Raising A Soul Surfer (10 page)

I spent a night in jail for eating evidence.
Allegedly, it was a very, very small pot plant. Not a leaf, but a seedling. Oddly enough, it wasn’t even mine, nor was I actually in trouble over it; it was just the final straw in a series of misadventures. But if I hadn’t been thrown in jail; if I hadn’t destroyed that miniscule piece of evidence that wasn’t even against me; and if I hadn’t been mad and maybe just a little crazy, I might never have decided to leave California for Hawaii.

Going back in time to Ocean Beach, my boyfriend had abandoned me and moved to Mammoth with his friends. Broken-hearted, I struggled to pay the rent as I worked at the Homestead health food restaurant, the very same restaurant my future husband frequented. But it would be far too simple a story for me to have noticed him then. I was too focused on everyday life, either at work or in the water, even though he often surfed the same spots I did.

It was a very lonely time for me. I felt as if I were not tethered to anything. And because I was young and maybe a bit naïve, I imagined that if I went up to Mammoth, I could patch things up with my ex-boyfriend—even though he had told me in his letter that we were over.

I moved out of my cottage and drove my little Karman Ghia up to Mammoth Mountain. Tony’s friends had put a wall between us, so I ended up renting a room in a house from a guy who was managing it for the owners. I soon found a job punching lift tickets. You could say that things were a bit strained. There were plenty of people my age, many of them surfers when not on the slopes; and while I was busy with work, I still managed to get in my fair share of skiing. In the end, the challenge of becoming a good skier overrode the relationship woes that had brought me to the mountain.

There was a couple that rented the room next to me. I hardly ever saw them, and I never talked to them; but I’d hear them arguing at night or just making a racket. Their schedule was unpredictable; they came and went at weird hours, sometimes disappearing for days on end. Unlike the typical friendly folks in this small mountain town, they were extremely private.

One day, I ran into my fellow boarder as he rushed out of his door to use the bathroom. He nodded quickly at me, never saying a word. His hand was wrapped in a rough bandage with blood seeping through.

Later that afternoon, as I was coming home from work, police had surrounded the house. They had his girlfriend, but she wasn’t in custody, because he was the one they wanted. It turns out that he was a bank robber and had been shot through the hand during his last hold-up. They had finally tracked him back here, the house where I lived, through the license plates on his stolen RV!

The sheriff interrogated me. “Did you know him? What was he doing here?” I explained that my housemates had been a total mystery to me. This situation now made a whole lot more sense to me.

The next day, I was asked to come down to the police station, and I assumed it was to make a statement about my former housemate, the bank robber. But I was whisked into an interrogation room and grilled about the alleged pot plants the police had found on the landlord’s porch.

“What pot plants?” I asked, because I truly had no idea that the landlord was growing pot. That’s when they brought out these two plants no bigger than my thumbnail.

The officers started to increase the pressure. They wanted me to tell them that my landlord was part of a drug ring and that he was growing marijuana. I’d never seen any sign that he was dealing drugs, and I wasn’t about to get him in trouble for something that I had no knowledge of.

After turning the screws without results, one of the officers said (just like in a bad police drama), “We’ll give you some time to think this over,” and then walked out of the interrogation room, leaving me alone with the tiny plants. I was annoyed and angry about getting hassled—angry that they wanted me to blame my landlord just so they could get a bigger bust. Angry that they’d dragged me down here for these two little alleged pot plants.

I guess I was so incensed that I decided the easiest thing to do was eat the evidence. Which is exactly what I did! You should have seen the looks on their faces when they returned.

Needless to say, they were unhappy with me. It earned me a night in jail.

Looking back, I bet I would have been more cooperative in the first place if they’d just told me that my landlord had skipped
town with all the rent he’d been collecting for several months.

The real bummer was that the jail they took me to was in Bishop, California, which was an hour’s drive away. When they booted me onto the street the following day, I had no way to get back to my car parked at the police station in Mammoth. I thought about hitchhiking, but instead started calling a few friends I knew back in Mammoth to ask for a ride. I finally reached Chris, one of the surf crew, and one of the guys I knew through Tony, my ex-boyfriend.

Feeling free and having a need to de-stress, I left the police station and headed down the remote mountain road to meet up with Chris. I grew wary when a Chevy van, traveling in the opposite direction, slowed down and the driver asked me if I needed a ride. I said, “No, thanks,” so he drove on; but then, looking behind me, I saw him make a U-turn back toward me. Alarm bells went off! At that moment, Chris, looking a bit like a hippie, came along to pick me up in his brown Volkswagen camper van. In retrospect, I could see God’s hand of protection on my life.

As we drove back to Mammoth, Chris and I talked about Hawaii and how much fun it would be to surf there. Spring was coming, the snow was melting—and with it my job. I didn’t have a place to live, thanks to bank robbers and an embezzling bonsai-pot grower for a landlord. It seemed to be the perfect time to make a radical change in plans. Chris asked me if he could tag along.

Instead of going to Oahu, where all the famous surf breaks are, Chris suggested that we go to the island of Kauai. I had never heard of it. He had friends who lived there and would put us up, and from what he’d heard, the waves were uncrowded.

I agreed. Kauai it was! We sold our cars, packed our surfboards and were off to the islands and my destiny, the place where I was meant to be.

All this time, Tom was settling into college classes in San Diego. The G.I. bill paid for his education and housing costs. He condensed his classes together into two days so he would have plenty of open time to surf.

When Tom was first discharged from the Navy, he’d gone home to New Jersey. But he quickly scraped up enough cash by hustling at local pool halls (and polishing his reputation as the “Trickster”) to return to San Diego, where the surf was more to his liking.

Surfing was undergoing an emerging revolution during this time. Long, heavy surfboards had given way to shorter, lighter and more maneuverable ones. The day of “hanging ten” (hanging all 10 toes off the front of a long board) was fading out. On a short board a surfer plants his feet and uses his core body weight to turn and carve the open face of the wave, staying just ahead of the whitewater foam.

Then the surf leash came along. Previously, if a surfer wiped out, he or she would have to swim after his (her) surfboard, usually all the way to the beach. One would think this idea of a leash on the board would make all surfers shout hallelujah and save countless wasted time swimming after boards in cold water, or crab-crawling over sharp reefs. But a bunch of surfers who considered themselves hardcore looked down on anyone who paddled out with a leash, calling them kooks. In fact, the early leashes were called “kook cords.” Even I refused to use a leash, as I was a very strong swimmer. But the kooks with leashes were getting a lot more waves, while hard-core guys were swimming after their boards. Eventually, almost every surfer went out and bought a leash.

Tom, like me, had been harboring the idea of going to Hawaii. He loved the surf in California, but he longed to find even more
challenging waves—such as the ones he always saw in surf movies or magazines. The words of his Hawaiian shipmate, Rob, kept echoing in his ears. After only a year of school, on Christmas break, he took all of his savings and bought a round-trip ticket to Honolulu.

He knew enough to get out of town, as Honolulu was called, and head for the countryside of the island. He was on the prowl for the bigger, more powerful waves. And they could only be found on the North Shore, where the surf breaks had familiar names that Tom had read about in the surf magazines filled with pictures of powerful pounding waves: Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay.

Tom found a room to share with some other mainland transplants. Surfing the North Shore with them, Tom increased his skill level in bigger waves. Within two years, his roommates would become legendary big-wave surfers.

A friend suggested that Tom shouldn’t leave the islands without checking out a more remote island in Hawaii. “Go visit Kauai,” he said. “That’s where you’ll find a more relaxed, slow-paced life.” And so it was his destiny, in response to a suggestion by a friend, and with just a few days left in his trip, that Tom landed at the Lihue airport on Kauai.

At the time, the runway wasn’t big enough to handle jets, so you had to fly in on noisy, rattling prop-planes. The gate was a pavilion with a few benches and a chain-link fence. The luggage carousel was just a 20-foot-long steel-covered piece of plywood.

Tom couldn’t help but contrast the Garden Isle to bustling Oahu. With his backpack and surfboards slung over his back, Tom hiked out onto the main street, a one-lane road that didn’t even circle completely around the whole island. To this day the sheer cliffs of the Na Pali coast make a connecting road impracticable, so not a whole lot has changed since that time.

Tom didn’t know anyone, nor did he know where anything was; he just knew one name: Hanalei Bay, where the waves were supposed to be the best. But he was a resourceful young man with a sleeping bag, a little cash and a surfboard. It would be an adventure. So naturally he stuck his thumb out for a ride.

It wasn’t long before an older Hawaiian guy in a pickup asked in thick Pidgin English, “Where you like go?”

“Hanalei,” said Tom, mangling the pronunciation like so many tourists do.

The driver motioned to the back of the truck and Tom climbed in. To his amusement, he found that he was sharing the ride to Hanalei with a couple of caged pigs and a load of pig slop.

Amazingly, the guy (who happened to be Henry Tai Hook, the honorary mayor of Kauai’s North Shore) dropped him off in the center of Hanalei town. Tom thanked him, grabbed his gear and headed to the beach. For the next couple of days, he camped out and surfed the north shore of Kauai, hiding his belongings in the bushes while surfing.

It took only those few days of breathtaking beauty, lush jungle, majestic waterfalls and crystal-blue waves to get Tom thoroughly hooked. He had his roommate in San Diego ship over the rest of his belongings. Then he enrolled in the small junior college and declared Kauai his new home.

The early seventies were the beginning of a dramatic demographic shift for the state of Hawaii. The chieftains had eventually made surfing strictly a royal sport; commoners were forbidden from surfing under penalty of death. The local islanders, heavily made up of a pan-Asian and Polynesian people, had outnumbered the
haoles
, as Caucasian people are called.

But the hundred-year-old agricultural economy that had made the island a melting pot by importing labor from Portugal, China, Korea, Japan and the Philippines was being superseded by a new boom to an old industry: tourism.

Tourism not only brought visitors from the mainland, but also people who liked what they saw moved to the islands. For a while the outer islands were mostly immune, but during the time when Tom and I separately and unrelatedly moved to Kauai, there was a surge of mainland surfers coming to Hawaii.

Maybe it had something to do with surfing going beyond a simple craze of the early sixties; maybe it had to do with the political and sociological turbulence of the times. Whatever it was, those who considered themselves “local” (even though the undiluted indigenous Hawaiian population had shrunk to a tiny percentile) found themselves swamped by young strangers from the mainland showing up at surf spots dominated for years by locals.