Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [90]
Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach contemplate their great white whale on a raw winter’s day in 2003. Photo: Grant Ellis.
Of course, addicted is a word fraught with peril when discussing something like surfing, which would seem to most to be an entirely optional undertaking. But in discussing Mike Parsons and his desire for big waves, Rob Brown, Chris Mauro, and Brad Gerlach all used the word. More than one big wave Surfer has merited the term, and it gets at the distinction between wanting to paddle out versus literally needing to. However, I wondered, could Mike Parsons really be addicted to surfing big waves? Was such an addiction even possible? Rob Brown, who has covered big wave surfing for much of his life, assured me that it was.
In fact, he says, it’s the only explanation. Over time, he says, “You come to realize—big wave surfing—it’s not about size or muscles. It’s really in your mind. I mean, of course you have to be fit, but growing up, I didn’t have the ability to surf those waves, and I didn’t want it. The ability to sacrifice and be near death every time—these guys are so comfortable with it and they’re so addicted that they just don’t realize how radical it is. I’ve photographed Indy car racers—Ari Luyendyk and Roberto Guerrero. They would risk locking wheels at 240 miles an hour—but they’d never go out in two-foot waves. And I’d feel safer in an Indy car than in these big waves. I mean, when you crash, the car stops—and you can have a doctor pull you out. You could drive straight into a concrete building and survive. At Todos or Maverick’s the crash is just the beginning of your problems. The building is going to fall on you. You’re going to get hit a number of times, and you’re all alone. I guarantee you, I could not survive a single wave. Wipe out and it would be instant death by either drowning or heart attack. Even if it’s a near-death experience—guys like Mike, they just laugh it off. They just paddle back out. It’s really weird. I’m not sure they even get it. The bottom line is that on Earth, I don’t think there’s a more dangerous thing you can do.”
Given that, could there be a more self-destructive, egocentric choice for a lifestyle? Mike, Skindog, Pete, and Evan are married with children. Gerlach has a steady girlfriend whom he loves dearly. Every time these guys paddle off into the unknown, you could argue that they’re embarking on a quest no less daunting, deadly, and selfish than that of Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless or the crew of the Andrea Gail.
But how much of a choice is it? You might say, well, the crew of the Andrea Gail had to feed themselves and fishing was all they knew, so they had no choice but to motor off. And yet, if they really wanted to, each man could have found less-dangerous ways to make a living. In fact, I see real parallels between Parsons and his friends and Sebastian Junger’s ill-fated crew. I’m fortunate to share a dingy little office at a fishing dock outside Charleston, South Carolina, and I have regular occasion to shoot the shit with a crew of tight-knit fishermen. When the crew of the Hailey Marie or China Girl come in after being slammed around in a nor’easter or battling a fourteen-foot tiger shark, they’re exhausted, but they’re also lit up—energized and alive. And they are no more Constitutionally fit for an office job than Snips is for selling real estate. Sometimes they hate their jobs, but more often it’s obvious that there’s nothing they’d rather be doing. Such muddy, bloody work is chosen because they’d be lost without it, and without the ocean.
When I asked Parsons why he surfed big waves, he first went back to his childhood. To the heckling he endured at school, to his love of competition, to his almost