She sits astride the ski, holding in gentle water, clapping her gloved hands together to break the cold. Watches the men in the lineup, some sitting on their boards and others seated behind their drivers. Even through the ski noise, their voices carry across the water. Occasional nervous laughter—nervous because the sets are only an hour and fifteen minutes for your best five rides. There are ten boats in the water, including Pipedream. Plus the four rescue skis, hired by the contest organizers. All bobbing in separate, uneasy syncopation. When the big waves come marching in and towering up, all the watercraft and the people on them look like a tiny village perched at the foot of a moving mountain. We’re all so small, Jen has always thought. A band of tiny crazies. “Start Me Up” and “Iron Man” slug it out from boats bobbing at opposite ends of the lineup.
Abruptly, the breeze changes direction and gains force, coming from the northwest now, with the swell. Jen shoots an energy drink and it’s kicking in. She angles for view, trying to gauge wave direction and speed, trading observations with her son.
Everybody watches and waits as a couple of nice fifteen-footers lope in and break, breeze lifting spray off their backs. The waves are more temperamental now, the lips pouting and collapsing earlier.
The fifteen-footers become twenty feet, then twenty-five. Like they’re just warming up, Jen thinks. She’s seen this before on the big open-ocean breaks, where a mid-set wave jumps up much higher than the others, suddenly, and for no apparent reason.
Tom Tyler, the favored nineteen-year-old phenom from Santa Cruz, ditches his tow rope and paddles into a twenty-five-foot wave that lurches to almost forty just as he’s trying to launch. Tyler is thick and strong, and Jen watches him dig for all he’s worth to catch this wave as it towers up and starts to break over him. Tyler makes a miracle drop—heavy as an anvil, so vertical and fast is his descent—then jams on the brakes with a knee-rattling bottom turn, sprints through the massing whitewater, then races up the face, over the top and out.
Jen and Casey holler for Tyler, and offer up neoprene-muffled applause.
“Big points, Mom.”
“Focus on yourself, son. Focus on the job.”
Pure Mom again, thinks Jen. At forty-six she knows she’ll never outgrow her mother’s indomitable will to win.
Jen rocks on her jet ski, well to the side of the Pit, the Cauldron, and the Boneyard—three of the most lethal rock formations at Mavericks. They’re impossible to locate precisely until the waves inhale and rise up, suddenly exposing the rocks just a few feet under the cold, clear water. Jen glimpses the Cauldron—an undersea grotto—just before a furious six-foot wall of whitewater crashes over it.
A hideous place. Where John went down.
She glances at Casey, a blade of fear cutting through her.
“He’s all around us, Mom.”
“He always is.”
The waves arrive bunched closer now, eager as bulls entering a ring. Thirty-foot faces, Jen figures, as she watches a local fisherman—Sal Stragola, tall, thick, and barrel-chested—being towed into a wave six times taller than he is. He makes the drop but not the turn, has to surrender to the whitewater, then prone out on his gun. The wave crests and crashes over him with a stout boom. Sal broncos along in the wall of suds and sand, clambering his way inside, holding on with all he’s got. This bailout will keep him from getting held down by any of the next five waves of the set, which might save his life but will probably cost him the heat, scored by judges on Pipedream. Jen sees that Stragola is in water too heavy for a jet ski, so by the time he waits out the set and gets back in the lineup, he’ll have lost a waveless twenty minutes.
The next wave is Casey’s, a wobbly thirty-footer that puffs out early and leaves him with a frothy short shoulder and an easy exit. No points for this one.
Tom Tyler is towed into a forty-foot wave. No sooner has he dropped the rope when the lip splinters ahead and knocks Tyler off his board, then grabs the boy by the neck from behind and takes him down.
Jen hears the shouts and cries, and joins the jet ski fleet making the big semicircle to water that’s safe, but as close as they can get to where Tyler went down.
No sign of him. Her stomach tightens.
Engines whine and blast smoke into the air.
A driver she doesn’t know gets in too close to climb over the wall of whitewater, which hurls his ski across the water. He crashes, holds on with both hands as his machine lurches in tight circles, sputtering exhaust and seawater into the air. He manages to climb back on, right the ski, and close in on Tom Tyler, who has surfaced just out of the impact zone, holding on to half his board for flotation.
“No worries!” he yells.
Rene Carrasco gets pitched from a twenty-five-foot wave that jumps suddenly, shaking him off like a flea. Jen sees him dive, his tethered board plopping out in front of him. Carrasco’s tow partner circles out after him.
Flip Garrison shreds a clean, thirty-five-footer that barrels over him mid-wave and leaves the man hidden inside the tube for three full seconds—only the tip of his gun showing—before Garrison, crouched, shoots out like a ball from a cannon. Clean exit.
Wave of the day so far, Jen thinks.
Ted Kaiawalu purls on his takeoff and flies, arms out, his board midair above him. He lands hard, scrambles, disappearing under six feet of whitewater churning with pieces of driftwood and shreds of kelp.
Jen watches the ESPN helicopter hovering out in front of the impact zone, and the rescue chopper below it—so low its blades whirl just above the breaking waves. Looks like one could jump up and grab it, she thinks. The skis slash and the boats scramble for safer water in the heaving sea.
Over the din: “Outside, Mom!”
Jen guns seaward for the next wave, a lumbering forty-footer. She swerves out and away from the still-forming crest, and onto the rising flank.
From where she looks back at Casey, his rope in both hands, lining up with the forming peak, pointing his big board down for the drop.
At once: the wave stops forward motion, and it’s face rises up—fills from below—the same reverse hydrology Jen has seen at Jaws and Cortes Bank, when wave and bottom hold still while the wave swells higher, as if taking a huge breath—the strange stall of time when a big wave decides to become a very big wave.
Casey lets go of the rope and drops in.
Elbow down, Jen flogs the throttle and grinds Thunder far along the rising shoulder, then over it, getting air before landing on the kinder backside sea.
She swings down and around to the edge of the impact zone to see Casey make the drop, body and board vertical, arms out, head cocked calmly, measured and methodical like John would be.
Fifty feet, thinks Jen. Sixty? It’s the biggest wave she’s seen anyone ride and her son is on it, and she’s towed him into it. She’s bone-deep scared, for everything that can happen, for everything that has.
Casey makes the bottom turn, his legs strong and true as pistons, and the wave breaks top to bottom over him with a concussive finality.
He’s gone.
Three seconds. Four. Five.
In Jen’s mind, even the jet skis and outboards and helicopters seem to have gone silent, but she isn’t thinking about that, she’s watching the four-story cement mixer in which Casey’s future is being formed, and plotting the best way to get down and around to the impact zone if this wave won’t let go of him.
Casey bursts out of the barrel, already aiming for the top of the wave, toward which he climbs with calm deliberation. The wave coughs a cloud of spray after him, as if trying to knock him down, then follows with another.
