Desperation Reef

The sky above is gunmetal gray, and the water here in the harbor is the same color, but shiny. Up on the bluff the old Air Force tracking station globe presides over the harbor, a World War II relic.

Behind Jen trails the rescue sled. When she speeds past the breakwater into the open ocean, she hears Casey’s ritual war-whoop invocation behind her: “God save us all!”

The sea is rougher outside the second breakwater. Thunder bucks into the chop, her engine whining with the dips and drops. Jen cuts diagonally to lessen the impact, half of her attention already on the waves that she can see coming in a half a mile northwest. They’re very big — thirty-foot faces breaking right — nicely formed and spaced at lazy intervals, crowned by twenty-foot plumes of spray suspended by a light offshore breeze. Jen’s last Surfline forecast this morning had the brunt of FreakZilla hitting Mavericks between 10 and 11 A.M., carrying forty-foot waves with sixty-foot faces. Surfers measure waves from the behind, she knows — a Hawaiian tradition — and faces from the front. Two helicopters — a red San Mateo County rescue chopper and a black-and-white ESPN machine — weave high above, awaiting action.

Aboard Amiga, Jen helps Casey choose his board. Brock and Mahina are trying to sleep in the little cabin, still pounded by three days at the Flagstaff fire, which claimed two lives. Reno holds his boat steady in the current and swell, chattering away about his new granddaughter, but his eyes keen on the waves, which here at Mavericks are prone to sudden changes of size and shift of direction when they hit the reef below.

Jen watches her son waxing his board — an eight-foot-ten, orange-and-black thruster with three of the five available fins deployed. Casey moves like his father, she thinks, deliberately and calmly, on his knees, pushing the wax block across the deck with one hand, rocking with the swell.

He looks up at her. “Hey, Mom.”

“These are good waves, Casey.”

“These are beautiful waves.”

“Don’t try to win this thing on the first one.”

“Never. Easy does it.”

“You have to make it. Then on the next one you do more.”

Jen sounds just like her mother, always the coach.

“You sound like Grandma,” Casey notes with a smile.

With his thick yellow hair tousled Casey of course reminds her of John. More than reminds her. Is John, in one of those rare, exact genetic handoffs from father to son.

“I’ll be there if you need me.”

“I know, Mom. I got this.”

Sitting on the deck, he zips on his booties, pulls on his hood and gloves. Clamps the leash to his right ankle, takes up his gun, stands, and slips overboard.

Jen climbs down Amiga’s folding ladder and onto Thunder, which starts up with a throaty blast of white smoke.

Casey hits the lineup — first heat, six men. Jen joins the other five tow skis, buzzing around like noisy wasps, all keeping well away from the big walls of water marching in. Pipedream, the judges’ boat, rocks steadily inside, allowing good binocular views of the rides. The ESPN chopper drifts low, while the county rescue copter stays higher for the macro view.

Through the raunchy smoke of the outboards and ten jet skis — four of them for rescue — Jen tows Casey into his first wave.

It’s a twenty-five-foot beauty queen with a smooth face, a thick lip, and an inviting right shoulder. Casey drops the rope and Jen makes a quick escape, circling out wide so she can see him.

Casey drops in and makes the bottom turn easily, tucks into the barrel, runs his right hand along the cylinder, then accelerates up to the lip again from where he drives a straight fast line out ahead, then launches his board and himself into the sky and over the mounding wave to safety.

Jen watches with a hitch in her breath and a smile on her face, Thunder rocking under her. She picks up Casey on the lee side of the wave, hears the boom of it over her snarling ski. She steadies Thunder while Casey straps his board to the sled and climbs on.

They’re back in the lineup a minute later. Casey sits behind her on the ski, for elevation, his still-leashed board stowed for now in the rescue sled.

“Beautiful work back there,” she says.

“Perfect tow, Mom, but I need bigger.”

“You’ll get it.”

But, as if a switch has been thrown, the morning goes small. Jen watches the breakers come in, like five-foot Little Leaguers wanting their pictures taken.

“This fully sucks,” notes Casey.

But if the Surfline oceanographers and meteorologists and wave prophets are right, Jen thinks, those first sets were just a preview. The main attraction is still to come.

“They’re on their way, Case.”

“That first one will get me good points, but Tom Tyler’s was better.”

“Be calm.”

“I know, because Dad was always calm. I think Brock got tired in the fire.”

“He looks pretty whupped,” says Jen.

“But he’s got that energy in him, like, when you least expect it.”