Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [47]
It would be easy to dismiss Kirkwood’s mania as crackpot, but he was not crazy. He eventually moved on, made a nice fortune for himself with a golf course on Kauai, and—as far as Houtz knows and I can figure—died of natural causes around a decade ago. Kirkwood was not alone in his obsession with Cortes Bank—for the freedom and riches it promised, for his “inherent” desire to possess and own it. This quality is shared by nearly every person who has encountered it. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche described a similar, universal sort of need back in 1886 when he wrote, “Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority.”
You don’t find much more freedom than by building your own citadel atop a sunken island.
Houtz completely understood and in his own way strongly shared Kirkwood’s impulse, and it echoes in the stories told by Mel Fisher, Ilima Kalama, Bill Sharp, Sean Collins, and every surfer risking his thin neck on the Bank today. Kirkwood, in the grandness of his schemes, his efforts to defy if not destroy the wave, and his penchant to cast himself in the role of the benevolent monarch, perhaps fulfills the part of Ahab more than most, but as Melville makes clear, everyone on the Pequod hungered for the white whale.
And Houtz asks us to consider: Had he and Kirkwood reached Cortes Bank a day earlier, the seas would have been calm. With placid conditions, and time on their side, Houtz thinks it likely that he would have been able to work around the anchor issue by having Whitney Olsen simply motor Jalisco in the right spot and hold while ballast valves put Jalisco on the seafloor. With five barge loads of rocks then dumped off her bow, she would have been far better protected from the next day’s waves. Houtz isn’t certain she would have been protected enough. In fact, had he remained on board as planned, he probably would have died. But Cortes Bank would have become an island. Fierce legal battles would have made global headlines. Most likely, if that happened, the only person to ever ride a wave out there might have been Harrison Ealey in 1961; Bruce McMahan’s boulders would have surely ruined the break. Houtz, though, disagrees. He had planned on laying Abalonia’s rocks in a long, slow, upward slope, and so, he said, “You might have ended up with the longest, biggest point break on Earth.”
Today, Houtz doesn’t talk much about what happened on Cortes Bank, even though it’s one of the stranger episodes in U.S. maritime history with a cast of characters straight out of a movie. It’s just not his way. Still, as he thumbs through his scrapbook, stopping at a photo of Joe perched out on the deck of the Jalisco, he shakes his head and tells me he relives the moment Kirkwood was blown off the deck every day of his life. Kirkwood’s last words aboard the Jalisco still echo in his mind, their conviction so certain. “The wave’s gonna go by me. It’s gonna wash around me.”
“I’m just sitting there looking out at Joe, just going, ’You’re crazy,’” he said. “I still think the guy’s crazy. But then again, so was I.”
Chapter 5:
ROGUE
WAVES
The incidents in the life of a wave are many. How long it will live, how far it will travel, to what manner of end it will come are all determined, in large measure, by the conditions it meets in its progression across the face of the sea. For the one essential quality of a wave is that it moves; anything that retards or stops its motion dooms it to dissolution and death.
—Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1951
As Rex Bank, James Houtz, and Joe Kirkwood discovered, if you find yourself above the Bishop Rock on a calm autumn or winter’s day and don’t heed the distant early-warning signs, the first breaking waves of a new swell might well be