Desperation Reef

She sits astride the ski, holding in gentle water, clapping her gloved hands together to break the cold. Watches the men in the lineup, some sitting on their boards and others seated behind their drivers. Even through the ski noise, their voices carry across the water. Occasional nervous laughter — nervous because the sets are only an hour and fifteen minutes for your best five rides. There are ten boats in the water, including Pipedream. Plus the four rescue skis, hired by the contest organizers. All bobbing in separate, uneasy syncopation. When the big waves come marching in and towering up, all the watercraft and the people on them look like a tiny village perched at the foot of a moving mountain. We’re all so small, Jen has always thought. A band of tiny crazies. “Start Me Up” and “Iron Man” slug it out from boats bobbing at opposite ends of the lineup.

Abruptly, the breeze changes direction and gains force, coming from the northwest now, with the swell. Jen shoots an energy drink and it’s kicking in. She angles for view, trying to gauge wave direction and speed, trading observations with her son.

Everybody watches and waits as a couple of nice fifteen-footers lope in and break, breeze lifting spray off their backs. The waves are more temperamental now, the lips pouting and collapsing earlier.

The fifteen-footers become twenty feet, then twenty-five. Like they’re just warming up, Jen thinks. She’s seen this before on the big open-ocean breaks, where a mid-set wave jumps up much higher than the others, suddenly, and for no apparent reason.

Tom Tyler, the favored nineteen-year-old phenom from Santa Cruz, ditches his tow rope and paddles into a twenty-five-foot wave that lurches to almost forty just as he’s trying to launch. Tyler is thick and strong, and Jen watches him dig for all he’s worth to catch this wave as it towers up and starts to break over him. Tyler makes a miracle drop — heavy as an anvil, so vertical and fast is his descent — then jams on the brakes with a knee-rattling bottom turn, sprints through the massing whitewater, then races up the face, over the top and out.

Jen and Casey holler for Tyler, and offer up neoprene-muffled applause.

“Big points, Mom.”

“Focus on yourself, son. Focus on the job.”

Pure Mom again, thinks Jen. At forty-six she knows she’ll never outgrow her mother’s indomitable will to win.

Jen rocks on her jet ski, well to the side of the Pit, the Cauldron, and the Boneyard — three of the most lethal rock formations at Mavericks. They’re impossible to locate precisely until the waves inhale and rise up, suddenly exposing the rocks just a few feet under the cold, clear water. Jen glimpses the Cauldron — an undersea grotto — just before a furious six-foot wall of whitewater crashes over it.

A hideous place. Where John went down.

She glances at Casey, a blade of fear cutting through her.

“He’s all around us, Mom.”

“He always is.”

The waves arrive bunched closer now, eager as bulls entering a ring. Thirty-foot faces, Jen figures, as she watches a local fisherman — Sal Stragola, tall, thick, and barrel-chested — being towed into a wave six times taller than he is. He makes the drop but not the turn, has to surrender to the whitewater, then prone out on his gun. The wave crests and crashes over him with a stout boom. Sal broncos along in the wall of suds and sand, clambering his way inside, holding on with all he’s got. This bailout will keep him from getting held down by any of the next five waves of the set, which might save his life but will probably cost him the heat, scored by judges on Pipedream. Jen sees that Stragola is in water too heavy for a jet ski, so by the time he waits out the set and gets back in the lineup, he’ll have lost a waveless twenty minutes.

The next wave is Casey’s, a wobbly thirty-footer that puffs out early and leaves him with a frothy short shoulder and an easy exit. No points for this one.

Tom Tyler is towed into a forty-foot wave. No sooner has he dropped the rope when the lip splinters ahead and knocks Tyler off his board, then grabs the boy by the neck from behind and takes him down.

Jen hears the shouts and cries, and joins the jet ski fleet making the big semicircle to water that’s safe, but as close as they can get to where Tyler went down.

No sign of him. Her stomach tightens.

Engines whine and blast smoke into the air.

A driver she doesn’t know gets in too close to climb over the wall of whitewater, which hurls his ski across the water. He crashes, holds on with both hands as his machine lurches in tight circles, sputtering exhaust and seawater into the air. He manages to climb back on, right the ski, and close in on Tom Tyler, who has surfaced just out of the impact zone, holding on to half his board for flotation.

“No worries!” he yells.