by John Long
Following our session the beach kids hacked open a coconut for me, and I had to ask them how to eat it properly. Back in the car, Aamion gave me a little clinic for next time, telling me that young coconuts are the drinking ones and that the older dead-fall coconuts are the ones with the thick meat and that you can strain the white meat through an old sock or even through coconut husk to get out the milk and boil it, and once you've boiled it you've got a good oil for your skin or for cooking-makes fish taste pretty good, especially if you're eating fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and getting pretty sick of it-and that says nothing of what you can do with the fronds, like weaving them into rope or making shelter via the technique that Aamion calmly, painstakingly explained from what was clearly personal experience.
Or bananas: Aamion Goodwin could not say a simple phrase like, "Yeah, I like bananas," because he didn't think of bananas monolithically. He thought of bananas in terms of cooking bananas, apple bananas, and about a dozen other banana varieties, some of which he liked, some of which he hated, and others he said you could use only in certain ways. And when I asked what he'd meant before about eating fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner-"What's that all about?"-he said that was just how he'd grown up, and so I asked who was catching all that fish, and he said that he was, for the most part, and I asked how, and he said he usually threw spears off rocks on the beach, and then I asked why the hell there were always fish right at the surface waiting to get nailed, and he said, "Well, when I was a kid I used to walk along the beach on the island where I grew up and catch crabs and mash them up with rocks and toss them in the water, and by the time I'd walked all the way around the island there'd be big fish coming in for the chum so I could brain them with a spear."
"And how about Slurpees?," you want to ask. Were you into the jumbo size or the super jumbo? "Oh, yeah, and also, What freaking planet are you from?"
"Fiji and Kauai, mostly. And New Zealand. Hey, stop the car," Aamion said. "Seriously, stop the car. I want to get out."
Aamion unfolded his endless limbs and jogged into the cacao orchard and pulled down a few huge pods and jumped back into the car. Then he cut one open with a knife, dipped in a finger to scoop out this goopy white membrane, and started sucking the gelatinous shite off his finger. "Okay, you can keep driving," he said.
To place Aamion Goodwin in the surf world, picture a Kauai childhood contemporary with the Irons brothers, growing up in the shadow of Laird, and surfing down at Pine Trees with Andy, Bruce, Roy Powers, Jesse Merle-Jones, Danny Fuller, Dustin Barca, and Kamalei Alexander. Lots of heavy older guys, too: Kala Alexander, Clay Abubo. But, of course, it wasn't all Pine Trees; that's just the only Kauai surf spot that Kauai boys are allowed to say exists. That's why it seems like an entire generation of heavy-wave chargers came out of a lame little beachbreak perfect from grom contests. But anyway, Aamion tried the contest route-amateur events around Hawaii, a second place in the Hawaiian State Championships-and then he realized that three-to-the-beach would never be his strong suit. He landed a Surfer cover in 2000 in the tube at Teahupoo: "That kind of jump-started my photo-slut career," is how Aamion describes its effect on his life. Now he's with Hurley, Etnies, Wave Riding Vehicles, etc., but mostly he's all about Pipeline and about his friends at Pipeline. He started working his way into the lineup in '98, sat out there for hours at a time catching the odd closeout, finally started picking off occasional set waves.
"Now it's a great feeling to be out there with your friends and be the guys getting waves," he says. But then he catches himself and adds, "Not that I get a lot of waves, either, and I certainly don't get my pick."
Then he makes sure to tell me about the older guys who do get their pick-Derek Ho, a few others-and he also makes sure to say that those guys deserve it, they've earned it.
They're very primitive, very tribal, these Kauai guys: always thinking about their friends, always paying respect.
"Any memorable days at Pipe?" I ask, knowing it won't work. Naming a memorable day would require claiming size, and that's a flat-out no-no.
So he says, "Memorable waves, maybe."
"Tell me."
"Last year, I got one that feathered on second reef but didn't break, and then it shelfed."
So I ask what "shelfed" means, and suddenly we're off and running because we're talking specifics about the wave, with no risk of accidental boasting: "Pipeline breathes, right? When you're in the barrel on a big one it breathes, and it'll kind of pull you back toward the foam ball-it's this weird, weightless feeling, and it usually does that right before it spits its guts out, and there's so many ways you can fall right then, like you can get blinded by the spit, or you can catch a boil. See, if you're already extended when it breathes, you almost always fall. So you keep your body compressed so you can compensate for that weightless feeling. But, anyway, somehow I got lucky and did everything right and came out. That was a memorable wave."
So low key, right? It's what these guys are like right now: no hyperbole. Spend enough time with them, and you imagine some mysterious figure standing over them with a baseball bat, ready to flatten them if they misspeak or speak openly about the dangers and outrageousness of surfing big Pipe and beyond. Like, here's Aamion's friends commenting on his presence at Pipeline.
"He's definitely out there at Pipeline," says Danny Fuller. "He's definitely out there getting the bigger waves. He's good. Aamion's one of the boys, and he gets his fair share of waves, and he's a standout. He's out there whenever it's big, doing his thing."
"Shit, he's really pretty much come into his own, found his niche, and surfs fucking really good out there," said Kamalei Alexander. "He can surf all right everywhere else, but at Pipeline he's starting to be a force with his fucking 10-foot arms; real healthy person, positive, always stoked to see other people do good."
Daize, Aamion's wife, is a little more expressive, talking about how they were fifteen when they met, and she had a job at Aamion's father's health food store: "He was skinny and tall and lanky. He hadn't filled out yet, and he had braces and acne. He was really safe. I could hang out with him every day, and my boyfriend wouldn't care. He was this hippy kid who would do anything fun, like cover each other with mud or pick ticks off the dog. But I didn't see him for maybe five years there, and one day my boyfriend was like, 'Look at this, and he was pointing at some guy on the cover of Italian Vogue. He said, 'It's that guy you used to hang out with, Aamion. After that, when I'd see him on North Shore, I was so scared because he was this ugly duckling who turned into the most beautiful swan."
Brad Gerlach wins a 2006 BiLLabong XXL Global Big Wave award with this 68-foot Leviathan at Todos Santos, Mexico. PHOTO © ROBERT BROWN/BILLABONGXXL.COM
But what's behind the person you become? When we're talking about well-endorsed young pros getting showered with money and free clothes and not caring about too much beyond hanging with their friends, I bet a lot of us think we know: not a lot, right? Well, check out Aamion's nativity story, which emerged that night in the hot darkness of a kerosene-lit deck at a former slave plantation, rain hammering the tin roof and spraying off the railings. The four of us, on that surf trip to the jungled Atlantic island, were eating pork and rice and drinking Portuguese beer, and when I asked what exactly Aamion meant about growing up in Fiji, New Zealand, and Kauai, I got a start-with-the-beginning story about two American kids in Vero Beach, Florida, in the mid-1970s, much in love and caught up in all the hope and changing values of that era. Making love by firelight, on the beach, they got pregnant, set out for Mexico, birth the baby au naturel in a mud goat shed with no midwife. Soon after, Dad's mom and grandma show up unannounced and help the little family back to Virginia Beach.
Aaron and Marion split up, Aaron takes custody of their baby, Aamion, and lights out for the Pacific islands, looking to escape industrial civilization-lands in Fiji, living with locals on a riverbank in the upland jungles, with friendly Fijian mothers caring for Aamion while the young father makes his art. Visa probl
ems lead them onward to New Zealand, a few months of migrant farm work and surfing and hitchhiking. "I would bundle Aamion up before light," Aaron recalls of those farm working days, "place him still sleeping under the cherry tree and have an hour or more of first light to pick by, until the little bundle popped his head up and monkey-climbed high into the cherry tree to help drop some cherries in my bucket between breakfast mouthfuls."
Then came a berth on a dubious French yacht headed back to Fiji. The yacht had no working motor, a hole above waterline, and a sketchy French crew with a mysterious past, and they did run into a violent storm just offshore. "My dad had to hand-pump the bilge all night, and I kept running up on deck screaming, 'Dad, where are you?' Waves were smashing over, and I remember he's like, 'Don't come up again! You stay down there!' I came up again, and he grabbed me by the ankle and dunked me overboard and said, 'That's what it's like! Stay down there!"' The wind died, too, after the storm, and it stayed dead for two weeks-a serious problem when you don't have a working engine. Aamion recalls being knee deep in flying fish on deck and watching the captain spear a big shark. But seventeen days later, they limped into Fiji s Suva Harbor.
Everybody has a story; some are just better than others. Aamion's grew deeper and stranger as our Atlantic surf trip wore on, and I grew more and more curious about the gulf between his calm, well-adjusted normalcy and the astounding dysfunction of his childhood. Back in Fiji, for example, he and his father were invited to join a Fijian village, so they lived in a lean-to for several months while Aamion played all day with the local kids, catching prawns and gathering wild yams. "At the tender age of three," Aaron writes, "Aamion was immersed in this culture so freelyevery day foretold how Aamion's heart would always dwell with these people in a way I could never know." There's a Hawaii chapter, too, all about being homeless on Maui's Makena Beach, living in caves with other hippies and Aaron finally remarrying.
Back in Fiji, yet again, Aamion, Aaron, and Aaron's new wife, Ave, got invited to a small group of outer islands that turned out to be paradise-one with a tiny village, the other four uninhabited. So they simply stayed, moved in, joined the village. "At seven years old," Aaron says, "Aamion could make his own spears, dive deep into the lagoons, hunt and spear fish, use a hand line to pull in big fish, use a machete, and climb tall coconut trees for nuts to drink and leaves to plait, scour the islands for food, and help return with the bounty for the waiting hum of coconut scraping and expectant fire tenders to feed all."
"We'd go throw spear with the young Fijian guys," Aamion says, "and we were all learning, and the older guys would teach us how to stalk the fish and how to throw at the right angle." He also went trolling off small boats, catching mackerel and rigging them with double hooks as bait for bigger fish. Idle-trolling across a pinnacle once with five hundred-pound test, he saw a marlin nail his line. Aamion was just a kid at the time, with a couple Fijian friends. "Bam, we just see the thing jump, and we're freaking out. It was probably like 7 feet, 8 feet from tip of the bill to the tail, and it was too big for me to hand-line in, so I just tied the line to the seat, and we towed it to the beach, and it was jumping and thrashing, and you could see the fins of four other marlin swimming right next to it, and we ended up bringing it in close to the beach and throwing a spear into its head, and we spread the meat around the village.
"But realistically," Aamion told me, "breakfast, lunch, and dinner were fish. No joke. Sometimes you were eating the boiled fish from the night before for breakfast, and as a kid I remember dying to have something sweet, something that was different tasting, so I would be in the time trees when they were in season like, 'Oh, limes!' If there was a stalk of bananas that was going to be ripe, the whole village would know about it, like 'There's bananas on the other side of the island, don't tell anyone!' And it would be gone. When the mango trees go off, they don't even wait for them to get ripe, they're just grinding them. There were a few papaya trees, which the birds would get to before you, guaranteed. You'd be eating the scraps, which was fine, just to have a different taste in your mouth from fish." To season the fish, apparently they rarely did more than boil it in seawater or, after cooking it over a fire, dip it in seawater. "What they really looked forward to," Aamion said, "is a different fish for dinner, or a different fish for lunch, and, of course, their favorite things are like the eyeballs and the slime off the head. I don't particularly like the eyeballs that much, but the head is really moist, and the taste is really nice."
All my life I've wished I could spearfish, so I asked Aamion to give me a lesson. We borrowed a spear gun and fins and masks from the resort and got a guy with a dugout canoe to run us out to an offshore rock pile. Dropping into the water, Aamion took the gun first and went searching while I followed. Water depth ran down to about 30 feet, among various blocks and alleys, and small schools drifted in and out of sight. The local islanders bring home dinner every night this way-amazing watermen-and Aamion, I could see, would have no trouble doing the same. I shot at three fish that day and missed them all, but everything about Aamion's water presence spoke of absolute comfort-and as I lay in bed that night, only a few hundred yards from a plaque marking the equator, I decided that comfort seemed the great take-away from Aamion's miraculous experience in Fiji. Comfort with himself, comfort with exotic places, comfort with the sea-but most of all, comfort with Fiji, a specific place he can always call home.
Aaron did move them along to Kauai again and also New Zealand, where they lived in the orchards. A strong, young Aamion helped with the picking, but they got back to Fiji as soon as they could afford the trip, and that circuit became the annual migration path of Aamion's entire childhood and youth, right up until he was a teenager. At some point, Aaron's and Aamion's Fiji trips started to become separate affairs: Aaron and Ave now go for a month or so each year, staying on an uninhabited outer island with a freshwater drip that provides five gallons a day. They get dropped off without a boat or a satellite phone. Aaron makes art; Ave makes jewelry. When I ask if it's a lovely place, Aamion says, "It's a platform on top, drops off 200 feet to the water; in order to get on to the top, you have to climb up the roots of a banyan tree. You sit up there and just look over the reef, and where it drops off into the deep blue you can watch schools of fish swim by all day, sharks. They bring brown rice, and they drink coconuts and tea and relax. I'm not exaggerating. My dad doesn't even fish. And there's a mango tree on top, so they have mangos right now."
Aamion eventually started taking his friend Mark Healey; they head first to that one little village on the outer islands, where males old and young wear cast-off clothes left behind by Aamion over the years. After a good, long visit, including hellos to various villagers who have been named after Aamion, his father, and Ave-who once helped birth a baby in the village-Aamion, Healey, and a few old Fijian buddies load a boat with fresh water and make a two-hour trip to an uninhabited island. Sometimes they stay two weeks. Sometimes they stay a month. Mostly they just dive all day long and maybe throw spear in the afternoons. Aamion admits that there are waves on these islands and that he surfs out on these trips, but he says that for years he never even thought about surfing there. "It was all about fishing and hanging out with Fijians, and time would pass quickly," he says. "You just fall into the experience of being there. It's easygoing and satisfying and constant."
Aamion never pretends his life has been any easier or better than anybody else's. After all, another way of looking at his past is that his mom and dad split up right after he was born and that his penniless father dragged him all over the planet in pursuit of art and meaning. Along the way, the baby boy spent a lot of time either genuinely homeless or living in marginal circumstances. He also grew up hardly knowing his biological mother, which isn't a picnic for anyone. That's probably why Aamion's tips on how to eat coconuts or cacao pods or how to build yourself a home with palm fronds or how to mash up rock crabs and toss them out for chum don't ever smack of boasting. In every life, a little rain must fall, but Aa
mion has seen his downpours. The home Aamion has made on the North Shore and among his childhood surf buddies-the Wolfpack, that is, filling up the pecking order at Pipe-reads in this light as a very natural commitment to the safe and the familiar. But Aamion seems to know that he's had his share of blessings, too, and that his father had an astonishing reservoir of courage, commitment, and love-how few fathers would really stand by a baby son all on their own? Most of all, Aamion seems to know that he's found something in Fiji that most people never find anywhere: a genuine home on earth.
"For certain people," he says, "there's a place where you're absolutely content with everything. That's what Fiji is for me."
GERRY LOPEZ: THE LAST SOUL SURFER
The Gerry Lopez-Pipeline union in the 1970s was another one of the sport's perfect matches, like Miki Dora at Malibu and Greg Noll at Waimea Bay. But he added a twist. Where everybody else used the wave as a platform upon which to perform, Lopez's idea was to literally disappear into the wave. In his best moments he didn't seem to be performing at all-or at least not in the way Dora, Noll, and the rest performed. Lopez stood quietly, hands and arms relaxed at his sides, knees just slightly bent, face calm. He wasn't the first less-is-more surfer. But he did it in the ionized center of Pipeline tubes that exploded around him like cannon fire, making the most difficult thing in the sport appear not just easy but meditative.
Nobody had better timing than Gerry Lopez. He was a gifted surfer who would have left a mark no matter when he came on the scene. Yet, every surf-world event, trend, and development seemed to go Lopez's way, beginning with Jock Sutherland's bewildering announcement in December 1969 that he'd voluntarily joined the U.S. Army and was shipping out forthwith, leaving the position for top Pipeline surfer wide open. Anticontest sentiment was peaking, too, which created a need for a new kind of surf hero. Lopez filled both roles, immediately and effortlessly. For six years, he was surfing's preeminent figure.