A moment later, Bette turns and catches his right-hand shaka sign, the one Brock can’t stand, then she eases her machine into a brisk trot and picks her way along and behind the breaking wave. She sidles west, parallel as the wave rises in front of her, gunning Wanda faster now toward the peaking crest. She feels the weight of Casey behind her.
Loves the power of the ski, the power of her own strong body in control of all those horses. Like Casey’s.
Swerves ahead and around the cresting wave, then speeds along the left-breaking shoulder. When she feels Casey drop the tow rope she looks back to make sure he’s dropped it, then opens up the ski and blasts up the steepening face of the breaker and over it, into the sky, engine screaming, Bette getting off this wave as fast as she can so Casey, behind her, can inherit it.
She crashes down into the smooth dark water, cuts hard left, safely behind the wave now, and sees the back of Casey’s yellow head cutting along in front of the breaking lip, the rest of him a faint speeding shadow in a wall of blue-green water. Same yellow head she watched so intently in the Barrel bar not quite a year ago when she dressed her best and tried to catch his eye but he never once looked over.
Casey trims along the shoulder, ducks into a quick clean tube, lets it spit him back out to carve the face. Up and down and up and down, what a joyful wave she is, proud but generous and truly, fully stoke-worthy.
Shoots across this living animal, traces a hand along her flank, dips to the bottom and shoots back to the top, where he launches his board.
Flies high, bending into free fall, arms spread and eyes on the gray-blue sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My introduction to the literature of surfing was the hundreds of Surfer magazines I read and reread as an adolescent. I didn’t just read Surfer; I memorized it. I loved the sassy writing, the exotic datelines, hip lingo, and its single-minded passion for riding waves. That writing, and of course the photographs, drove me to hours in high school classes, ignoring the teachers, while sketching romanticized waves in my notebooks. It drove me to Newport Beach where I began my own short wave-riding career, bodysurfing 15th Street—a stout beach break with hollow tubes—makeable with nothing but Birdwell Beach Britches and a pair of Duck Feet.
That said, much of the recent nonfiction surf lit is, in my opinion, even better, especially with regards to big-wave surfing and tow-in surfing, which changed the sport dramatically.
These books informed, delighted, and often thrilled me:
The Wave by Susan Casey
Maverick’s: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing by Matt Warshaw
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
Ghost Wave: The Discovery of Cortes Bank and the Biggest Wave on Earth by Chris Dixon
Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast by Daniel Duane
Women on Waves by Jim Kempton
“Surf noir” is a literary subgenre that I’ve enjoyed since Kem Nunn’s wonderful Tapping the Source pretty much put surf noir on the map. His Tijuana Straits and The Dogs of Winter are wonderful, too.
Don Winslow’s novellas Sunset and Paradise—part of Broken—are powerful stories, steeped in surfing life and death.
Thank you, writers, you inspire.
Thank you, waves, you seduce and sometimes terrify.
Thank you, champion agents, Mark and Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media Group, and my wise and exacting editor at Forge, Kristin Sevick, for helping me make the paddle out and the drop into Desperation Reef.
And thank you, Rita, for life, love, and laughter.
ALSO BY
Laguna Heat
Little Saigon
Pacific Beat
Summer of Fear
The Triggerman’s Dance
Where Serpents Lie
The Blue Hour
Red Light
Silent Joe
Black Water
Cold Pursuit
California Girl
The Fallen
Storm Runners
L.A. Outlaws
The Renegades
Iron River
The Border Lords
The Jaguar
The Famous and the Dead
The Room of White Fire
Swift Vengeance
The Last Good Guy
