by Jon Krakauer
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” insists Renneker. “Here were the best big-wave surfers in the world, and they were behaving like fools. Partly it was the fact that some of the guys surfing Mavericks for the first time were underestimating it. Because it was only a California wave, they refused to believe it was as serious as the surf they were used to on the North Shore. But mostly it was just Kodak courage: doing stuff they wouldn’t consider doing if the cameras weren’t there. And Mark was right in there with them, just as far out of position, making the same mistakes.”
Perhaps, Bradshaw concedes. “But what’s so strange is that when Mark took off on the wave that killed him, he was not deep. He was right where he should have been.”
* * *
—
Foo had ridden about a dozen waves when, shortly before noon, he saw a beefy set rear up on the horizon. As calculated from photographs, the wave he went for stood approximately 30 feet from trough to crest. Less experienced surfers had ridden larger waves earlier in the week without incident. Foo himself had handled much bigger, gnarlier surf at Waimea on numerous occasions.
He let the first wave of the set go by, then spun around and dug hard for the second. His takeoff looked good. Foo jumped into his trademark crouch as the wave pulled to concave, his arms stretched wide and low for balance. He maintained control when the board went into free fall beneath the overhanging ledge, and seemed to be in equilibrium as he reestablished contact with the wave halfway down the face.
Mavericks, however, is a famously nervous, unpredictable wave. “The bottom configuration, the energy vectors—everything out there is incredibly complex,” explains Renneker. “As a consequence, the wave goes through these strange kinks and lifts and drops, all happening in microseconds. You never know what’s going to happen next. Mark’s surfing reflexes were as good as anybody’s in the world, but on some waves there’s just nothing you can do to avoid a wipeout.”
As Foo angled down the face, observes Allen Sarlo, “the wave jacked and the bottom just fell out of it.” Foo’s board veered suddenly to the left, the inside rail bogged in some chop, and Foo was thrown violently off the front.
He slammed into the water with tremendous force, a hard belly flop that wrenched his arms back and hyperextended his spine. Foo skipped down the face like a flat stone, and never penetrated the wave far enough to have a shot at escaping out the other side. Embedded in the wall of the heaving green barrel, he was drawn back up the face and sucked over the falls. Viewed in slow motion, the video shows Foo’s ghostly silhouette suspended in the roof as the wave throws forward, arches down, and then crashes into the pit with a horrific explosion of whitewater that splintered his board into three pieces.
As Foo had lived, so he died: in the camera’s mythologizing eye. More than a hundred people saw Foo get buried by the collapsing lip, and every aspect of the wipeout was captured on film and videotape. Several seconds later, however, Brock Little and Mike Parsons—a renowned big-wave surfer from Orange County who was also surfing Mavericks for the first time that day—took off together on the next wave of the set, and as the immense shimmering wall reared and started to fold over, all eyes turned to watch their ride unfold. Nobody noticed that Foo didn’t return to the surface.
As Parsons and Little dropped down the face side by side, the nose of Parsons’s board pearled and he went down hard. Two seconds later, Little was mowed, too.
Falling onto his back, Parsons was slammed in the chest by the guillotining lip and driven toward the bottom. “It was maybe the worst wipeout I’d ever had,” says Parsons. “It took a really long time to come up. At that point I didn’t know the worst was still coming.” As he struggled back to the surface, desperate for a lungful of air, he was bumped sharply by what felt like someone’s head and arm. At the time, he mistakenly assumed it was Little. It was actually Foo.
Little, by that point, was fighting for his own life about 20 yards away. Caught in the boneyard, pounded repeatedly by incoming waves, both Parsons and Little were swept into the rocks. The leash running from Little’s board to his right ankle—a 15-foot polyethylene line strong enough to pull a truck—snagged on a submerged boulder, nearly drowning him, then snapped, and Little was eventually carried through a gap into the safety of the inner lagoon.
Parsons’s leash also snagged, but he wasn’t so lucky. “I was pinned underwater,” he remembers, “getting slammed into a rock by the waves, unable to get a breath. Out of air, I was absolutely sure I was going to drown. I’d written it off and was waiting to die when the wave action suddenly unhooked the leash. I got to the surface, but I took a bad beating before the current finally washed me into the lagoon.”
Foo was still nowhere to be seen, meanwhile, and in the excitement over what was happening to Parsons and Little, his absence went unobserved. Bradshaw, outside the surf line, his view blocked by the back of the breaking wave, had no way of knowing that anybody was in trouble. Fifty seconds after backing out of Foo’s wave, oblivious to what was happening in the impact zone, Bradshaw took off on the set’s last and biggest wave. He nailed the drop, carved hard across the bottom, then charged through the bowl and down the line, covering nearly 300 yards before the whitewater overtook him and knocked him off his board.
Paddling back out to the lineup past the media boats, still buzzing with residual adrenaline, Bradshaw paused to chat with a photographer named Bob Barbour. “Barbour told me that Mark ate it really bad,” says Bradshaw, “and that it looked like he’d broken his board. I didn’t figure it was a big deal—people break boards all the time. When Mark didn’t show up, I just assumed he’d gone in to get another board.”
Around one P.M., the sky clouded over and a stiff onshore breeze began to blow, messing up the waves. Surfers started to leave the water, the helicopter departed, the media boats headed in. The Deeper Blue started motoring toward the harbor with Parsons, Evan Slater, and two photographers on board. Just beyond the jetty guarding the harbor entrance, somebody noticed the tail block of a purple and yellow surfboard drifting in an eddy. “That looks like Mark’s board,” Slater casually observed as they cruised past. “Let’s go pick it up for him.” Then Slater noticed what appeared to be a half-submerged human figure, clad in a black wetsuit, floating facedown beside the broken surfboard. Refusing to believe what they were seeing, someone insisted over and over that it was just a ball of kelp. “No,” Parsons replied, feeling dizzy, “that’s not kelp.” Slater dove in, pulled Foo to the side of the boat, and the others hauled his motionless body onto the back deck.
Until that moment, nobody even suspected Foo was missing. He’d been in the water for more than an hour. The captain immediately radioed the harbor patrol, two paramedics arrived within minutes, but all attempts to revive Foo failed.
Not long thereafter, Bradshaw, one of the last surfers still on the water, caught a final sloppy wave and headed for the beach. In the parking lot, he was approached by Jeff Clark. Stammering, barely able to speak, Clark told him about Foo, and Bradshaw sprinted down to the dock. “I told the sheriff I wanted see Mark,” he says, his voice growing thick. “I had to see him with my own eyes to know it was true.” Pulling back the blanket that covered the body, Bradshaw looked down at the face of his friend and turned away.
* * *
—
The autopsy determined that the cause of death was saltwater drowning; why Foo drowned remains unclear, however. “It was a heavy wipeout,” says Bradshaw, “getting swept over the falls like that, but the same thing has happened a hundred times to all of us.”
Foo was found with a small laceration over his right eye and an abrasion across his forehead. Renneker examined the body, however, and he insists that “the head wounds were really very superficial. It’s possible that he hit his board and was knocked unconscious, but the pathologist found nothing under the skull to suggest that. My speculation, which is shared by Jeff Clark and others, is that he probably got caught on the bottom.”
&n
bsp; The ocean floor in the vicinity of Mavericks is riddled with caves, crevices, and sharp, stony projections that bristle like stalks of petrified cauliflower. Foo’s body—or his board or his leash—could easily have snagged on some rocky feature that held him underwater, just as Little and Parsons were snagged and held down.
Most of the surfers who were present at Mavericks that day view Foo’s death as a freak accident. This may well be the case. But nagging doubts remain.
Much has been made of the fact that death was a subject Foo thought about—and talked about—with great frequency. “Mark often told me that when it was time for him to go, he wanted to die surfing the ultimate wave,” says his friend Allen Sarlo. “He told that to everybody. I’d tell him, ‘Hey, Mark, you don’t have to die to surf the ultimate wave.’ But he’d always reply that I didn’t understand. He really believed that sooner or later he was going to die surfing.”
Foo’s friends didn’t know what to make of his morbid preoccupation and had trouble reconciling it with the rest of his personality. He didn’t exhibit suicidal tendencies and drove his car with the exaggerated caution of an old man. Reckless behavior was anathema to Foo—he almost never drank, didn’t even smoke weed. Except for riding big waves, he was loath to engage in hazardous activities of any kind, and the risks he took in the water were very calculated. He spoke enthusiastically to Lisa Nakano, his fiancée, about having children after they were married.
Nakano adds, however, that on numerous occasions Foo mentioned having “this strong feeling he wouldn’t live very long. It didn’t bum him out or alter the way he conducted his life, but he was convinced he was going to die surfing. He calmly accepted it. At the time, I didn’t take him seriously. I don’t think anybody did.”
Because Foo was in the habit of making overwrought declarations, confirms SharLyn, “most people thought all that stuff about dying was bullshit. Statistically, big-wave surfing just isn’t that dangerous.”
Rick Grigg fractured his neck at Waimea in 1982. A huge wave snapped Titus Kinimaka’s femur there in ’89. Foo himself had scars up and down his body from collisions with North Shore coral heads. He shattered an ankle surfing big Pipeline two years ago, and last spring a surfboard fin sliced into his left kneecap, severing tendons and wreaking general havoc. But for all the famous close calls and near-death experiences, Foo was the first expert surfer to die in big waves since 1943. On the face of it, the evidence suggests that surfing giant waves is much less hazardous than climbing, say, or even heli-skiing.
Was it just a fluke, then, that two consecutive waves judged to be of unexceptional size—waves described as 15 to 18 feet by the survivors—killed one of the world’s most accomplished surfers, and very nearly killed two others?
The reassuring statistics about the safety of big waves mostly reflect the safety of Waimea Bay, where, until very recently, virtually all big-wave surfing took place. The water there is 82 degrees Fahrenheit, there are no hazards equivalent to the rocks at Mavericks, and the Waimea surf line is patrolled by lifeguards on Jet Skis. A rescue helicopter is on standby.
Mavericks is without question a much more dangerous patch of ocean, and people have been surfing it in significant numbers for less than three years. As more and more surfers visit Mavericks, there will probably be other fatalities, and the statistical likelihood of dying in big waves will have to be adjusted upward.
Not that a murderous reputation is likely to scare elite surfers away. To the contrary, it will probably draw even more of them to Mavericks, just as the malevolent mystique of the Eiger attracts mountaineers in droves. In cultures that idealize boldness—as both climbing and big-wave surfing do—the more dangerous a challenge, the greater the prestige of those who meet it. Nobody understood this better than Foo.
His death is woven through with dark ironies, not least of which is the fact that for years people accused him of overstating the danger of huge surf. But how much was Foo to blame for his own demise? Was he playing too much to the cameras that Friday morning? Did he get careless and make a critical mistake? The answer to both of the latter queries seems to be no. He appeared to be doing everything right on the wave that killed him. Foo, famous for his showboating, was surfing with uncharacteristic prudence when he lost his life.
On December 30, a memorial service attended by 700 people was held on the North Shore of Oahu. More than 150 men and women paddled surfboards into the middle of Waimea Bay to pay their final respects, held hands to form a circle, and cast leis into the sea. Some words were spoken, everyone called out Foo’s name thrice, and then Dennis Pang pulled a box of ashes from his backpack and returned Foo to the waves.
After the ceremony, trying to put a positive spin on their loss, several people observed that in making such a theatrical exit at Mavericks, Foo managed to achieve his grandest ambition. In death, he moved beyond mere fame and entered the more enduring sphere of legend. “My bruddah Mark,” Pang speculates, “he’s sitting up there somewhere, smiling and combing his hair, saying, ‘Yeah, top that one!’”
According to SharLyn Foo-Wagner, their mother derives little solace from such thoughts: “My mom is mad. She accepted Mark for what he was, but she never really understood him. It’s no comfort to her that Mark was doing what he wanted to be doing when he died. She thinks it’s such a waste.”
* * *
—
At first light on a fogbound California morning, Jeff Clark walks down the beach to the end of Pillar Point and considers the steel-gray expanse of the Pacific. A big west swell is booming over the outer reef, sending mares’ tails of spindrift arching high over the barreling waves. Clark zips up his wetsuit, waits for a lull between sets, and starts paddling out. It has been four days since Foo died. Nobody has surfed Mavericks since.
Clark duck-dives under a small inside wave, then catches the outgoing surge and works the rip into the channel. Fifteen minutes later, he’s at the lineup. Straddling his board beyond the surf line, for a long time he just stares out to sea, aligning his senses to the ocean’s rhythms, trying to sort out the disturbing events of the preceding week—trying, as he would later put it, “to get real clear about Mark’s death.”
To the west, the surface of the Pacific lifts into a series of sharp black ridges, and the incoming set yanks Clark from his reverie. He lets the first swell roll under him, and the second, then levers his board around and starts to paddle. The sea heaves up beneath him into a towering green peak, vaulting Clark heavenward even as he strokes furiously down the face. As the wave lurches to its apogee, he jumps to his feet and plunges toward the abyss. Above his head, the crest feathers and throws forward into an immense translucent arch.
There are no photographers present, no crowds or boats or helicopters—just Clark, alone, streaking down a colossal wall of salt water. After twenty years, the act still gives him the same pleasure it always has, that shudder of bliss and transcendence. His mind clear and untroubled for the first time in days, Clark accelerates across the trough, leans hard to set the rail, and carves a tight, elegant arc as the wave curls over and tries to swallow him—a roaring, spinning tornado, spewing foam, bearing down fast on his blind side.
PUBLISHED IN OUTSIDE, MAY 1995
Living Under the Volcano
At 14,410 feet above sea level, I have to pause for breath between each plodding step as I reach the crest of Mount Rainier, the highest point in the Cascade Range. I’ve climbed this huge volcano many times over the past thirty years—for fun, for exercise, for escape from the urban grind. On this occasion, however, the impetus is morbid curiosity.
Recent geological reports have suggested that Rainier poses a serious threat to thousands of people who live in the shadow of the mountain, as I do, even if it does not erupt. My hope is that this ascent will shed a little light on the matter. Two days of strenuous effort were required to reach the top. Now a surly wind is screaming across the summit crater, flash-freezing the skin on my face and turning my mittened hands into blocks
of ice.
Before my eyes is a swath of country that stretches from Canada to central Oregon, some two hundred miles away. Scanning the craggy spine of the Cascades, one can’t help noticing that this corner of the planet is lousy with volcanoes: from this lofty vantage, I count no fewer than nine of them. The most riveting—and most notorious—is Mount St. Helens, whose truncated cone squats immediately to the southwest. At the moment, its yawning crater is belching a plume of steam high into the troposphere, a gentle admonition that St. Helens—along with some two dozen other Cascade peaks—is very much an active volcano.
On Sunday, May 18, 1980, shortly before nine o’clock in the morning, I happened to look up from a commercial salmon net I was mending on a dock in Gig Harbor, Washington, and saw what appeared to be a massive cumulonimbus cloud boiling toward the heavens, where a moment earlier there had been nothing but blue sky. Unbeknownst to me, multiple simultaneous avalanches had just carried millions of tons of rock and ice off the top of Mount St. Helens, suddenly removing the geologic lid that had enabled the mountain to contain the molten rock and superheated steam within. The resulting explosion obliterated the upper 1,300 feet of the volcano and sent it hurtling into the sky.
The blast devastated plant and animal life for 150 square miles. The cloud of ash that caught my eye soared to a height of more than 60,000 feet, turning day to night across much of Washington, and scattered 540 million tons of volcanic debris across the western United States. Fifty-seven people were killed, a remarkably small number considering the violence of the eruption. The death toll was so low due to evacuation measures, and because the mountain’s rugged environs were sparsely populated and largely undeveloped.
Fifteen years later, as I regard the scenery from atop Mount Rainier, the merest glance between my boots suggests that the consequences could be much more dire when it is this peak’s turn to blow. Hard to the northwest sprawl Tacoma, Seattle, and their myriad suburbs. I can plainly make out the Space Needle, skyscrapers in downtown Seattle, and 747s touching down at Sea-Tac Airport.