The Charmed Life: December 2013

"We don't have a continental shelf. We're just a mountain range in the middle of the Pacific."

I overhear this as I am checking out a board from Surf N Sea, a prominent surf shop in Haleiwa, identifiable by its yellow and red exterior and its covered wooden walkway in front, the latter being reminiscent of the Old West towns in classic movies glimpsed on unattended televisions in the suburban living rooms of childhood.

The statement is offered by way of explanation by some promoter of the competition playing on the television hanging over the counter as I pay $13.98 to rent a board for a pair of hours on an unremarkable Monday morning. The store is mostly empty. Among the people who are there, it's hard to distinguish who is just hanging around and who works there, without looking closely for the telltale name tags that might, for instance, say "Kim" in feminine handwriting. There isn't a single window in the ground floor of the building, but the bright sunlight through the open door is sufficient.

The lack of continental shelf is meant to carry a lot of significance in that it is credited in part for the undiminished intensity of the waves that hit this shore reliably during the winter and have made this place known in a lot of otherwise indifferent corners of the world. Winter storms from as far north as the Bering Straight transfer their extraordinary high energy into the ocean's surface and that energy forms waves. Those waves then have several thousand miles of open ocean to bounce off one another, organize their force and be generally refined by the action of time and space into something rare and desirable for a lot of people. It is here on the North Shore that you can see, probably better than anywhere else in the world and certainly without looking too hard, a whole subculture that has organized itself around the possibilities that derive from having something buoyant and appropriately hydrodynamic along the right stretch of shoreline at the right time.

Surfing is a simple process. You watch the wave arrive. You judge it as it approaches in order to determine whether it is something for which you ought to paddle. You do or you don't ride it. It crashes into the beach and its energy dissipates. Sand and rock absorb its force. Perhaps a bit of coral or rock becomes a new grain of sand. The life cycle of the wave is complete. Over decades and centuries the coastline erodes, but no single wave makes a difference and, anyway, from the perspective of a wave (if a wave could have a perspective) even a decade is a period of time impossible to comprehend.

***

Joan Didion wrote about being on Oahu in 1977, but she never mentions having made it to the North Shore. She was trying to save her marriage (incidentally, she did) and writing something for a magazine about the death of the author James Jones, weeks earlier. She stayed at the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu that time, which is still there today and is still painted the same color: pink. The luau at the Royal Hawaiian in the fall of 2013 is $175 per adult. I can't help but search YouTube for video of the performance. I click through it curiously and hear, among other things, the MC as he does crowd work. "Where you from? Ohio? Brrrrr!" etc. I'm confident lots of people who go think it worth every penny.

***

It's nighttime. I haven't had a proper shower since yesterday morning, but I've spent hours in the salt water followed by a rinse either under a hose (if at home) or under the single, high-volume stream from an open pipe at a public park.

We celebrate Elise's first Hanukkah with a menorah improvised from Legos. We prepare for Thanksgiving. We cut pineapple. Surely there is no more forbidding fruit than what grows here. A pineapple, which itself is wrapped in a skin rougher than the lava rock, grows on a stalk surrounded by a legion of stiff, sharp leaves that will draw blood if approached from the functional angle. These same leaves top the fruit itself. It is a trope here that the original labor for the pineapple fields had to be imported, because the locals wouldn't accept the work. It is an unspoken but important detail that the imported labor was surely recruited from a place where it could be assured that they knew nothing of the pineapple plant.

A coconut is similarly confounding. The hard shell readily apparent in any major supermarket is one thing, but in its natural state that enticing little bowling ball is wrapped in yet another hard and thick husk that makes one wonder why anyone bothered developing a taste for the stuff to begin with.

***

Thanksgiving morning. I wake to the sounds of laughter of an infectious kind and go into the main house to find a 10 month old Skyping with a dog in New York. This is truly a brave new world.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is reporting that tourism arrivals and spending have dropped for the second month in a row. The drop was primarily attributed to price increases.

The whole day spent by the beach has a sort of surreal feeling, because the waves have dropped to almost nothing, but a 15-18 foot northwest swell is forecast to peak the following morning. Through sunset the nondescript, scarcely rideable surf continues to crumble over the reef, where low tide arrives about 5 p.m.

Next door is a big family gathering. I hear someone calling for Aidan all day to the extent that I suspect there must be more than one of them over there. It is also my nephew's name. The new names are now fully here. No one is given the name Ryan anymore, just as the were no little American boys named Ryan in the 1960s.

***

The swell arrives, as big or bigger than forecast. The Vans World Cup of Surfing goes into its second day at Sunset Beach, less than a mile from where we sit and watch the best surf of the day (and for all we know, the year) land on Ehukai Beach, at a surf spot known formally as the Banzai Pipeline, but referred to in conversation among those familiar with it merely as Pipeline. It is the kind of day where there are no casual sunbathers on the beach at Ehukai and, when someone gets a great ride, dozens of people on the beach cheer.

***

I reach my modified NaNoWriMo goal on Saturday night, 6 hours before the end of the month, with 50,014 words of electronic type. The manuscript isn't finished, but I reached the numeric goal.

On Sunday morning, just as we're getting ready to leave, I am reading an essay on Las Vegas in Harper's and I read the following paragraph:

"I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college's creative-writing workshops and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep "write what you know" - for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world's indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul."

As I read this - and I'll give you this on oath - I am sitting outside on the deck and it really is raining hard, the runoff from the roof really is drumming a loud, syncopated rhythm on the splash blocks beneath the gutters and there really is lightning with big pops of thunder.