The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Ten weeks had elapsed since December 3. Looking at Hamilton now, and hearing the tone of his voice, I realized he was still living through that day in his mind. Grisly as it was, Lickle’s injury would heal; the psychological imprint would take longer to fade. As if thinking the same thing, Hamilton added, “That wave ran us down like we were going backward at fifty miles per hour.” He frowned. “There was a lot of emotional stuff that went on, once we got mowed.”

  “What do you remember the most?”

  He was silent. A tern wheeled overhead, and then dipped toward the water. The light had ebbed, turning the surface a deep slate navy. A moment passed.

  “When I saw Brett’s leg,” he said. Pain flashed in his eyes. “It looked like a smashed orange. Just torn to the bone. And I thought, ‘Ohhhhkay. What am I gonna do a tourniquet with? Maybe the strap off the flotation?’ But then I realized, my wet suit was perfect. It was a long arm, thin, one millimeter. Which I don’t always wear—but that day I did. I took it and did a double wrap, tied a knot, double wrap again, and tied another knot. And just made that thing frickin’ solid. But not too tight because you can overtighten a tourniquet and fuck people up.” He nodded. “Yeah, you can make them lose their leg if you leave them on too long or too tight. Then I gave him my flotation so he was lying on mine and wearing his. And then I’m like, ‘Now, where’s the Ski?’ Then I saw the Ski, it was so far off—”

  Suddenly Hamilton’s voice cracked, the emotion spilling out. “I knew I couldn’t swim Brett out. I told him, ‘I’m gonna go … you have to hang in there.’ So I went, and all I could think was, ‘God, please don’t let him bleed out.’ ”

  I was quiet, listening. It was one thing to hear the details of the accident and another to glimpse its personal toll. Hamilton paused, trying to collect himself. “I just remember that the one thing I was thinking about was … to uh, not uh …” He looked down at his hands. “I didn’t want to have to explain to Shannon and the girls that Brett wasn’t coming home,” he said haltingly. “That Brett didn’t make it back.” Several tears rolled down his face. He reached up to wipe them away, squinting hard at the far-off shore. Then he shook his head slowly. “That was just a real day of ‘DON’T get confused,’ ” he said, translating the ocean’s rules of engagement. “ ‘DON’T think you’re going to be able to ride everything. That’s not happening.’ ”

  “But that was the biggest wave you’ve ever ridden, right?”

  The question was a gamble, given how much Hamilton hated the notion of sizing up waves that way, but I had to ask. He was silent for another long moment and then he inhaled deeply, as though steeling himself for some unavoidable chore. “Was it a monster, ridiculous thing?” he said in a quiet voice, turning to look at me. “Yes. There was one wave in particular I remember—it was like you stopped knowing how to measure. I was counting the lips. One—one thousand. Two—one thousand … They were falling between three and four seconds. Simple math: at thirty-two feet per second, per second, it takes almost four seconds to fall one hundred twenty feet.”

  I looked out at Egypt, trying to summon up the image of a 120-foot wave by multiplying the day’s waves at Jaws by three. I couldn’t. “I don’t even think a picture would give you the full—”

  He cut me off. “The great thing, the whole irony of that day: there are no pictures.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Which is perfect! That one was for us. We have it. No one can take that away from us and it doesn’t fade and we don’t need a digital copy of it. None of that. We have it. We have it right here.” He touched his chest. “It was about the experience of that day. It’s like when Don said to me, ‘I don’t need to go out there.’ And I said, ‘Yes, you do. You have to. To see it. It would be like Tyrannosaurus rex is right over the ridge and you can go look at him and he’s eating something! You have to go look.’ ”

  “I still think the weirdest thing was that nobody expected those waves to be here,” I said. “How do you think that happened?”

  Hamilton cupped his hands so they were making a letter V. “It’s like a light. When you’re closer to the storm, the window is a lot smaller, and a lot more intense. I think the storm was funneled right at us. We were right in the center of the energy. And why wasn’t it forecast? Well, there’s no buoy that would have captured it. There is nothing positioned to the north and west of us.” He shrugged. “I also think they don’t know how to read storms that close. They’re not used to figuring out how big the surf is going to be one hundred miles off the eye.”

  The wind had picked up and we had drifted even farther out, so Hamilton reached down with the lanyard and started the ignition. As he did so, two humpback whales appeared about fifty yards away, their knuckled backs skimming the surface. They spouted with a faint huffing sound. We were in the lair of giant waves and mammoth sea creatures, and it was a good idea not to forget that. “There’s some power out here,” Hamilton said, watching them pass through the swells. “But that’s what it’s about. That power.”

  His remark stayed with me as we turned away from Egypt. Around us the waves were breaking and tumbling and churning like the restless auguries of some distant storm, but at the same time everything felt peaceful. Like the sea, we are always in motion. The waves loom in our dreams and in our nightmares through all of time, their rhythms pulsing through us. They move across a faint horizon, the rush of love and the surge of grief, the respite of peace and then fear again, the heart that beats and then lies still, the rise and fall and rise and fall of all of it, the incoming and the outgoing, the infinite procession of life. And the ocean wraps the earth, a reminder. The mysteries come forward in waves.

  21.3° N, 134.8° E, THE NORTHWESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

  NOVEMBER 25, 2009

  On satellite photos Super Typhoon Nida was a fearsome sight, a huge, menacing vortex with a perfectly circular ink-black eye. A sign of brute force, Nida’s eye was so wide and well-defined that fifty-foot seas were clearly visible through it, and as the storm swept northwest, loosing 170-mile-per-hour winds, giant waves, and torrential rain on the islands of Okinawa, Guam, and Yap, weather experts ventured that this was the most intense cyclone ever to develop in the month of November, and one of the strongest on record.

  She lit up the Pacific, this Queen of the Magenta Blobs, weakening slightly to a category four, only to roar back again as a mighty five. As she dervished toward the Aleutians, wind shear interference slowed her down, and she devolved into a less powerful—but still sprawling—low-pressure system. When Nida’s tropical moisture collided with other, colder storms in the area, Sean Collins noted on Surfline that “this is like throwing twenty gallons of gas on an already raging bonfire.” What surfers were in for, he wrote, was some waves for the ages: “Our December 2009 storm will be a very special one.”

  By December 3 the radar maps were awash in purple. “The entire Pacific is in an uproar,” Surfline reported. The result of all the turmoil was a beast of a northwest swell aimed squarely at Hawaii. Its waves would be massive, the forecasters reported, possibly even eclipsing those of December 4, 1969, when the largest swell in Hawaii’s history hit the islands, washing away roads, dragging cars out to sea, depositing boats far inland, and ripping houses off their foundations. “As Hawaii’s Seas Roil, Surfers Await the Big One,” read a headline in the New York Times. “Climes Against Humanity as the Weather Goes Wild,” trumpeted the New York Post, “50-Foot Waves Hit Hawaiiieee!” and “Super Swell Coming,” warned the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser. “Oahu Braces for Monster Surf.”

  Dave Kalama, monitoring the swell as it bore down on Maui, was shaken by its size and intensity. “It was the biggest storm I’ve seen on the forecasting maps ever,” he’d tell me later. “It kind of sent me into a tailspin. I had to think about how much I wanted to risk.”

  Hamilton, who was training on Kauai, heard news of the waves through various channels, none of which involved a computer. “I try to avoid looking at the screen as much as possi
ble,” he said. “I listen to what everyone’s saying and then I end up having my own opinion.” Always skeptical of the hype that attended a potentially serious swell, in this case even he was wary: “I was gearing up for the unknown.”

  After forty-two years in Hawaii, Hamilton had vivid memories of famous storms. The ocean, as he had witnessed, was capable of far grander furies than people consciously allow for. He was five years old during the epochal 1969 swell, and recalls his family’s midnight evacuation from their house on Oahu’s north shore. “I remember getting into my dad’s ’fifty-six Chevy convertible,” he said, “and waves were running under the car, under my feet.” In 1992 he was living on Kauai when Hurricane Iniki tore through, destroying more than four thousand homes (some of which were carried out to sea by forty-foot waves) and leaving the island in tatters. On another childhood occasion he remembers watching Kings’ Reef break, a deepwater wave outside Hanalei Bay that appears so infrequently as to seem mythical. To erupt into its full splendor, Kings’ needs a rare—and monumentally powerful—set of conditions that happen only once or twice a decade. Hamilton had never forgotten the sight, or the size, of Kings’ Reef. “It’s always in the back of my mind,” he said. “You could get a two-hundred-foot wave there. One hundred, easy.”

  As the swell created by Nida advanced on the islands, however, it became clear that the wave most suited to its direction was Jaws. “It looks like a perfect Pe’ahi swell,” Hamilton said. “And we haven’t had one for so long.” He gathered up his gear and flew back to Maui.

  The sky was restless the night before the waves arrived. I drove through Paia, the town twinkling with Christmas lights, and then up the Hana Highway under a strange horizontal half-moon. Thin clouds scudded in front of it, muting its amber light. There were few cars on the road, a general air of desertion. At Hookipa I pulled over and got out. A damp blast of air and a wall of ocean noise rushed at me, the rising energy from the first creeping edges of the swell. Even in the dark I could tell the waves were coming up. White crests flashed boldly offshore, and the pounding bass of the break was loud and insistent.

  Across the island people had spent the day mobilizing for the approaching high surf. At north shore beaches the lifeguards moved their towers inland. County workers coaxed the homeless back from shorelines and advised residents whose property might be underwater by morning. Boats returned to marinas. Launches were closed. Rescue services added personnel. “How about these waves we’ve got coming?” a cashier said to me at the grocery store, his face beaming with excitement.

  Hamilton and Kalama had been busy prepping Jet Skis, tow ropes, boards, and rescue equipment. “The bigger it is, the more redundant we get,” Hamilton said. “We’ve got a checklist of things we go through every time. Did we change the plugs? Tighten our footstraps? How are the sleds? Do we need oil? Radio batteries? There are just multiple layers of stuff. I’ll go through it. And then Kalama will go through it. Then I’ll go back through it again. And then he might go through it one more time. It’s a ritual of consequence.”

  The board Hamilton planned to ride was one he called the Green Meanie. Handmade by master shaper Dick Brewer, the Meanie was a sleek six-foot spear with a cruel point and razor-sharp fins that, according to Hamilton, “had some magic in it.” Not every board did. Often he had to test a dozen to find one that really clicked. “Some I can just look at and know I don’t like them,” he said. “When the energy isn’t flowing quite right.”

  Along with its spiritedness, the Meanie could handle speed. “It’s got a fifth gear,” Hamilton said, adding that the last thing a person wanted to feel when he was making a bottom turn on a seventy-foot wave was his board chattering around beneath his feet. But like any twitchy thoroughbred, the Meanie occasionally misbehaved. It had been present four years earlier when Hamilton buckled his knee in Tahiti, and at Egypt when Lickle’s leg was flayed. (Lickle, in fact, believed the Meanie’s tail fin had been the instrument of his injury.) Though surf lore held that green boards carried bad luck, Hamilton shrugged off the concern. “When they work like this one, you don’t get rid of them too quickly.”

  The Meanie had been to Jaws before, but never on a swell of this size. After all, four years, fifty-one weeks, and a day had passed since the last one. In that regard this storm was a reunion, the first time Hamilton’s full crew had been together since December 2004. In the late afternoon Darrick Doerner arrived from Oahu, along with Jamie Mitchell, Don King, Sonny Miller, and two camera assistants. Big-wave veteran Terry Chun flew in from Kauai; along with Doerner and Mitchell he’d trade off riding waves with running safety for Hamilton and Kalama on another Jet Ski. Don Shearer, patrolling overhead in his helicopter, and a pair of medics who’d be stationed on a boat in the channel, rounded out the team.

  But there was one person missing.

  Earlier in the day I’d spoken to Brett Lickle’s wife, Shannon, and asked if he was planning to be out on the water. “He’s not sure,” she said. “But … I don’t think so.” In the two years since the accident Lickle had sat out several swells, but one time in 2008 he’d agreed to get back in the saddle and tow Hamilton. The session had ended badly, with Hamilton frustrated and Lickle feeling gun-shy and rattled. Despite this, I wondered if the sheer drama of this event would make him change his mind. Only the morning would tell.

  In the predawn shadows Kahului Harbor bustled with riders, photographers, boat captains, and all the heavy machinery that accompanied them. The first thing I saw when I pulled into the parking lot was a truck and its trailer being sucked into the sea by waves that licked the top of the launch ramp. The driver’s eyes bulged and his tires spun as he gunned it on the slick cement, but he was headed backward fast. The ocean pawed the top of his sidewalls. It took quick action with a winch to save him; luckily there were many around. Standing next to the pier, a tow team I didn’t recognize zipped themselves into double flotation vests, expanding into aquatic Michelin Men. As I walked by them I caught the twinned scent of marijuana and fear.

  Jet Skis and boats backed up to the fast-rising water, sliding into the harbor. All other access points on this side of the island were closed. “This is the real deal,” Don King said, looking out at the ocean. “And the tide is super-high.” He stood on the deck of our boat, a thirty-five-foot vessel called the Kai Kane (Hawaiian for Water Man), captained by local fisherman Alan Cadiz. Hamilton, Kalama, and the others were just ahead of us on four Jet Skis; Shearer would lift off from the heliport with Miller at first light.

  Jaws was likely to be crowded; the pent-up desire to ride the wave at full throttle guaranteed that. “Everybody wants one,” Kalama said earlier that morning. “Watch—at least half the guys out there today shouldn’t be.” The potential for chaos was heightened by the fact that many experienced riders would be missing from the roster. Men like Greg Long, Twiggy Baker, Carlos Burle, Garrett McNamara, Kealii Mamala, and Shane Dorian had remained on Oahu for the Eddie Aikau competition.

  Known as the Eddie, this was paddle surfing’s most iconic event. Held to honor Aikau, a Hawaiian waterman lost at sea in 1978 while paddling for help after he and his teammates became stranded on an outrigger canoe, the Eddie was part big-wave contest, part hallowed memorial. Adding to its aura, it rarely took place: since its inception in 1984 it had been held only eight times, when the waves at its venue, Waimea Bay, were pristine and topped twenty-five feet. This year it looked as though the weather gods had finally delivered. The only question: Would the waves be too big?

  Hamilton and Kalama—both of whom would rather eat glass than enter a surf competition, even the Eddie—were in pursuit of something entirely different. The Kai Kane chugged out of the harbor and into the rollicking Pacific. Cadiz, an athletic guy in a navy sweatshirt and surf shorts, stood barefoot at the wheel. He surveyed the ocean with heightened alertness, as if the water’s every movement carried some greater portent. Today was not a day for carelessness.

  The leading edge of morning came, gauzy yellow
light against a tabula rasa sky. It was hard to predict what the weather would do. With such a formidable storm parked (relatively) nearby, anything was possible. “Every swell is different,” Don King said, pulling up the latest buoy readings on his phone. Cadiz nodded agreement, flicking on the radio. Static crackled and the computer voice that delivered the marine weather boomed through the cabin: “A large and dangerous northwest swell will continue to bring very large surf to the islands through at least Wednesday,” the voice said in its flat machine drone. “Surf will exceed warning levels … some areas may experience waves in unusual places.” Today was Monday and that swell was here all right, galloping past us in bus-size berms with deep troughs between them. The boat lumbered up and down in a slow, purposeful rhythm.

  We passed outside Hookipa. The beach entrance was closed, cordoned off by police. A wall of spray obscured the shore, waves exploding on the outer reefs. I looked up at Haleakala. The sun flared off the observatory at the volcano’s peak, making it gleam like a beacon. Jaws lay ahead. Cadiz swung wide and eased the engine, scouting the scene before venturing closer. King leaned over the rail and smiled. “It’s on,” he said. In the distance I could see the ocean spitting long plumes of white from what appeared to be a soft-edged, surging mountain.

  Carefully we made our way toward the channel. Jet Skis flitted in from all directions. Three helicopters flew tight circles at low altitude; one had a movie camera mounted on its nose. The wave seemed to form from miles out, building from bump to peak to howling monster. We were nearer now, and the frenetic energy began to settle and focus. “When you get close enough to actually hear it and feel the noise in your chest,” Cadiz said, “that’s when you realize.” King stood on the back deck and pulled on his wet suit and flotation vest. I did the same, though my hands were shaking and I was far from sure I wanted to go in the water. As we idled in the channel, Cadiz examined the waves’ angle. Even a slight twist to the north could swing the break in this direction.