Pastor Mike and his new Hillview Chapel were everywhere, in full-page ads for Sunday services in the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, and the several small papers published in Laguna Beach. Posters in shop windows, too, billboards on Interstate 5 and the big inland boulevards in Santa Ana and Huntington Beach, and on Coast Highway from San Clemente all the way north to the LA county line.
Pastor Mike was everywhere you looked.
The ads and the posters and billboards all used the same graphic: Mike Stonebreaker in a white robe, arms raised, his back to you as a bright white light washed toward him like a wave from the sky. There was darkness all around the light and the man. I thought it was dramatic but overblown.
Not long after I befriended the Stonebreaker girls—Kate and Robin—Mike and Marilyn took me under their generous wings. They had room in their vans for an only child, her surfboard, wetsuit, and a duffel for food and water, a towel, tubes of sunscreen, and a wide-toothed comb to get through her sun-and-salt-blasted copper helmet of hair.
John and his older brother Raymond pretty much ignored us girls, all three of us at least five years younger. Which, when you’re twenty-two, is a lot. Especially if the women your own age are more than a little interested.
On the Stonebreaker family caravans, I’d find a way to get seated in the old hippie van, which John always drove, and I’d watch him secretly. From the right angle, I could see his eyes and part of his face in the rearview mirror. I never got more than a quick glance back. Even though he was sitting just a few feet from me, shoulders hunched over the big steering wheel in the slow, straining van, John always seemed to be miles away. Already there, I thought, in the barrel.
In the lineup at Blacks or Salt Creek or Trestles, I’d position myself medium distance to John, so I could study his technique and just basically gawk at how beautifully he handled these—now, to him—little waves.
I don’t remember John saying more than just a few sentences to me over those five years, mostly surfing pointers, weather and swell forecasts, tides and wind. He didn’t say much to his girlfriends either, as I observed.
On my eighteenth birthday we had an island-themed party in the backyard. Dad manned the barbecue for burgers and hot dogs; Mom made a couple of giant salads and a pot of fettuccini steeped in olive and truffle oil.
Forty or so people showed up on that chilly winter Sunday afternoon, mostly my friends and their parents. They came early and stayed late. Belle got a little more than tipsy and Raymond drove her home.
John showed up well after dark, red-eyed from the ocean, and dressed in bright orange shorts and a blue-and-orange hibiscus-blossom Aloha shirt. He raised a hand to Dad at the barbecue, who raised a hand back.
John seemed preoccupied when he wished me happy birthday but ate mightily, as surfers do.
“For you, Jen—it’s all yours!” he said, and handed me a little wooden box.
I was collecting his empty paper plates for the trash can. Set them down and took the box. It felt empty, but inside, wrapped in a cutting from the Sunday LA Times funny page, was a pair of earrings—irregular pieces of sea glass strung with copper wire.
“I found it,” he said. “The glass, not the wire.”
I held them up to the nearest tiki torch: pale greens, soft browns, sanded clears. Even a cobalt blue, all glowing roughly in the light.
“I like them, John. Beautiful.”
“It’s just broken beer bottles,” he said, almost apologetically. “Jen, I’m leaving before dark tomorrow for Imperial Beach, down on the border. South swell ten seconds, strong, and a rising tide. It’s going to be big and fast. Just you and me. Interested?”
So much in that question.
“You can do it. I’ve been watching you.”
I knew my answer but didn’t know what words to use.
“I talked to your dad and he’s okay with us going just ourselves.”
John’s face was serious and beveled in the torchlight. Another picture of him I’ll carry forever.
I felt like I was midair, letting go of one trapeze and reaching for another.
“What time?”
“I’ll come get you at five.”
3
Jen’s son Casey speeds across Desperation Reef off San Diego, headed home for Laguna, Moondance riding high, slicing through the gently rolling swell. Desperation Reef is Casey’s prime tuna spot this time of year, though it’s also popular with the charter fishermen.
Today, he’s got his bluefin tuna in the ice hold, a one-hundred-pounder, dragged, drained, filleted, and ready for the pricey sashimi specials at his mother’s restaurant.
Mae, a chocolate Labrador, sits on a bench in the cabin beside Casey, facing the sea, tongue trailing, an aging, curious dog without a mean bone in her body.
White clouds seem fixed in the blue October sky and the surface of the sea is dark and supple.
Casey is a big man at twenty-four, all muscle and bushy yellow hair, built much like John Stonebreaker, the father he never met. He’s got the same knee knobs and foot bumps, the same pale blue eyes under dark brows. Without sunglasses, the only parts of Casey’s face not tanned to darkness are the strips of skin between his eyes and his ears. He’s wearing a pendant he had made of sterling silver—a sharp-tailed “gun” surfboard with an oval orange Spessartite garnet embedded lengthwise on the deck. It’s the orange of his father’s signature big-wave guns, and the orange of his mother’s hair.
He sees the commercial trawler bobbing out ahead of him and by the time he gets closer something looks, well, wrong. Pulls near enough for binoculars, throttles down and banks to a sweeping stop. Moondance, an angler’s dream at thirty-two feet, sleek and powerful, rides the swells high and lightly.
Casey two-hands the Leicas, rolling with his boat, keeping the trawler in his field of vision as best he can. It’s a shabby thing, predominately blue with red trim, outriggers swaying empty and no fishing lines out that Casey can see. A rust-stained hull. A ragged black sunscreen flapping over the stern deck.
Two men and a woman stand hard at work at tables heaped high with fish, some big. Black rubber boots and aprons. Blades flashing. Seabirds wheel and dive. A shirtless, muscled guy in red shorts and a flat-brimmed black cowboy hat with silver coins on its band leans against the stern railing, and trains his binoculars on Casey.
“What do you think of that, Mae?”
Mae’s native curiosity has already kicked in and she steadies herself on all fours, attentive to the trawler and, of course, the birds.
Casey gets his phone from the steering wheel cabinet, unzips the sandwich bag and pulls it out. Goes to video, reverses the direction, and holds the phone at arm’s length.
Casey is Casey’s favorite subject, star, and director.
So he checks his look: very tan. Hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. Got on the big straw, high-domed Stetson that he wears all the time—fishing or not—which makes him look, at six foot two, tall indeed and not a little funny in his board shorts and shearling boots and the brazenly colored T-shirts he personally designs for his fledgling surf-clothing company, CaseyWear.
In other words, perfect.
Unmistakably Casey Stonebreaker, number ten big-wave surfer and currently number eighteen on the World Surf Tour.
He gives himself and his followers his right-hand shaka—the universal surfers’ hang-loose sign that his brother, Brock, says is idiotic and is always trying to get him to stop flashing.
“Here are Mae and I on our way home from Desperation Reef. We got one of the best bluefin tuna I’ve ever caught, best sushi on Earth, all ready for dinner specials tonight at the Barrel in Laguna Beach. You all know the Barrel. Reservations, please!”
Casey gives himself his coolest smile, then kneels down and gets video of him kissing Mae on the nose. She wipes her tongue up his stubbly cheek. Casey switches the camera direction back to normal, stands and points it at the vessel.
“And what do we find here on this beautiful sea off the California coast? Well, at least four people—three men and a girl—on a commercial fishing vessel, cleaning their catch. See, they’ve got some big ones up on the tables. But why does this look wrong to me? Because the fish look like sharks, that’s why. I’m not so sure these people are playing by the rules out here. Maybe Fish and Wildlife—hi, Craig, hi, Charmaine—would like some video and a CF number. Maybe my brothers and sisters at the Shark Stewards—hi, Booker, hi, Trish!—would like some video, too. So Mae and I are going in for a closer look.”
From a hundred feet away it’s clear to Casey that these model citizens are finning sharks. Not legal, not humane, but very profitable. Black Hat still has his binoculars on him and the cleaning crew is really hustling now, slicing the fins—dorsal, sides, and tail—off the club-stunned sharks, sweeping the bloody-edged silver-blue-black triangles into a bait well and heaving the finless sharks back into the ocean.
Moondance rocks on the chop while Casey shoots video. He notes his GPU location.
“Oh fudge!” he narrates as he resumes shooting. “See this! Those fish will either bleed to death or get eaten by their cousins. Man, there’s threshers and blues and leopards and even a baby great white! See this baby Jaws! And you know where all the fins end up? In soup! In restaurants from California all the way to China! A whole shark sliced up and thrown out to die. Shark fins are the most valuable thing in the sea except for sunken treasure. Shark-finning is illegal and ugly, brothers and sisters. See this! This is a sin against nature!”
The swell rolls Moondance closer to the trawler, Empress II, and Casey gets its CF numbers. Black Hat lowers his binoculars, raises a hand, and flips Casey off. Mae thumps her tail on the padded bench back.
