Reef Dance Page 17

  “Hey Jack,” I called out across the flames, “ever hear of a development around here called Sea Pointe?”

  He kept his eyes on the fire. “Sea Pointe? Can’t say that I have, Master J.,” he replied with no visible discomfort or emotion. He seemed to be telling the truth—or he could have been playing it cool to the hilt. Sometimes you needed a road map to follow his line of jive.

  No one else had heard of Sea Pointe either.

  The Hawaiians played on and the last of the logs popped and split. I grew transfixed by the pulsating flames. This evening had been a truly fine time until someone had to go and lift those brochures. The visit to the attic weighed heavily on my mind. The letters, the portfolio, Sea Pointe—tracing my mother’s footsteps. Moving ahead after thirteen years of inertia.

  Minutes passed. When I looked up again, my eyes immediately met Jackie’s, and I had the distinct feeling that he’d been watching me all along, tapping my thoughts. His gaze was intense, and yet I did not resent the intrusion, but rather welcomed it. I was apt to benefit from Jackie’s watchful presence.

  December, 1979

  Holy Rollers looked big to my eyes, even from the pier, a solid quarter mile from the reef. Booming, violent. I felt more like a roped-off tourist watching the detonation and collapse of large buildings than a lone rider checking out a surfable wave. A mysto spot, all right. For anyone with the audacity to even think of paddling out on days like this, the anxiety hangs in the air like a gypsy curse. Nerves of steel turn to quivering jelly. Old sports injuries mysteriously act up. Long forgotten side projects suddenly require urgent attention; wives and girlfriends, special treatment. Maybe another day. I knew the deal. Holy Rollers would always be msyto, I decided, because surfers wanted it that way.

  Today it was my turn to be cursed.

  Never mind the curse, you’re ready, I told myself. After all, I surfed nearly every day, played water polo for the high school team, and could handle myself reasonably well in overhead beachbreak conditions. My bigwave-riding genes were unparalleled.

  I secretly harbored a few grand aspirations, too. One day I would travel to the Islands, the North Shore of Oahu, and hunt the big stuff as my father had done. Holys was a natural stepping stone toward that goal, a full-tilt big wave training ground right in my own backyard. I’d observed my share of rumbling, white-knuckle days out there the previous winter, leaning against the bait shack wall at the end of the pier and squinting through binoculars as thick lips poured onto the outer reef in what seemed like slow motion. Occasionally a few surfers from Huntington would show up and paddle out, guys with Island experience and a lot of big days at H. B. Pier under their belts. But more often than not, the lineup I studied was empty. In our town, only Jackie Pace had the skill and experience to regularly handle a complex, dangerous big wave spot like Holys. But I didn’t know Jackie Pace—he’d rocketed to stardom when I was still a child—and he hadn’t been seen around these parts much in recent years. The playing field was wide open, yet eerily deserted.

  I silently reviewed the rules of the game. A low tide rising to medium is usually optimal, because on higher tides the volume of water pulling up the face is too great to make that drop over the ledge—and the last thing you want to do at a spot like Holys is get hung up at the top and pitched over the falls. At Holys, you surf the right, which is not self-evident since the peak breaks cleanly both ways. But only the right dumps you into a deep paddling channel at the end, ensuring a reasonably safe trip back outside. The best swell direction is a strong west with some north in it, anything over ten feet. Swell direction is important. The peak stands up and dumps on the outer reef, then lines up into a long right wall that goes hollow near the end in an inside bowl section known as the Tabernacle. On a straight west, the inside bowl produces a wild and beautiful barrel, but it tends to shut down too soon, swatting the rider before he can escape cleanly. A touch of north, however, angles the swells in a tad wider and holds open the Tabernacle’s door, as they say, making tube riding less dicey.

  Wipeouts are usually cold, deep and violent. Size-wise, no one knows how huge a swell Holys can handle before closing out, but the bigger the better seems to be the rule. In the epic winter of ’69, the outer peak hit twenty-five feet plus several times and still held rideable shape.

  A trio of tortured souls huddled nearby on the pier, alternately watching, pacing, and crapping their pants at the spectacle of big Holys. We exchanged nervous nods.

  A gargantuan deep-water wall exploded, sending a slight but bone-chilling tremor quivering through the wooden planks beneath our feet. The inside reef was boiling white now, like an underwater nuclear bombsite. I was hoping the other surfers would stick around and paddle out with me, but when I turned my back on Holys, they were shuffling off the pier toward Main and drinking in a commonplace, yet now oddly wonderful, view of advancing terra firma. A giant tube yawned and slammed shut the Tabernacle door, and I hooted, but no one heard me. The boys were already lost in debate over which restaurant offered the best breakfast special.

  The sky was a soft, misted gray, the kind that closely follows a rain, and the air was cold and clean. In the wet sand below the pier, the children’s playground was half underwater, giant puddles hemming in the jungle gym like a moat around a castle.

  I’d been staying with my father’s old friends, Pam and Grog Baker, for three months now since my mom had left or disappeared—or whatever. Like my dad, Grog had been a big wave rider in his time. He’d kill me if he knew I was doing this, I thought. Well, he wouldn’t know. No one was on the pier when I trotted down the metal gangway to the boat landing, stretched my legs a bit, and jumped in.

  I paddled slowly but at a steady clip, reminding myself to reserve enough energy for the long paddle back in. Two other older surfers from Long Beach had shown up a half hour earlier, just after the under-gunned trio had begged off and headed to breakfast, but they were nowhere to be seen. We’d hooted at a big set, chatting without eye contact. One of the Long Beach guys knew all about my father and spoke reverently of his contributions to the evolution of the big-wave gun. I told him I’d let him ride Honey Child—the board my dad had shaped for me when I was just a baby—once I’d had my fill.

  At least, I hoped that Robert Shepard had made Honey Child with me in mind. He died before I ever got the chance to ask him. I’d found the board in the rafters a few months ago and shown it to Grog. My father was always tossing off nicknames, Grog said, and I was a very blond baby, so . . . well, you never know.

  The board made me feel safer, somehow, as if my father was with me now in spirit. That was the idea behind this first-ever session at Holys: to strengthen my ties with him by putting Honey Child to its intended use—and to help put my deserter of a mother behind me for good. But as I approached, the outer peak was lonely and menacing in its desolation. Behind me, cold swells rolled unscathed toward shore, no other paddlers in sight. I removed a chunk of wax I’d tucked under the wrist of my wetsuit and rubbed it into the middle of my deck, then worked on the tail area a bit. Ten minutes of tense anticipation passed. When the first set lifted in front of me, I felt very much alone.

  Paddling over those first few swells was almost surreal, so much more mountainous were they than any waves I’d ever attempted. The fifth and last wave was the biggest in the set, and as I scratched to escape over the top, I hesitated for an instant to look back. Ten feet to my right, an improbably thick lip was already pitching way, way out onto the flat some twenty-five feet below. I pushed over the back before the lip broke the surface, but the explosion was deafening. Behind me, the wall humped over as it wound down the reef, huge bursts of spray squirting out the back as it peeled away. Something shifted deep in my stomach and I felt like puking.

  By the time the second set arrived, I’d all but forgotten the hype I’d been feeding myself about riding Honey Child for my father. My focus was now on survival, and I set about reviewing everything I’d ever heard about surfing Holys at size.
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  The first two waves were clean, but I let them pass, not wanting to have to contend with the rest of the set if I were to blow the takeoff and get stuck in the impact zone. The third was a fat, good-looking one, and I turned and dug for shore with all my strength as the trough sucked out far below me and a wet mist whistled up the face, blowing back my hair. I was scared, but I wanted this wave.

  “When you think you’ve got it, paddle hard twice more before you go!” a voice in my head shouted in last-minute instruction. It was one of my father’s rules, and I dutifully followed it, but when I stood, the wall jacked so steeply beneath me that for an instant I felt betrayed, like a trusting soul driving off a cliff, road map in hand. Fuck me, this spot wasn’t surfable after all.

  The next few seconds I was falling, weightless, and I braced for the horrid wipe that was surely in store, but a third of the way down I felt my inside rail slice cleanly into the rushing bottom-suck and somehow found my balance as the wall hooked over behind me. My bottom-turn was weak but sufficient to project me around the peak, and I climbed slowly back up the thrice-overhead wall as it stretched out before me like a tilting, blue-green meadow of heavy water. I was not really turning, but merely trimming across the open face on this handsome bullet train of a surfboard my father had made just for this wave. Aah, Honey Child! The speed was intoxicating, so much so that I forgot about the bowl section yet to come and failed to link together any solid, momentum building turns. I was flying, yet falling behind, for the wall was still gathering speed as it hit the Tabernacle section and began to warp into an almond eye. All I could do was feebly tuck in as high and tight as I could and watch the silvery daylight funnel away.

  I imagine I was riding inside the tube untouched for only a few seconds, but at the time, it felt like an extended stay. Then everything got dark and foamy and I found myself bailing off the front of my board as it tracked up the face and over the falls. I tried to penetrate the surface but landed awkwardly, with a skip and splatter. An awful suction drew me high up inside the wave as if I was caught on a conveyor belt. For an instant, my head popped free of the tumult, and I glimpsed a faraway patch of white cumulus and pale blue winter blue sky before plunging into utter darkness.

  A deep, roaring thunder engulfed me. I was being bounced and scuttled across the inside reef, the turbulence tearing at my arms and legs until I instinctively rolled into a fetal ball. My shoulder slammed flat onto the bottom and I loosened up, an icy blast of water coursing through the new tear in my wetsuit. Then, just when I thought the pounding had let up, I was ripped down over a ledge into even deeper, colder water, and pummeled again.

  Another wave had hit the inside reef. The tiny breath I’d stolen just before bailing out was gone. My lungs were on fire. If I didn’t break the surface before the next wave, I was sure I’d drown.

  I opened my eyes and squinted through the brine, swimming hard, fighting to find light. The first thing I saw when I burst to the surface was a row of beachfront houses way inshore. I’d barely gulped a quick breath of air before another sickening crash exploded a few feet behind my head. The next wave took me deep again, flushing me through the full rinse cycle, then rejecting me as if it was spitting up an unwanted seed. When I broke the surface again, my head was ringing from lack of oxygen and my shoulder throbbed. Honey Child was gone. I treaded water for a few minutes and tried to plot my next move. Then I threw up.

  Five minutes later, I was caught in the rip and headed straight out to sea. My choices were few. I could let the rip take me and hope to keep afloat until a passing boat might spot me before I drowned, or I could hack back over to the outer peak and try to get washed in by a set. I chose the latter. It took fifteen minutes of hard swimming to get back to the outer peak, but I made it. My plan was to wait for a set, dash in over the reef and get washed in by a smaller, hopefully less psychotic wave, then swim for the jetty for all I was worth. But the surf seemed to be picking up by the minute with the rising tide.

  Three more sets hammered the reef. When I made my break for it, the double-thick inside wall that rolled me was no smaller than the sets I’d passed on earlier, when I was still riding my board, and no less violent. By the time I surfaced, my arms had rubberized and my wetsuit felt like a coat of armor on my back. Shivering and utterly exhausted, I drifted into the seaward rip yet again.

  My life was slipping away, and I felt a fool, ashamed of the end I’d met. To dishonor my father with such an ill-conceived plan to surf his favorite reef. My first time out, and alone—blind audacity. And all to spite my mother, who’d never, in her entire life, done a thing to hurt me.

  “Climb on!” someone shouted.

  I felt a strong arm reach under my aching shoulder. He was on a bright red big wave stiletto, a dark blond whose deeply tanned face I vaguely recognized from a time and place I could not quite recall. He pulled me across the deck of his board and let me rest for a few seconds, then directed me to get on his back and clutch his waist as he began to paddle.

  “We’re outta here!” he cried as a hulking wall clattered a hundred feet behind us on the outer reef. “Keep your weight centered and don’t let go!”

  My rescuer dug straight for shore until the whitewater engulfed us, bucking and buffeting the surfboard like a twig in a rushing torrent. But we held on. Seconds later, the nose of his sleek red gun shot ahead of the turbulence and we were planing again over smooth water.

  I crawled up the sand and sat back on my elbows, the earth still listing beneath me. “Thank you,” I said when I regained enough strength to speak. He looked away. I studied his profile. “You’re Jackie Pace.” He didn’t answer in a way that told me I was right. “I’m J. Shepard.”

  “I know who you are,” he said.

  “You saved me. What you did out there for me . . . Christ, you’re a hero.”

  He gazed at the roaring ocean. “Save the flattery, kid. Your old man was one of the best shapers in the world.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jackie Pace’s eyes stayed fixed on the reef. “Bailing you out was the last thing on my mind. I was going for your board.”

  I laughed weakly, but he didn’t sound like he was joking. At the moment I felt too giddily grateful at being back on dry land to care. A few rays of sun broke through the cloud cover and shone like a spotlight on a metallic slick of water out past the pier.

  “I want you to have it,” I said.

  He regarded me with instant suspicion. “What are you talking about?”

  “The board. You said—”

  “I know what I said. Suppose I was being ironic.”

  “Oh . . . right, I knew that.”

  He looked at me and almost laughed. “I didn’t say I was. By the way, what the hell were you doing out there anyway?”

  I told him about Honey Child, my father, and my mother. He listened to all of it without speaking.

  “That board isn’t mine,” I said. “It deserves to be ridden by a surfer like you. Take it. It’s what you wanted.”

  He sniffed at my gesture. “What I wanted.” A rush of foamy soup splashed at our feet, then slithered back into the sea. “Look, man,” he said, “you know what, don’t worry about what I want.”

  “But you saved—”

  “So what?” he shot back. “People do what they, do, okay? We all have our motivations. Why are you so bent on rooting them out?”

  Jackie Pace was not exactly digging my company. I was mortified. “Okay, sorry.” The turmoil of the past three months welled up behind my eyes. “I’ve been kind of . . . upset.”

  “Tell you what. Your stick’s probably out to sea in the rip anyway, but if I find it, I’ll take it on one condition.”

  “You got it, absolutely.” Shit—I’d used a little more enthusiasm than was called for.

  He regarded me with caution. “Right. Go home. Pack up your mother’s things, sell ’em, throw ’em out, whatever. Pull yourself together, man. And don’t trouble yourself about why she split. Peop
le do what they do. The less you worry yourself about why, the better. You’ll be a lot less miserable in life if you can remember that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I started to offer him a handshake, but he looked away.

  “Still surfable,” he said after a time. A series of steel-blue mountains rose and fell out on the reef. “Later.” He trotted to the water’s edge, waited a minute for a lull in the surf, then sprinted into the heaving shorepound and was gone.

  Jackie Pace left for Tahiti, Sumatra, and parts unknown a few days later, but before he caught a cab for the airport, he called me at Pam and Grog’s house, described the upcoming trip, and asked me to watch the lineup at Holys for him while he was away.

  I promised him that I would.

  Eight

  I was planted before the kitchen sink, hand-washing silverware and lamenting the automatic dishwasher’s passage into Appliance Heaven, when the phone rang. Jackie was on it as if he knew the call was for him. “Chez Shepard,” he said, his back turned. Making a lady-friend connection, I assumed.

  Britt and Shannon were flirting and snapping dishtowels at each other as they dried for me. “So J., about tomorrow, you’re cool with Oceanside?” Britt asked me as I handed him a dripping salad bowl. I nodded yes. He had a contest down south and his truck still wasn’t running right, so I was driving.

  “No, no, I said Chez Shepard, as in this is the man’s pad,” Jackie said into the phone. “Slow down Joe, I’m not going anywhere, I’m not him.”

  “Take a break,” I said to Jackie, motioning for the receiver.

  “An asswipe by the name of Nelson Gilbride for you Mr. Shepard?” Sounding like a dutiful secretary.