Desperation Reef

Rene Carrasco gets pitched from a twenty-five-foot wave that jumps suddenly, shaking him off like a flea. Jen sees him dive, his tethered board plopping out in front of him. Carrasco’s tow partner circles out after him.

Flip Garrison shreds a clean, thirty-five-footer that barrels over him mid-wave and leaves the man hidden inside the tube for three full seconds — only the tip of his gun showing — before Garrison, crouched, shoots out like a ball from a cannon. Clean exit.

Wave of the day so far, Jen thinks.

Ted Kaiawalu purls on his takeoff and flies, arms out, his board midair above him. He lands hard, scrambles, disappearing under six feet of whitewater churning with pieces of driftwood and shreds of kelp.

Jen watches the ESPN helicopter hovering out in front of the impact zone, and the rescue chopper below it — so low its blades whirl just above the breaking waves. Looks like one could jump up and grab it, she thinks. The skis slash and the boats scramble for safer water in the heaving sea.

Over the din: “Outside, Mom!”

Jen guns seaward for the next wave, a lumbering forty-footer. She swerves out and away from the still-forming crest, and onto the rising flank.

From where she looks back at Casey, his rope in both hands, lining up with the forming peak, pointing his big board down for the drop.

At once: the wave stops forward motion, and it’s face rises up — fills from below — the same reverse hydrology Jen has seen at Jaws and Cortes Bank, when wave and bottom hold still while the wave swells higher, as if taking a huge breath — the strange stall of time when a big wave decides to become a very big wave.

Casey lets go of the rope and drops in.

Elbow down, Jen flogs the throttle and grinds Thunder far along the rising shoulder, then over it, getting air before landing on the kinder backside sea.

She swings down and around to the edge of the impact zone to see Casey make the drop, body and board vertical, arms out, head cocked calmly, measured and methodical like John would be.

Fifty feet, thinks Jen. Sixty? It’s the biggest wave she’s seen anyone ride and her son is on it, and she’s towed him into it. She’s bone-deep scared, for everything that can happen, for everything that has.

Casey makes the bottom turn, his legs strong and true as pistons, and the wave breaks top to bottom over him with a concussive finality.

He’s gone.

Three seconds. Four. Five.

In Jen’s mind, even the jet skis and outboards and helicopters seem to have gone silent, but she isn’t thinking about that, she’s watching the four-story cement mixer in which Casey’s future is being formed, and plotting the best way to get down and around to the impact zone if this wave won’t let go of him.

Casey bursts out of the barrel, already aiming for the top of the wave, toward which he climbs with calm deliberation. The wave coughs a cloud of spray after him, as if trying to knock him down, then follows with another.

Jen watches her son bank the lip and hold high for a horizontal glide, then tuck in for a fast run back down the wave face. Fast indeed.

A beautifully carved bottom turn.

Then a graceful, arms-relaxed, palms-out, head-cocked, leaning-back-at-the-waist glide up onto the shoulder. Where Jen feels his joy, and, smiling, watches Casey shoot over the black wave and into the sky, disappearing into the windblown spray on his orange-and-black magic carpet.

Next heat, Jen watches from Amiga as Mahina tows Brock into his first wave. It’s just after ten — the beginning of Surfline’s witching hour for the biggest waves of the swell — and the gray sky is dissolving into sun and blue. The offshores have picked up a little, spangling the water with light and lifting white spray off the incoming waves.

Jen’s heart — pounding steadily since the ski ride out some two hours ago — has settled into a calm, steady thump. She’s finding that place outside herself, from which she can observe and calculate. Finding her “detachment,” as her mother used to say. Clear the mind, she thinks: behold the wave, sense its intent, see the future. Pro-act, as Brock likes to say. She watches the waves staggering in, black and windblown, imagines her attack, her drop, her turn.

Mahina pulls Brock into a forty-foot pyramid that, by all measures, appears to be a perfect wave.

He drops in, board straight as a spear, his body lean and ropey, his head a forest of spiky dark dreads.

Jen watches her son, frankly awed — for the how many hundreds of times — by his instincts, daring, and reflexes.

He carves the bottom turn so deeply it slows him, allowing the smooth-faced monster to swallow him back into its maw, then he snakes down again for another turn.

Jen swears her heart skips a beat.

“Fudge, that’s massive,” Casey observes. “First wave, man.”