Page 2 of Try Easy

Walls of Water

Waimea Bay,Oahu

January 20, 1968

Keoni

The whole carwas shaking as Keoni maxed it out at top speed, racing across the island to the North Shore.

“Come on,” Keoni urged the car. “We’re almost there.”

He rounded the cliffs of Waimea and gasped as the shoreline unfolded before his eyes. He had seen big waves before, but nothing like this. This was crazy. Violent. Unsafe. Perfect.

Walls of water two stories high sprayed into the air, shrouding the entire North Shore in a lavender-hued mist.

Keoni slowed down, wanting to remember every moment of the day. There might not be another one like it for years. Then he punched the gas again and headed straight for Waimea Bay.

The other surf spots along the eight-mile stretch of sand on the North Shore would be no better than boiling cauldrons of water. They would eat a surfer alive. Only Waimea Bay could handle a storm like this one.

Keoni screeched to a stop in the church parking lot that overlooked the bay and jumped out of the car. He stood in the same spot where his ancestors had once stood, studying the conditions of the surf. He noted where the waves broke, how many were in each set, and how fast they were coming. People assumed Keoni had a magical gift for predicting where the best waves would break, and for always being in the right spot at the right time. But it wasn’t a gift, it was a skill that had been passed down for generations. Keoni’s father had taught him how to listen to the voice of the ocean, and his mother had explained how to feel the mood in the wind.

Surfing was in his blood.

Keoni could still remember the days when the locals had said that only gods could ride the wild waves of Waimea Bay. They all said the waves were too big, too angry. They believed the bay was haunted from above by the heiau in the cliffs and from below by the bones of a dead surfer.

Keoni had been a child when the locals had been proven wrong.

It had been a sunny day in the winter of 1957. Keoni was in sixth grade, and his dad had let him stay home from school to watch the haole surfers from California try to commit suicide on the giant waves.

The Kamehameha Highway had been lined with cars. Everyone was sitting on their hoods, watching the show. Keoni, his four siblings, and his parents had climbed onto the roof of their Studebaker and eaten a picnic of fried chicken and macaroni salad while the surfers wiped out. It had been better entertainment than a World Series baseball game.

The surfers had been pummeled by the waves and had nearly died, but they had also caught some of the biggest waves Keoni had ever seen.

“I’m going to catch even bigger waves someday,” twelve-year-old Keoni Makai told his father. “I’m going to make our name famous all over the world.”

Once Keoni got a taste of the power of the waves at Waimea, he was hooked. Two years later, he quit school to surf full-time. He didn’t belong in a stuffy classroom all day, learning the literature and history of white people from the mainland. He belonged on the water. The ocean became his classroom.

Watching the waves strike the sand with the force of a power plant, Keoni thought today might be the day.

There were a handful of surfers in the water, not really doing much more than clinging to their boards. Keoni knew all of them.

Rabbit Jones, an old-timer who had been one of the first surfers of the North Shore, looked to be the only one doing any riding.

Keoni saw the flash of Rabbit’s board fly down the face of a giant wave. Rabbit was well over six feet tall with a wiry frame, but he looked as tiny as an ant in the giant swells of water.

Rabbit made the bottom turn and then got pummeled by the closeout.

Keoni could hear the groan of the spectators on the beach as he jogged across the sand with his board under his arm. They were all disappointed to see Rabbit go down.

Keoni scanned the water anxiously for a sign of his friend and sighed with relief as he saw his dark shaggy head pop up. Rabbit turned toward shore, flashed the shaka sign, and paddled back for more.

“Somebody’s gonna die today,” said a woman in the crowd.

There was a group of housewives with small children clustered together, watching the entertainment just as Keoni had done on that day long ago.

Keoni reached out and tousled the hair of a small boy of about ten years old.

“Ey, kid,” he said. “You wanna be out there someday?”

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