They were off in a bark of engine and a billow of smoke, semicircling away from the break. They came to a stop, below and well to the left of the incoming peaks. I could see them through the smoky wave spray, watching the set, and hear their voices yelling back and forth.
Then John eased his jet ski onto the forming shoulder of a giant, turning to see Randy, who threw the rope and dropped onto the face of a wave that looked to be six times his height.
We three witnesses stood mute, silenced by fear, and by a fierce, almost paralyzing hope as Randy bounced down the wave, his legs bent at the knees, his feet locked into straps improvised from wetsuit neoprene fastened to the board’s deck with plastic bolt sleeves and fiberglass.
He rode a smaller wave, then, after a blue-lipped cup of instant coffee back on board, during which he tried to explain through chattering teeth what it had all felt like, Randy looked at John.
“Your turn.”
John’s first wave was the size of Randy’s, but choppier in the growing wind. Randy towed him in flawlessly.
John dropped into the thing, all his cool gone, nothing but survival on his mind. Crouched, arms out, feet locked into his homemade straps. He was too far away for me to see his expression but I guessed it was one I’d never seen.
He caught two more before the wind came up hard and the lumbering behemoths of Cortes Bank were blown out and unrideable.
When I helped get him back aboard, his face was pale and almost expressionless but his blue eyes brimmed with light.
“He was there, Jen. He was there.”
On that rough run back to land I tried to knead the cold from his back and shoulders. We hardly said a thing.
Hours later, by the time we got into his truck in San Diego and cranked up the heater, I looked at myself from above and saw an eighteen-year-old girl in the front seat of a pickup truck, leaning uncomfortably over the center console to put her hand on the shoulder of the young man driving.
But when I looked inside me, I saw that he was mine and his journey was mine. We were us, one wave at a time. Maybe for a week. Maybe for years.
He had seen what he was looking for, and so had I.
I graduated from high school with a 4.35 GPA and gave the graduation valedictory, became Miss Laguna Beach in a pageant, and in the fall started the creative journalism program at UC Irvine.
Getting the grades was tough, but Mom pushed me through to the finish line. She taught me to read early, and I did have a knack for writing, starting with printing, then the cursive script that I tried to make perfect and beautiful.
I entered the Miss Laguna pageant on a dare from one of my good friends, Ronna Dean, who said she’d do it if I did. For the talent part of the program, I played Mom’s slick video of me at surfing contests, several of which I won. Ronna, a beautiful honey-blond California girl all the way—daughter of a US Mail carrier and a waitress at the Ranch & Sea—finger-picked her guitar and gave a sassy, sexy rendition of “Wild Horses.”
After the pageant at the Women’s Club, there was a big party, vegetarian food and soft drinks. Ronna snuck in some schnapps, which we shared in the bathroom, but she seemed upset, and drank most of it, fast. I suspected she wanted to win that pageant, but she wouldn’t admit to being that un-hip until years later. She was second runner-up and became part of my “court.”
I thought being Miss Anything would be silly and a little demeaning, but when I did my civic duties—attending art festivals and ribbon cuttings, greeting visitors, spending a Memorial Day dedication at the Sandpiper nightclub, which was owned by two veteran brothers and their mom—I saw how good and alone most people were, how much they longed to belong.
I did all those long, boring Rotary lunches, but loved their motto: Service Beyond Self. Reminded me of Dad’s police motto, to protect and serve. He took that oath very seriously. I had no formal oath as Miss Laguna, other than an agreement to comport myself “with good cheer, high morals, and a willingness to help the less fortunate.”
So when the Rotary gave out scholarship money for high school grads based on need and not grades, I was proud to be one of the presenters.
I didn’t mind being looked at as an object of beauty. There were some touches and hugs and kisses that were not quite appropriate. Nothing flagrant. I warned them off, though. After years of bikinis and boys, I understood how hard it was for some of them not to stare at my body. I saw to it that my swimsuit for the competition, and later, my formal gowns and casual wear, were modest. I really was the girl next door.
Ronna and I drifted apart when I started college. She took up with the drug crowd and left town—allegedly for Hollywood—without saying goodbye.
Three years later she was back in my life.
But, to be honest here—as a journalist and a person—the world I cared about wasn’t mine: it was John’s, and I spent every minute I could with him.
When I said I’d run away with him at eighteen, it wasn’t literal but it was true. But after Cortes Bank, I was all in for him, all about being with him, surfing with him, even though I was physically anchored to Laguna, and UCI. Everything I did that wasn’t with or about John Stonebreaker was an interruption.
I was on his team, like I had asked John to be, in his garage when I was a girl.
Just another young girl in love.
I gave up my virginity to him later that year, at about the time my Miss Laguna days were to end. I felt duty-bound to complete my reign as a virgin, but happily failed.
Unsurprisingly John was some years ahead of me on that count. With how many women and how many times, I didn’t ask and didn’t want to know. He never referred to a relationship, never said a name, never alluded to anything he’d done along those lines. Never got a call that I overheard, or an email or a card I wasn’t supposed to see. He turned a lot of heads, though—both genders. John was recognizably, preposterously handsome, of course, and a growing celebrity in the world of surfing. Everywhere we went—from California, then around the world back to California—John was noticed. And usually recognized. He did a magazine spread for Ralph Lauren in Esquire. People stared at him, many of them sensing celebrity, though they couldn’t place him.
I was his loyal girl, his sidekick, and, at nineteen years old, his wife. Early, for sure, but it felt natural and right. We were married at Waimea Falls Park, then caravanned with family and friends up to Sunset Beach, which had caught a small December swell breaking six to eight feet, good shoulders, very shapely. Honeymooned all of December on the North Shore and hustled home for the winter quarter at UCI. That was where I rode my first waves over twelve feet, beautifully shaped freight trains of speed and power, the sheer weight of them enough to break boards and bones.
Married and happy. Fueled by waves and love.
Sex from the sublime to the comedic, the urgent to the languid. Frantic seconds. Long hours.
And waves. Weekends we surfed California: Blacks, Cortes Bank on the rare days it would break for us, Salt Creek, the Santa Ana River Jetty, Huntington Beach, Malibu, Rincon, Hollister Ranch, and Mavericks. Mavericks, of course. Anytime a winter swell lined up and we had a couple of days off from my classes and John’s part-time UPS work at the Anaheim hub, we’d drive all Friday night to Half Moon Bay in the Westphalia and find ourselves, teeth chattering, in the dawn darkness of the scariest break in the world. A writer once described Mavericks as “a portal to the dark side.” And on mornings like that, with fifty-foot crushers lining up to hit the reef, so much fog you could hardly see them until they were towering over you, it seemed to be the dark side indeed.
John towed me into an eighteen-foot Mavericks wave on my twentieth birthday. It was a lumbering, uneven thing but the face was smooth and after my drop, it sectioned beautifully. I rode it well but wiped out badly. Managed to get back onto my board and ride out of the impact zone on my belly, until the whitewater pushed me into a soft valley that seemed unconcerned by the fury around it. I breathed very hard for a very long time. Then paddled back into the lineup and took the tow rope from John again.
That wave didn’t change my life; it gave me focus. It gave me what I wanted. Not John and Mike Stonebreaker’s God, but something bigger: freedom. Freedom through velocity. Skidding along behind the jet ski before dropping into that wave, I looked out at the distant hills and the Pillar Point Marina filled with matchstick boats, and the houses of Princeton-by-the-Sea, small as Monopoly pieces. After my first Mavericks tow-in, I didn’t want just waves anymore; I wanted big waves. To give me freedom, speed, and release. To let me ride them, these gigantic stallions stampeding in from the depths from miles away.
I wasn’t John anymore.
As I had wanted to be, from the first time I saw him surfing Rockpile when I was twelve.
Three years later things were different.
By then, John and I had seen much of the world on terrifying, beautiful days at Mavericks, Jaws, Teahupo’o, Cortes Bank, Todos Santos, Nazaré.
In spite of spotty attendance at UCI, my writing was good, and I was on track for early graduation and honors. I’d managed to publish some surfing articles in the LA Times, the Orange County Register, and the Daily Pilot. I had full-time offers from two of them.
We’d moved into a rental on Castle Rock, high above Laguna Canyon Road, a house built on caissons so when you walked in, you were standing in the sky. Little cars and houses below, like looking down from a giant wave.
I was absolutely faithful to my birth control, but guess what?
I miscarried.
Felt some little spirit inside leave me for parts unknown. Really hurt. Empty and disappointed though I didn’t want a baby yet.
Picked myself up and got back in the water, every day, surfing hard. Writing hard, too, getting it all down. Surfing and sadness, putting my heartbreak into words that I could sell.
I’d become the ninth-ranked female big-wave surfer in the world, out of ten.
John was fourth of fifty.
We were tight, emotionally and physically.
By fall, the Monsters of Mavericks was just weeks away.
