http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Morris-t.html?pagewanted=all
Surf’s Up
By HOLLY MORRIS
Published: September 17, 2010
What’s as tall as a small office building, snaps large vessels in half and inspires a small tribe of brethren to strap on fiberglass and launch themselves into an unholy maelstrom for a glimpse of transcendence? Giant waves. The bigger the better — or way worse — depending on who’s talking.
Andrew Ingram, The Cape Times
This Singaporean ship, pounded off South Africa, later sank.
THE WAVE
In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
By Susan Casey
Illustrated. 326 pp. Doubleday. $27.95
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Excerpt: ‘The Wave’(randomhouse.com)
Susan Casey, the editor in chief of O: The Oprah Magazine and the author of “The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks,”examines big waves from every angle, and goes in deep with those who know the phenomenon most intimately: mariners, wave scientists and extreme surfers.
Casey makes a convincing, entertaining case (nifty cliffhangers and all) that there is a heretofore little-known monster in our midst. Until very recently giant waves lived only as lore. There was the story of the Tlingit Indian woman who returned from berry picking to find her entire village disappeared. The polar explorer Ernest Shackletononce reported narrowly surviving “a mighty upheaval of the ocean,” the biggest wave he’d seen in 26 years of seafaring. But witnesses of a 100-foot wave at close range rarely lived to tell, and experts dismissed stories about these waves because they seemingly violated basic principles of ocean physics. It was only 10 years ago, when the British research ship Discovery was caught in a punishing North Sea storm, that legend became scientific fact. The battered ship straggled into dock, and grateful scientists unlashed themselves from their bunks, tiptoeing around bashed furniture and shattered glass. They discovered that despite the Armageddon-like conditions, the ship’s research collecting devices had kept on working. And indeed they recorded seas 60 feet high, with some wave faces spiking at 90 feet and higher. The evidence was in, and soon became overwhelming as satellites began confirming that rogue waves thrust out of the world’s oceans with some frequency.
They do exist; now the question is, how? Strangely, in many ways we have a better understanding of subatomic specks than we do of these behemoths. In the most general sense, waves are the “original primordial force,” Casey says. “Anywhere there’s energy in motion there are waves, from the farthest corners of the universe down to cells in your eyeball,” and describing wave behavior has long been a staple of math and physics. But ocean waves, generated in such a vast and chaotic environment and subject to numerous variables, have been notoriously difficult to model or predict.
For sure, rogue waves are wily creatures that play with laws of physics, logic and gravity, and as it turns out, so are the people who are dedicated to them, including surfers. Casey blends her reporting on seafarers and scientists with a portrait of tow-surfing, and in particular, its best-known purveyor, Laird Hamilton. Using Jet Skis and water-skiing tow ropes and working in pairs, one person tows another into position at 30 miles per hour; the surfer lets go and rockets onto the face of waves far too big and too fast to catch by the conventional paddling. The technique allows surfers to ride enormous waves, sometimes miles offshore.
If all goes right, the rider gets “inside the barrel, a place that surfers regard with reverence,” where “light and water and motion add up to something transcendent.” But it often goes wrong, resulting in horrific crashes. Tow surfers endure broken necks, cracked femurs and punctured lungs, though, to date, surprisingly few fatalities. As for stitches, Hamilton “stopped counting at 1,000.”
Casey’s connection with Hamilton is her reliable long suit in “The Wave,” and she clocks significant time with him near his home in Hawaii and jetting around the world on the “global scavenger hunt” of surfers in search of huge waves. At the airport in Tahiti, on the eve of a big break, she describes this pack as “a sea of tans, tattoos, testosterone and nerves stretched tight as wire.” Hamilton’s presence rattled the other surfers; if he was there “they all knew, the waves would be serious.” Depending on one’s perspective, Hamilton is either a surf prophet or a madman.
The other wave elites are the brainy scientists who are working to create better climate models and forecasts. Their presence at the 10th International Workshop and Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting and Coastal Hazard Symposium in Hawaii temporarily tripled “the North Shore’s per capita I.Q.,” Casey notes.
She pushes the scientists on the big question: Will global warming lead to stormier oceans and bigger waves? With varying degrees of hesitation — because the data is not in to confirm a long-term trend, not because they are global- warming deniers — the answer is a resounding yes. (Though, as one attendee pointed out, “you’re not going to be able to prove it until it’s too late.”)
Scientists do know, however, that average wave heights rose by more than 25 percent between the 1960s and the 1990s, and insurance records document a 10 percent surge in maritime disasters in recent years. From 1990 to 1998 alone 126 vessels were lost, along with more than 600 lives.
The future most likely portends meaner hurricanes, freakier waves, higher ocean levels and dramatic geologic events that will create devastating tsunamis. Given that 60 percent of the world’s population lives within 30 miles of a coastline, wave science is suddenly vitalscience, and the experts are keenly aware that there are levees, oil rigs, shorelines, ships and millions of lives at stake.
The relationship Casey builds between investigating big waves nautically and scientifically — and riding them — feels at times like a marriage of convenience: not entirely sympatico, but by and large the partners hold their own. Casey is fluent in “gnarly” and proficient in “wonk,” and she writes lucidly so the rest of us can come along for the ride. Her wonderfully vivid, kinetic narrative only occasionally groans under the weight of too many Wild Surf stories, and she offers a prescient vision of watery perils — and sometimes, bittersweet triumphs.
In December 2007, at a break called “Egypt” in Maui, Hamilton and Brett Lickle accomplished tow-surfing’s equivalent of climbing Everest when they managed to ride a freakish swell of 100-foot waves. They survived that terrifying day, but only barely. After successfully riding one of these powerhouses, Lickle had his leg sashimied top to bottom, turning the thundering whitewater red. As he bled and neared death, a Herculean rescue effort by Hamilton saved him. The price of the day was high. An emotional retelling by Hamilton reveals he may have glimpsed something he fears more than death: “being pounded so bad that psychologically you don’t recover.” Lickle has never tow-surfed giant waves again.
Amid the images of demolition, Casey hangs on to the magic and beauty of waves, “always out there, racing toward an uncharted finish line, as uncountable as the stars in the sky, as present as your next breath.” Humanity most definitely needs to face the waves, to find a way to grapple with their ferocity and potential. Will we rise to the challenge, or get pummeled? For now, big-wave surfing legend Greg Noll chooses to huff the force: “That rush! . . . When you blow down the side of a wave and the thing’s growling at you and snorting and all that power and fury and you don’t know whether you’re gonna be alive 10 seconds from now or not, it’s as heavy an experience as sex!”
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