The Big Juice: Epic Tales of Big Wave Surfing

by John Long

  For some inexplicable reason I didn't immediately rush my family to high ground. Another mistake. Maybe I was in shock. What I did next was to get some plywood and start nailing it against our sliding glass windows facing the sea. While I was hammering I heard a roar louder than all the rest, and what I saw will always remain with me. I saw something impossible.

  The roar sounded like a jet taking off, and with it came a wall of whitewater at least 15 feet above my palm trees. It came so suddenly, so forcefully. I do not remember exactly what happened next. An explosive crash, breaking glass, and I went blank. I was swept off the ocean-side veranda, away from our house. I found myself down by our driveway, 100 feet away from the home. I remember struggling through hip-deep whitewater, forcing myself against it, uphill back to the house. Our yard had turned into a shorebreak.

  My wife was screaming. She and my daughters had been swept through the plate-glass doors on the mountain side of the home. My youngest daughter lay beneath the home's broken woodenframe wall and under a plate-glass window. I could see blood gushing from my wife's arms and legs. My little daughter. I pulled on the wood, trying to lift part of a wall off and get her out from under the broken glass window frame, certain that another wave would come and hit us soon.

  We got her free. Her tiny head was covered with blood. Her eyes stared big and wide at us, and she was completely silent. Shock.

  Somehow we got ourselves to the Sunset Beach fire station at Sharks Cove. I'll never know quite how. They had set up an emergency center and were tending to other injured people. They immediately started treating our wounds, my daughters and wife first. We were all cut up by glass, deep cuts. All the while, there was the roar of the sea at Sharks Cove.

  Suddenly the firemen told us to evacuate the fire station. They feared the waves would destroy it, and they needed to get us all to higher ground. Immediately.

  I don't remember how my wife and daughters were evacuated to Wahiaha Hospital. Helicopter? I doubt it. But I found myself not wanting to leave. I told them to go, but I would stay behind. Why? I can't remember.

  I limped to the Sunset Beach Elementary School a quarter of a mile away, the whitewater coming across Kamehameha Highway often reaching up to my knees. The school was perhaps a quarter of a mile inland from the beach, on the Pupukea Pali side of Kamehameha Highway. It was a small wood-frame building. Other people had already gathered there, evacuees, too scared to move. Remarkably, the electricity was still on, and the telephones still worked. I called my wife's mother to tell her what was happening, but the phone went dead.

  It was dark. From the beach perhaps a quarter of a mile away I could hear the sound of wood breaking and trees snapping as the surf plowed over homes. Cars were washing up to Kam Highway, some upside down. Police cars and a fire truck were parked beside the elementary school, radios blaring, emergency lights flashing. Then another tremendous roar, and a giant wave, bigger than the rest, exploded on the shore, and perhaps 7 feet of whitewater rushed across the Kam Highway.

  It lifted the elementary school off its foundation, and we began floating backward toward the Pupukea Pali. Panic set in. Police and firemen abandoned their vehicles and yelled, "Everyone, up to the Pali, up to the Pali!"

  Panicking, too, they seemed sure that the surf was about to inundate all the lands of the North Shore and that the only escape was to get to the escarpment, maybe three-quarters of a mile from the beach-and do what? Climb it? But nothing like this had ever happened before, and who could tell what would happen next?

  I'll never forget the sight of brave policemen and firemen running in the dark, away from their vehicles toward the mountains, toward the Pali. Us, no. We stayed in the school and prayed for the best. There were perhaps twelve of us. No one spoke, and now it was pitch black. No lights, only the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles that lay abandoned and now partly underwater. One police car was overturned. All around us were the sounds of terrible roaring surf and splintering wood and crashing walls. The sounds of disaster. And death.

  It lasted through the night, but so did we. The elementary school became a floating boat. Up and down, bobbing. Whitewater came in, hit the small wooden building, and then it floated, did circles, then settled down again when the water receded. This happened over and over again throughout that night. How big were those waves pounding the shoreline? We were perhaps 70 feet above sea level, and still we weren't safe. There seemed to be no escape.

  Dawn. The waves had receded. The sound of breaking wood and glass became intermittent, then stopped. The policemen and firemen returned to their smashed vehicles. And here again I draw a blank. How did I reunite with my wife and children in Honolulu? I don't remember. And why did I choose to stay and not get out with them? I don't know.

  I thank God we survived. Other people didn't. Seven or eight people were killed, though it is a miracle it wasn't more. We survived. We had our lives. All our physical possessions were lost, but most of them could be replaced-though not my lecture notes, study notes, my library of books, my IBM typewriter, my cameras, slides, et at. Years of study and research-gone. Irreplaceable.

  A few days later in Honolulu, reunited with my family at my mother-in-law's home, I received my scoldings. She and my wife had a right to be angry. Why did we live there? I had been warned. Hawaiians never lived that close to the sea. Before World War II and after, haoles moved in, planted trees, built homes, brought in dirt fill, sand was trapped, a wide beach created, but all artificial. Now the sea took it back. "Only a crazy person, lolo, would live there," my wife's mother scolded. She was right.

  Years ago the Oahu Railway once took sugarcane around the island, even around Kaena Point, and carried passengers, too. One can still see remnants of those train tracks on the North Shore. My mother-in-law rode that train before the war and saw what was there. It was all lava on the seaside, and indeed, after the high surf, which washed the sand away, we discovered thousands of Hawaiian petroglyphs carved into the lava on the beach. This is how the seaside looked a long time ago. All lava and no homes. The petroglyphs are still there. I'm sure folks who live on the North Shore today see them occasionally after huge swells, but there are many more under the sand-a hidden historical record of the Hawaiian fishermen and farmers who also once called the North Shore home-though their houses, of course, were up toward the Pali.

  I took one year off. Leave of absence. I spent the next year rebuilding our home. Mr. Honda, the farmer across the road, loaned me his front loader, and I went up and down Kam Highway gathering up sand to bring back to our land. But there was no land left. Only deep holes down to lava. The sea had washed everything away. I received a Red Cross loan to reconstruct my property-and rebuild my life. Disaster assistance. But I found myself in heavy debt. No flood insurance in those days. And that was the end of my PhD program.

  It took me five months to fill those holes where our house once stood. I had suffered a concussion and other minor injuries, but I worked through them. I replaced the milo, naupaka, coconut trees, and most of the Hawaiian plants. And it took me another five months to rebuild the house. But the place never looked the same. Not as green. And it was tainted in my mind with bad memories.

  The concussion? Perhaps that is why I let my family go and I stayed behind. I have no other explanation for my actions.

  Many of our neighbors' homes were also destroyed. They never came back to live there again. They sold them and forgot about North Shore living.

  Fred Van Dyke, Jose Angel, and Peter Cole lived east of me. Beach homes also. Their homes suffered minor damage. The Log Cabins, Pupukea, and Kami Land Reef forced the huge surf to break offshore before hitting their land. We had no such reef, thus the horrendous exposure to giant waves.

  Then, again I was lucky. The next year after rebuilding the home, I was offered the position of dean of students at Maui Community College, a job I took with much gratitude. We started a new life on Maui. Our Maui home was 3,000 feet above sea level. And that dean position was
a stepping-stone to other jobs, international work with the East West Center. I sold the North Shore property with no regret. We just felt lucky to be alive.

  On Maui, my students coaxed me into surfing Honolulu Bay in 1970-1971. No one out but us. But I never again surfed big waves, nor did I wish to. I couldn't forget what I saw and experienced that night. December 1, 1969.

  2009: Northeast Thailand

  Now it is forty years later, and I am retired. After I moved to Maui and became dean of students, my wife and I divorced, and I raised my daughters as a single dad for many years after. My eldest daughter became a teacher. She married a Punahou School athlete, and they have four children. My youngest daughter became a corporate attorney in Honolulu and is now executive director of the Waikiki Community Center. At least I was a good dad, and my children did well as adults. But none of my daughters surfs. Wonder why?

  Over ten years ago I married a Thai woman, and we live in northeast Thailand in an area called "Isan" in Ubon Rachathani city. It is a university town. We live on two acres of rural property, high above the Moon River (Mei Nam Mun), which flows into the Mekong River, not far from us. Here I fish, paddle my kayak, grow fruits and vegetables, and swim long distance in Olympic swimming pools. I stay in condition; I am still a waterman, in a way.

  I thought I was finished with those appalling surf memories, but I am not. They refreshed themselves here in Thailand. The Phuket or Boxing Day tsunami. No, I wasn't in it, but my friends were.

  David Sanaman was from Hanalei, Kauai, and after retiring he built a beautiful beach home in Khao Lak, northeast of Phuketright where the tsunami did the most damage.

  My wife, my eight-year-old step-daughter, and I were invited to David's house party on December 26, 2004. By dumb luck, we didn't make it; 5,321 people were killed in Thailand by the tsunami, among them everyone who attended David's Christmas party.

  Four days afterward my wife and I went to Phuket to help look for David's body. What I saw made December 1, 1969, at Sunset Beach look like a rehearsal for greater dreadfulness. There is no stopping the sea. Where once stood resorts, we saw canyons 20 feet deep, holes down into bedrock. Earth and sand and cement buildings swept away and holes down to the Earth's bone layer. But that is another story.

  Today I surf Google Earth and look at the homes on the North Shore of Oahu. As my senior surfer-attorney friend Wesley Lau says, "The haoles have rebuilt million-dollar homes along the beach, and the ocean is just biding its time to reclaim the shore."

  I'm sure there are technical oceanographic explanations for why that surf was so big that night, and there are many explanations about the Boxing Day tsunami. But I know enough about what happened on the North Shore that day and night, just from experiencing it. It was a once-in-a-generation big wave episode, and it will happen again.

  The surf still stays with me in my memory-surfing with my friends as a young man. But I know how the sea can turn, and as a senior man I now live a more agrarian rural life and look at my old surfing pictures of Waimea Bay and think, "How did you do that? Why were you crazy enough to do that? And to live there?" But then think I'm glad that I did. It was great fun and in a way a rite of passage to some kind of understanding about the nature of things-how precious life is and how fleeting. And how wonderful.

  SCARED SHITLESS

  Makaha, prewar. Wave-riding in Hawaii during the late 1930s was still done almost exclusively at Waikiki, where the surf was generally biggest from May to September. Everyone on the beach had a vague understanding that the waves on the north and west sides of the island came up during fall and winter and that they were often bigger, much bigger, than anything that hit the southwestfacing reefs at Waikiki. Yet, this was an abstract thought, the way a skier might wonder about snow conditions in the Himalayas. Before the hot curl, surfboards were all but nonfunctional in waves bigger than 6 feet; a surfer paddling boldly into the Castle Break lineup on a summer's afternoon with a 12-foot swell pumping through had every right to think he'd just placed himself at the very back of beyond.

  Returning to shore, of course, the surfer was almost traditionbound to play up the experience. Jack London, after all, had described the Waikiki surf zone as a place filled with "white battalions of the infinite army of the sea." Tom Blake often told the story about Duke Kahanamoku launching into a Castle Break wave that measured "30 feet high," with surface rills hitting the bottom of Duke's board like the "patter of a machine gun." Two or three generations later, Hawaiian surfers, to look cool, would reduce their wave height estimations to such a ridiculous degree that a 15-footer could be offhandedly pegged down to 6 feet. In the 1930s, though, wave measurement was still very much in its golden era of exaggeration.

  John Kelly and Wally Froiseth got an early lesson in big wave relativity in late 1937, when they loaded up Kelly's Model T and drove west into the dry coastal outback near Waianae Town. This was an overnight lobster-hunting expedition, so their new hot curl boards were left behind. After parking next to a long, broad crescent of sugar-white sand, they walked north to a rocky intertidal zone, carefully laid a pair of lobster nets, returned to the car, and eventually set out their bedrolls and fell asleep on the beach to the gentle murmur of flat surf.

  At 3 a.m. Kelly woke to a kettledrum roar of a new swell, and even in the black-gray duotone of night, he could tell the waves were huge-bigger, thicker, faster, and longer than anything they'd ever ridden in Waikiki. "We went home later that day," Kelly recalled, "and told everybody about what we'd seen, and they all just scoffed. But next time we took our boards, and we had Makaha to ourselves for two or three years."

  Oahu's West Side is hemmed in by the towering Waianae Range, and for centuries it had been a badlands. Tribes here, having remained independent when the rest of the islanders unified, were known as Hawaii's best fighters-Makaha translates to "fierce"-and missionaries sent to the area were mostly ignored. The Waianae-based community that developed around a nearby sugar plantation was tight-knit and occasionally generous to outsiders but also ghettoized and crime-ridden.

  The landscape was dazzling and harsh. Jutting lava-black hillsides gave way to canopied valleys spilling into the island's clearest, bluest ocean water. Less rainfall meant less muddy runoff. This was the last stretch of coast on Oahu to have paved roads. Kelly and Froiseth drove on a graded dirt track from Barber's Point north during their early visits to Makaha, and they were occasionally turned back by an unpassable gully washout.

  Makaha's enormous wave field hasn't changed over the decades. With a moderate swell running, three distinct takeoff areas are in play, each one good for a playful if somewhat meandering right-slide that terminates, just a few feet off the beach, in a spectacular backwash-generated shorebreak. For spectators, this last feature has become a Makaha favorite: A spent wave rolls up the sandy berm, doubles back, and plows head-on into the next wave. Surfers and boards caught at the moment of impact are often launched like tiddlywinks, 10 feet into the air.

  The hot curl surfers enjoyed riding on these kinds of small and midsize days. But in years to come, what they really hoped to find after the long drive from Honolulu-what each succeeding generation of big wave surfers has hoped to find-is something called "Makaha Point Surf": long 10-foot-or-bigger right-breaking waves that start at the top of the point and thunder into the bay for 100 yards or more with no loss in size. In the middle of the bay, where the wave should obligingly spill into a deep-water channel and die, it instead funnels into an end section called the "Bowl," where it fans out like a cobra's head, not only gaining height-10 or more vertical feet in some cases-but also bending in on itself.

  The takeoff and middle sections of a Makaha Point Surf wave are twice as powerful as anything found in Waikiki, and the power doubles again at this last stage. Furthermore, as Kelly, Froiseth, and the rest of the hot curlers quickly learned, the speed and steepness of a Point Surf wave mean that it has to be taken as an all-or-nothing proposal. Nine times out of ten, the surfer who manages to race across
the Point and deliver himself to the Bowl section fails to negotiate the last 50 yards to the channel; he either sizes things up and ejects voluntarily (by doing a cannonball move off the back of the board or by dropping prone and sledding for the beach) or continues full speed into the Bowl to be overhauled by a dropping cataract of whitewater.

  Waianae natives likely rode Makaha in the centuries before Cook's arrival, but nobody knows for sure. The break's only premodern surfer of record is Kuho'oheihei "Abner" Paki, the partially Westernized high chief father of Hawaii's revered Queen Liliuokalani, who rode Makaha during the mid-nineteenth century on a 14-foot, 150-pound olo monstrosity.

  When Kelly and Froiseth began riding Makaha, they did so believing they were the first. They eased into it. Full-size Point Surf was too much for the early hot curl prototypes, but the Empty Lot Boys were confident in their new equipment and pumped to the gills with immortal teenage swagger. They understood that new big surf techniques were theirs to invent; three or four years later, they were confidently paddling into waves bigger than anything they'd ever seen in Waikiki.

  Other Waikiki surfers were curious enough about Makaha to venture out and give it a try, but just a few made it a regular thing. "We'd lose guys in two ways," Froiseth recalled. "We'd drive out there, bragging the whole way about the surf, and it would be totally flat. And they'd say 'Ah, you guys are bullshitting; and there was nothing to do then but turn around and drive back. The other thing that happened was, the surf would be so goddamned big they'd just sit on the beach, scared shitless, and not go out at all. Same thing. They couldn't wait to get back to Waikiki."

  -From The History of Surfing, by Matt Warshaw

  It's one of surfing's greatest tales and one that big wave legend Greg Noll has told often enough: the epic day during the Swell of '69 when Noll, out alone in gigantic Makaha Point Surf, took off on what until only recently was considered the biggest wave ever ridden. But in the many magazines, books, and movies that have chronicled this epoch-ending event, the story almost always stops with Noll catching "the Wave," seldom examining the ride itself and, for the man who rode it, its life-altering consequences.