Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [154]
Greg Long echoed the sentiment. “I’m fiending,” he said. “Fiending to go out there. Ask anyone who’s been out there and really experienced it: It’s one of the most incredible places in the world, if not the most incredible. Of all the waves and all the places I’ve surfed in my life, without a doubt it’s the most extreme. Without a doubt. I think of all the times I’ve looked around the world for waves, and all it takes is a single rock outcropping in the wrong place and, sorry, you can’t surf it. That Cortes is just another one of the Channel Islands that’s just not quite breaking the surface of the ocean. That it’s so surfable on the right day. Everything about the place—that it came to be at all—is literally a miracle.”
AFTERWORD
”The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demigods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.“
—Ishmael, from Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick, 1851
I have to hand it to Sam George. Despite working together for several years at Surfer during the late 1990s, and despite possessing what he himself describes as one “of the loudest voices in all of surfing,” he never—as far as I know—betrayed Flame in revealing the Cortes Bank. I was, thus, as shocked as anyone when Swell/Surfline.com revealed the Bank to the world in January of 2001.
My obsession with the Bank took root slowly, taking a backseat to my own addictions to storytelling and the simple need to make a living. In the years after 2001, I continued work as an environmental editor for Surfer and wrote or contributed to around two hundred stories for the New York Times—work with a team of remarkable people for which I am profoundly grateful. I covered murders, wildfires, mudslides, the X Games, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ascension to the California governorship, and Michael Jackson’s freak show of a trial. I spent humbling time with wounded Iraq veterans and people who had lost loved ones to terrorist bombers and tsunamis. On one ill-advised assignment, I flew with a pair of kids who repaired a battered old drug-running airplane and became the youngest pilots to circle the globe. On another, I careened over a thousand-foot-tall sand dune with a drunken sand rail jockey at 110 miles an hour. On another, I sat alongside a maniacal Swedish drift-racing champion in a 500-horsepower Dodge Viper as he slid sideways around Monterey’s tortuous Laguna Seca race course at 120 miles per hour.
I suppose that in some ways, this desire to sit alongside people who have experienced the remarkable is its own form of high sensation-seeking. I know I’ve taken some risks, but in my mind, there’s a big difference between writing about a risky behavior and actually doing it. Still, one result of this work was a simple fascination with thrill seekers. Riding out to witness huge waves at Maverick’s on the back of a Jet Ski with Grant Washburn is the cheater’s way to experience the Almighty, and to me, it makes big wave surfing seem an even more fascinating and lunatic pursuit than it appears at a safe distance on the TV screen or from the sand.
But despite how many people still see them, most big wave surfers are not crazy. They’re a small, argumentative brotherhood—complex, cerebral, raw, and damaged—who take their seemingly insane quest no less seriously than Jacques Cousteau or Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s religion, passion, and science all rolled into one, and they pursue it with discipline and an unrelenting fervor.
The hook for this book was set with the barrage of deadly swells in late 2007 and early 2008. At the end of 2007 I wrote a feature for Men’s Journal that began with the near-death experiences of Brett Lickle and Laird Hamilton on Maui and ended with a heart-wrenching