by Susan Casey
Beside him, a man in his thirties stepped out from beneath a large tree. “Laird,” he said, “you probably don’t remember my cousin, but he met you, he’s a surfer and you were surfing …” His voice was high and tight and he spoke quickly, trying to rush into a connection.
Hamilton listened politely for a while but the man just kept talking, so he began to walk to his truck. The man followed, drawing his story to its punch line: “He hit you! My cousin! He scared the shit out of you!”
“Well, then I probably remember him,” Hamilton said in a wry tone. He climbed into the driver’s seat and lowered the window. Kalama was at the shower now, surrounded by groms. “Breakfast?” Hamilton yelled. Kalama looked over and nodded.
I headed out after Hamilton, driving down the Hana Highway and into Paia. If you turned onto the main street from the other direction, you passed a sign that said, “Welcome to Paia, Maui’s Historical Plantation Town.” Below that someone had affixed another sign: “Please Don’t Feed the Hippies.” The edict was delightfully impossible to obey, as everyone in Paia had a touch of hippie soul; it was only a matter of degree. No one cared about your résumé in Paia, or that you hadn’t brushed your hair all the way through, or that your truck had seen better days. In the town’s hub, a ramshackle grocery store called Mana Foods, yoga instructors shopped alongside heavily pierced drifters, and pot farmers mingled with supermodels, and Brazilian kitesurfers lined up at the deli counter behind Buddhist priests, and three-hundred-pound Samoan construction workers jostled in the aisles with movie stars, and everyone got along perfectly well. There was something about the town that brought the people in it down to earth, a pronounced antislickness. Nothing in Paia was sparkling new. Old posters peeled from wooden walls. Tin roofs looked like they’d been repeatedly pelted by hail. Built during the sugar boom of the late nineteenth century, the buildings had a faded, scuffed quality, even though they are painted in the most vivid colors. There were hot-pink buildings and turquoise buildings and lime green buildings. There was a vermilion-tinted building with canary trim. By contrast, Anthony’s Coffee, Hamilton’s favorite breakfast spot on the main street, appeared subdued with its pale green and white storefront.
Anthony’s was run by Hamilton’s friends Ed and Kerri Stewart, a couple from Seattle who knew a thing or two about coffee. It was an airy, white-walled café with ceiling fans, a mottled cement floor, and a blackboard menu written in rainbow colors. The place was usually packed, and this morning was no exception.
Hamilton walked past the line of people waiting to order and straight into the kitchen, where the cook, a hearty Hawaiian woman named Val Akana, met him with a bear hug. “Got some fresh ahi for you, bruddah,” she said, as he continued on to the back patio, where he sat down at a rickety metal table. Within a minute Ed was there with Hamilton’s regular drink, a quadruple long espresso. Ed was slightly built, with a brush of gray hair and a megawatt smile. He and Hamilton had a longstanding tradition of heckling each other. He greeted us and asked me what kind of coffee I wanted. “Do you want anything else?” he asked Hamilton.
“Yeah,” Hamilton said. “I want to see you do a little tap dance for me.”
“Got a pistol?” Ed said.
“I can get one,” Hamilton said.
“You’d better.” Ed smiled and began to walk away.
“That was real original, Ed,” Hamilton said. “Think up something else and come back when you’re ready.”
Kalama arrived, followed by Lickle. Ed brought my Americano.
“Can I get an açai smoothie?” Hamilton asked.
“You know where the line is,” Ed said with a smirk, before heading off to get the smoothie.
A waitress brought out platefuls of eggs and toast and lightly seared ahi with sides of salsa, avocados, and brown rice. As we began to eat, I asked Hamilton about an exchange I’d seen him having with a surfer in the lineup. It hadn’t looked friendly.
“Do people get uptight in the water?” he said. “Totally. Somebody always has something to say. I think they get frustrated.” The standup boards might have something to do with that, he conceded, but it wasn’t an issue that concerned him. They could paste up all the go-away stickers they wanted—the oversize boards and paddles were here to stay. “It’s the best training I’ve come across for big-wave riding,” Hamilton said. “In a normal surfing situation, if you catch a long ride, that’s twenty seconds. When you’re standup surfing you’re out there for two or three hours, working your legs, core, and foundation the entire time.”
Kalama nodded: “It forces you to use your whole body, even the little muscles in your feet.”
Hamilton continued, his voice rising. “And it’s fun! Which means you’re gonna do it a lot more. Unless you’re just robot guy.”
“Plus, you see things—it’s like you’re in a big aquarium,” Lickle said, buttering his toast. “The other day I was out at Kanaha, between Lowers and the beach. I looked down and thought the bottom was moving; I looked again and realized, ‘That’s a fucking monster tiger shark.’ ”
“They love to cruise on the bottom,” Hamilton said. “They collect dead shit.”
“He was in way shallower water than I ever would’ve imagined,” Lickle said.
“You mean than you ever would’ve hoped,” Kalama said.
“Well, we know they’re out there,” Hamilton said.
“Yeah, we do.” Kalama fixed Lickle with a steely look.
Lickle laughed guiltily. “Hey, buddy … I said I’m sorry.”
They were referring to an incident that had taken place a while back but had not been forgotten: “The time he trolled me,” Kalama said drily. Lickle and Kalama had been tow surfing at Spreckelsville, Lickle driving and Kalama floating in the water on the end of the rope, waiting for a set. “I’m sitting on the Jet Ski looking off the back,” Lickle recalled, “and I see this big-ass shark coming right at Kalama. It was far enough away … I just wanted to screw with him a little bit. So I said very calmly, ‘Hey Dave, check out the size of that shark coming to visit you.’ ”
Kalama shook his head. “I see this dorsal fin—at first I thought it was a dolphin. But it just kept coming up out of the water and I realized, ‘That ain’t no dolphin. It’s coming straight at me.’ And this thing wasn’t seven, eight, ten feet long. I want to call it at least fifteen.”
“It was a big freakin’ shark,” Lickle agreed.
“So I yelled, ‘Get me the fuck out of the water!’ ” Kalama said. “And he looks at me and laughs! He just starts laughing!”
“I go, ‘No, have a better look at it!’ ” Lickle said, laughing. Hamilton was doubled over, laughing too.
“I’m thinking, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ ” Kalama’s voice was incredulous. “So I take it up a level. I yell louder. And he looks at me and laughs again. I’m like, ‘What the hell is wrong with him?’ ”
“That’s grounds for disembowelment,” Hamilton said.
“So finally I went to that bloodcurdling … ‘I swear to God if I get out of this I am going to kill you!’ ”
“And then I brought him up slowly,” Lickle said, wiping tears from his eyes. “Just enough to get him to the surface.”
“My ankles were still underwater,” Kalama said. “But I’m moving. And now the shark’s close—about fifteen feet away! And I’m like, ‘What is wrong with this guy?’ ”
“Well, the way I remember it,” Lickle said, “I had a bit of humor going, and then he started playing the baby game so that made me—”
“Yeah, the baby game,” Kalama said sarcastically.
“He was crybaby at the end of the line,” Lickle continued. “I do remember just bringing him up to an ankle drag and going, ‘Dude, check that big boy out!’ ”
“So did you get a good look at him?” I asked Kalama.
“Better than I would’ve liked! I just could not believe he did that. Here’s my partner, I’m thinking, ‘He’s got my back in every situation.’ And he’s trolli
ng me for a monster shark! And he’s laughing about it!”
“And he’s still laughing,” Hamilton said, laughing.
“I really am sorry, Dave,” Lickle said, trying not to laugh.
Looking around the table, I realized it would be hard to find a trio who had been through more together. They had staked their territory in an uncharted realm, a place where the ocean didn’t necessarily allow people to be. The odd instance of partner trolling aside, they had saved one another’s lives with chilling regularity. The reason why Hamilton, Kalama, and Lickle were all here now, still at the top of their games, with wives and kids and successful careers in a sport that did not dole those out easily, was because they did have one another’s backs. As talented as each man was, the whole was more than the sum of the parts.
Far from instilling cockiness, their years of survival validated the attitude that had been there from the start: profound respect. Though none of the three had actually been born in Hawaii, they were native in their outlook, to the point of superstition. Whenever Jaws broke, they always carried a ti leaf along on the Jet Ski—a Polynesian tradition when going on a risky journey—for protection. “You take the leaf out,” Hamilton explained, “and the leaf brings you home.” For all the flash and technology that went along with tow surfing, they believed in timeless principles like karma, that a person gets back what he gives out, and they understood the hubris of humans trying to impose their will on the ocean.
Understatement was their way. A big-wave rider didn’t exaggerate. He didn’t hype his achievements or lose his bearings. The more amazing his feats were, the less he said about them. He could be confident, of course, but only losers ran around with what Hamilton called “puffy chest.” As a matter of principle, the Hawaiians purposely diminished the size of a wave, measuring its height from the back rather than on its face. Thus, a twenty-foot wave was “ten-foot Hawaiian.” “Usually the guys that do the talking are the guys that aren’t doing the riding,” Hamilton said. “Because if you’ve been in front of one of those waves [at Jaws], you don’t flap like that. And if you do, you’re asking for it.”
In this belief system, to rush around after a cash prize for the title of First Man to Ride a Hundred-Foot Wave was to tempt fate. “As soon as Billabong put the golden carrot up, that was when the carnage started,” Hamilton said. “That was the beginning of Skis on the rocks, guys getting hauled away. Everyone came out of the woodwork to get their shot at it.”
“They didn’t need to outsurf anybody,” Kalama said. “They just needed to stand in the right place long enough for someone to take a picture.”
“ ‘How big was my wave?’ ” Hamilton said, in a mocking whine. “ ‘Is my wave bigger than his wave? His was sixty-eight feet? Well, mine was sixty-eight and a half.’ Biggest, longest, widest, tallest—what is it, a dog show?”
“Well, and number one,” Lickle added, “if you’re getting the prize for riding the biggest wave, you have to make the wave.” He was referring to the Billabong XXL champion from a few years back whose winning ride had ended in a spectacular crash.
Hamilton leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. The conversation was a reminder that another season was beginning, the fourth winter since anybody had needed to worry about measuring giant waves around here—there hadn’t been any.
A shadow passed over his face. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “All that contest stuff, that frenzy, that pursuit of the golden carrot—is what has caused Pe’ahi not to break.”
“I believe that,” Lickle said.
“It’s done something,” Hamilton said. “Because she’s been very aloof since then.”
“I think it had more to do with Brett riding the surf bike out there,” Kalama joked. “Now that’s disrespect.”
“That was a contributing factor,” Hamilton said, nodding. “Definitely.”
“That had nothing to do with it,” Lickle said.
I mentioned what Dave Levinson had told me, that the storm tracks were shifting, upending traditional weather patterns. Furious ocean conditions were out there, but they might not appear in the usual places or at the usual times.
“That seems right,” Hamilton said, pointing out that the recent waves in Tahiti had come months out of season. “And we’re getting a lot of strange swell directions,” he added. “We’re getting north. Or really west, almost southwest. Or superweird northeast. Not northwest, which is the usual window for the big winter swells.”
The waitress came and cleared the table. The wind had picked up, sweeping a piece of palm leaf across the patio. Overhead, clouds hustled by as though late for an important appointment. Suddenly restless, Hamilton stood up to leave. “It’s the calm before the storm,” he said. “I just feel like there’s only one thing that can happen when it’s been flat. It’s gonna get real big.”
THE GLOBE BEGAN WITH SEA SO TO SPEAK; AND WHO KNOWS IF IT WILL NOT END WITH IT?
Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
LONDON, ENGLAND
No one understands the risks of an unruly sea better than Lloyd’s of London, the British-based insurers of most of the global shipping fleet, a huge swath of the planet’s most valuable real estate, and just about anything else you can think of. When a freighter disappears in the North Sea, Lloyd’s pays. When storm waves surge into a low-lying city, Lloyd’s pays. When an earthquake cracks the seafloor, sending a tsunami barreling toward a densely populated coastline, Lloyd’s pays. There is nowhere a person could go to get a more exact reckoning of how dangerous and destructive giant waves can be than One Lime Street, Lloyd’s headquarters in London’s financial district.
I walked into the building, along with the morning crowds. One Lime Street is a glass and metal monolith nicknamed the “Inside Out” building because all of its workings—its cables and ducts and trusses and pulleys and vaults, all its stark iron guts—are visible. The lobby opens onto a twelve-story glass atrium crisscrossed with steel escalators that appear to be suspended in space. It was a long way from Lloyd’s original headquarters back in 1688, a London coffeehouse where sailors and shipowners gathered to make impromptu insurance deals. When the sea proved to be every bit as lawless as sailors feared, the situations being insured against became legally defined as “Maritime Perils: the perils consequent on, or incidental to, the navigation of the sea, that is to say, perils of the sea, fire, war perils, pirates, rovers, thieves, captures, seizures, restraints, and detainments of princes and peoples, jettisons, barratry, and any other perils, either of the like kind or which may be designated by the policy.”
Insuring ships was still at the heart of the operation, although over the centuries Lloyd’s had branched out from its nautical roots, venturing so far afield that it had become known for insuring such valuables as Keith Richards’s hands and Tina Turner’s legs. Its policies covered the Golden Gate Bridge and, formerly, the World Trade Center in New York. Unique among its competitors, Lloyd’s had proved willing to service unusual requests. One time, for instance, it insured a thirty-six-hour flight for ten elephants against “all risks of mortality.” On another occasion, it agreed to cover a famous male flamenco dancer’s pants against splitting midperformance. That’s not to say that every client got the policy they were seeking: recently, Lloyd’s declined to insure a two-headed albino rattlesnake because the last two-headed albino rattlesnake they’d had under coverage had died. The livestock underwriter’s report reads with crisp finality: “An apparent disagreement between the respective heads had fatal consequences.”
I had come to meet Neil Roberts, a senior executive who specialized in marine activity. Roberts, I hoped, would provide some perspective on the disappearing ships and what a stormier ocean climate might mean for Lloyd’s business. How worried were they? In a story titled “Surf’s Up: A Rising Tide of Natural Disasters,” The Economist had reported in its 2007 preview issue that “the number of climate-related catastrophes tripled between the 1970s and the 1990s, and has continued to climb i
n the current decade.” For insurance companies, this was an expensive fact. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to cite just one example, had set them back more than $60 billion. “It is climate security which presents the biggest risk to insurers, and, for that matter, to us all,” Lloyd’s chairman, Lord Peter Levene, was quoted as saying. As I waited in the lobby I browsed through a booklet that outlined how climate volatility had prompted Lloyd’s to deploy a supercomputer “the size of four tennis courts, three stories high, and housed in an earthquake-proof bunker,” to create “realistic disaster scenarios” and assess the resulting claims exposure.
In short order Roberts appeared, a trim man with a broad, friendly face and just a hint of silver at his temples. Like everyone else in the building, he was immaculately dressed. Looking around at the dark suits, the smart ties, the below-the-knee skirts, it was clear that anyone looking to cut loose on Casual Fridays should search for another employer. Roberts and I shook hands and headed to a café in the middle of the lobby. Above us, floors of risk analysis, underwriting, and insurance trading thrummed with activity. We ordered coffees, and Roberts began to explain the kinds of harrowing situations that crossed his desk as a matter of course. His days were filled with troubles scrolling past like movie credits, bulletins streaming in with titles like “Climate Change Severe Threat to U.S. Coastlines,” “Rapid Sea Level Rise,” and “Piracy in the Gulf of Aden.” I asked Roberts if Lloyd’s considered freak waves to be a threat. “They have been on our committee’s radar for a time now,” Roberts said, sitting down at a table and opening a dossier of shipping statistics to show me. “They do exist. That’s the one thing everyone agrees on.” But in the grand scheme of maritime perils, he emphasized, giant waves—freakish or not—were among many concerns.