Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  Yet stepping off the tour was a mixed bag. Musical success didn’t come immediately, and Gerlach found that he actually didn’t like the celebrity and loss of anonymity wrought by MTV. He stepped out of the spotlight, choosing a low-budget life chasing waves and photo incentives around the world. It was a pretty decent life, but he was no longer a rock star. Brad and his father, Joe, founded an entirely new type of team-based surf competition, which they called “The Game,” and Joe invented a revolutionary downhill skateboard called a Carveboard, whose turns greatly mimic those on a surfboard. Neither effort made either one of them rich.

  Joe is in his seventies today, and I once asked him if he looks back and sees much of himself in his son. He says it’s something he thinks about often. “At first, I’d only notice [similarities] when I’d see the bad stuff,” he says. “When I want to advise him on something and he doesn’t listen. But then, sure, he surprised me sometimes. I mean, I used to think I was wasting time with the life I chose—my friends were in jobs and VP executive positions, building up collateral in their jobs, and what am I doing? But then I realized, I learned more than all those guys put together. I mean, I had to do all this shit myself. I negotiated, I traveled, all this stuff. It was my way to keep my freedom—from having to have a real job. Then Brad—he ends up doing the same kind of radical stuff as me, and I never told him to do any of those things. You go for broke, dude. I’ve done it all my life. So has Brad.”

  Through the 1990s, though they didn’t realize it, Gerlach and Parsons were on a collision course. They were not what you’d call friends after they stepped off the tour, but they were making the same choices: preferring the quality of their surfing life over competitive glory, world titles, and celebrity. They occasionally crossed paths in the water, particularly at Todos Santos, but were initially nothing more than cordial. Gerlach loved to surf Todos, but he also possessed an appreciation for his own mortality that Parsons and a few of his friends—like Evan Slater and a few of the boys from Maverick’s—seemed to lack.

  “I was in awe of Mike,” says photographer Rob Brown. “At the same time, he was just scaring the hell out of me. He would absolutely, 100 percent take off on anything. He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to charge it,’ he just did it. One time I taped an expensive water housing to the nose of his board. He paddled out and took off on a 30-foot closeout—got absolutely murdered—and we never saw the camera again. I was like, ‘Mike, what the hell?’ He just said, ‘I’m so sorry, but God, I just had to go.’ He just couldn’t pass anything up. It was bizarre. There was a period where I was seriously worried that he was losing his mind.”

  “Rob’s observation is pretty good,” Parsons says. “I’d watch footage of guys at Waimea, and they’d always come up. At Todos, there was a series of winters where I felt I could take any wave and survive it. I’d take off from a place where I knew I wouldn’t make the wave because I just wanted to see what would happen. One time, I sat way out for a couple of hours and waited till the next really big set came through. I took off and got to the bottom of the wave. The lip landed on me and I put my knee right through my board—a horrendous wipeout. I don’t think that even slowed me down. I went even harder after that.”

  One day around the turn of the twenty-first century, no one seems to remember exactly when, Parsons was out towsurfing small- to medium-size Todos Santos with his buddy Taylor Knox. A panga showed up bearing Brad Gerlach. Gerlach was curious as hell about the ski, and eventually Parsons offered his former enemy a turn with the rope. Gerlach was suddenly making big, swooping carves—the sort of gouges he might have made at 6-foot Rincon, but at Todos. Holy shit, this was fun. Maybe even addictive.

  Gerlach had never really spent a lot of time talking to Parsons. He always thought Parsons was so serious. Instead, it quickly became evident to the former enemies that they had a hilarious, adventure-filled past to look back on and laugh about. In fact, Parsons made Gerlach laugh like hell. They started recalling contests, paddling competitions during the NSSA years around the Huntington Pier, when Gerlach was so hungover he could barely see straight, but God if he let Parsons beat him. The time Gerlach convinced a buddy to sound a contest horn a second before Parsons caught a wave. There were so many moments that each wanted to kill the other, but said nothing. If only they had looked past the surface—what each thought the other represented at the age of nineteen—they might have found a perfect yin-yang balance. Had they been there to critique and encourage, instead of willfully disdain and misunderstand one another, each might have eventually walked away with a world title.

  One thing was also obvious. They were complete fiends for this new sport, and they suddenly became perennially bitchy and inseparable best friends. “When we started to hang out before we surfed Cortes, I was just blown away at how much of a nutcase, what an addict Mike is for big waves,” says Gerlach.

  Parsons will readily admit it. Up until the death of Mark Foo, he didn’t really think about dying in big waves. Didn’t admit that it could happen to him. It wasn’t really until he actually saw Foo lying in his open casket that the reality of what had happened crashed down around him. “That I was there firsthand to have that experience. I was right down there underwater with him in my arms,” he says. “Just this realization, you can just…drown. Everything was running through my head for weeks on end. I still have crazy dreams today, when I think back. What could I have done differently? How did that happen?”

  Afterward, Parsons paddled out with Ken Bradshaw at 6-foot Sunset Beach—the kind of conditions he would have previously laughed off—and was utterly terrified. He wondered if he’d ever manage to muster the nerve to paddle out at Todos or Maverick’s again.

  Thinking back today, he furrows his brow and takes a deep breath. “You know, I suppose in the back of my mind, I guess I always knew something like that could happen. But going through it so vividly. Riding the wave behind Foo and bumping into him underwater. All that. It was as hard as you could ever lay it on. I guess that sounds kind of weird. I mean it’s nothing—it’s nothing compared to the fact that he drowned. I mean, Mark lost his life, so who cares what happened to me. But at the same time, it was so real. You can read about a guy freezing to death on Mount Everest and you could say, ‘Wow, that’s so heavy. I can’t believe people could walk by this guy, and he’s freezing to death in a little cave.’ But if you’re the guy who sits down next to him and almost freezes to death yourself, it’s obviously a lot different. What if those two waves took out three people instead? Because it was that close.”

  After countless hours of conversation with his dad and friends about the loss and the fear, Parsons came to understand that even if he had realized that he was bumping against Foo underwater, he could have done little to save him. There were no rescue crews out on Jet Skis, and even if Parsons had somehow managed to paddle back and alert everyone else, Foo would have already been down for too long.

  For a year or so, Parsons even thought about giving up big waves. “Ian Cairns—he had a horrendous wipeout at the Smirnoff event at Waimea years ago. Injured his neck forever in that one wipeout. He was one of the few guys who admitted, ‘That changed my perspective and my entire life. I never wanted to drown. I’m not going to risk my life like that again.’”

  Then, on December 23, 1995, a year to the day after Mark Foo died in California, a talented Californian named Donnie Solomon drowned in huge surf at Waimea Bay. It was the first time a Surfer of repute had died at Waimea since Dickie Cross’s disappearance in 1943. Then on February 13, 1997, well-liked North Shore big wave Surfer Todd Chesser got caught inside a massive wave and drowned at an offshore spot on Oahu called Outside Alligators.

  Bill Sharp said it was as though a fifty-year run in the casino had suddenly turned up three sets of snake eyes. If Mark Foo, Donnie Solomon, and Todd Chesser could drown, any big wave Surfer could check out at any time. The entire sport went through a mortality gut check.

  But Parsons didn’t quit. Unlike Ian Cairn
s, the very real possibility of dying wasn’t enough to scare him off, and unlike Greg Noll, he hadn’t yet found a wave that pulled the monkey off his back. However, he promised himself that he would do things differently: There would be no more just leaping off a boat and paddling out into the unknown without studying a spot. Where were guys lining up? What were the currents? What were the escape routes? What were his lifesaving backups? If he had none, he might actually be content not to surf. At least that’s what he convinced himself.

  In the end, despite their claims to the contrary, I would argue that the deaths of Foo, Solomon, and Chesser didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, fundamentally change surfers like Mike, Brad, Peter Mel, Skindog, and Evan Slater. They would become a bit more careful, but during the ensuing decade, they would become, paradoxically, even more determined, more dangerous, and more addicted.

  Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach contemplate their great white whale on a raw winter’s day in 2003. Photo: Grant Ellis.

  Of course, addicted is a word fraught with peril when discussing something like surfing, which would seem to most to be an entirely optional undertaking. But in discussing Mike Parsons and his desire for big waves, Rob Brown, Chris Mauro, and Brad Gerlach all used the word. More than one big wave Surfer has merited the term, and it gets at the distinction between wanting to paddle out versus literally needing to. However, I wondered, could Mike Parsons really be addicted to surfing big waves? Was such an addiction even possible? Rob Brown, who has covered big wave surfing for much of his life, assured me that it was.

  In fact, he says, it’s the only explanation. Over time, he says, “You come to realize—big wave surfing—it’s not about size or muscles. It’s really in your mind. I mean, of course you have to be fit, but growing up, I didn’t have the ability to surf those waves, and I didn’t want it. The ability to sacrifice and be near death every time—these guys are so comfortable with it and they’re so addicted that they just don’t realize how radical it is. I’ve photographed Indy car racers—Ari Luyendyk and Roberto Guerrero. They would risk locking wheels at 240 miles an hour—but they’d never go out in two-foot waves. And I’d feel safer in an Indy car than in these big waves. I mean, when you crash, the car stops—and you can have a doctor pull you out. You could drive straight into a concrete building and survive. At Todos or Maverick’s the crash is just the beginning of your problems. The building is going to fall on you. You’re going to get hit a number of times, and you’re all alone. I guarantee you, I could not survive a single wave. Wipe out and it would be instant death by either drowning or heart attack. Even if it’s a near-death experience—guys like Mike, they just laugh it off. They just paddle back out. It’s really weird. I’m not sure they even get it. The bottom line is that on Earth, I don’t think there’s a more dangerous thing you can do.”

  Given that, could there be a more self-destructive, egocentric choice for a lifestyle? Mike, Skindog, Pete, and Evan are married with children. Gerlach has a steady girlfriend whom he loves dearly. Every time these guys paddle off into the unknown, you could argue that they’re embarking on a quest no less daunting, deadly, and selfish than that of Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless or the crew of the Andrea Gail.

  But how much of a choice is it? You might say, well, the crew of the Andrea Gail had to feed themselves and fishing was all they knew, so they had no choice but to motor off. And yet, if they really wanted to, each man could have found less-dangerous ways to make a living. In fact, I see real parallels between Parsons and his friends and Sebastian Junger’s ill-fated crew. I’m fortunate to share a dingy little office at a fishing dock outside Charleston, South Carolina, and I have regular occasion to shoot the shit with a crew of tight-knit fishermen. When the crew of the Hailey Marie or China Girl come in after being slammed around in a nor’easter or battling a fourteen-foot tiger shark, they’re exhausted, but they’re also lit up—energized and alive. And they are no more Constitutionally fit for an office job than Snips is for selling real estate. Sometimes they hate their jobs, but more often it’s obvious that there’s nothing they’d rather be doing. Such muddy, bloody work is chosen because they’d be lost without it, and without the ocean.

  When I asked Parsons why he surfed big waves, he first went back to his childhood. To the heckling he endured at school, to his love of competition, to his almost insatiable need to be the best Surfer in the water, and to a gnawing need to stand on the shoulders of giants. But that was as far as he could go. He didn’t really know where the drive originated—only that he had it.

  I asked Skindog and Pete Mel. Both said part of it had to do with the mutual pushing of the wild-assed circle of friends they grew up with—a group of surfing hellions known as the Santa Cruz Ratpack. But that didn’t explain everything. “Sometimes I bust on, why am I doing this?” says Skindog. “Well, I enjoy it. Do you enjoy it to the point of dying? No, but I do enjoy it. So why do I keep doing it?”

  Wherever the impulse comes from, Skindog and his lovely wife, Annoushka, are already seeing similar traits in their six-year-old daughter, Aianna, and towheaded two-year-old son, Koa—especially Koa. On the day we spoke, standing in their kitchen, Koa was sucking a bucktooth-shaped pacifier and hurling pieces of his model train at me. “Quit it!” Skinny yelled, scooping him up and giving him a big tummy raspberry. “The kid scares me,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “He’s already stuck his hand in a stove vent and nearly pulled his finger off. Next day, he’s doing the same thing with his other hand. I watch him and say, ‘What’s wrong with that guy? Is he stupid, or programmed for it?’”

  I think back to Brad Gerlach and his reckless, high-diving father and to the manic, driven competitive energy of Mike’s father, Bob. I tell Skinny, maybe Koa’s programmed for it, because maybe Dad is too.

  In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud was the first person to posit a genetic component to what we might call “thrill-seeking” behavior. He suggested that there were “torpid types,” who felt best at a low level of excitement, while “vivacious types” craved excitement. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that a curious young psychologist at the University of Delaware named Marvin Zuckerman took Freud’s ideas and put them under the microscope. He asked test subjects a litany of questions: Do you like to drink, gamble, or experiment with drugs? Does monogamy make you happy—or would you prefer multiple sex partners? Might you enjoy leaping out of an airplane “just for the thrill of it”? Around 17 percent of humans, he found, are drawn to risky, sensory-stimulating behavior like moths to a flame. They also tend to be less religious, laugh more, dominate social group settings, and love testing exotic foods.

  Zuckerman coined a term. These people were high-sensation seekers (sometimes abbreviated HSS). In short, they’re prisoners, slaves, and addicts to adrenaline.

  Zuckerman is quick to point out that sensation-seeking behavior runs along a complex continuum, and no two sensation seekers are alike. But when it comes to potentially deadly activities like big wave surfing, there are common threads. “Part of it goes with how you expect to feel in a situation,” he told me in a telephone interview. “Even the risk of dying. If you expect to feel very anxious, it’s not very pleasant to anticipate a sensation. But with the high-sensation seeker, the anticipated possible sensation outbalances the fear of dying.” When I asked Zuckerman about big wave surfing, specifically, he said there were real similarities between guys like Mike Parsons, Travis Pastrana, and a hellbent skydiver. “Even before they do something for the first time [such as landing a double jump, parachuting, or dropping into a massive wave], high-sensation seekers also tend to estimate a risk as lower than low-sensation seekers. After they’ve done it a few times and survived, the risk appraisal is lowered even further still. They feel confident they can handle a situation.”

  A couple of decades back, Mark Foo famously said, “If you want to ride the ultimate wave, you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” Many dismissed Foo’s remark as glib, even cynical marketing hyperbole
, but was it really hype? Really, Foo expressed a genuine truth that all his big wave surfing friends understood implicitly: A major component of the thrill that draws them is risking death. What few understand is where that truth and impulse comes from.

  All the factors that lead to HSS behavior are not yet known, but one source is clearly, and genetically, biochemical. In 2006, researchers discovered a gene, called D4DR, that helps regulates the body’s release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps keep us on an even keel. Those with an inordinately long version of this so-called sensation-seeking gene possess an exquisite, almost bipolar sensitivity to blood dopamine levels. At what most of us would consider normal dopamine levels, HSS subjects feel low, even depressed. When a heavy situation triggers a dopamine release, glands squirt out adrenaline, endorphins, and estradiol. The blood becomes a nitroglycerine stew, and this lights up pleasure centers of the brain, yielding a high those who have never tried crack or heroin would find difficult to conceive. “Adrenaline is actually a peripheral,” said Zuckerman. “It affects the muscles. The main neurotransmitters are noradrenalin or norepinephrine. When those are aroused, the whole brain is activated. Then dopamine also creates arousal—a pleasurable arousal. The heart pounds. Sugars are released. You can have the same level of heart rate and blood pressure increase as you would during an orgasm.”

  And just like a drug addict, over time the sensation seeker often requires a bigger and bigger rush for a fix.