Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [78]
Pastrana’s seemingly insane devotion to such an apparently self-destructive activity is something most of the big wave surfers I’ve ever met have shared. It’s the same devotion that drives mountain climbers to want to summit Mount Everest despite grave personal risk and a complete lack of control over the elements: It is all too easy, despite sherpas and oxygen tanks, to get caught in a blizzard and freeze to death or lose fingers and toes to frostbite. Indeed, in 2010 alone, four people died on Everest while 513 reached the summit—thus making one year on Everest more deadly than all of big wave surfing in the last decade.
A number of theories have been raised over the years about why big wave surfing has such a comparatively low fatality rate. One is that unlike sports such as motocross and high-altitude mountain climbing, surfing traditionally has never depended heavily on machines to carry them into waves or on gear as a safety net. Technology, in fact, comes with two flaws: It can fail, and it can fail when it’s carried an athlete much further than they’d have gone on their own, leaving them exposed and vulnerable. Consider the Himalayan climber who runs out of oxygen at 28,000 feet just as a storm rolls in. Some have argued that because a Surfer isn’t insulated by such technology, they’re better at staying within their limits and thus big-wave surfing is much safer than it might appear.
This idea was raised most recently in a spring 2011 story in Surfer’s Journal called “Death Trip” by former Surfer editor Brad Melekian. In it, Matt Warshaw, a former professional Surfer and the author of The History of Surfing, is quoted as saying: “Surfers, when you think about it, have always had a lot invested in the idea that what they were doing was deadly. In reality it’s not that deadly at all.” Without question, big wave surfing, as a sport, enjoys thinking of itself in such life-and-death terms; this helps burnish its heroic profile. Yet I respectfully disagree with the implication that, beneath the bluster, big wave surfing is somehow actually safe, or at least inherently safer than other extreme sports. Despite what the statistics say, the constant threat of dying is very real.
In addition, towsurfing with a Jet Ski has blurred the once-fundamental distinction between surfing and other motorized or gear-intensive sports. Obviously, in a sport like motocross, the machine is the sport, and the machine itself is what’s most likely to lead to your shattered body or death. In big wave surfing, the Jet Ski might hurt you, if it runs you over, but its main function is to throw you into the most dangerous waves possible. The Jet Ski is also a rescue vehicle that can yank you out of harm’s way, but if you wipe out and are held down, you still have to reach the water’s surface on your own. If you hit a reef and get knocked out or are stuffed beneath a rock, even a life vest won’t do you any good. And a life vest only increases a margin of safety, anyway. Typically, only towsurfers wear them at all—since paddle surfers find they make it too difficult to paddle or dive under a wave—and a big wave, a really big wave, can submerge even a life-jacketed Surfer for minutes at a time. In short, even with every safety measure in place, a Surfer can still easily drown. And in my mind, short of being burned alive, drowning in big waves is about the scariest thing that can happen to a person.
In fact, to me, this fear is what sets