Wave Warrior Read online

  “I lost,” she said. “But I didn’t lose as well as you.”

  Ray joined us and we waited for the scoring. I came in dead last in my heat.

  “Warrior mentality,” Ray said. “Congratulations.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ray only let me visit him once in the hospital, and it wasn’t easy. I was still hurting from the death of my grandfather. And now this.

  “I bet there are some kind of waves wherever it is I’m going,” Ray said the one time I did see him. “May not be the Atlantic or Pacific, but I hope they’re blue and fast and full of light. Think of me as a cosmic surfer when I die.”

  He was still making a joke out of it. And I was mad at him. It didn’t seem fair and it didn’t seem at all right. Ray had taught me a lot of good stuff and now he was leaving. I almost wished that he had never shown up. Never taught me what I needed to know about surfing. “I still don’t get it,” I said with some bitterness in my voice. “Why did you come here to Nova Scotia if you knew you were in such bad shape?”

  He took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “I wanted the feeling of a fresh start. I wanted it to be like back at the beginning.” He paused and looked at the ceiling. “And I guess I wanted to meet a kid just like you. Someone young and uncertain but with a great future ahead of him.”

  “What makes you think I have a great future?”

  His manner changed, and he was back to the old Ray I knew. “Hey, dinghead, when the big kahuna tells you about your future, you listen up. The man don’t lie.”

  I wanted to tell Ray I didn’t have a clue about what I was going to do with my life, but I kept my mouth shut. The room felt awfully hot.

  “You gotta take care of Mickey D for me,” Ray said.

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak. I was about to cry. Mentioning Mickey D made everything suddenly seem real. He really was going to die if he was giving me his dog.

  Some of Ray’s old friends and girlfriends from California started showing up midweek. I met a few of them at the beach. They knew who I was because I had Mickey D with me. It was flat all week. Not a ripple in the ocean. It was as if the sea knew about Ray.

  Ray died on a Saturday, one week after the contest. On Tuesday, a taxi arrived at the beach right after sunrise, and the driver, holding a golden urn, got out and looked nervous. Tara and I were already there in our wet suits. So were about twenty of Ray’s friends from California. A big Hawaiian-looking guy named Carlos took the urn with Ray’s ashes from the driver and carried it down to the water’s edge.

  Then Carlos picked up his twelve-foot board, set Ray’s urn on it and began to paddle out to sea. We all followed him. The water was like glass. The gulls dipped and swooped above, and you could see the kelp waving back and forth in the clear water below.

  We paddled about a mile out to sea, near Shut-In Island. I’d never been this far from shore on my board before, and I felt excited, spooked and sad, all at the same time. I could tell that Tara was a little scared, but she was trying not to show it. Carlos stopped paddling and we all formed a circle. Four seals popped up close to us and stared with those big sad eyes. And from high above, you could hear the beating wings of a pair of Canada geese flying over. Even higher up you could see the vapor trails of American jets on their way to Europe.

  Carlos held up the urn, and each surfer in turn said something to Ray. Some said something funny, some said something serious. I knew that everyone said something that was true. When it was my turn, all I could say was “Thanks, Ray. Thanks for teaching me to surf.”

  Then Carlos poured Ray’s ashes onto the surface of the sea and there was silence. After about ten minutes we all paddled back to shore.

  By mid-afternoon, a funny thing happened. The sky became overcast and yet there was still not a breath of wind. Waves began rolling in. Sleek four- to six-foot waves came in sets of seven. There was a lull of nearly five minutes between each set.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Tara said. We were sitting on the beach, eating vegetarian sandwiches that one of the Californians had made for everyone.

  “It’s a long time between sets,” I said. “Ray told me that means the waves are coming from really far away.”

  Carlos was sitting nearby and he smiled. “Yeah, bro. Long way. Like from off the coast of Africa or something. Time to surf, my friend. Looks like Ray pulled some strings somewhere.”

  And so we all got back into our wet suits and paddled out to the Reef. The waves were fast and smooth, and the glassy walls allowed us to carve up and down. I had never seen such graceful surfing before. Then Tara and I took off on a wave together. I took off closer to the peak but told her to stay on. We both arced high up onto the wall and tracked in perfect unison, and I felt like we had bonded in a way I thought was impossible.

  The waves lasted for two hours and then, as mysteriously as they had begun, they stopped. It was as if someone had just thrown a switch.

  “Someone forget to put money in the machine?” Carlos joked. But we all knew that it had something to do with Ray. Somehow.

  By the time we paddled in, the city surfers started arriving. They’d all been to the beach earlier that day and seen that it was flat. Then someone phoned in the news of the freak swell. But now it was gone. I’m not sure who said it. I just know that it wasn’t me. I was petting Mickey D, scratching him behind the ears, when I heard the words: “Man, you guys should have been here an hour ago. You missed it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  After that the summer kind of evaporated. I felt haunted by the loss of Ray. I sat in my grandfather’s fish shack with Ray’s old boards and his photos and thought about a lot of things: surfing, school coming up in the fall, Tara, me. Ray’s old van sat rusting out front. I slept at the shack sometimes and once invited Tara to stay the night with me.

  I guess I tried to push things a little too far and she stopped me. I got the point so I apologized to her. She still spent the night, but we had a hard time talking to each other in the morning.

  Through August and September, the hurricane waves never made it to these shores. I was back in school. It felt like a door had shut forever on some happy chapter of my life. I got in the ocean when I could and paddled a lot, but I can’t say I had much in the way of exciting surf.

  But then in early October, a tropical storm off Florida turned into a monster hurricane that tracked north and stalled offshore. The sea went wild with monster brown foamy waves pounding the coastline. There were traffic jams at the beach as people from Halifax and Dartmouth drove out just to look at the storm waves.

  A couple of guys tried to paddle out only to be slammed back in the shore break. It was an out-of-control ocean and the waves were not to be surfed. I tried to tell one of them it was stupid to surf in these conditions. He said it was none of my business. I could see that he was really cold from just a few minutes in the water. That seemed odd, so I walked down and stuck my hand in the ocean. It was bloody cold.

  The storm had moved north, just below Newfoundland, and kept churning big killer waves our way. And it had created an upwelling that made the water icy cold. The water was so uninviting I wanted to give up on surfing. But there was a kind of fever in the air and surfers arrived in the parking lot each morning, waiting for the ocean to clean up, waiting for a chance to surf double-overhead waves.

  And then it happened. The wind went offshore. The waves were steep and hollow. All the usual places were still unsurfable, closing out with killer waves. But on the west side of the Lawrencetown headland, right where the river emptied into the ocean, was a clean surfable peak. A lot of guys were standing on the headland, looking down at the wave in awe. It was huge—a fast, hollow, salt-spray-spitting, grayish green wall of water that looked big enough to eat a man alive. But was it makeable?

  I watched Gorbie and Genghis putting on their wet suits, heard them arguing and watched as they ran down the steep side of the headland to surf the peak. I wanted to say something to the
m. I wanted to remind them that it was near low tide. The river was emptying into the sea. A powerful current— not a rip, but a powerful river current—was sweeping straight out to sea, right alongside the break. If someone lost a board, they’d be swept to their doom.

  All I got out was “Guys...the river...”

  It was Genghis who spit on the ground as he ran past, and all he said to me was “Piss on it,” which I assumed meant he didn’t want my advice.

  Everyone watched as they entered the water below and paddled that same river current out toward the break. It looked almost too easy. Some of the other surfers started unstrapping their boards to follow. I knew how dangerous that river was. Swimmers had drowned here before.

  Tara arrived then and looked at me. “You’re not going out there, are you?” She touched my arm and looked in my eyes. She still cared about me.

  “Not today,” I said. “I’m dying to surf. But this is all wrong.” I pointed to the foam from the colossal breaking waves that was being swept out to sea in the current.

  Genghis made a heroic takeoff and almost made the drop before a big mushroom cloud of exploding white water knocked him off his board. He came up sputtering. We could see that his board had been broken clean in two. He was in close to the rocks in the shallows. All he had to do was drag himself out without getting knocked down and he’d be okay. There was a crowd of surfers and non-surfers on the headland, and they cheered as if it had all been a performance.

  Next, Gorbie executed an amazing late takeoff, made the drop down a twelve-foot wall and made a bottom turn, heading away from the peak. It looked like something out of a magazine. He tracked across the wave, dragging his hand and barely keeping his balance. I was sure he was going to make it.

  Then the wave sectioned and it was like the fist of God came down on his head. Hard.

  Gorbie was down. Wisely, he dove deep.

  His board surfaced first—very close to shore. But no Gorbie.

  “His leash snapped,” I heard someone yell. “He’s screwed.”

  I walked closer to the edge of the headland. Gorbie’s board was banging around on the rocks. I studied the churning white water farther out.

  That’s when somebody saw him. And pointed. Gorbie had tried to swim out of the impact zone and found himself in the river current. He was savvy, though. He was trying to swim across it, not against it. The only problem was that he kept getting beaten back by incoming waves that were smacking him over and over. Gorbie was at the mercy of the waves pushing in and the current pulling him straight out to sea. He wouldn’t be able to get out to deeper water and he wouldn’t be able to get to shore.

  Tara took out her cell phone and dialed 9-1-1. She understood that this was a true emergency.

  “The Zodiac will never get here in time,” I said. “I’m not even sure the firehouse rescue team can handle anything like this.”

  “So what do we do? Stand here and do nothing?”

  Tara got an operator and began to explain the situation.

  I saw a couple of other guys pull up their wet suits. Weed and Tim. Right, I was thinking. Two surfers who had just toked up, heading out to sea on their shortboards. No way could they be of any help.

  I was staring hard at the river current, the waves and the tiny dot that was Gorbie’s head as he tried to stay above water. Almost unconsciously, I started to put on my wet suit, still looking out to sea. That’s when I realized there was a small window between the killer sets of waves. Twelve waves and then a short break of maybe three minutes. Enough to get myself in the river current and paddle like hell.

  When Tara looked back at me, I was already running down the hill, my longboard under my arm. She yelled, but I couldn’t understand her words. I didn’t have to. She didn’t want me to go.

  As I stumbled across the boulders at the base of the hill, I saw the lull I was looking for. Now or never. I threw myself into the foamy water and began paddling like crazy. I was totally freaked at how cold the water was. This was even worse for Gorbie. If he was getting walloped over and over, he’d lose his strength pretty quickly.

  I got to my knees as Ray had instructed me and knee-paddled straight into the river current and then with it, digging with deep powerful strokes. Here at water level, I couldn’t see Gorbie anywhere.

  I had never been this scared before. My body was shaking. From the cold or fear, I didn’t know. I just kept my head down and I paddled.

  When the next set of waves arrived, I saw a huge dark mass of water coming my way. I watched in terror as it grew bigger and bigger. I prayed that I could paddle over it.

  I made it. Just barely.

  And then there was another.

  And another.

  I shifted farther into the deep water and found the river current again and worked with it. Gorbie had to be out here somewhere. The current wouldn’t let him be anywhere else. When I could stop paddling for the briefest break, I looked back toward the headland. The other surfers had not made it through the shore break. I saw a couple more scrambling down the hill. All shortboarders. But they were at a disadvantage. I still couldn’t see Gorbie anywhere.

  And then I saw Tara on the headland, waving and pointing. When I finally saw Gorbie, he was farther out than I would have thought. The river was that powerful. He was being pulled toward a rocky shoal. The waves were crashing on the shallow reef with a terrible force. It had once been called “the Graveyard” because so many ships had wrecked there. I had to get to Gorbie. Soon.

  It was all about strength, pacing, breathing, paddling. I was Gorbie’s only hope. And I didn’t even like the guy. I was really scared. I wondered why I was out there.

  That’s when I heard Ray’s voice. Inside my head. You are here because you can do this, he said.

  Do what? I was thinking. What would I do if I could even get to Gorbie?

  Move past the fear. Don’t ignore it. Stay focused.

  I could barely breathe. I realized that I had to paddle slowly. I needed to find Gorbie but I needed to conserve energy. And I needed to quell the doubt rising within me.

  I could hear sirens in the distance. Somewhere there would be rescuers with a Zodiac. But could they even get through the waves to get here?

  And then I saw Gorbie. Not struggling, but floating. His head was above the water, but he had no strength left in him. He was being pulled close to the shoal now. It was only a matter of time.

  Slow and steady. My breathing came back. My lungs stopped aching. A calming voice in my head now. Work with the sea. Don’t fight it. I kept paddling.

  I turned to look back at the land. I was shocked to see how far out to sea I was. But I kept paddling. And that’s when I heard Gorbie’s feeble cry. It wasn’t a word I could make out. But it didn’t matter. I realized that, even on my longboard, even if I could get him, we were not going to make it ashore. What would I do?

  And then I had him. He couldn’t talk. He could barely hang on. He didn’t have any gloves on and his hands were blue. I got in the water and shoved him up onto my board.

  It was all pretty much slow motion. A weird kind of calm determination came over me. I had this lump of a half-dead surfer on my board. There was no way I could paddle him ashore. Gorbie was trying to hang on, lying on top, and I had to climb up half on top of him, get the nose of the board up and paddle. I had to get away from the pounding white death of the shoal, of the Graveyard.

  And that meant there was only one place to go. Out to sea.

  The farther from shore we got, the deeper the water. Massive swells passed under us, but none were breaking. I realized that everything was out of my hands. For now, we were alive. Gorbie tried to say something about heading ashore.

  “Save your breath, bro. If we head back in there, we die.”

  “What then?”

  “We wait. We do nothing.” And then I added something weird. “Warrior mode,” I said. “Save our strength and wait.”

  The Zodiac failed to blast through the walls of i
ncoming water. The boat swamped and, fortunately for all, the men were washed back ashore.

  Forty minutes later, after I had tried to reassure a frightened and freezing Gorbie, a search-and-rescue helicopter appeared on the horizon. Within minutes it was overhead.

  The props churned up the sea, and two rescue divers dropped into the water beside us. I had been amazingly calm up to that point.

  But right then I was suddenly scared to death. The rescuers harnessed Gorbie first and hauled him aloft.

  And then it was my turn. The second diver took a knife and cut my leash at the last second as I was being hauled up.

  Inside the chopper—an old Sea King—I was more scared than ever. “Just stay calm,” said the diver who had pulled me to safety.

  And then I said the strangest thing.

  “What about my board?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to let that go.”

  The waves subsided in a couple of days. I was glad it was over. I knew it would take a while for me to want to surf again. But I knew I would. The ocean could be deadly here, but it could be kind as well. I decided to socialize with the sea on the kinder days from then on.

  I had thought about the whole ordeal, and I can’t say it made a lot of sense to me. In fact, I didn’t like talking about it or thinking about it. But Tara brought a navigational chart to my house and spread it out on the kitchen table a couple of days after the near tragedy.

  “It shows all the currents along the shore here.”

  “So?”

  “So, given the waves and the wind direction the last few days...and the currents, my guess is that your board—Ray’s old board that he gave you—would’ve come ashore right about there.”

  She pointed to a headland farther east. The Farm. Nirvana Farm.

  “No way,” I said.

  She just shrugged.

  So we went to the Farm and we searched. There was no surfboard.

  But we went back the next day and hiked farther along the coastline.

  On the third day we found it—dinged with a broken fin and wedged between some rocks and driftwood. But in one piece. I picked it up and carried it home.