Desperation Reef

From the bottom Brock shoots forty feet back up the face — Jen thinks it takes him about one second — then suddenly banks off the lip, his airborne body and board so horizontal it seems they have to free-fall, but Brock mocks gravity, riding the gun down and across the great, ribbed wave.

Which now peels off in a long section so fast that all Brock has to do is draw a straight line. But he doesn’t; instead, he works the huge flank with a series of goofy tail pumps, like when he was a kid, eking the last few yards out of a little wave in Laguna.

Then a straight race to the top, up and over the exhausted beast, and out.

“Oh man!” yells Casey. “He’s gonna win it with that!”

“Your wave was bigger, Case. Don’t count yourself out.”

Brock’s next two waves are thick and heavy, breaking with a random, hard-to-read violence, but still nothing like Casey’s freak giant.

Brock unleashes all his aggression on them, pushing the limits of balance and speed, teasing the monsters with the small-wave precision he mastered as a twelve-year-old.

Jen studies him, feeling her old pre-heat confidence building.

37

The klaxon for the women’s heat blares just after noon.

The waves are the biggest of the day — routine forty-five-foot faces — staggering in, deranged and urgent.

There’s a brief, bucking huddle around Pipedream, during which the contest organizers offer to postpone the women due to wave size. They greet the idea with curses and raised middle fingers.

Jen’s up against five surfers she doesn’t know, all younger by at least one decade, all ranked in the World Surfing Tour ratings, with much better odds to win, place, and show here at the Monsters of Mavericks. She’s a walk-on, a big-wave footnote hanging on by her now ancient reputation. And, of course, John Stonebreaker’s long-reaching legend.

She plops overboard, last in the lineup, unties her board from the rescue sled.

“You can do this, Mom,” says Casey. “God Himself is going to be there with you. So’s Dad. Listen to them.”

“Got it, Case,” she says, sitting on her board now, lifted by a rising swell. “I like what I’m seeing out there.”

“I’ll get you where you need to be.”

She watches the first woman, Ruby Peralta, drop into a marauding forty-foot face. She free-falls and lands staunchly mid-wave, but digs her rail. With the nose of her board trapped vertically, the wave shrugs forward, flipping Ruby into the air, where she’s already swimming as the whitewater plants her.

The four rescue sleds scream in, boiling around the impact zone, their drivers calibrating rescue and disaster. A capsized jet ski is a deadly thing. Jen watches Ruby’s board — leash attached — hurtling toward one of the rescue skis. The driver ducks and guns his craft toward Ruby, now aloft in the whitewater, stroking hard, head up, helmet long gone. She lunges for the pausing sled, grabs and hangs on as the driver carves a wide arc away from the zone.

Jen watches her climb onto the sled and raise a fist.

“Oh, Mom, look at this!”

Casey nimbly tows her in, waits for her to drop the rope, then guns Thunder to safety.

Jen’s first wave unfolds in front of her. She makes it, glances at the three-story drop in front of her, then focuses on a narrow section of it — the upwelling flank down which she must slice. The world reduced to this. Lets her feet obey her eyes, feels the wild slide of her board as she flies across the face and down, ankles chattering, feet locked in the straps.

The g-force of her bottom turn tries to telescope her legs, but Jen hasn’t been carrying iron weights in the Laguna Beach High School swimming pool just for the fun of it. She feels the change of direction shuddering up into her back and shoulders as she leans forward, pivots, and makes the turn into the first section.

Which is already starting to break, high above and well ahead of her, a heavy, black-and-white lip, wavering with menace and ready to pitch.

Terrible news.

She can’t outrun it from down here, so she races up the face, banks into its power, crouches, hangs high, and holds on for her life as the barrel takes her.

The sound is like nothing else, a percussive roar she feels in her bones.

Two. Three. Four and...

Out she blasts, an orange-and-black comet in a dark sky.

Cranks up and off the lip, down and across, speeds through a long section without Brock’s dillydallying shtick, then up the face, over and off.

Midair, Jen reaches out both arms and screams as hard as she can.

No words, no thoughts, just the wail of fear banished, of a soul in joy.

Casey bucks through the chop like a bull rider, and picks her up — his smile like the one he had as a four-year-old, looking at his very own first surfboard in the Castle Rock living room twenty years ago, Christmas day.

Back in the lineup, helmet and hood off, Jen chomps an Abba-Zaba, feeling the warm seawater slowly oozing from her ears.