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He wore shiny black shoes with long sharp toes, tight pants, and bright flowered shirts.
kinky hair was cut in a pompadour,
In the mags, Hawaiian waves were always big and, in the color shots, ranged from deep, mid-ocean blue to a pale, impossible turquoise.
The wind was always offshore (blowing from land to sea, ideal for surfing),
during my first, frantic survey of the local waters, I found the surf setup confusing. Waves broke here and there along the outer edge of a mossy, exposed reef.
I was the only haole
“Outside.” It was the only word spoken to me that day. And he was right: an outside set was approaching, the biggest of the afternoon, and I was grateful to have been warned.
Knees were more deeply bent than in the surfing I was used to, hips looser.
hanging five, hanging ten, defying the obvious physics of flotation and glide.
I didn’t know it then, but what I was looking at was classic Island style.
He stayed away from the main peak, riding peripheral waves.
the next day he cocked his chin in greeting.
The fat guy who appeared on bigger days, taking off far outside and ripping so hard that the rest of us stopped surfing to watch,
Aipa, he said. (Years later, Aipa photos and stories began to fill the mags.)
Day in, day out, Glenn Kaulukukui was my favorite surfer. From the moment he caught a wave, gliding catlike to his feet, I couldn’t take my eyes off the lines he drew, the speed he somehow found, the improvisations he came up with.
Hawaii had seen plenty of white supremacism, particularly among its elites, but the In Crowd knew nothing of elites.
There were other haoles, I later realized, who were too smart to get involved in gang nonsense.
These kids, most of them surfers from the Waikiki side of Diamond Head, knew how to keep low profiles when in the minority. They also knew losers when they saw them.
I already knew, in rough outline, what had happened to the Hawaiians—how American missionaries and other haoles had subjugated them, stolen their lands, killed them en masse with diseases, and converted the survivors to Christianity.
how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed the test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning.
a restaurant called the Jolly Roger, part of a pirate-themed chain, with burgers named after Robert Louis Stevenson characters, in a shopping mall in Kahala.
Steve’s urgent ambition was to escape the Rock, ideally to England, where his favorite band, the Kinks, played. But anywhere “mainland”—anywhere not Hawaii—would do. I, meanwhile, wouldn’t have minded staying in Da Islands forever.
When the waves were good, “all thought of work is at an end, only that of sport is left,”
“All day there is nothing but surfing. Many go out surfing as early as four in the morning.”
Been there, done that! Sometimes the only way to skip crowds…
Their winter harvest festival lasted three months—during which the surf frequently pumped and work was officially forbidden.
This was not what the Calvinist missionaries who began arriving in Hawaii in 1820 had in mind for the islanders as a way of life.
Duke Kahanamoku, who kept the ancient practice of he‘e nalu alive. Kahanamoku won a gold medal for swimming at the 1912 Olympics, became an international celebrity, and started giving surfing exhibitions around the world.
Surfing caught on,
In the cafeteria, we ate our saimin and chow fun together in a dim corner.
I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries.
There was clearly a me I didn’t know—a rabid rodent of some type.
The noise alone was something new to my ears.
The board was my most prized possession,
There was something new happening in surfing, and Glenn seemed to be in its vanguard. Nose-riding was, I suspected, not part of it. I had become adept at hanging five, hanging ten, cross-stepping up to the tip and back as a wave allowed.
particularly at low tide, hollow waves—waves that created, as they broke, honest-to-God tubes.
these tube rides, had the quality of revelation.
You felt like you had stepped through the looking glass for an instant, and you always wanted to go back. The tube, not nose-riding, felt like the future of surfing.
We saw surfers around town. They had sun-bleached hair, drove old station wagons, wore plaid Pendleton shirts, white jeans, huaraches—Mexican sandals with soles made from old car tires
Evidently it took Catholic school to turn young kids into fearless, hardened apostates.
anyone they didn’t esteem was a “kook” (an insult usually reserved for an incompetent surfer—the term derives from kuk, a Hawaiian word for excrement).
For most inlanders, the road to surfing ran through skateboarding.
the first-order problem that we’re out there trying to solve: what are these waves doing, exactly, and what are they likely to do next? Before we can ride them, we have to read them,
in terms of swell size, swell direction, wind speed, wind direction, tide, season, and sandbar configuration;
Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered.
The basic ingredients of a ding-repair kit were polyester resin, catalyst, fiberglass cloth, and a block of polyurethane foam,
When the culture wars of the ’60s heated up, Spock was prominent on the antiwar left, and beating children came to seem, at some point, to many people, including my parents, medieval.
Surfing had, and has, a steel thread of violence running through it.
small waves and weaker waves, it’s mild, benign, unthreatening, under control. It’s just the great ocean engine that propels us and allows us to play. That mood changes as the waves get more powerful.
The larger satisfactions of the shortboard were
First and foremost were tube rides, or barrels.
