Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [63]
On a day like this, it seems hard to believe that Makaha could drown anyone, but that assumption would be a mistake. The volcanic seafloor is subject to churning rip currents and waves that can go from playful to deadly serious at the literal flip of a switch. This typically first happens sometime in the mid- to late fall, when titanic righthanders awaken and thunder down Makaha’s outside reef.
The history of what we today recognize as the sport of surfing begins in ancient Hawaii, and it reaches back at least seventeen hundred years—well before the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arrivals of explorers like Captain James Cook, whalers like Herman Melville, journalists like Mark Twain and Jack London, or naval officers like Archibald MacRae. To Hawaiians, surfing formed the basis for an entire culture. In around 1859, a brilliant Hawaiian writer and cultural anthropologist named Kepelino Keauokalani used the recollections of his elders to capture the cultural zeitgeist of precontact surfing in terms that any dedicated wave rider could recognize today:
“Expert surfers going upland to farm, if part way up perhaps they look back and see the rollers combing the beach, will leave their work…then hurrying away home, they will pick up the board and go. All thought of work is at an end, only that of sport is left. The wife may go hungry, the children, the whole family, but the head of the house does not care. He is all for sport, that is his food.”
In the modern era, the offshoot that’s come to be known as big wave surfing is inextricably linked with Makaha, whose formidable righthand waves were plied by countless generations of Hawaiians. The break’s first documented charger was the six-foot-six Hawaiian chief Abner Paki, a man who actually made Archibald MacRae’s acquaintance during a Honolulu church service in 1845. Paki was reputed to hold off on launching his hundred-pound, fourteen-foot-long koa wood surfboard until the waves were absolutely massive (Paki’s board is today part of the permanent collection of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu). Yet the torch of Paki’s obsession almost blinked out, along with the rest of Hawaiian culture, when Western disease and oppressive missionaries worked to practically annihilate the islands’ indigenous population and society throughout the nineteenth century. The Hawaiian penchant for combining nudity and he’a nalu, or wave sliding, was considered the worst sort of godless hedonism and particularly singled out for censure.
Surfing survived only in isolated pockets until the early 1900s, perhaps dwindling to no more than a dozen practitioners at its lowest ebb. After the turn of the century, though, Olympian swimmer Duke Kahanamoku helped lead a revival of the “Sport of Kings,” demonstrating and teaching surfing to Westerners and exporting it to the U.S. mainland, where it flourished on California beaches through the first decades of the twentieth century.
In the years surrounding World War II, a handful of U.S. surfers—like Tom Blake, Pete Peterson, Whitey Harrison, Wally Froiseth, John Kelly, and brothers Walter and Philip “Flippy” Hoffman—made the crossing to Hawaii on the promise of surf and adventure. Once here, these Americans went native, leading a feral, carbuncle-covered life so at odds with the suburban postwar idyll that it’s almost inconceivable. They were a step ahead of Kerouac and established the rootless, surf-chasing lifestyle that guys like Harrison Ealey and Ilima Kalama would come to treasure. They lived in tents, had no money, and subsisted on fresh fruit and fresher fish. They were also the first Californians to risk themselves on Makaha’s frightfully perfect wintertime walls.
The first big Makaha waves of modern times were ridden atop long,