Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [145]
The water still held a mogul-field of south windswell, and some of the long-period waves literally wrapped back onto themselves like a medieval sling atop Bishop Rock. This created bizarre 10-foot-high wave trains that ran sidelong into the big sets. “We had always thought, if it’s 80 feet, it’s going to be perfect dome bowls out there,” says Parsons. “But it looked like The Perfect Storm. This was the first time out there when I was like, ‘Is that 70 feet? 100 feet? How are we even gonna do it?’ The only time I’ve ever been nearly as scared to ride a wave was at Jaws. But this—the consequences were just so heavy. We took forty-five minutes just to piece together—where do we ride, and how do we ride it? It was just so ominous and overwhelming.”
Of course, all four surfers had been mortally scared before—plenty of times. But this was something different. It was a naked, primal fear of obliteration and nothingness; like the first Kinkipar, Archibald MacRae, Rex Bank, Ilima Kalama, and Joe Kirkwood, they felt completely inconsequential and alone among these monstrous, shaggy wrinkles in the earth’s skin. Cortes Bank was huge beyond comprehension. As if to emphasize their insignificance, the possibility of actually disappearing—of capsizing or wiping out and not being found—was palpable. They didn’t need to be caught inside and then swept out into the empty ocean. They could be lost right here. One mistake, and you’d simply float in that choking, boiling nowhere until you drowned or froze to death. But they couldn’t back out. Their whale was out there. This was the hunt they’d been waiting for all their lives.
Gerlach had come this far, and somehow Parsons had always seen him through. He thought back to how unfathomable this day would have been to an eleven-year-old latchkey kid surfing sun-dappled two-footers on a Jesus board with dolphins swimming all around. Jaws, Todos, Ghost Tree—everything he’d ever seen paled compared to this. He tried to shove the fear down deep. Digging through his gear as the boat lurched back and forth brought a wave of nausea. He’d either forgotten or lost the wetsuit booty for his left foot. His front foot would not only be numb with cold, it would be loose in the foot strap. “Two wetsuits, fins, wax, surfboards, no fucking booty!” he cursed. “The biggest day of the entire fucking century and I can’t find my booty.”
Half hoping this might offer a way out, he gave Parsons a hard look. “Are we really doing this?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Gerlach leapt onto the Jet Ski, still cursing. “Fuck, I can’t believe I went out without my booty. Fuck. Okay, it’s not my day. That’s okay. It doesn’t have to be my day. Every day doesn’t have to be my day. That’s okay. I can still be a good driver, right? I can still have fun.”
“You’re surfing first,” Parsons said.
Parsons was grappling with his own fears; life as he had known it was changing. Wondrous days of fatherhood lay just over the horizon. For the first time since the death of Mark Foo, the possibility of his own death suddenly seemed less important than the effect it would have on someone else. “I thought about Tara and our baby,” he says. “You’re telling yourself, you know, you can’t leave her.”
In a visceral way, he felt the seriousness of his responsibilities as a husband and father tugging against his big wave addiction, and yet he was in a situation where he couldn’t allow himself to think about death or caution. Doubt was as dangerous as the Bank. “The thought process, the decision to go, it’s really quick,” he says. “And you’re not thinking about dying when you’re about to ride a wave—or you’d better not be. If you’re timid, it’s gonna be worse because you’ll make decisions on waves you wouldn’t normally make. You have those thoughts and you listen to them. That’s the balance. For me, I think that the thrill—and whatever it is about riding waves that big—that still somehow outweighs the thought in my mind. I still know I can drown. But I still do it.”
“We were going to surf the world’s heaviest big wave,