Desperation Reef

So when the Rotary gave out scholarship money for high school grads based on need and not grades, I was proud to be one of the presenters.

I didn’t mind being looked at as an object of beauty. There were some touches and hugs and kisses that were not quite appropriate. Nothing flagrant. I warned them off, though. After years of bikinis and boys, I understood how hard it was for some of them not to stare at my body. I saw to it that my swimsuit for the competition, and later, my formal gowns and casual wear, were modest. I really was the girl next door.

Ronna and I drifted apart when I started college. She took up with the drug crowd and left town — allegedly for Hollywood — without saying goodbye.

Three years later she was back in my life.

But, to be honest here — as a journalist and a person — the world I cared about wasn’t mine: it was John’s, and I spent every minute I could with him.

When I said I’d run away with him at eighteen, it wasn’t literal but it was true. But after Cortes Bank, I was all in for him, all about being with him, surfing with him, even though I was physically anchored to Laguna, and UCI. Everything I did that wasn’t with or about John Stonebreaker was an interruption.

I was on his team, like I had asked John to be, in his garage when I was a girl.

Just another young girl in love.

I gave up my virginity to him later that year, at about the time my Miss Laguna days were to end. I felt duty-bound to complete my reign as a virgin, but happily failed.

Unsurprisingly John was some years ahead of me on that count. With how many women and how many times, I didn’t ask and didn’t want to know. He never referred to a relationship, never said a name, never alluded to anything he’d done along those lines. Never got a call that I overheard, or an email or a card I wasn’t supposed to see. He turned a lot of heads, though — both genders. John was recognizably, preposterously handsome, of course, and a growing celebrity in the world of surfing. Everywhere we went — from California, then around the world back to California — John was noticed. And usually recognized. He did a magazine spread for Ralph Lauren in Esquire. People stared at him, many of them sensing celebrity, though they couldn’t place him.

I was his loyal girl, his sidekick, and, at nineteen years old, his wife. Early, for sure, but it felt natural and right. We were married at Waimea Falls Park, then caravanned with family and friends up to Sunset Beach, which had caught a small December swell breaking six to eight feet, good shoulders, very shapely. Honeymooned all of December on the North Shore and hustled home for the winter quarter at UCI. That was where I rode my first waves over twelve feet, beautifully shaped freight trains of speed and power, the sheer weight of them enough to break boards and bones.

Married and happy. Fueled by waves and love.

Sex from the sublime to the comedic, the urgent to the languid. Frantic seconds. Long hours.

And waves. Weekends we surfed California: Blacks, Cortes Bank on the rare days it would break for us, Salt Creek, the Santa Ana River Jetty, Huntington Beach, Malibu, Rincon, Hollister Ranch, and Mavericks. Mavericks, of course. Anytime a winter swell lined up and we had a couple of days off from my classes and John’s part-time UPS work at the Anaheim hub, we’d drive all Friday night to Half Moon Bay in the Westphalia and find ourselves, teeth chattering, in the dawn darkness of the scariest break in the world. A writer once described Mavericks as “a portal to the dark side.” And on mornings like that, with fifty-foot crushers lining up to hit the reef, so much fog you could hardly see them until they were towering over you, it seemed to be the dark side indeed.

John towed me into an eighteen-foot Mavericks wave on my twentieth birthday. It was a lumbering, uneven thing but the face was smooth and after my drop, it sectioned beautifully. I rode it well but wiped out badly. Managed to get back onto my board and ride out of the impact zone on my belly, until the whitewater pushed me into a soft valley that seemed unconcerned by the fury around it. I breathed very hard for a very long time. Then paddled back into the lineup and took the tow rope from John again.

That wave didn’t change my life; it gave me focus. It gave me what I wanted. Not John and Mike Stonebreaker’s God, but something bigger: freedom. Freedom through velocity. Skidding along behind the jet ski before dropping into that wave, I looked out at the distant hills and the Pillar Point Marina filled with matchstick boats, and the houses of Princeton-by-the-Sea, small as Monopoly pieces. After my first Mavericks tow-in, I didn’t want just waves anymore; I wanted big waves. To give me freedom, speed, and release. To let me ride them, these gigantic stallions stampeding in from the depths from miles away.

I wasn’t John anymore.

As I had wanted to be, from the first time I saw him surfing Rockpile when I was twelve.