by Hughes, Chip
Inside Surf n’ Sea, a rustic country surf shop with a rambling plank porch, I wandered among the racks of gleaming boards by T & C, Robert August, Stewart, Ben Aipa, Donald Takayama, and lots more. Leaning in to get a closer look at a nine-seven carbon fiber Velzy was cousin Alika, his coffee brown eyes as focused and intent as an airline pilot inspecting his ship before takeoff.
“Eh, haole boy!” Alika glanced up from the black surfboard and flashed a roguish grin, his deep, resonant voice filling the surf shop like the thrum of a bass fiddle. He extended his muscular brown arm and we shook local-style.
“Howz’t, Alika?” I looked up at my cousin, towering over me in board shorts and a bulging tank top emblazoned with “Hawaiian Superman.”
From his steel grip and imposing physique, you could tell that Alika Kealoha surfed big waves. His shoulders were wide and his arms massive, and his torso was shaped in a powerful V. He was a brawny iron-hard Atlas of a man.
If anybody knew Waimea, it was my Hawaiian cousin. Off the top of his head he could recite the various swells and their directions, the correct lineups for each, the dangerous riptides, and the sometimes risky shore break; he could also tell you who rode the biggest wave ever, who took the nastiest wipeout, who got hurt, who disappeared and was lost or found, and who died outright. With only a little prompting Alika remembered Corky McDahl’s wipeout at Waimea Bay.
“Da haole surfah dat wipe out on Christmas Eve?” Alika asked me. “Da one they nevah find?”
“Dat’s him. You evah see him surf? Candy cane board, blon’ hair, attitude . . .“
“Maybe at Chun’s Reef. If dat him, brah, he OK for one mainland surfah. But bettah he wen sit on da beach and watch us guys, yeah? Big Waimea not for beginnahs.”
“You surfing Waimea when he wipe out? Or your frien’s?”
“Not me, brah, but maybe Bolo or Mapuna or Puka,” Alika said, referring to his surfing buddies.
“Can ask ‘em today?”
“Shoots,” the Hawaiian Superman replied, meaning, “Why not?”
Out in the gravel lot we climbed into Alika’s rusted-out Toyota truck, knobby tires crusted with red dirt. In the bed lay two big guns—sunshine yellow and lime green—similar in size and stiletto shape to Corky’s missing board.
As my Hawaiian cousin wound through the gears and the tires began to sing on the blacktop, I recalled today’s surf report for Waimea: occasional twenty-five foot sets, or higher.
This was a rare occurrence. Only a large winter swell, generated in the North Pacific and headed in just the right direction, causes waves to break like that inside the bay.
On these special days, liquid mountains loom on the horizon, sweep around the point, and explode with the percussion of a volcano. The “booms” can be heard halfway to Hale‘iwa. The mile-wide bay transforms into a colossal outdoor amphitheater peopled by surfers and photographers and spectators from around the world. The road surrounding the bay chokes with double-parked cars. The lot at the beach park jams. Waimea takes on the elevated mood and bustle of a world-class amusement park. A Disneyland of waves.
But for big-wave riders this is serious business. The potential thrill of a lifetime can become, in unfortunate cases, the end of a lifetime. Mark Foo, drowned in 1994 at Mavericks, said it best: “If you want to experience the ultimate thrill, you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.”
When the California surfer wiped out on Christmas Eve there was undoubtedly no shortage of photographers on hand with powerful telephoto lenses that can pick out a tattoo a quarter mile away. But since Corky’s wipeout occurred after sundown, the light would not have been best. The news clippings said a few bystanders had watched him get pounded by the first of several twenty-footers. No one reported seeing him after that.
As we approached Waimea, I noticed the bell tower of the Mission of Saints Peter and Paul soaring over the bay, familiar to surfers around the world. Less well known is the ancient cliff-top Mahuka heiau, or temple,for human sacrifice just beyond. Both the bell tower and the heiau have always suggested to me the sacredness of the bay. For surfers, coming here represents a pilgrimage, a confrontation with the ultimate power, and maybe even a meeting with their destiny.
This morning the bell tower cast its long shadow across Waimea’s wide beach, where countless caution signs pierced the sand like errant spears: “High Surf . . . Hazardous Conditions . . . No Swimming . . . Beach Closed.”
Despite these warnings, two surfers were paddling out to join many others in the distant lineup, where one of those liquid mountains was just now steaming in. As it jacked up, a dozen surfers flailed their arms like winged fleas trying to climb over the massive cresting wave. Some few tempted their fate, turning and plunging down the almost vertical cliff.
“Booooom!” The mountain detonated in the bay.
“Chance ‘um, Kai?” Alika’s brown eyes taunted me as he pulled his truck into the jammed lot, parked illegally on a grassy strip, and we stepped out.
Dry mouth again.
Alika nudged me. “Grab one board.” He pointed to the two guns in the truck’s bed.
“Booooom!” Another mammoth crashed, shaking the ground beneath us. A shiver of fear ran through me.
“Bettah do da interviews first.” I wasn’t deliberately stalling, but wasn’t in any hurry to paddle into those giants either.
“Da surfahs you need fo’ interview stay in da waves, brah,” my cousin replied, “not on da beach.”
Five
If I was going to go tight in the chest, if I was going to start breathing fast and feeling weak-kneed or get butterflies in my stomach, if I was going to panic—the full-blown signs would appear now.
Had the unlucky Corky McDahl shown these telltale signs? I didn’t know and right now I didn’t care. My only job was to keep them away from me.
“No Fear . . . . No Fear . . . .” I said a little mantra to focus myself and stay loose.
I stripped off my aloha shirt and khakis, revealing the board shorts I was wearing underneath and the shark bite on my chest that Alika always referred to as my “tattoo.”
Alika handed me a chunk of wax and I began reluctantly rubbing it onto the deck of his lime green gun. Out in the distant lineup riders and their surfboards looked like ants clinging to toothpicks. Little more than specks. Each breaker jacked up three or four times higher than the boards cutting white trails down it. The swell was still rising.
“Ho, brah!” Alika pointed toward the roaring bay. “Let’s paddle out.” I took a deep breath and tried to exhale.
We jogged down the beach to the water. The cool February sea and hiss of the distant foam gave me a few more shivers. The glassy surface near the beach lay deceptively calm, but suddenly an overhead shorebreak wave slammed the beach like a guillotine. We waited for a lull again, then mounted our guns and paddled quickly through the danger zone.
I am not an experienced big wave rider. The few surfers who are form an elite cadre whose door Corky McDahl was knocking on when he got knocked off by those twenty footers. I’ve often heard the names of big-wave pioneers of the ‘50s and ‘60s uttered with reverence—if not a tinge of envy—by young surfers like Corky:
Greg Noll earned the nickname “Da Bull” for aggressively charging the biggest waves anybody of his day had ever ridden; Buzzy Trent, the consummate, muscle-packed athlete, resembled a Greek god; Jose Angel, all-around waterman, tragically died diving for black coral; Fred Van Dyke, the “Iron Man” of big wave riding, survived unimaginable wipeouts; Ricky Grigg, surfer and oceanographer, charted some of Hawai‘i’s famous reef breaks; Eddie “Would Go” Aikau vanished in the Moloka‘i Channel while paddling to save a stranded boat crew; and Makaha legend George Downing, to this day, directs the big wave competition at Waimea in Eddie’s name. The role call of legends also includes familiar names like Brewer, Brown, Cabell, Cole, Curren, Froiseth, Hemmings, Hoffman, Hollinger, Muñoz, Quigg, Strange, and such modern-day heroes as Ken Bradshaw, Laird Hamilton, Brian
Keaulana, and the unfortunate Mark Foo. Striving to become one of them, had Corky—like Foo—paid the “ultimate price”?
Alika and I paddled for what seemed like a half mile deep into the bay. My arms felt tight, no matter how many “No Fear” mantras I said. In the lull between sets we paddled into the lineup, then over to three surfers on the edge of the pack. One looked like a brown bear. The second, in a red rash guard, was tiny by comparison. The third’s scalp was shaved clean—bolohead. A bear, a shrimp, and a skinhead.
“Howz’t, Bolo?” Alika asked the shaved head. “Howz’t Mapuna, Puka?” He turned to the bear and his tiny friend in red. “Dis my cousin, Kai.”
“Howz’t, Kai . . . ? Howz’t . . . ? Howz’t?” All three responded in turn, checking me out on Alika’s lime green gun.
“Kai one private eye,” Alika told his three friends. “One Surfing Detective—Magnum P.I. kine.”
“You really one P.I.?” asked the big brown bear whose name, Mapuna, meant “bubbling spring.” He was the biggest spring I’d ever seen.
“Yeah, maybe you try help with my case?”
“Us guyz?” The three looked at one another, then broke into laughter.
“Yeah, you guyz.” I said. “You know dat California surfah dat wipe out Christmas Eve? His name Corky McDahl.“
“Nah,” said the small one called Puka,a nickname meaning “hole.” “Don’ know no Corky.”
“Maybe you wen’ see him in da lineup—Waimea—day befo’ Christmas?”
“What his board look like?” asked Bolo.
“Like one candy cane.”
“I seen dat board, brah,” little Puka said.
“Here at Waimea?”
“Nah—where wuz it?” Puka thought for a minute. “Ehukai . . . ? Sunset . . . ?”
“You remembah da guy—blon’, green eyes . . . ?”
“Nah, but da board—yeah. Sunset, da guy wuz surfing Sunset.”
Alika turned to the other two. “You know da guy?”
“Nah,” they both said.
“But,” bear-like Mapuna adjusted his giant frame on his slim board. “My frien’ Ham tol’ me he surf Waimea when da haole guy ate it.”
“Your frien’ Ham saw da wipeout?” I asked.
“Dat’s what he say. Ham say da haole guy bin bury undah da soup, brah. Nevah come up, you know? Nevah.”
“Your frien’ Ham here today?”
“Nah,“ Mapuna said.
“Ham working . . . Paradise Sandwich Bar,” Puka added, “In Hale‘iwa.”
“Tanks, eh?” I said. “Alika, we goin’ talk with Ham, sooner da bettah?” I tried not to sound too hopeful.
“You got your detective scoops.” Alika flashed a dangerous grin. “Now les’ chance ‘um.”
I swallowed hard.
The bay lay eerily calm. A big set hadn’t rolled through for several minutes. We sat on our boards and waited, which only made me more edgy. I started thinking about Summer. Why did I feel responsible for making things right? Her footloose husband had brought on her misfortune, not me.
“Outside!” Bolo yelled and paddled furiously toward the open sea. Little Puka and mammoth Mapuna followed. Alika and I paddled too. And behind us, the whole pack.
Out on the horizon where the sapphire sky met the sea, an ominous jade mass was building. It was dark and impenetrable, so thick the sun couldn’t shine through. And it was rising.
“Outside! someone else yelled.
“Ho!”
“Big, Big, Beeeg!”
The jade mountain was coming. And there would be more behind it.
“Paddle, brah, paddle!” Alika barked at me.
After the nearly half mile stroke from the beach to the lineup, this sudden surge burned my arms. But I kept paddling until I caught up with the first jade cliff, just as it was about to let loose. The face looked to be twenty-five feet, easy. Maybe higher. Up, up, up I clawed, and over the top as it passed. Phew!
Craning my neck back, I watched the enormous white lip forming that would soon pound the bay. I was far enough off on the wave’s broad shoulder to observe the monster crest and to see Cousin Alika turn, stroke just twice, then drop down the massive face. Alika crouched near the back of his yellow gun and spread his arms wide, like one of those ants I had imagined earlier clinging to a toothpick. His almost vertical drop looked impossible. Impossible! The Hawaiian Superman went anyway. I shook my head. No fear.
“Boooom!” The lip cracked like a thunderbolt. Alika and the jade mountain swept past, leaving only the gauzy lace of blown-back foam.
But there was no time to gaze. The second mountain was coming fast. I felt it rising underneath me. I paddled hard. But not hard enough. I couldn’t scratch over the top. Suddenly I found myself gazing down—straight down—a sheer cliff with only one way to go.
I swung my board around into a takeoff position. Thoughts raced through my mind: feet wide . . . stance low . . . arms spread . . . stay back on the board . . . Holy . . . !
Six
“Kai, brah,” Alika paddled back from his ride wearing a million-dollar smile. “Why you let da bes’ one go by?”
I shrugged. “I took da nex’ one.”
Alika glared at me in apparent disbelief.
“It da truth, brah. Da board drop so fas’—Ho!—almos’ pitch me off.”
It was the truth. The lime green gun had dropped down that steep face like the bottom fell out, me barely hanging on. In only seconds I had cranked my turn and, just like that, the ride was over.
“Hana hou!” my cousin brightened. “Again, brah, again!”
“Nah, let’s go to Hale‘iwa and find your frien’, Ham. Ask ‘em ‘bout da Christmas Eve wipeout.”
Alika frowned.
“I goin’ buy lunch,” I offered hopefully.
“Laytahs.”
Alika stroked out again into those jade cliffs and soon he took another impossible drop. And then another. And another.
It was afternoon before I finally coaxed my Hawaiian cousin out of the water. Luckily when we arrived at Paradise Sandwich Bar in Hale‘iwa, Mapuna’s friend Ham was still there.
“Da haole guy? He take off too late. Wen’ over da falls.” Ham spoke to us through the order window as he stacked a deli-style pastrami for Alika, and a mahi sandwich for me. Polynesian tattoos covered Ham’s dark brown arms, and his chiseled face was crowned by sun-bleached dreadlocks. Alika told me Ham had battled drugs and lost, then wound up at “Oh-Triple-C,” the O‘ahu Community Correctional Center in Kalihi, and then in rehab. Struggling to stay clean, he now built sandwiches, surfed, and reported weekly to his parole officer.
“Da red stripe board shot in da air, way high,” Ham explained as his fingers danced over the Kaiser roll that was Alika’s lunch. “Maybe twenty, t’irty feet—twirling, spinning, brah.”
Behind Ham I could see a chrome carousel whirling a half dozen sandwich orders, slips waving like flags in the breeze. Ham watched over my mahi sizzling on the grill, then stuck his hand in a plastic container of pickles.
“You like pickles, Alika?” Ham raised his eyes to my cousin.
“Everyt’ing, brah. Da works!”
“So da California surfer’s leash snap, or what?” I asked Ham as he flipped my fish fillet and piled pickles and onions and lettuce on Alika’s sandwich.
“Fo’ sure. Was not hooked to da board anymo’. No way could fly dat high.”
“You spot him aftah da wipeout?”
“Nah, da buggah gone. Undah da water. Nobody in da lineup see him. Was late, brah, aftah sunset.” Ham shrugged his shoulders, tattoos rippling over his brown biceps.
After downing our sandwiches, Alika and I cruised every surf shop in Hale‘iwa, trying to track down Corky’s missing board and the Sunset Beach woman who had found it. Tropical Rush, Strong Current, Surf n’ Sea, again, and all the rest. I questioned everyone I could, but nobody knew much about Corky, other than his well-publicized wipeout. One person did recall seeing the California surfer
showboating through Hale‘iwa in a BMW convertible. Another mentioned a girlfriend.
“Girlfriend?” I was curious. “Was she blonde and pregnant?” Summer had told me she didn’t accompany her husband to Hawai‘i, but maybe that wasn’t the full story.
“No, this lady had red hair,” I was told. “And she didn’t look pregnant.”
Was Corky pulling the wool over Summer’s eyes, stepping out with a redhead in a BMW? Or was it really Corky they had seen?
I left my card at each and every surf shop in Hale‘iwa and asked to be called if any board resembling Corky’s turned up. Though I had not yet discovered much, Summer was definitely getting her money’s worth of my time.
Guiding my Impala back to Honolulu, the allegation that Corky had a redhead girlfriend started bothering me. I decided I wouldn’t mention it yet to Summer. In her condition, she needed to think the best of her husband.
It was late afternoon by the time I returned to Maunakea Street. Beyond Mrs. Fujiyama’s display cases I caught a glimpse of Leimomi in the back room, stringing a rose bud lei.
Leimomi. We had a date tonight. If I missed it this time, I’d be hard-pressed for an explanation.
Inside my office the red message light was flashing again. I first dialed Leimomi’s Punchbowl duplex and I left a message that I would pick her up at seven. My conscience salved, I reached over to my answering machine and pressed Play.
“Hello, Mr. Cooke. This is Summer McDahl. Any chance I could see you? Same place? Tomorrow morning at nine?“
Why not at my office? When I returned Summer’s call there was no answer, then a recorded announcement came on—a gravelly male voice with a thick foreign accent: “Leave message at tone, if you please. Cannot talk right now.”
The accent was different than any I had heard before. Middle Eastern? Asian? European? As I left my message I wondered if that voice might belong to the owner of a black Mercedes. I hung up and stared at the phone.