Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [73]
“It was so obvious to me when I was down there that I had been wrapped up with Little,” he said. “When I saw him, it was just so relieving. All my fear just instantly went away.”
Parsons and Little believed that they could paddle north and make it back outside. They dug hard for thirty seconds, but a river of current swept them toward a limpet-and-mussel-encrusted series of boulders. Their leashes were snagged on the bottom as successive walls of white water waylaid them. The torrent was so strong that neither could even bend down far enough to release the velcro on his leash, and both commenced drowning anew. Parsons was stuffed under a rock. He struggled mightily, then tried to remember the instructions Brian Keaulana gave him for just such a dire situation: Relax. Think. But the current didn’t let up and neither did he. He escaped from beneath the rock, but his leash held fast. A curtain of blackness closed across his peripheral vision. Blood cells were dying, and his brain was starving of oxygen. Suddenly his leash inexplicably released. Jolted with fresh adrenaline, Parsons groped for the surface. Little had been miraculously freed, too.
Parsons was groggy, but he seemed to recall that the first thing he asked Little was something to the effect of “how radical was that?” Little agreed. Parsons assumed that Little understood the question to also imply that he was amazed when Little bounced off him. Amazingly, Little paddled back out. Parsons pointed his beat-to-shit Patterson out to The Deeper Blue. Filmmaker Steve Spaulding pressed his record button.
Parsons: I thought for sure I was dead. I don’t know how I lived.
Spaulding: What happened to Brock?
Parsons: He was drowning, too…I felt him come up underneath me. I felt him, like, banging underneath me. Then we both got thrown, right in the middle there, got thrown over all those rocks.
Spaulding: That was quite the intro to Maverick’s.
Parsons: Wasn’t it, though? That was by far and away the raddest thing that ever happened to me.
Spaulding: So where’s Foo? Foo broke his board.
Parsons: I don’t know. I thought me and Brock—we’re both in the rocks going, we’re gonna die in these fucking rocks. We couldn’t come up.
An hour later, clouds darkened sky and mood, and onshore breezes signaled the end of the session. Evan Slater paddled over, and The Deeper Blue began to motor back toward the baleful mechanized drone of the foghorn at Pillar Point Harbor. A few minutes later the crew spotted the bottom third of Foo’s yellow-and-purple surfboard. Then a black shape lazily lifted into view on the crest of a swell. Dread washed over Slater and Parsons with a force greater than any wave. It was Mark Foo, who’d drowned unnoticed on a wave no one thought was a killer. Everyone had thought that, after his wipeout, Foo must have paddled in. Instead, his body was pulled aboard The Deeper Blue, which sped back to the harbor.
When Rob Brown skidded down the cliff to find paramedics performing CPR on a person sprawled across the hood of a car, he thought it was Parsons. He then watched, ghost white in shock, as they zipped the yellow bag on Foo’s body. Sobbing uncontrollably, Parsons forever abandoned his surfboard and drove back to the San Jose airport with Brown. “Mike’s on the pay phone with Flame bawling his eyes out while all these people were going to celebrate Christmas,” said Brown. “It was overwhelming. Surreal.”
Jaws
The North Shore of Oahu is a tough place to be a little boy. Grommets grow up playing chicken with a shorebreak that can snap their spines in the blink of an eye, and they dig sandcastles in front of wicked rip currents that can drag them to their doom before Mom even realizes anything is wrong. When a local kid starts to surf, he enters a Jungle Book meets Lord of the Flies world where the bigger kids egg the little ones into maulers that they have no business surfing. Yet if a kid doesn’t at least attempt the drops, the words, taunts, or fists can hurt even