The boys broke into laughter.
“It just sank, like a brick in water,” Larry exclaimed.
“We better get out of here,” Lee said, catching a glance at the irate driver and his female passenger. “They’re pissed.”
Deep enough to keep the car doors from opening, but high enough that the passengers couldn’t escape through their windows in any sort of graceful manner, the hole was engineered to guarantee their safe escape. Since the fall didn’t damage the car, the driver suffered only disappointment and bruised pride, knowing his night of whispering sweet nothings into his date’s ears would now be spent waiting for a tow truck.
As they had done during those nighttime ambushes, the boys scurried away from the C. Reiss Coal Company via the dusty utility road, unsure where the cop had gone and how closely he was following them.
“If we get caught, don’t forget your alias,” Larry reminded everyone. To avoid any conflicting stories, the boys had rehearsed their alibis, which involved impersonating schoolmates they had chosen. They could recite personal information about the schoolmate—from addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers to parents’ names and Zodiac birth signs—in the event the police caught up to them for questioning. If they had been half as interested in applying their talents toward high school theater productions, Sheboygan would’ve been overflowing with Hollywood-caliber actors.
While fleeing north along the beach, Larry, who was a couple strides ahead of Kevin and Lee, made a hard left turn inland exactly four jetties past North Point. Maintaining their brisk pace, the three boys headed up a service road running alongside a large chain-link fence heavily covered in trees, plants, and vines—foliage thick enough to obscure the “Sheboygan Zoo” service signs dotted along the fence. Overcome by a foul odor emanating from behind the fence, Kevin groaned, “What’s that smell?”
Neither of the Williams brothers replied, focusing instead on their hike up the steep incline ahead. Hearing strange snorts from behind the fence, Kevin slowed to investigate. “Smells like manure,” he said.
When he reached a clearing in the foliage, Kevin crept up to the fence to see what was causing the smell. On the other side, stepping out of the shadows, a smelly mass of fur nearly six feet tall and weighing over eight hundred pounds lumbered over to him. With a broken-off horn and a wicked look in eye, the meanest junkyard bison east of the Mississippi River peered at Kevin through the chain-link fence.
“Better step back,” Larry warned as he and Lee stood a good ten feet away from the fence.
As if on cue, the bison thundered into a charge toward Kevin—who froze in fear and fascination. The bison bellowed as it galloped toward him at full speed before slamming its huge head into the fence, which shuddered and bent from the massive impact. Kevin raced off screaming up the utility road.
“I think he might have pooped a little bit,” Larry said.
“The bison or Kevin?” Lee snickered.
“Well, we shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out where he ran—just follow the trail of pee to his house,” Larry said, pointing to a thin line of wetness that led up the road.
Laughing harder, Lee said, “The buffalo bit never gets old.”
Larry agreed, adding, “At least until the zoo takes away his credit card so he can’t charge anymore.”
They sauntered up the service road alongside Kevin’s freshly tinkled trail before heading into the myriad alleyways and residential streets, undetected by the understaffed police force. Since Sheboygan maintained one of the lowest crime rates in the nation—a place where people felt safe enough to not lock their doors—it wasn’t surprising they only had to use their acting skills with Kevin that day and not with the police. Once again their luck had held out. They had enjoyed a fun day wreaking havoc at an empty factory, had been chased by the police, and had come out of it unscathed with another great story to tell.
Somewhat shaken by their close brush with the law, Lee and Larry decided to spend the rest of the summer hanging out in the family garage with their buddies, swapping stories and listening to music. While the Beatles dominated the airwaves that summer, the Williams garage rocked to the guitar-driven melodies of Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and surf-rock pioneers Dick Dale, the Bel-Airs, and the Pyramids. The rapid guitar picking and driving beats seemed to pull the sound and feel of the ocean right into Sheboygan.
With lots of free time on their hands, the boys began refining their amateur weatherman skills. By calculating basic information provided by local television, radio, and newspaper weather reports, they discovered that the two principal factors meteorologists used to predict wave conditions were temperature and atmospheric pressure. Deciphering those levels not only determined how major air masses passed across the continent, but also indicated air molecule movement, resulting in how much wind there would be at any given surf spot. With this method for predicting ideal surf sessions, often accurate up to five days in advance, the boys itched even harder to get back onto the water with the winter surf season quickly approaching. But nobody could predict the series of events that would leave Lee watching his friends surfing from the shore.
During that summer of 1969, Lee Williams lost his appendix, not in a gambling bet, but rather during an emergency appendectomy. For the freshman at Sheboygan South High School, the initial operation was a success. But as with most emergency surgeries, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Jack and Mary had just finished packing up the car for their annual camping trip up north. Delayed for three days, Jack finally decided Lee had recovered enough and persuaded the doctors to discharge him from the hospital with the promise that “Lee will do nothing but relax during our trip.”
As soon as the Williams family cruiser pulled out of the hospital parking lot, Lee proved to be as impatient as his dad. He began to build his case to do everything he planned to do while camping—surgery be damned. His constant nagging made the four-hour car ride from Sheboygan through Green Bay and across to Minocqua downright grinding on Jack, Mary, Larry, and Lee’s camping buddy for the weekend, Kevin Groh. By the time Jack pulled the car into the lakefront campsite, Lee had talked his parents into letting him and Kevin go out on the boat under the condition he couldn’t fish or do anything to aggravate the stitches.
As the rotting wooden boat pulled away from the dock, Lee promised, “I’m just going to sit here and enjoy the nice weather while Kevin fishes.”
With not much doing out on the water, the boys relaxed in the serene setting. “I could get used to this,” Kevin said.
“Too peaceful for me,” Lee said. “Sitting around makes me nervous.”
Then, an hour later—BANG!
“Fish!” Kevin shouted as his rod bent violently in a deep arc on the cusp of snapping. As a long, dark shape pulled hard at the bait while racing alongside the boat, Kevin swerved his fishing rod toward the portside. Summoning all the strength he could muster within his fifteen-year-old frame, he couldn’t control the lunging fish as it writhed in erratic figure eights. It thrashed and splashed and then leapt into the air. Seeing the size of the fish, Lee shouted, “What is it?”
Focused on fighting the fish, Kevin just shook his head. “That’s gotta be over forty inches long,” Lee said.
The flailing fish surged up out of the water again, pulling against the lure in its mouth.
“It’s a muskie,” Kevin blurted through clenched teeth. “They’re not called the freshwater shark for nothing.”
After the powerful fish pounced back into the water, crashing through the glassy surface, it raced away at almost thirty miles per hour in hopes of breaking from the hook. Then it exploded out of the water again, silhouetted against the setting sun. Following a fifteen-minute battle between hand and fin, Kevin drew the muskie close to the boat, though the feisty fish was still unwilling to concede as Lee lowered the net into the water. Lashing out in a last bid to escape, the muskie showed its massive jaws and teeth to Lee, who tried to wrestle it into the net.
“How do
I lift the thing up without losing my fingers?” he said.
“Chicks dig scars,” Kevin offered. Lee managed to haul the netted fish into the boat without bloodshed.
“Okay, where’s the camera?” Kevin asked proudly. “We gotta get a picture of this for bragging rights.”
“Camera?” Lee asked.
“How else are we going to prove we caught a muskie? This is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement.”
As Kevin practiced how he would stand with his trophy catch for the photo, Lee sheepishly mumbled, “We left it in the car.”
“You left it in the car?” Kevin shouted.
“What are you getting all angry for? You never get hostile like this.”
“I’ve never caught a killer forty-seven-inch muskie before.”
“I’ll vouch for you,” Lee offered.
Kevin shook his head. “Gotta have a picture. Nobody’ll believe us.” Then he took a deep breath and was about to lower the fish back into the water.
“Let’s show my folks,” Lee said. “Everybody will believe them. I’ll keep the fish underwater while you drive the boat back. We can set it free there.”
“Deal,” Kevin said.
By the time the boys returned to the dock, dusk had settled in and the last rays of the setting sun reached over the horizon. Jack and Mary were lounging on their plastic folding chairs, listening to the radio and reading the evening newspaper.
“Wow, that’s quite a catch!” Jack said.
But when Mary saw it, she screamed.
“Mom, it’s just a fish,” Lee reassured her.
“You’re covered in blood!” Mary cried out. She pointed to a wide bloodstain on Lee’s white shorts.
Lee looked down to where his appendix used to be. “I split my stitches!”
“We’ve got to get you to a hospital.” Mary bolted from her chair to find the car keys.
“We’re in the middle of the North Woods,” Lee said. “It’s so far away the only thing that ever hassled Al Capone up here were the mosquitoes.” He knew a trip to the hospital would bring a quick end to his vacation. “It’s no big deal. The bleeding will stop in a minute.”
A professional nurse’s aid, Mary wasn’t about to take medical advice from a teenager. She marched her boy straight into the car with a towel wrapped over the bleeding wound. At the hospital, doctors soon determined the scar couldn’t be re-stitched because it had already been stitched once, leaving them to butterfly-stitch it shut. The recovery time on the new appendix scar forced Lee to avoid any physical activity and, more importantly, kept him out of the water for two months. For Lee Williams, that was purgatory.
Left to miss out on the prime surfing conditions, Lee grew increasingly frustrated and depressed. While Larry and their mutual friends went surfing every weekend, he was left under his mother’s strict supervision at home, and he knew better than to cross her a second time.
Larry posing with his 10-foot, 2-inch Wardy with double ten-ounce volan glass and thirteen redwood balsa stingers in 1969
To escape his boredom, Lee bought a Super 8 motion picture camera with some of his paper-route money, knowing he’d be laid up for quite some time. Friends bought him film as “get well” gifts, and he soon found himself standing on the Sheboygan shoreline, looking to experiment with his new toy. In his viewfinder, Lee spotted Larry, Kevin, Chuck Walker, Rich Kuitert, and Jeff Schultz, all patiently waiting for the next great Lake Michigan wave. As the rolling film hummed through the camera, Lee enjoyed his new status as an amateur filmmaker.
For the next few weeks, Lee captured some of the earliest known motion pictures of Great Lakes surfing in existence. Though Super 8 cameras and film at that time did not feature sound (which arrived in 1973), Lee experimented with creative camera angles that caused the surfing maneuvers of Larry, Kevin, Chuck, Rich, and Jeff to leap off the celluloid frames. The grainy, washed-out footage captured the boys’ pure exhilaration of surfing Lake Michigan—emotions that still photographs could never reveal. For that brief time while Lee was on the sidelines, or shorelines in this case, he unknowingly contributed to the legacy of Sheboygan’s early days of surfing. But as soon as his doctor allowed him to return to the water, Lee put down his camera and grabbed his surfboard without hesitation. He was a surfer at heart, not a filmmaker.
Whenever the surfing conditions weren’t optimal on the water, Chuck Walker’s dad let the boys take out his sixteen-foot Starcraft boat. “If you can get it in the water and pay for the gas, have at it,” he told them. That summer, the sight of a half-dozen teenage boys dragging a boat on a trailer down the streets of Sheboygan without a car was not uncommon. Pulling it along like a rickshaw, the boys would have had a hard time convincing an inquiring Sheboygan police officer that the boat wasn’t stolen, if their paths ever crossed.
Once they got to the beach, they were left to drag the boat across the sand into the water—no easy feat with the twenty-five horsepower engine strapped to its back. With the smell of burning gasoline in the air, the garden of bubbles created in the water by the boat’s engine signified that the Sheboygan surfers could begin towing themselves from behind on their surfboards. Holding onto a tow-cable, much like a water-skier, while accelerating to speeds of eighteen to twenty-four miles per hour, they began performing very primitive edging techniques. When they moved outside of the boat’s wake, they gained speed as the rope tightened. Rapidly cutting back toward the wake and with the assisted acceleration, they caught air when they hit the boat-generated ridge of water. Long before the days of computer-generated hydrodynamic fin and integral molded rail designs, the Sheboygan surfers were unwittingly part of an underground movement across the globe that would became known as wakeboarding.
While the origins of the sport and its exact name have been hotly contested throughout its brief history, one aspect has stayed the same—ever since surfers have had access to motorboats, they’ve been towing each other around on surfboards. From those inauspicious early days, wakeboarding has become one of the fastest-growing board sports in the world. Akin to snowboarding and skateboarding on the water, it has since become part of the pop culture lexicon after ESPN’s X-Games added it in the 1990s. Crowds couldn’t get enough of the boarders’ acrobatic flips and 720-degree turns, and the sport took on a terminology all its own with tantrums, backrolls, scarecrows, boardslides, half-cabs, and whirly-birds.
Thanks to their ingenuity, the Sheboygan surfers turned what would’ve been lackluster days on Lake Michigan’s quiet waters into adrenaline-filled wakeboarding adventures. And when summer faded into fall and then into a hostile winter, the boys were caught in a war of attrition as they tried to maneuver the boat into the water over ice-covered beaches. As if signifying the end to their wakeboarding season, the peaking ice shelves along the shoreline began breaking off to form jagged, free-floating icebergs.
When ice shelves formed along Sheboygan’s shoreline by November, the handful of daring souls with the skills and guts necessary to ride among the icebergs and slushy outcroppings began squeezing into their eight-millimeter wetsuits and waxing their surfboards. The same conditions that enticed Lee and Larry Williams to start surfing again were exactly why Sheboygan’s five miles of coastline never received the sort of tourist-trampled traffic their surfing counterparts in Hawaii, Indonesia, or Tahiti received. With the nearest ocean over seven hundred miles away, frostbite, not shark bites, had become the Lake Michigan surfer’s most dangerous enemy.
Over three hundred miles long, one hundred miles wide, and covering twenty-two thousand square miles of open water, Lake Michigan has rarely been referred to as a lake by local surfers, but rather an inland ocean. Considered to be the most-often-surfed Great Lake due to the numerous cities and beaches along both its western and eastern shores, Lake Michigan’s bustling metropolises of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Gary, Indiana, are home to approximately ten million people, more than one-fifth the total population of the entire Great Lakes basin. Though it lacks the thousands of miles ne
eded to build ocean-like waves, Lake Michigan, with 1,180 cubic miles of water, is the only lake scientists have documented to have small, lunar tidal effects. Peaks in water levels come twice a day on Lake Michigan, just as in the oceans, but the inch- to four-inch changes are often marked by far more substantial water level shifts driven by winds. The small but deeply rooted surf culture is dependent solely on wind-generated waves, often nine seconds apart, whereas the ocean’s are normally twenty-one to twenty-three seconds apart.
Surfing in Sheboygan is as multi-dimensional as the lakes themselves—part extreme sport, part science, and part therapy. The Great Lakes feature over eleven thousand miles of coastline, which is more than the entire east and west coasts of the US combined. These inland oceans host the highest surfing on earth, with surfers on the western end catching waves some six hundred feet above sea level and those on the eastern end riding waves at nearly two hundred and forty feet above sea level. The freshwaters of the Great Lakes pose several differences to the saltwater-filled oceans, not least the nearly twenty percent decrease in board buoyancy that forces surfers to compensate with longer, thicker boards, up to ten feet long. With the majority of surfers equally split between Lakes Erie and Michigan, followed by Ontario, Huron and Superior, the Great Lakes surf spirit goes beyond regional or even national boundaries.
Centrally located along nearly four hundred miles of Lake Michigan coastline, the Sheboygan shores receive waves that blow in from every direction after developing and energizing themselves across nearly two hundred miles of open water. By comparison, Chicago, which is one hundred twenty miles south, only receives decent waves from strong north winds because of its location on Lake Michigan’s southern tip.
Also influencing a wave’s size and shape are the constructive interferences located at the end of the water’s long journey. Nearly all the best surf spots on the Great Lakes have a sandbar, a jetty, or, in Sheboygan’s case, both. As the swirling turbulence of waves excavates a trough on a sandy lake bottom, Sheboygan’s offshore sandbars are continually reformed and relocated as sand is carried and eventually deposited toward the beach. Jetties are manmade structures that extend perpendicular to the shore, often designed to influence currents and protect shorelines from the constant battering of waves. Sheboygan has both a north and south pier, which were constructed of reinforced concrete, steel, and boulders. Placed in strategic locations, they interfere with normal wind and wave patterns, contributing to the oncoming waves’ size and shape while forcing waves to follow new paths toward shore.
Some Like It Cold Page 8