Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [80]
This is precisely why only the most practiced or hell bent repeatedly head out into truly giant surf, and why once out there, they tend to survive. The typical Surfer at Maverick’s possesses the breath-holding ability of an apnea diver, the flexibility and focus of a yogi, the strength and endurance of an ironman, and the guts of a gladiator. In short, the lineups have already been strained through a .5-micron human filter. Everybody out there knows, once you paddle for any wave and get caught inside and pushed down deep, you can’t rely on a Jet Ski to save you. As you progress in surfing little by little, you decide your limit, which for 99 percent of surfers is something far less lethal than a smallish day at Maverick’s.
In this hypothetical scenario, you are very lucky to surface with little more than shattered pride and a tweaked knee, and you know it. In big waves, every hold down can simply become a fight for your life. Water is of course softer than rock, dirt, or trees, but when you fall from four stories up on a wave, you might as well be landing on cement. That’s why it still remains something of a mystery even to big wave surfers, why more don’t die or become critically injured—because when things do go wrong in giant surf, they tend to do so in a dramatic and awful fashion: faces peeled off on coral outcroppings, spines snapped, bones blasted through skin, muscles hammered into jelly, eardrums bowed inward until they burst. Medium-size Maverick’s has nearly torn off Evan Slater’s right leg, and it once pretzeled big Peter Mel so hard that his feet slapped the back of his head. The simple impact of a wave in 1997 left Ken “Skindog” Collins certain that he’d broken his back. In 1994, a simple, straight-up Maverick’s wave held down and almost simultaneously drowned Mike Parsons and Brock Little. Moments later, of course, it did drown Mark Foo.
So what is it that drives that 1 percent of surfers to willingly and regularly risk life and limb, whether aided by a Jet Ski or not? Why is it, not merely that they do it once or twice, but that they are so often driven to keep surfing big waves that regularly subject them to hold-downs that would scar most people for life?
Of all big wave surfers, Mark Foo was a man who both acknowledged and embraced the deadly potential of big waves, and volumes have been written and hypothesized about his death. Surprisingly, though, little of that story has focused on the guy who had the very last living contact with him. When Mike Parsons was drowning at Maverick’s, he assumed he’d been bouncing off Brock Little; only afterward did he realize that Little was nowhere near him, and the person he met trapped on the seafloor was Mark Foo. In the years after Foo’s death, Mike Parsons would go on to earn two XXL awards (the Oscars of the big wave set), two big wave world records (both set at the Cortes Bank), and become the subject of the most downloaded surf video on the Internet. Despite this, most folks outside of surfing don’t even know who the hell Mike Parsons is. He has never garnered a feature on 60 Minutes or graced the cover of Outside, National Geographic, Details, Men’s Journal, or any other mass-market magazine that purports to cover the lives of hard-core adventurers. That’s a shame, really. Parsons is surely among the most fanatical big wave hunters the world has ever seen, and to know him is also to gain an insight into the obsession that drives the sport. The complete portrait of this obsession, though, also includes the crew with whom Parsons shared his earliest Cortes Bank encounters: in particular, his former protégé Chris Mauro, former rival Brad Gerlach, and friends “Skindog”Collins, Peter Mel, and Evan Slater. To understand the addiction to big wave surfing is to know who these surfers were before the death of Mark Foo, and who