Some Like It Cold

by William Povletich

  Larry and his ice-covered wetsuit on New Year’s Day 2010

  “Happy New Year,” the greeting bellowed through the fog. “I got your message, but I figured you weren’t crazy enough to surf in this soup alone.” Mark Rakow appeared through the mist, kneeling on an eleven-foot longboard.

  “I’m not crazy,” Larry replied. “But I’d be certifiable if I passed up these curling barrels.”

  For the next couple of hours, the two jumped off six-foot icebergs into clean five-foot peelers. Since the air temperature was just twenty degrees, along with fifteen-mile-per-hour gusts, the early stages of hypothermia left neither one of them thinking too clearly. But when Mark’s board chunked into a wall of foam, he confessed, “That’s enough for me. I’m turning purple and already late for a family brunch.”

  Larry mumbled through frozen lips, “I’ll follow you in on the next good wave.”

  Mark gave a surfer’s nod before wading back to shore, soon losing sight of his friend. As the storm waves thundered in, Larry felt a rush of adrenaline. Letting a few smaller waves pass, he picked one that offered a perfect ride to end his day. When he reached the shallows, he dismounted, noticing the icy embankment near the shoreline had grown. When he was retrieving his board, a seething white wall of foam shoved him toward shore. Crashing against the jagged icebergs, Larry found himself trapped. The icy landing where he had entered the water only a few hours earlier had frozen shut. The wall of ice between him and the shore was shaped like a frozen wave ready to curl, arcing nearly fifteen feet overhead, making it impossible to climb. Walking through waist-deep water, Larry stayed optimistic he’d find a route through the blockade of sand-covered ice.

  As the storm conditions intensified, the surf pummeled against the ice floes, breaking apart gigantic chunks of ice, which crashed and overturned in the churning waves. Instead of avoiding the massive icebergs, which weighed as much as ten tons, Larry determined his only chance of getting out of the water before turning into a human popsicle would be by timing a jump onto one of them and hoping he could hold on. With his ten-foot longboard under his arm, he knew the prospects of pulling off the stunt were slim, but so were the odds he’d survive in the water much longer.

  With so much water washing off the towering icebergs, he had to time his jump just right. If he didn’t stick the landing, he would roll off the side of the iceberg as soon as another wave crashed into it and would fall into the churning current below. Even worse, he could be crushed between two floating icebergs. Or if he were to hold on after sticking the landing, but slip even slightly, he could get his leg caught and snapped off. But before he could jump, he’d have to leverage himself out of the water, which was no small feat in itself.

  Larry threw his longboard on top of the landlocked iceberg and began pulling himself on top of the ice. As he struggled up the ice, the edge broke loose, dropping him back into the water. He lifted himself up again, but the shelf broke off, plopping him into the water. For the next twenty minutes, he kept prying himself out of the water, knowing at some point he’d find a chunk of ice that would support his weight. As the snot-filled icicles formed under his nose, Larry knew conditions would only grow colder.

  Finally, he managed to scale the iceberg and scramble over it toward safety. He was able to make it out of the lake, but by then he was utterly exhausted and feared he wouldn’t be able to make the twenty-yard walk to his truck. As hypothermia set in, he was losing the use of his arms and legs. Pausing to catch his breath on the ice-covered beach was not an option. He ran as fast as he could—looking like a charging rhino with a broken leg—but when he reached the truck his hands were too cold to grip his keys. “Am I going to freeze to death while standing outside my car?” he said to himself.

  He saw the barren square of pavement where Mark’s truck had been parked not long ago and felt truly alone in his predicament. Growing desperate, he considered putting the key in his mouth, knowing it would freeze to his lips and probably break off some teeth but would warm up enough to turn the lock.

  Despite the hypothermia impeding his thought process, Larry chose, instead, to balance his car key between the fingers of his ice-covered gloves. He lunged forward toward the door lock, puncturing the thin layer of ice covering it, and using his entire body weight to shift open the lock, he heard a click—open! He jumped inside the truck and blasted the heat. As his fingertips tingled with the return of blood flow, he grasped the gearshift, ground the truck into drive, and bolted home.

  Once again a Williams twin had survived a brush with death. Although a warm shower helped thaw him out that afternoon, the painful shivering attacks he suffered throughout the spring were an unmistakable reminder of what he had put his body through at the start of the year.

  That same summer, Mitch also began suffering from inexplicable surges of pain. Always active and a regular at aerobics, she grew frustrated when a nagging ache slowed her down. Originally diagnosed with a pulled muscle in her lower back, Mitch assumed the source of the pain came from doing too much housework, lifting a heavy pot roast out of the oven, or cleaning the garage with Lee a few weeks earlier. Despite doctors prescribing a cocktail of pain medications, her symptoms would only subside for a couple of weeks before her dosage needed to be increased. As the school year progressed at Farnsworth Middle School, Mitch kept teaching her English as a Second Language classes despite excruciating bouts of pain. She knew something wasn’t right, but as the family matriarch, she had to stay strong and keep her household stable.

  “We’ll battle through this together,” she reassured Lee and Trevor. “We always have.” Her bold statement had twenty-six years of a solid marriage behind it. Mitch and Lee’s relationship had been based on trust. Her subtle sense of humor was the perfect complement to Lee’s over-the-top shenanigans. It seemed her sarcasm was the only way she could express her frustrations with the intensifying pain. “It’ll take more than straw to break this camel’s back,” she said through gritted teeth.

  Lee worried about her deteriorating condition, and his anxiety led to a renewed obsession with his lawn, which is where Larry found him on a humid evening in July a year after Mitch’s initial diagnosis.

  “I need your help,” Larry said. “I just got a call from John-Paul Beeghly, who said he was making a new Endless Summer.”

  “What surf cameraman isn’t?” Lee said sarcastically. “They all think they’re making the next great surf movie.”

  “No,” Larry said. “They’re actually filming the new Endless Summer, and Bruce Brown’s son Dana is directing it.”

  “I don’t know if I want to get involved in something like that,” Lee said, “especially since Mitch hasn’t been feeling well lately.”

  Knowing how Endless Summer introduced the cult of surfing to a worldwide audience back in the sixties, Larry wasn’t willing to accept anything less than a yes from his brother. “This could be the biggest thing to ever happen to Great Lakes surfing,” Larry said. “We’re always looking to be treated legitimately here, and having them come to Sheboygan during this year’s Surf Classic would really put us on the map!”

  Lee thought for a minute or two and then said, “I’ll do it, but you’re dealing with all the production and media requests. I won’t have anything to do with that.”

  Hugging his brother, Larry said, “This has me so stoked!”

  For the next month, Larry’s enthusiasm fueled the Surf Classic’s preparations. He kept in touch with Beeghly on a weekly basis to ensure the film crew would have the finest accommodations available upon their arrival. He went as far as calling all his friends around the Great Lakes to guarantee a good turnout for the event.

  “We can’t call Sheboygan the Malibu of the Midwest without crowds,” he told them.

  On the Wednesday afternoon before the Labor Day weekend, Larry received a phone call to confirm the film crew would be arriving the next day to begin preproduction. “Since your brother Lee is working, we can do that initial meeting without him,
” John-Paul told Larry. “You can just fill him in on the details.”

  For the next twenty-four hours, Larry was on edge, fretting over every detail of that year’s Surf Classic. “I can’t handle this anymore,” he told Kerry. “I’m going to the beach.”

  Larry headed toward the lakefront with his surfboard under one arm and his two dogs—a two-hundred-and-forty-pound English mastiff and a black Lab—leashed into his other hand. After pulling a bottle of shampoo from the back pocket of his baggy khaki shorts, Larry gave the dogs a thorough scrub before letting them swim around and rinse off in the four-foot waves. Tempted by the seventy-degree water temperature, he threw his surfboard into the water and rode the waves for the next hour. As the sun dipped low in the western sky, he headed home, feeling relaxed and revitalized. Just as he walked through the door, Kerry informed him the film crew was only minutes away.

  When Dana Brown arrived with his production team, Larry felt dizzy with excitement—the son of surfing’s most legendary filmmaker was walking through his kitchen. When Dana noticed a rare photograph of Greg Noll’s Big Wave Team on the wall, he looked at Larry and said, “You know, my dad, Bruce, is at home right now with Greg. They’re probably sitting on my front porch having beers as we speak.”

  After punching a number into his speed-dial, Dana handed his cell phone to Larry, who was nearly speechless. It was one of the most surreal conversations of his life. While legendary filmmaker Bruce Brown and one of his biggest childhood idols, Greg Noll, asked questions about the Sheboygan surf scene, Larry’s heart thrashed in his chest. Managing little more than “uh-huh” and “yup,” Larry couldn’t believe he was talking to two of the greatest surfing legends of all time while he stood in his kitchen. As soon as the conversation ended, he handed the phone to Dana and asked, “Why’d you decide to come here?”

  “We thought it would be great to put on the movie poster,” Dana joked. “Surfing from Australia to Sheboygan.”

  Actually, the Wisconsin community wasn’t on Dana Brown’s preliminary destination list when he started researching surfing locales for his documentary film, Step into Liquid. Looking to expand on his father’s epic film while also putting a spotlight on the cutting-edge style of twenty-first-century surfing, Dana sought places not on the typical surfing map. He asked the editor of Surfer Magazine, Sam George, for places where a surfer’s dedication to the sport was as extreme as the conditions they surfed. Sam suggested Sheboygan. Immediately fascinated, Dana researched the city’s potential as a featured location for the movie. Soon after that decision, Larry received the call from Dana’s producer, John-Paul Beeghly.

  Since the winds were bending tree branches against Larry’s kitchen window, Dana hoped for a good weekend of surfing. “Tell me more about what exactly is going on tomorrow with the Dairyland Surf Classic,” he asked. “When does the competition start?”

  “There’s not a competition,” Larry replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re not really big into the whole competitive side of surfing,” Larry continued. “If the surf’s good, nobody will want to get out of the water to compete and none of the judges would get off their boards long enough to score a heat.”

  “So people come from all over—California, New York, Canada, everywhere—without the promise of any sort of surfing competition?”

  Larry nodded. “Since they don’t want to surf in a competition, there’s no competition.”

  Dana’s eyes widened. “That is so cool! I love it!”

  The filmmaker turned to his crew with a smile. “We’ve come to a place where the stoke of surfing outweighs any sort of competitiveness!”

  For the next hour, the production team briefed Larry on what they hoped to accomplish over the next five days of shooting. Then Dana pulled a VHS tape from a large manila envelope and loaded it into Larry’s VCR.

  The screen came alive with vibrant colors popping out from scenes shot at some of the crew’s previous locations. Sitting alongside Dana, John-Paul, and the handful of crewmembers sprawled around his living room, Larry didn’t know if he was sitting on the couch or floating above it while being hypnotized by the gorgeous footage. For the next hour, he was transfixed by the lush, green jungles featured in the clip of an American veteran who returned to Southeast Asia for the first time since the war ended, only to leave his surfboard behind for Vietnamese surfers. His jaw dropped when surfers in Texas rode the wakes of onethousand-foot freighters motoring through the turquoise waters of Galveston Bay. It wasn’t until the tape went to black that Larry returned to reality.

  “Our signature shot for each segment is a sunrise,” Dana told Larry. “So we need you to meet us at the North Point Pier for that first shot of the day no later than five a.m.”

  When the crew headed back to their hotel for the night, Larry called Lee to explain about being at the beach for the most unusual Dawn Patrol of their lives. “They’re a good group of guys,” Larry said. “So be sure to make a good impression you meet them.”

  The next morning, Larry arrived not a minute past five. He saw the massive tripod and camera set up near the North Point Pier. Before the crew turned around to capture their signature shot of a Lake Michigan sunrise, they were taking pictures of some lounging Canadian geese through a thatch of cattail reeds. Hoping to startle them into the air, Dana threw a rock in their direction. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for Lee, who decided to march straight up to them with a disgusted expression plastered on his face.

  “You know, it’s illegal in Wisconsin to harass Canada geese,” he said sternly. “That’s a five-hundred-dollar fine per bird. I have no choice but to arrest you.”

  The film crew looked at him in stunned silence, completely unaware who he was.

  “As long as I’ve been with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources,” Lee continued, “I’ve made a career of putting away thoughtless clowns like you who abuse these poor, innocent birds as nothing more than target fodder.”

  Believing every word, Dana Brown stammered, “We’re sorry. We just wanted to grab a shot for our film.”

  As Lee finished counting how many geese were scrambling into the sky, he extended his right hand toward the filmmaker. “By the way, I’m Lee Williams. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  That greeting set the tone for the remainder of the weekend. Lee and Larry did their best to keep up the witty banter and practical jokes, which relaxed the crew. The filmmakers followed the brothers around as they set up the various events of the day. While organizing the Dairyland Surf Classic’s giant paddling race that afternoon—the only “competition” at the Classic, and one that was more for entertainment than serious rivalry—Larry was unable to command the large, uncooperative crowd with his bullhorn. With the film crew rolling, it seemed every bodyboarder, windboarder, and paddleboarder who lived on the Great Lakes wanted in on the race. Whenever Larry tried explaining the rules through his bullhorn, he had to threaten to use the aerosol air horn in his other hand if the crowd didn’t settle down. The only person who seemed to be paying attention was Otto, the crew’ audio mixer, who captured all the film’s sounds through an orbshaped, fur-covered microphone at the end of a fifteen-foot aluminum boom pole.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Larry saw the fuzzy mop-top covering the microphone and decided to defuse his frustration by spinning around and grabbing hold of it. With a mischievous grin, he held the aerosol horn tightly against the fur-covered blimp, acting as if he were about to press his finger on the trigger. Otto jerked the boom pole as hard as he could, propelling Larry through the air toward him. Just as Larry was about to crash into the digital audio mixer, Otto hit him square in the chest with the palm of his hand, flattening Larry backward onto the sand, knocking the smirk off his face. The otherwise passive sound mixer screamed, “What were you thinking? You could have killed me! You could have blown out my eardrums!”

  “Sorry, man. I was just kidding,” Larry said. As Otto chastised him, Larry he
ard someone laughing behind him. It was Lee.

  “I can just see the headphones exploding and brains squirting out of the guy’s nose,” Lee giggled.

  The incident blew over as Dana focused the crew on capturing surfers in the water. Much to the crew’s delight, there was some small surf at North Point during that first day of filming. With everybody in the water hoping to get into the film, Lee and Larry seemed to be the only two standing on land. When Dana asked why they weren’t in the water, Lee explained, “We’ve got too much going on with getting the Dairyland organized and all.”

  “Well, we need some footage of you and your brother paddling out together and surfing a few waves,” Dana said. “So you have to go out there since that’s the whole reason the cameras are here.”

  Lee and Larry reluctantly grabbed their boards and headed into the water. After surfing two waves, they returned to the shore, refusing to go back out. “It just isn’t worth it,” Larry commented, knowing their attempts to ride the small surf would come back to haunt them. “If you film us surfing these small waves, everyone will think Sheboygan is a fraud.”

  “Speaking of frauds, what’s with that guy?” Dana asked as he pointed toward the only guy surfing without a wetsuit and leash.

  “He’s the local kook,” Larry said, gritting his teeth in embarrassment. Kook is a term used by surfers to describe a fool lacking any sort of etiquette on a board. “Every beach has at least one.”