower and drop of water contained a spiritual life force, called mana, as surely as people and animals did. All things in nature were fully alive. If you shut your eyes and listened to the rocks clacking and grinding, it was as though Pe’ahi had a voice.

  We swam on. As we approached the mouth of Jaws, the bottom features changed from midsize rocks to slabs and shelves and monoliths, an aquatic Stonehenge. Here, then, were the molars (and some pointy incisors). The reef was larger than I’d expected—to make out its shape you’d need an aerial view—and also starker, meaner, and more forbidding. Beneath its blue surface, Jaws was a study in grays: slate gray, gray-black, teal-gray, a pale whitish gray. Part of its eeriness, I realized, came from the ghost town atmosphere: there wasn’t a fish to be seen. Usually when you’re swimming around rocks, you can look down and pick out creatures everywhere. Not here.

  I looked around for Hamilton and couldn’t find him. There was an instant of panic, and then something flashed below me. Hamilton had dived to the seafloor—forty feet down. I could see his blond hair, brilliant against the gloom. Floating in the swells, I watched as he wound through tunnels and between rocks for what seemed like an aeon. Once I had asked him how long he could hold his breath underwater, figuring this was something he practiced. “There’s a school of thought that says you don’t train for what you don’t want to happen,” he replied. “I don’t want to consciously know how long I can hold my breath. I just know that so far—long enough.”

  Hamilton resurfaced, holding a handful of the bottom. It wasn’t a fine-grained sand but rather a rough mixture of broken stones. Jaws is not the kind of place that invites lingering, and we turned to head back. The afternoon had ebbed and the water took on an even blacker cast as the sun slipped behind the cliffs. Above us, the gnarled silhouettes of wind-bent trees stood out in sharper relief. The waves were choppier now, the wind angrier. Hamilton stroked toward the rocks, the tightest line available.

  I decided to take a longer route to stay away from the rocks, as that made it less likely I would be dashed against them. As I swam, I tried to calm my nerves. There is nothing more unsettling than being alone in a spooky patch of ocean. When three large gray fish darted in front of me, I reared up like I’d been attacked.

  Back near the spot where we’d jumped in, Hamilton waited fifty yards offshore. Waves were now exploding against the rocks. “So you’ll follow me in,” he said. It wasn’t a question. We both knew the only way I’d make it onto shore in one piece was to suspend my judgment and do exactly as he said. When he said go, I needed to go. If I hesitated because I wasn’t sure his timing was right, I would pay. Judging waves, knowing the pulse of their energy—this was as obvious to Hamilton as any of his five senses. Looking over his shoulder at the incoming surf, he waited until a set had passed, and then he shouted, “Now!” and hightailed it in, exiting the water in a single fluid motion. I hung back an instant too long, got rolled by whitewater, scraped the rocks, and bloodied both my knees.

  The house where Hamilton lives with his wife and daughter presides over the pineapple fields with a low-slung, minimalist grace. It is a two-story house, planned along horizontal lines. The living area is upstairs, while the lower floor is given over to a gym and a sprawling garage that, like an airplane hangar, opens on both ends. For Hamilton the garage serves as a combination clubhouse, mission control, and storage facility. Under its roof there are many vehicles, including two old army dump trucks, a trio of souped-up golf carts, three heavy-duty Ford pickup trucks, a Range Rover, a half-dozen Honda Jet Skis on trailers, and a Yamaha jet boat. There are also mountain bikes, road bikes, kids’ bikes, a tandem bike, off-road skateboards, a picnic table, two refrigerators, a restaurant-grade espresso machine, and every tool imaginable; shelves filled with generators, shop vacs, gas cans, chain saws, hacksaws, and band saws; and of course, racks and racks of surfboards. Hamilton estimates that he owns about 140 boards, ranging from sleek six-foot tow boards for riding Jaws to majestic twenty-six-foot standup boards for doing things like paddling through the entire Hawaiian Island chain.

  To witness the garage—Daredevil Central—is to wonder what Hamilton’s wife makes of it all. But anyone who has met Gabby Reece instantly gets the answer. At six foot three, with blond hair down to her waist and an athletic résumé that includes playing NCAA volleyball and professional beach volleyball, and being the first woman to have an eponymous Nike shoe, Reece stands eye to eye with Hamilton on all matters. The two first met in 1995 when Reece, host of a television show called The Extremists, invited him on as a guest. The pair skydived together. They married two years later, in a canoe on Kauai’s Hanalei River. In 2003 Reece gave birth to their first child, a girl named Reece Viola Hamilton, and that fall she was seven months pregnant with their second. (Hamilton also had a daughter, Izabela, thirteen, from a previous marriage.) Given her own sports background, Reece not only tolerated Hamilton’s unusual lifestyle, she supported it wholeheartedly. “It’s who he is,” she’d said. “You couldn’t live with him if he wasn’t doing it.”

  Poised next to Jaws, raising a family, compromising nothing: it had taken more than two decades of hard striving for Hamilton to get to this place. From the start he had turned his back on professional surfing competitions, with their judging panels and sponsorship obligations, and focused his attention entirely on giant waves. This was a noble stance, perhaps, but a decidedly noncommercial one, at least in the beginning. A sole sponsor, the French sports company Oxbow, had supported him since his early days, and Hamilton’s loyalty to them ran deep. He and Kalama had also partnered in a film production company, releasing movies each year of their big days at Jaws. As Hamilton’s visibility and notoriety grew—and as tow surfing captivated the mainstream—companies like American Express and Toyota came calling. Building a lucrative career had required him to hack his way down a sin
gular path: one, in fact, that hadn’t existed before him.

  Evening had closed in by the time we returned from our swim, pulling in front of the house next to Hamilton’s two three-hundred-pound razorback pigs, Ginger and Marianne. The pigs were snuffling around, gouging divots of mud and grass. Hamilton parked the tractor, walked around the side of the house, and picked up a hose to rinse himself off. Casil disappeared into the garage. I stood looking at the fields as they turned from green to gold, and at the ocean beyond. It’s one thing to be told that something is magic, I thought, and another to sense that yourself. It is the difference between seeing a picture of a thunderstorm and finding yourself in the middle of one, smelling the water in the air as the light drains from the sky, hearing the thunder. I definitely wanted to see Jaws when it broke, but even now I was beginning to understand what made the wave unique.

  Hamilton walked the hose across the grass and began to wash the mud off Ginger and Marianne. “Do different waves have different personalities?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said quickly, then hesitated. “Pe’ahi is … hmmm … the Grand Empress.” Generally Hamilton was an articulate person, and when he was passionate about something, he spoke in a rush of words. His voice had a gravelly baritone edge, not a growl exactly but getting there. When he talked about Jaws, though, his thoughts were carefully measured, his tone softer. “Just the magnitude, the sheer volume, the size of the wave, the shape of it,” he said. “And it’s finicky too. On any given day she’ll give someone a kiss and somebody else a slap. You hope you’re the one getting the kiss. But she’s sensitive that way.” He paused for a beat, and then laughed. “I’ve gotten a spank or two, but not that often. I’m real polite to her.”

  Not everyone could say the same thing.

  As tow surfing headed into its second decade; as it became clear that a person could drastically change his fortunes by having his photograph taken on a seventy-foot wave (with the image zipping around the globe that same day); as wave-forecasting services sprang up so that epic conditions were no longer a local secret—a new cadre of riders was showing up on the biggest days. They were more aggressive than experienced, more brash than respectful. They hadn’t spent years honing their skills and practicing rescues and cultivating their partnerships. Because of that, they were dangerous.

  The problem came to a head on December 15, 2004. It should have been one of the best days ever at Jaws, but instead the problems began early. “When we got there the first thing I saw was a body skipping down the face,” Dave Kalama recalled. In past years there might have been ten tow teams out, all of them familiar players, treating the situation with gravitas. On that morning the scene that greeted the men looked like something out of Fellini’s aquatic circus.

  Two thousand people lined the cliff, while below the water teemed with photographers, surfers, Jet Skis, and boatfuls of gawkers. At least forty tow teams were buzzing around, and a swarm of other vessels bobbed in the channel next to the wave. Helicopters circled overhead. Many of the top big-wave riders in the world had come to Maui for this swell, but so had dozens of surfers whose best credentials were that they could get their hands on a Jet Ski and find someone to drive it.

  People had worried that the hundred-foot-wave prize (the Odyssey had morphed into an event called the Billabong XXL) would lead inexperienced riders into situations that were over their heads, and the craziness of that day seemed to prove them right. Medevac helicopters hoisted out a steady stream of the injured. Jet Skis lay smashed on the rocks. One surfer took such a beating in the whitewater that his flotation vest, rash guard, and trunks were torn from his body, and he lay naked and bloody on the rescue sled as he was driven back to the channel.

  Kalama was stunned. “They’re going straight to the Indy 500 as soon as they get their drivers’ licenses,” he said. Lickle was amazed: “I watched guys take off on a sixty-footer, no skill whatsoever. Whole thing hammers them on the head. They take another five waves on the head and then get back on the Ski and do the same thing over again. What’s that about?” Hamilton was furious. When a Jet Ski had crossed directly in front of him as he dropped into a wave, he was forced to straighten out and surf directly into the impact zone. The violence of the crash split his lips open.

  Everyone agreed that half the field wouldn’t have come if not for the potential prize money. When the Odyssey had first been announced, Hamilton, Kalama, Doerner, and Lickle made it clear that, far from scrambling to win the thing, they wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s all about people wanting to box it up,” Hamilton said, angrily. “ ‘So-and-so rode the hundred-foot wave.’ That’s by chance. I don’t want by chance. I want more performance. What are you doing on this hundred-foot wave that you’re supposedly riding? Are you running for your life on the shoulder? Are you barely making it? Or are you ripping it apart like it’s a twenty-foot wave?” Besides, he added, it was stupid to judge a wave’s intensity by height alone. A thick, pugnacious shorter wave could be far more extreme than a tall, anemic one: “Would you rather be attacked by a pit bull or a Great Dane?”

  Here was the weird thing: after a decade of churning out at least two humongous days each season, since December 15, 2004, Jaws hadn’t broken at anywhere near peak size again. Two winters had passed, a third was beginning, and still Jaws hadn’t roared. It was as though the Grand Empress had decided to punish the entire court for misbehavior.

  Nothing was more depressing for a big-wave rider than to have months go by when the waves went elsewhere. He felt a sense of purposelessness, frustration, and even depression, the kinds of things you’d feel if you were a mountaineer stuck on the plains, or a Formula One racer in a world that had only Ford Escorts. Hamilton’s response was to train even harder, to physically exhaust himself by working outdoors or riding his mountain bike up the volcano or going on long, arduous paddles down the coast. “The busier I stay, the better,” he said. “I’m here in the firehouse, waiting for the fire bell to ring.”

  Eight days later it did.

  WAVES ARE NOT MEASURED IN FEET AND INCHES, BUT IN INCREMENTS OF FEAR.

  Big-wave surfer Buzzy Trent

  PAPEETE, TAHITI

  At one o’clock in the morning on October 30, 2007, the Faa’a airport in Papeete, capital of the island nation of Tahiti, was packed. Musicians in Polynesian shirts serenaded the newly arrived visitors, while smiling women in long red dresses handed out white tiaré flowers. The flowers were tiny but their fragrance filled the air, which felt hot and sticky even in the middle of the night. At the baggage claim, things were chaotic. Hundreds of padded surfboard bags and hard-sided camera cases and oversize duffel bags and suitcases and crates and boxes were brought out until the area couldn’t hold any more, and trucks pulled up in front of the little open-air terminal to load the cargo, jamming the road. Horns honked, people yelled. Everyone jockeyed with too much gear, and a frazzled energy ran through the place like a current.

  The crowd was composed almost entirely of men, most of whom knew one another. Though they had flown to Tahiti from all corners of the globe, they could always recognize the members of their tribe. For one thing, they had a uniform: long, low-slung shorts, flip-flops, hoodies, and T-shirts emblazoned with logos for Quiksilver and Billabong and Hurley and Pipeline Posse. Most wore a hat of some sort, a baseball cap or a woolen ski cap pulled low over the ears. Among these brethren there were no potbellies or thick glasses, no pasty complexions cultivated under fluorescent lights. It was a sea of tans, tattoos, testosterone, and nerves stretched tight as wire.

  The men had all come here for the same reason: a legendary wave called Teahupoo (pronounced tay-ah-HOO-po). About twenty-eight hours from now a gigantic swell was due to arrive at these shores, causing the wave—its Tahitian name translates loosely into “Broken Skulls”—to erupt into its full, feral splendor. No one was more identified with old Broken Skulls than Laird Hamilton, who strode through the airport unconcerned that his presence rattled every other surfer in the ter
minal. If Hamilton was here, they all knew, the waves would be serious.

  Like Jaws and other spots where the right storm brought not only big waves but also a life-and-death proposition, Teahupoo was known for its special brand of jeopardy. It was a mean vortex with a deep belly and a thick slab of a lip that all but promised to pile-drive the surfer into the reef, which lay only a few feet below the surface. So much water and energy exploded in such a compressed area that oceanographers often referred to Teahupoo’s hydraulics as “freakish.” It terrified even the most seasoned big-wave riders—and that was on a small day.

  Then there were the not-so-small days. In particular there was August 17, 2000. The only three words on the Surfer magazine cover that featured a photo of Hamilton riding Teahupoo on that date were “Oh My God.” Only a few months earlier a surfer had died in far tamer conditions, his neck broken and face torn off on the jagged coral, and that must have been on everyone’s mind when Hamilton, towed by Darrick Doerner, took off on a wave so massive and so vicious that spectators watching from boats feared they were watching a man’s last ride. There was just so much fury in this wave, a meat-grinder-cement-truck-wrath-of-God fury, that even now to watch it on video is a sobering experience. As the wave rose around him Hamilton couldn’t see it; he was riding backside, his body turned away from the barrel. But he could feel it, and his mind, he said later, screamed at him to abort, eject—anything but go through with this. At the same time, hesitation would have been fatal. As the lip slammed down on the reef the tube convulsed, the spray exploded around him, and he disappeared from sight. For a heartbeat or three no one knew if the wave had gotten him. Then he emerged, gliding along with his arms in the air. If Hamilton had fallen, the wave cognoscenti agreed, the only thing left of him would have been a red stain on the reef.