The Wave: In the Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean

THE GRAND EMPRESS

Having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern... Two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire - fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it.
Leonardo da Vinci
HAIKU, HAWAII

Eight miles east on Maui's Hana Highway, in the shadow of the Haleakala volcano, away from the tourists streaming to the island's lush southern beaches, there is a candy box of a town called Paia. Only a few blocks in size, its streets thrum with locals-only bars, open-air seafood joints, yoga studios, shops selling bikinis and hemp T-shirts and dolphin-themed art. The peace-love-aloha vibe aside, Paia's main purpose is instantly obvious: every vehicle bristles with surfboards.

The surfers are headed to Spreckelsville and Hookipa, nearby stretches of the north shore where the waves are consistently lively. Both areas are wild and exposed; neither is a spot for beginners. Compared to what lies a little farther up the road, however, they're a pair of kiddie pools. The true spectacle requires another five miles of driving, past the blink-or-you'll-miss-it town of Haiku, down a red-dirt path bearing the signs "No Trespassing," "Beware of Dog," and "Authorized Personnel Only," and through a sea of green pineapple fields. At the foot of those fields, there is a cliff.

It's a lonely spot with a harsh beauty, blasted by wind and pummeled by the sea that surges in, three hundred feet below. But a half mile offshore, a number of geological features have combined to create something even more dramatic and foreboding: a giant wave called Pe'ahi, also known by its nickname, Jaws.

For about 360 days a year Jaws lies dormant, indistinguishable from the seas around it, waiting for the right conditions to come along and set it off, like a match to a gas leak. This is one of the first places the North Pacific storms hit, menacing splotches on the radar maps spiraling down from the Aleutian Islands. When a powerful enough storm arrives, all of its energy - which has traveled through water hundreds and even thousands of feet deep - trips on Jaws' fan-shaped reef. Deep channels on either side of the reef, carved by millennia of lava flow and freshwater drainage from the Pe'ahi Valley, above, funnel the energy inward and upward. (Imagine a runaway Mack truck suddenly hitting a ramp.)

The result is sixty-, seventy-, and eighty-foot waves, so beautifully shaped and symmetrical that they might have come from Poseidon's modeling agency. The white feathering as the wave begins to crest, the spectrum of blues from rich lapis to pale turquoise, the roundness of its barrel, the billowing fields of whitewater when it comes crashing down - when you envision the cartoon-perfect giant wave, the gorgeous snarling beast of Japanese landscape paintings, what you are seeing is Jaws.

As far back as the 1960s surfers had been coming to the cliff and eyeballing Jaws. "This is a super freak wave," the famed surfer Gerry Lopez said after one reconnaissance. "Looking at it makes you physically nauseous." Lopez, a 1970s pioneer on some of the Pacific's most fearsome waves, had originally nicknamed Jaws "Atom Blaster," because "it broke like an atomic bomb." That didn't stop people from wanting to ride it, though, and when tow surfing came along, they got their chance. They learned a few things right away. Most important: like all sets of jaws, this one had a tendency to snap shut, swallowing anything unfortunate enough to be inside it. And its teeth... well, they were more like fangs.
On a gusty afternoon in late October 2007, I sat in the passenger seat of a battered golf cart as it drove past the Pe'ahi cliff and wound down a steep, stony path toward the ocean. At the wheel was Teddy Casil, a rugged Hawaiian with a bouncer's physique and a don't-mess-with-me vibe. With his left hand, Casil alternated steering the vehicle with drinking a can of Coors Light; in his right hand he held a large machete. Every so often we stopped so he could hack off some jungly tentacle that was blocking our way. At times the path became so precipitous and twisty and thick with red mud that I thought we might just cartwheel to the bottom. But this was no ordinary golf cart. It had been jacked up, fitted with knobby tires, Recaro seats, all-wheel drive, and safety netting. It was ready for anything, its owner made sure of that. And he was right behind us, driving an enormous tractor: Laird Hamilton.

Hamilton, as mentioned, is not the typical small and wiry surfer dude you see on the World Cup Tour, doing flippy tricks in ten-foot waves. He's a large guy, and visibly powerful, a huge advantage in the biggest seas. His back muscles, shaped by decades of paddling, are so defined that they almost seem to push him forward. It is when sitting atop a piece of earth-moving machinery or balanced at the peak of a seventy-foot wave that Hamilton most comfortably fits into scale. Not every successful life seems inevitable, but in this case it's as though fate set out to tailor-make a human being for one specific pursuit. Hamilton's size, his abilities, his mind-set, his upbringing - everything pointed him into the ocean's heaviest conditions.

California-born but Hawaii-bred, he was raised with the planet's most famous surf break - Pipeline - only steps from the house on Oahu's north shore where he lived with his mother, JoAnn, and his stepfather, Bill Hamilton, a star big-wave rider in the 1960s and 1970s. (The story of how three-year-old Laird selected his own father is etched into surf-world lore. His biological father having left the scene shortly after his birth, Laird encountered Bill Hamilton, then a seventeen-year-old fledgling pro surfer, on the beach. The two connected instantly and body-surfed together for an hour or two, the child clinging to the teenager's back. Afterward Laird told him, "I think you need to come home and meet my mother." Bill Hamilton and JoAnn Zerfas married eleven months later.) And if all that didn't make for a perfect enough petri dish, Gerry Lopez lived next door, acting as a mentor. When Hamilton was six, his father decided to escape Oahu's growing crowds by moving the family to the wilds of Kauai, at the northern tip of the Hawaiian Islands, where the Pacific storms hit first and hardest.

Back then Kauai was a kind of Hawaiian Hades all but closed to outsiders, and Wainiha, the north shore encampment where the Hamiltons lived, was a rugged, isolated backwater where things like electricity and indoor plumbing were scarce. Though it's hard to imagine Laird Hamilton being picked on, his non-native status made school one perpetual fight. Surfing was a way to channel the frustration; by age thirteen Hamilton had become a respected presence at Kauai's most demanding breaks. Between the fierce Na Pali Coast in his front yard and the serpentine rivers that streamed off Mount Wai'ale'ale (a 5,200-foot volcanic peak that has the distinction of being the wettest spot on earth) in his backyard, Hamilton said, “I just happened to grow up in the most aggressive water in the world."

When I decided to head out in search of giant waves, he was the obvious person to call. Our paths had crossed before. During the 1990s I'd worked at a magazine that covered extreme sports, and Hamilton's exploits qualified, to say the least. Over the years I followed his career as it progressed from "Hey, what's he doing?" to "Oh my God, look at what he's doing!" to a level even beyond that, where the most common response was speechless gaping. By the time Hamilton turned thirty he was already hailed as a legend; now, at forty-three, he was still considered the greatest big-wave rider, despite a talented pack of would-be successors trying their best to dethrone him.

Not only did he ride waves that others considered unrideable, at Jaws and elsewhere, but he did it with a trademark intensity, positioning himself deeper in the pit, carving bottom turns that would cause a lesser set of legs to crumple, rocketing up and down the face, and playing chicken with the lip as it hovered overhead, poised to release a hundred thousand tons of angry water. He seemed to know exactly what the ocean was going to do, and to stay a split second ahead of it.

That intimacy, that rare knowledge of what it feels like to be part of an eighty-foot wave - to be in it, to be on it - was something I wanted to understand. So I had come to Maui. This was where tow surfing had been brought to the world's attention, and Jaws was still the gold standard for giant waves. It was also the reason why Hamilton lived on this island, at the top of these pineapple fields: Jaws was literally in his backyard. During a big swell he can feel the wave before he sees it. The ground shakes for miles.

When I'd arrived at his house earlier in the day, Hamilton and Casil were digging a ditch. If the waves were absent Hamilton channeled his energy into working on his land, to tending it and building on it and clearing brush off it. In particular, he loved to move large hunks of it around so that a steeplechase racetrack for golf carts could be created, or a 700,000-gallon pond with a twenty-foot cliff jump carved out of a hillside. Casil, a friend who also helped manage the property, was usually there working with him.

As I stood watching the ditch grow deeper, I noticed a line of steely clouds massing on the skyline. This was typical Maui weather, sudden squalls followed by soft rainbows. In the ocean there were smallish waves coming from the west. But it was almost November, when the Pacific storm swells would begin to arrive, swapping average conditions for threatening ones. Likely Hamilton had that calendar on his mind when he stepped back from his digging and turned to me. His hair, skin, shorts, and boots were all covered in a brownish-red dust. "You wanted to swim out to Pe'ahi?" he said. "Today's a good day."

I did want to do this. After hearing haunting descriptions of the seafloor topography that creat...