Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Then, one day in 1957, a salesman called in with a small chunk of a newly invented by-product of the petroleum industry: polyurethane. German chemical plants had first created this light, almost woodlike plastic magic, which could be foamed into size, then sawed and cut and milled to the perfect shape—which Alter realized in an instant would be the undisputed future of surfboards. Together with one of his employee laminators, an engineer named George Clark, who was a late convert to surfing from a half-formed career in soldiering and in the oil fields (and who became so passionate about surfing that he would go days without bathing, hence his nickname, Grubby Clark), Alter started experimenting with foam.

  Hobart “Hobie” Alter, creator of the inexpensive learner yacht the Hobie Cat, also invented the polyurethane surfboard, and along with his onetime friend George “Grubby” Clark turned surfing into an entirely affordable sport.* [Hobie Archive.]

  “It was dirty, messy and smelly, nothing you’d dream of doing for a career,” Clark once said. In the early days, it involved mixing a dark and oily-looking substance, toluene diisocyanate, with a polyol and a blowing agent: within seconds the two combine to form a foam that expands to a frightening volume, up to twenty-five times that of the liquid components, and then sets, hard. Alter and Clark (Hobie and Grubby in the lore of surfing, since they promptly almost monopolized the business) took two years to work out how best to capture the foam inside a surfboard mold, and how to persuade it to set without trapped air bubbles or any other distortions. Their patience paid off, because in the winter of 1959, the company began producing polyurethane boards, placed a small advertisement in the Los Angeles Times, and began to reap the beginnings of a fortune.

  That was a scant eight months after Gidget made the sport popular. Soon after, the five-man singing group the Beach Boys came along and eventually provided the anthems and the mood music; and then came more movies, Bruce Brown’s 1960s paean, The Endless Summer, most justly famous of all. A craze that had been straining at the leash since the 1920s suddenly broke free: an industry was born, fortunes were gathered in, turf wars were begun and ended, and millions became involved in a sport that was uniquely American, but that, unlike baseball or gridiron football, had as its playground the entire coastal world, where warm waters and big waves and white beaches provided a sandpit of inexhaustible size.

  I was in Hawaii in the early spring of 2014, when Hobie Alter died at the age of eighty. Hawaiian public radio stations offered what seemed like wall-to-wall encomiums—Alter also created skateboards and the famously inexpensive learner yacht, the Hobie Cat, so he was revered by many. By chance, I had the radio on while driving along the north shore of Oahu, along the stretch of coast south of Pupukea, the site of the Banzai Pipeline, one of the best-known wave breaks in the world.

  On this blissfully warm afternoon, the swells were long and powerful, the tubes were rolling in over the three reefs, and under the press of the northeasterly trade winds, they were curling in from the right, a configuration that prime surfers say they like best. So the sea was dotted with the tiny black silhouettes of men and women floating, gazing, looking over their shoulders into the blue distance for the faraway sight of the oncoming waves. Leaving the engine running, I got out of the car so that I could hear the tributes to Hobie—the phrases “legend,” the “shaper of a culture,” references to the man who “never wanted to wear hard-soled shoes or work anywhere east of the Pacific Coast Highway,” drifting from the speaker.

  His legacy was on this great beach in front of me. His boards were there in abundance. Either they were standing up in the sand in multicolored ranks; or they were being brought in to shore under the arms of droves of exhausted, happy people who had just spent hours riding, floating, wave gliding; or they were still out on the ocean, either waiting with their riders aboard or else plunging, wheeling, soaring, gliding on the great green wave faces or through the Banzai tunnels that swept in, minute by minute, to the enthralled ecstasy of all the watchers and waiters in the sun. Few legacies can be wedded to so singular a pursuit of human happiness than this ancient Polynesian tradition, born of the Pacific, and now found everywhere, made available to so many by inventors such as Hobie Alter.

  George Clark’s legacy is the more enigmatic. He parted ways with Alter soon after the board company became a success, and set up his own company, Clark Foam, to make polyurethane surfboard blanks, to be shaped according to need. He proved a formidable businessman, and by the turn of the millennium had a hammerlock on the industry, controlling nine-tenths of the market for surfboard manufacture in America, 60 percent of the business across the world. And by 2005, twenty million people worldwide were defined as surfers. Clark and his firm were powerful beyond imagination, and he won a reputation for ruthlessness, and worse. He seldom spoke to the press, lived far away from the surfing scene in near-monastic seclusion. He was known for a vindictive streak, and a pitiless and ruthless attitude to competition, quite out of character with the genially relaxed sport that his ability and expertise had long allowed him to dominate. Unlike Hobie Alter, George Clark was decidedly not a well-loved figure.

  Not least because of one moment in his career, when, on December 5, 2005, he suddenly shut down Clark Foam, destroyed all his blanks and concrete master molds, and locked away from prying eyes all his proprietary chemical formulas—effectively denying to everyone else the immense storehouse of technical knowledge and expertise he had accumulated during his four decades in the business.

  The surfing industry was left aghast. There seemed no reason for the closure. Power-madness, some said. Plain meanness, suggested others. Clark himself sent a lengthy and barely coherent fax to his dealerships, suggesting that there was a lawsuit pending against him because of the suggested carcinogenic nature of one of the hardening agents used in his manufacturing process. But no suit was ever filed, and no known complaints of a chemical kind had ever been leveled against his firm.

  An image remains of that day, long since known to surfers as “Blank Monday.” Jeff Divine, one of the sport’s best-regarded photographers, abandoned his customary universe of sunshine and blue waves for a day, and took off for the cloudy inland of the industrial world, where he found and captured an enduringly melancholy moment: it was of a man standing disconsolate in a concrete recycling yard, gazing down at a pile of broken and discarded surfboard molds, dumped there on Grubby Clark’s orders, amid a tangle of rusting rebar and mountains of cement dust.

  The industry took a deep breath, and wondered hard about its future. Why so many board makers had relied on one supplier remains a mystery. It took the industry months to recover, until others built new molds, learned the tricks of the trade, and the spigot was turned back on. Clark never properly explained why he’d acted as he had. He moved to an immense ranch in Oregon, a reclusive octogenarian, the puzzling centerpiece of a swirl of surfing rumors.

  Inevitably, one must suppose, sorry tales like this go hand in glove with the evolution of an industry—for industry is the word today, rather than sport, pastime, or ancient Hawaiian tradition—into such a monster of wealth and power. There are corporate giants who cater to surfing now; and television shows, and magazines, advertising and sponsorships, and all the other necessary evils of juggernautery have tinted and tainted a thing once so pure and innocent. George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku and Alexander Hume Ford and even Jack London would hardly recognize and would scarcely welcome what has happened, I suspect.

  Nor would Kathy Kohner, the five-foot, ninety-five-pound fifteen-year-old who traded stacks of homemade peanut butter sandwiches for a few moments’ use of a Malibu surfboard—and became skilled enough that she would be the Gidget of a novel written by her father, and then in due course the Gidget made even more adorable by Sandra Dee, of the movie that a little-known Malibu director of war movies, Paul Wendkos, was persuaded to make.

  The world of surfing they all knew bore little relation to the industry it had now become.

  The ethos of the surfers th
emselves—the detached, otherworldly, laid-back, relaxed, pleasure-addicted world of sun, sea, sand, and endless pure enjoyment—has left its own legacy, and in unexpected places.

  Industry, most particularly. A handful of company founders—most of their companies based on the American West Coast, and in places close enough to the Pacific wave breaks to allow employees to surf in their spare time—decided that it might be prudent to hire people who surfed, and then to accommodate the firm’s working practices to those employees’ peculiar needs, and hope for good and fair treatment by their workers in return.

  A pioneer of such an idea was Yvon Chouinard, the son of a French Canadian plumber, who became an avowed environmentalist, bird-watcher, and climber—and surfer—and who decided in 1957 to teach himself blacksmithing so that he could make his own climbing equipment, since he found American-made pitons and crampons so wanting. A decade later he similarly found that American-made foul-weather clothing could not adequately protect him and his other wilderness lovers, so in 1970 he established a company, Patagonia, that he said would produce the kind of outdoor clothing he would use. He also declared that he would follow as ethical a path as possible. He explained to me how his own enthusiasm for surfing colored his business practice and his approach to his firm:

  Because of the unpredictability of weather and wave forecasting in the past, a serious surfer was required to choose a lifestyle and a job which allowed one to go surfing whenever the conditions were favorable. One could not plan a schedule to go surfing precisely at 3:00 p.m. next Thursday afternoon. Surfing really took off in the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, which I believe was the height of the fossil fuel “party.” Gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon, a used car could be bought for twenty dollars, and they were so simple any teenager could work on them. Camping was free, and you could always find a part-time job. There was a lot of fat on the land, so it was a perfect time for a counterculture to exist on the fringes of society.

  My Patagonia business philosophy is based on a principle which I might call “Let my people go surfing.” I named it after our flex-time policy here at the company. None of us ever dreamed of working in a normal business environment, so we hired self-motivated and independent folks: surfers and climbers. We leave them to decide when and how to do their jobs. So far it has worked out very well.

  More than a few West Coast companies have since followed suit. The idea of flextime, the informal approach to office wear, the provision of a working environment that one might imagine someone with a penchant for the outdoor life might actually like—such features have inspired enormous firms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple to consider, even to appropriate, some of Patagonia’s management techniques.

  Such company practices may yet be spreading slowly elsewhere. For now, though, they are a principally Pacific phenomenon, born in part in tandem with this sport of the old Hawaiian kings, the Polynesians’ great seaside calling, and alongside what one might these days fairly term the Pacific Ocean’s greatest gift to the outside world beyond.

  1 A wave breaks when the depth of the shore water is less than one-seventh of the distance between adjacent wave crests. The drag at the base of the column of water slows this lower part, leaving the top of the wave speeding along—but unsupported from below. So it breaks, with the onrushing top curling over and beginning to fall down the wave’s leading face. The white mess into which all this eventually disintegrates is the surf—from the Anglo-Saxon term suff, indicating the inrush of water toward the shore.

  2 Heyerdahl wanted to show that Polynesia could have been settled by South American boatmen who drifted with the currents, and that the cultural basis for the Pacific islands is thus all incontrovertibly Incan. Later research showed that Polynesians knew very well how to navigate without instruments, and had long sailed the often considerable distances between the ocean’s islands. DNA results disprove Heyerdahl’s theories, and show that Polynesia was settled from the west, from Asia. His 1947 expedition is seen now as little more than an amusing, though courageous, stunt.

  3 The first of three, whose grandson, Hiram Bingham III, was an early claimant to finding the ruins of the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu, in the Peruvian Andes.

  4 Ireland has tried hard, though with scant success, to claim George Freeth. A film, Waveriders, was made in 2008, to press the case; in the end it was the great waves off Ireland’s west coast, most notably at Mullaghmore in County Sligo, that caught most viewers’ attention, and helped place Ireland prominently among the world’s great surfing centers.

  5 Sweet Caporal was Kinney’s best-known brand, with his factory in New York’s Chelsea making eighteen million a week until 1892, when a fire started by a suspended gasolier destroyed the giant building and its entire stock. The formidably wealthy Kinney was asthmatic, and eventually left for Southern California and clearer air.

  6 Prince Alfred was given the resurrected title to the dukedom of Edinburgh by his mother, Queen Victoria. His life was colorful: on the same transpacific journey that brought him to Hawaii, he was shot in the back in Sydney by a would-be assassin (who was hanged), and then one of his own sons shot himself during the duke’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebrations. The tiny capital of Tristan da Cunha, still a relic of British colonialism in the South Atlantic, is called Edinburgh, named after this most peripatetic of British royals.

  [Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]

  Chapter 4

  A DIRE AND DANGEROUS IRRITATION

  O it’s broken the lock and splintered the door,

  O it’s the gate where they’re turning, turning;

  Their boots are heavy on the floor

  And their eyes are burning.

  —W. H. AUDEN, “O WHAT IS THAT SOUND?”

  One crisp, cold winter’s day in 1968, men with burning eyes fired their heavy machine guns on a small, dilapidated, and barely armed American warship and managed, by doing so, to bring Washington swiftly to its knees.

  The men were North Koreans, and the actions they commenced shortly after noon on Tuesday, January 23, culminated in the capture of the ship, a 335-ton army freighter turned floating electronic eavesdropper named USS Pueblo. The ship’s seizure resulted in one of the most calamitous intelligence debacles the United States had ever suffered, and it was the first time an American naval vessel had been seized on the high seas since the British captured the frigate USS President off the coast of New York City in 1815, more than a century and a half before. But whereas the President’s crew was merely imprisoned in Bermuda and then sent home, the Pueblo’s eighty-two surviving sailors were starved and tortured for the better part of a year, until the American government was compelled to make a craven apology in order to have the half-broken men set free.

  The humiliation caused by this incident was total, deliberate, and public. It was also entirely in keeping with the long-standing behavior patterns of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea, in its formal English-language rendering) toward the United States and its allies in this corner of the western Pacific. The Pueblo incident was just one of hundreds of taunting provocations, some of them lethal, some profoundly dangerous, others ludicrously extravagant, but most of them merely annoying, that have taken place since the ill-tempered signing of an armistice agreement marking the end of the Korean War’s formal hostilities in July 1953. No peace treaty has ever been enacted between the various sides in that brutal three-year brawl: the 1953 agreement merely established rules meant to prevent the resumption of armed hostilities. Considering that today the principal parties have atomic weapons, these rules seem more necessary than ever.

  The roots of the nuisance—and although harsher words can easily be used to describe the pariah state of North Korea, its purely military significance in the Pacific theater, even with its atomic warheads, is reckoned to be little more than a wretched annoyance—lie deeper still than the 1953 armistice. And they are entirely the result of a single hurried decision, by just one man, with just
one map, that brought about the division of the Korean Peninsula. And both the man and the map were decidedly American.

  The map was a large, wall-mounted, small-scale (552 miles to the inch at the equator), National Geographic Society map of the Pacific Ocean. It had been designed by the society’s legendary chief cartographer, Albert Bumstead, and its photo lettering was designed by the equally famed typographer Charles Riddiford. The map was pinned up in the Pentagon office of George Marshall, who was then the army chief of staff, and who had used it to plan the movements of American forces in and around the ocean.

  In Washington it was nighttime on August 14, 1945. Five days before, the second atomic bomb had been dropped, with devastating effect, on Nagasaki, and Emperor Hirohito, in his thin, reedy, and hitherto publicly unheard voice, was on Japanese radio telling his people that the fighting was now over and that Japan would surrender, bringing the war in the Pacific to an end.

  Those listening in the Pentagon were relieved and satisfied, though it was a satisfaction muted by the sober realization that their supposed allies and friends, the Soviets, were now scything their way fast and furiously past the defeated Japanese units in Manchuria, on Sakhalin Island, and into Korea. And as the Communist Russians did so, they were claiming immense new tracts of territory. Fear about the long-term implications of this land grab dampened any celebration inside the Pentagon.