The Big Juice: Epic Tales of Big Wave Surfing

by John Long

  The addiction, in fact, would end up fracturing the peer group. While still using, Mel said that he began to hear voices. He became paranoid. He thought that his home was under surveillance, that "they" were listening to him. Mel eventually acted on his psychosis by cutting the cable lines to his house, which, in his mind, seated the listeners out. "It [meth] basically made me crazy. I was crazy-losing it," he said. This was a low moment but not the bottom. Mel last used with Flea. He remembered staying up tossing around the idea that he would actually move in with Flea and that they would come clean together. In hindsight, it was just another attempt at hatching a plan to keep using.

  "I knew in my heart that that wasn't going to work."

  Mel finally realized that his immediate family was "not going to take any more of it." He outed himself to his extended family and thereby began a path toward recovery. "My love for my family is what turned me around and brought me back. That and the twelve-step program." Yet, there were high costs.

  "The drug doesn't leave you," said Mel. "You have to keep working on it. I had to disconnect myself from all the things that led me down that road. I had to stop seeing my other family [his close friends]. When I first started getting clean, that was the hardest thing I had to do." Other than supporting Flea at a recent meeting, Mel hadn't really communicated with him in two years.

  One of the things that allowed them to keep using, Mel believed, is that drug use is not talked about in the surf worldand this unwillingness to address the issue eventually hurts the grommets. "The kids know. Nat Young and those kids know. Maybe the parents don't, but the kids are talking. But no one [in the media] wants to touch it."

  Flea's sponsorship pretty much dried up early last year, so he hasn't much to lose there. Quiksilver continued to sponsor Mel. Socially and financially, it was not an easy decision to talk. And yet a major part of the twelve steps is providing service to the community, helping those who need it, and offering the "experience, strength, and hope" that only recovering addicts can. That and a very tough form of honesty.

  Mel admitted, "I'm embarrassed by the things I did. I'm so embarrassed I don t even want to talk about it. There's a quote. But what's the cure? To communicate about it. And that's what Flea is doing."

  Without forewarning, Flea drove me to another spot on our coastal tour. Wedged into a wooded canyon that leads to a private beach and the same towering white cliffs, there lay a ranch owned by family friends. Fleas esteem for the place was obvious. He knew where to find a fossilized tree buried in a creek, a kind of stone comprised of oil that would actually burn, an abandoned tree house nearly invisible from the ranch. There was a good break on the south end of the beach. On the north end he pointed to ancient shells gathered in bands of the cliff face. Flea didn't mention that the ranch was for sale nor the grander possibilities he saw in it as he detailed its qualities. I wouldn't learn until later that instead of an expected return to the well-paid ranks of surfing, Flea's ambition was a pie-in-the-sky idea he saw himself developing here at the ranch.

  The entire impetus for coming clean-and for this article, in fact-was a plan for community service Flea had been in the midst of creating with wetsuit manufacturer Jack O'Neill and Santa Cruz big wave pioneer Richard Schmidt. The working name was "Fleahab." It proposed to serve surfers and athletically minded addicts through a twelve-step program while restoring the body and connecting with nature-"Using the ocean as a healer," as Schmidt put it. This idea contrasted sharply to Fleas experience of rehab, which lacked physical activity. Further, though, Flea envisioned a special program capable of connecting with the ethos of "Surf City."

  The three would-be founders met early this year at O'Neill's home overlooking Pleasure Point. At eighty-six years old, O'Neill's awareness of drug culture and its aftermath is long and personal. He'd experienced the '60s counterculture through his children as well as many of the surfers he met since opening his shop in 1959. "The surfers, especially in the beginning, were always adventurous guys-and they tried everything, too. Some of them got stuck, you wouldn't see them anymore," O'Neill said, later adding, "It's extremely disturbing when your kids get involved."

  As well as a longer view of history, O'Neill offered his financial power and business acumen to the planned rehab. Schmidt offered his organizational expertise in running camps as well as his more recent experience with interventions. Flea offered life's experience, counseling, and name. "There's a big, big need for this," O'Neill said, "and I think Flea can really do something. You've got to have been there in order to impress these guys and gain a following."

  Mel, however, openly worried that Flea was taking a lot on his shoulders for someone just a few months sober. "I'm two years sober," Mel said, "and I struggle every day. Sometimes it's more than enough work trying to save yourself." He did add, however, that accountability, responsibility to others, and service to the community might just be the things to serve in Flea's recovery.

  After our tour of the coast, life grew a bit tougher for Flea. He learned that back taxes on his house would virtually clean him out. And a hoped-for sponsorship deal failed to materialize. Still, sponsorship or not, Flea was invited to the Mavericks event and the Eddie, and he knew he would be present and clearheaded when they ran. His dream of creating a rehab moved slowly, but the ranch was still a possibility. He said that recent hardships wouldn't drive him to use again but that "It's hard to suck up sometimes. Getting clean and all that shit is good, but it gets harder as I go. There's wreckage."

  And yet Flea has taken hold-downs before, sucked it up, and paddled back out.

  Of all the legendary big swells in surfing history, nothing stands above what has come to be known as "the Swell of '69. " Generated by the largest storm system ever recorded in the northwest Pacific Ocean-at one point the humongous low-pressure system covered most of the North Pacific Basin-massive waves hit the Hawaiian Islands on December 1, with the brunt of the swell focusing on the North Shore of Oahu. For all its size, not much surfing was done during the episode-too stormy, too big, too out of control-but that didn't mean that this swell of swells didn't impact surfers' lives. In fact, surf mythology has it that the wave Greg Noll rode at Makaha that day was so big that, not long afterward, he quit surfing forever. He'd found the summit of surfing's possibilities. More than forty years later, the September 2010 issue of The Surfer's Path featured a detailed account of the swell from fellow North Shore veteran Ted Gugelyk, one of those caught up in the maelstrom, the power of which stands the test of time.

  Sunset Beach, North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, USA

  November 30, 1969, Sunday. We had perfect, small, glassy North Shore waves. Not bigger than 4 feet. Pupukea was breaking in front of Fred Van Dyke's house. Lots of fellows were out, all of them my friends. But no surfing for me. The next day, Monday, December 1, 1969, was my Important Day.

  I was nervous about it, so I spent that weekend preparing hard. My first official seminar, a discussion for public health professionals and academics at the University of Hawaii s School of Public Health, where I had a part-time position as a researcher, working on my PhD in sociology. My topic was leprosy stigma and prejudice. The question I was working on was, "Why did patients afflicted with leprosy all around the world avoid treatment and very often confine themselves to the former leprosy 'colonies' like Kalaupapa on Molokai?" There Hawaiian leprosy patients lived in isolation, in a self-imposed prison. Leprosy patients all over the world did the same thing. Why?

  So ... no time to think about surfing.

  There was a slight onshore wind, and I was in a sweat. Through the wall of intense concentration I was aware that a high surf warning had been issued. Nothing new about that. They said very big surf was coming. How big, they couldn't predict. In those days, ships at sea fed information to the Hawaiian Weather Bureau, and satellite images were in their infancy. No TV reception yet on the North Shore either. Big surf coming. That's all we knew.

  Our home, on Ke Iki Road at Sunset Beach, was located
northeast of Sharks Cove and the Sunset Beach fire station, halfway between Waimea Bay and Sunset. The house was adjacent to a lava peninsula jutting out 400 yards straight into the Pacific Ocean. Off that lava peninsula there was an extreme drop-off into deep blue water, 30 feet down, then deeper.

  East of the peninsula the sandy beach fell off quickly into deep water.

  The area was notorious for a horrendous and deadly shorebreak. No surfing there. That shorebreak was worse than the one at Waimea Bay. When the surf was up, it offered top-to-bottom explosions onto shallow sand and lava. Each year unwary tourists and Vietnam-bound soldiers from Schofield Barracks died there, bodies never found.

  That beachbreak was a beast, an ugly, voracious maw of a wave, and living next door to it was like living next to some wild beast, avoided at all costs. When the beast was awake, we heard the roar. Our little cottage shook, windows rattling.

  Life in that house was good. One could say I had it all. I was thirty-one years old, I had a professional future in academia, two lovely little daughters and a gorgeous Hawaiian-Chinese wife, and a house on the North Shore, a stone's throw from the Pacific Ocean. What more could a young man ask for?

  Big Monday

  1:00 a.m. Monday, December 1. Startled awake by the beast lashing out in our direction. Waves were rolling over the lava peninsula, hitting our seawall and rattling the house. We were just 20 feet above sea level, and that seawall was the only thing between us and the ocean.

  But big waves were nothing new. They happened all the time. Twenty-foot waves breaking top to bottom onto 3 feet of water just outside the house? That was my nighttime signal-Waimea would be breaking, for sure Sunset Beach. I tried to sleep but couldn't.

  My family was already up when sunrise exposed an ominous scene: a gray mist of sea spray, a fog so thick you couldn't see 200 yards. How big were the waves? No telling. We could only hear the roar all around us. The air was thick with saltwater, to me a familiar odor that led to apprehension, something I always felt before surfing big Waimea.

  5:30 a.m. Hot black coffee. I packed my papers, kissed my wife and young daughters goodbye, and off I went in my VW Bug, headed for Honolulu and my Important Day. Leaving the house, I thought my wife looked worried. Scared. She was Hawaiian, and she had a profound respect for the sea and nature. But I was a surfer. That earth-trembling roar just meant there was a challenge for me out at sea that day-albeit one I couldn't rise to on this the first day of my professional life. But today some lucky guys would get great waves. Movies! Photography! A moment of fame. Memories for a lifetime. But not me.

  Waimea Bay-Heading to work in Honolulu, I took the old Kamehameha Highway toward Haleiwa. As I came to Waimea my windshield wipers were on, the spray was thick and wet, obscuring my view. Five or six surfers stood on the east cliff surveying the scene. Nothing unusual there. But it was right then that the morning seemed to turn surreal. In the mist I couldn't make out who the people were. Strangers? In those days, we knew everyone who surfed the North Shore. These fellows wore hooded sweatshirts, hoods up over their heads. They looked like gray monks in the dawn gloom, members of some mysterious society-the society of surfers pondering whether they should chance it and paddle into the maelstrom. I had no doubt what they saw. But would they paddle out? And who were they, anyway?

  I wondered in passing, but my mind was absorbed with research data, my presentation, the people I needed to impress, and how best to impress them.

  I don't remember driving past Haleiwa or into Honolulu or onto the Manoa campus at the University of Hawaii. I remember my desk in the School of Public Health and then late in the afternoon, one hour before my seminar, a surprise phone call from my wife. She had fear in her voice. "Waves are coming under our house," she told me. The whitewater had washed our lawn furniture down to the bottom of the property; she was worried she wouldn't be able to get the girls out of the house; the neighbors had left, and the fire department was driving up and down the highway, loudspeakers blaring, telling people to get to high ground.

  "People are evacuating," she said. "Come home."

  Again, my memory goes blank. I must have cancelled the seminar. My secretary later told me I did. I know I grabbed my notes, my picture slides, and camera and raced for the parking lot.

  5:30 p.m. Afternoon traffic. Even in 1969 Honolulu traffic was bad. Oahu is a small island, and at the time 700,000 people lived there. Bumper to bumper from Honolulu all the way up to Wahiawa, up to the pineapple plains above Honolulu leading north, back to the North Shore. I drove like a maniac.

  Fighting traffic, in my mind I heard over and over again the fear in my wife's voice and my little daughters crying in the background. This was serious. Why did I even leave the house this morning? What was I thinking? How big was that surf? I knew. It was too big. A nightmare. I punched the steering wheel.

  Then I remembered those hooded people standing in the mist at Waimea. Perhaps they somehow signaled this dreaded eventlike ominous spirits, a menacing omen I hadn't heeded. Nor had I listened to my own common sense.

  By 1969 I had been living in Hawaii for twelve years and surfing Waimea since 1958. I knew the place. I knew it wasn't to be trifled with or underestimated. The sea is a living thing with many personalities. It can turn angry, violent, and when it does we must keep our distance, use our heads, and let it have its way. Which meant I should have stayed home and looked after my family on that day. But I was absorbed with my professional ambitions and ignored the warnings.

  Driving north, dizzy with anxiety, I felt guilty and furious at myself.

  Haleiwa. I couldn't see the town coming down from Wahiawa. Usually there's a beautiful view of Haleiwa Bay, all the way from Kaena Point, the westernmost point of the North Shore, and east almost up to Laniakea. But not today. That salt fog was a heavy blanket, and it was turning dark. Night was coming.

  As I reached the bottom of the hill before Haleiwa I could smell it. Nasty. The smell of saltwater mingled with earth and overflowing septic tanks. Saltwater, human excrement, and a whiff of gasoline.

  Road blocks. The police stopped me. I showed them my ID and explained that my family was at home waiting for me. The policeman shook his head and said, "You can go, but you're risking your life." He waved me on.

  I couldn't see the highway clearly. Whitewater had spilled over the Haleiwa boat harbor, and sand and coral covered the roadway. I made it to the Haleiwa bridge and slowly rolled over the waves. Whitewater was breaking into the Haleiwa River, soaking the bridge, the road top splashed with sand. Amazing. How big were these waves? I'd never seen anything like that before.

  There were no other cars on the road, only me. Past the bridge, fire trucks were parking uphill from the highway, their signal lights flashing red and yellow. A fireman stopped me and asked where I was going. I explained and he said, "I don't think you can make it around Waimea Bay, and Laniakea is under water, so good luck."

  It was getting dark. I felt fear. I realized this was a life-anddeath situation. I must hurry. Drive faster.

  My VW Bug skidded through pools and around rocks all the way up to Laniakea. Nobody else was driving in the cloudy darkness of night. I pushed that little car as fast as I could, spinning the tiny wheels as I headed to Waimea. Once past Laniakea the land ran to Waimea Point. Somehow I made it, but in my rearview mirror I saw whitewater as high as the car rolling in behind me. Luck was with me, but what about my wife and daughters?

  Waimea Bay. At the top of the hill looking down into the bay, firemen stopped me and said, "No way you can get around the bay. It's too big, brother, the road's closed. There is no road."

  "But my family. I have to get to them," I explained.

  "Where are they?"

  I told them, and someone said, "My god. They should have left this morning."

  "I'm going!" I shouted. And no one stopped me. It was my life.

  Again, I was lucky. The VW skidded, slipped and slid through sand, rocks, and water. I could only guess where the road was.
Luckily the highway markers were still standing, and the light poles were standing and lit. My headlights on, windshield wipers going full blast, I drove through the spray to the bottom of Waimea Bay. Again, somehow, I made it through during a lull in the surf and on toward Waimea Catholic Church. Above the bay I noticed for the first time that the roar of the waves was deafening.

  I raced for home. Past the fire station. Again police and firemen tried to stop me, but I drove through them like a man possessed, up to Ke Iki Road, made a left turn, and drove to the lava peninsula upon which stood our home. Amazingly, the lights were on.

  But I could hear my wife screaming hysterically, almost like an animal sound-trapped, with nowhere to go. I could hear her, but I couldn't see her. My children were also crying for me, and all these noises were almost smothered by the roar of the surf. It was breaking over our seawall and then rolling under our home and down to the driveway. All around me there was salt spray and a dirty brown mist, a thick fog, and I found myself struggling against hip-deep water up toward our house. As I did, my Volkswagen Bug began to float away toward the Kamehameha Highway, toward the mountains.

  Finally I struggled up to the house and found my family clinging to one another, a kind of disbelief and horror in their eyes. We were alone. Everyone else had evacuated long ago, and it was almost too late to escape-just us, stuck in the dark of night, without a car, and the ever-rising waves.

  Then my mind went blank again. All I remember was walking to the ocean side of our home. There was no lawn, just sand and coral. The spotlights were on and turned toward the ocean, illuminating our Hawaiian foliage. There were palm trees 15 feet high planted beside our seawall. And thick naupaka, milo trees, and bamboo 15 to 20 feet tall. And heavy, strong lauhala (pandanus). I had planted these as wave breaks to protect our home from high surf. What a naive thought. Those beautiful plants could never protect us from what was still to come that night.