Everything Becomes Something Else 

Being on the ground—and especially in the water—anywhere from V-Land to Waimea will put you in direct contact with legendary geography and characters. The author recently walked this fabled stretch of coast to revisit some of its mythology—and found his own history waiting for him.  

My first winter on the north shore was in 1982. My brother and I stayed in a little beachfront cottage at Log Cabins. It was a classic surf flophouse, festering with boards, leashes, moldy towels, empty beer cans, half-eatean tins of Spam, towers of dirty dishes, and mosquitoes—lots of mosquitoes. At least seven unemployed surfers in their mid-twenties lived there.

They’d come from the mainland to ride big waves. There was talk of a major swell coming in a few days. In the interim they surfed the wonky peaks at Log Cabins, but mostly they partied. I have an indelible memory of our housemates gathered around the kitchen table playing poker, a bottle of Jack Daniels tipping into coffee cups, Blue Öyster Cult’s “Fire of Unknown Origin” blaring on repeat, a lot of shouting and pounding on the table. 

When the swell came up it rumbled through the house, the parking lot at Kammies, the produce aisle at Foodland. Everyone on the North Shore felt it. For big-wave surfers, it was an opportunity to distinguish yourself. You could rise to heroic status in a single session, on a single wave. I made friends and got my ass handed to me. 

For about 35 years now I’ve been making regular trips to the North Shore—first as a wide-eyed aspirant, then as a traveling pro, and today as a writer. It’s become a sort of lifelong anthropological study for me. I’m fascinated by the way it changes, and by the way we surfers change. My relationship with the North Shore is like a chalkboard on which the ghosts of winters past are never fully erased.

Those were the memories I hoped to explore as I set off to walk the beach from Velzyland to Log Cabins, a stretch that covers about half of the Seven Mile Miracle, and one that resonates vividly with me. It was a bright December morning. The swell was a couple feet overhead. The trade winds were warm and sweet smelling. I parked my rental car along Kam Highway and made my way down the access trail to V-Land, a tunnel of lush foliage with the ocean shimmering at the end of it. 

It was the sort of visual that might kick off a Velzyland sequence in a surf film. As I came on to the beach I remembered Many Classic Moments from 1978, the scene with Buttons: he tools around on a chopper bicycle, eats a pre-surf meal of sand and driftwood, and paddles out and does all sorts of blink-and-you-miss-it magic at Velzyland, including 360s and switch-stance cutbacks. I never knew a human could be so at home in the water.

I did not find Buttons at Velzyland (he died in 2013), but I did find Mason Ho. V-Land is a shallow, hollow, sometimes doubling-up wave, but it’s also playful. Mason accentuated that playfulness with pyrotechnics very much in the Buttons line. On the beach I ran into my late 1980s pro tour colleague John Shimooka, whom I hadn’t seen in about a decade. He sauntered up, shoved the tail of his board in the sand, gestured at what used to be a row of rickety beachfront cottages and was now a leafy walking trail, and said, “Sunny [Garcia] and I used to come here and stay all day. We got up to all kinds of shit. You have no idea.”

We laughed in our old-war-buddies way. I remembered a heat that Shimooka and I had together in the 1989 Pipe Masters. It was one of those swiftly rising west swells—4 feet in the morning, 8 to 10 by noon. To paddle out you started way to the west, toward Off The Wall, and the current—moving toward Sunset—was like a raging river. The barrels were Mack Truck size. The lips threw wider than the waves were tall. Watching from the channel, I remember thinking they looked like striking snakes, their wide-open mouths seemingly double jointed. I did not make it through that heat.

On the outer reef, a kitesurfer glided across a looming swell. On the inside, a boogieboarder airdropped and disappeared into a kamikaze barrel. Shimooka paddled out and I moseyed on, the sand deep and full of sun-bleached chunks of coral. To my left was the million-dollar gated community known as Sunset Beach Colony. “Amazing ocean views and the ability to live among the stars,” goes the real estate tagline. It wasn’t always like this. In the 80s the area was known as the North Shore Ghetto—low-income housing with big trucks and fierce pit bulls in the front yards. Next to it was a run-down apartment building and a parking lot. When you parked there to surf V-Land you kept your voice down and didn’t leave anything valuable in the car. For us haoles, it was very clear that we were outsiders.

At Freddyland, the next reef over from V-Land, a goofyfoot with a wide stance zoomed left and bunny-hopped a rampish right. Way, way, way out behind him sat the outer reef known as Phantoms, though the swell was too small for it to show. Popcorn clouds scattered the cerulean sky. The wind shifted and blew stronger. In the empty lot that opens onto Backyards I found windsurfer Craig Yester rigging up his sail.

“Why windsurfing and not kitesurfing?” I asked him.

“We did kitesurfing for a while,” he said, a sinewy fifty-something man who radiates good health. “Now we’re back to the windsurfing.”

I thought of the pickle makers in Williamsburg, the blacksmiths in Oakland, Shane Dorian paddling, not towing, into giant Jaws. “The future is primitive,” as my bodysurfing pal Rodrigo likes to say.

I know this empty lot well. I used to cross it on my way out to Backyards. I remember it as being sunny and exposed. Now it’s dense with greenery, almost a jungle. It comes with a story.

In 1991, Robby Naish, Curt Carlsmith, and a third windsurfer were riding Phantoms and Backyards. The waves were giant. The wind was light. There was a film crew shooting from a helicopter. Carlsmith caught a big one at Outside Backyards. The lip exploded and drove the boom of his rig into his chest. The helicopter went in for the rescue. Carlsmith grabbed onto the skid, but as it was flying him to safety he lost his grip and fell about 100 feet into the water. The helicopter made a beeline to the Sunset tower and scooped up lifeguard and big-wave rider Darrick Doerner, then zapped him out to Carlsmith. 

“At that time Curt was still conscious but we were getting pounded by 20-foot waves. All of a sudden he turned really gray. I went, ‘Hey, hey, are you okay?’ That was when—the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen—he started puking pure, red blood. Every time his heart beat it was shooting out of his mouth.” 

Darrick told me this story over the phone. There was a long pause, his emotion palpable. “At that point,” he continued, “I pulled him close to me and held on to him as he bled out with each heartbeat. He was my neighbor. I said goodbye to him. He said goodbye to me.”

Darrick added something else, almost as an epilogue: “Curt was a retired attorney. He owned that property at Backyards. I found the will in his car and it said, ‘To the people and the yardbirds at Sunset Point, I donate my property.’”

I stood there a while, in the now-overgrown lot, thinking about Carlsmith and his gift. This place has long been a Backyards hangout. Behind me, where Oopuola and Makanale streets meet, a trio of towheaded boys about eight or nine took turns skating a small jump. I say “jump” instead of “ramp” because they rode off the top of it, twisting in the air.

“Nice oop,” said the alpha of the bunch, his voice high.

The next kid hit and twisted, his board flying away from him and crashing in the bushes.

“You gotta bottom turn into it,” said the alpha.

From where I stood you could throw a tennis ball and almost hit the homes of Da Hui founder Eddie Rothman, shapers Pat Rawson and Jeff Bushman, the Ho family, and many other luminaries. At the end of Oopuola stood the nondescript duplex where Dogtown uber-skater Jay Adams once lived in the mid 90s. His skate career had ended and he was fixing dings for a living. We were friends from LA. Exchanges with Jay were always memorable. One day I saw him talking Jesus and the glory of God. 

“I’m a born again Christian,” he announced. 

A few days later he was smoking a joint and swearing and carrying on in an unholy manner. 

“I thought you were born again Christian,” I said. 

“Hypo-Christian,” said Jay.

His cackle was sinister. He had a tattoo of a zipper on his bald head and “Team Pain” on his knuckles. I was always a little scared of him. We’d hang out in his backyard while he patched dings, then move into the kitchen and have a couple of beers. One night a couple led to an entire twelve-pack. 

“Let’s hit Foodland and get some more,” he said. 

We got in his car, headed toward the store. He was fidgety and manic. “Just gotta make a little stop,” he said. We parked in front of a house near Waimea Bay. Jay told me to wait and disappeared into the house. He returned 20 minutes later, fired up and sniffly. He told me that he’d seen a couple of my 70s surfing heroes in the house.

“They were fucking stoned, man!” 

By this time Jay, too, was fucking stoned. It got me thinking about life after pro surfing (or pro skating), how the ecstatic highs of the peak athletic years can later become a curse. Coming from metropolitan Los Angeles, I had many opportunities to find a second act once my tour days were over. This wasn’t necessarily the case for my colleagues from the North Shore, where surfing is everything and career opportunities are few. The sense of being left behind by life was heightened. There were all kinds of temptations. 

I continued on. The waves at Backyards were messy and uncrowded. The sand was deep and thigh burning. A couple of runners trudged past, headphones on, bare torsos shiny with sweat. The North Shore is a body culture. Six-pack abs reign supreme.

I passed the beachfront cottage once owned by photographer Aaron Chang and 1987 world champ Barton Lynch. For the next 100 yards I was back there: Chang’s travel images splashing the pages of the magazines. Barton’s surgically precise backhand hooks. Sunny Garcia proclaiming, “I’m going to kick some Top 16 ass.” Dane Kealoha and Johnny Boy ruling Backdoor. Darrick Doerner and Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo riding monster waves at Waimea. Ross Clarke-Jones pulling an all-nighter and then charging giant Waimea in the Billabong Pro. Brock Little drinking pitchers of beer and jumping off tall bridges into shallow water at night as a kind of big-wave training. There was the calculated approach, and there was this adrenaline-junkie, push-every-moment-to-the-edge MO. It was hard to tell which worked best. I spent most of my competitive years with Ivan Lendl riding on one shoulder, and Iggy Pop riding on the other.

Sunset Point is a friendly wave. It can be double overhead and middle-age men on longboards will dominate the lineup. Cumulous clouds smeared into cirrus clouds. A set of lumpy rights shimmered. A girl in a yellow wetsuit flew across a steep, blue-gray face. On the beach I passed a couple of girls doing yoga and, a few paces further along, a woman meditating. A familiar-looking guy trod past, longboard underarm. He looked like my friend from LA, Jon Theodore. By the time I made the connection he was already in the water. I pulled out my phone and checked his Instagram feed. His most recent post: Honolulu, Hawaii. It was him.

Val’s Reef is the very inside reef at Sunset. In the early 80s, I watched 1978 world champ Rabbit Bartholomew weave across a big Sunset wave, connect it to Val’s, and pull into a closeout tube right where Jon now paddled out. Rabbit surfaced, propped himself on his board, and began the long paddle back to the lineup at full speed with windmill arms and kicking feet. Rabbit, I thought, I get it.

“Sunset jacks so much,” said Jeff Hakman in the first surf film I ever saw, 1975’s Super Session. The Tarzana 4-Plex was all hoots and whistles, flying popcorn and wafts of something that smelled like a burning Christmas tree but was another kind of greenery. Sunset spans a couple football fields of reef. It calls more upon old sea captain instincts than the fast twitch/gymnastic. 

The North Shore has become a sort of lifelong anthropological study for me. My relationship with it is like a chalkboard on which the ghosts of winters past are never fully erased.

I got my first serious taste of it in the mid 80s. I’d just flown in from LA. My pro surfer pals Willy Morris and Wes Laine picked me up at the airport. Giant swells detonated on the outer reefs as we dropped down into Haleiwa and drove along the Laniakea/Jocko’s stretch. The urge to surf was overwhelming. First we had to go to a wedding—Richard and Lisa Cram’s, at the St. Michael Parish at Waimea Bay. 

Here was the mythical on every front. Richard was one of my favorite surfers, the guests were the very pros I’d read about in the Aussie mags, and the church was a landmark that showed up in aerial shots of The Bay. After congratulating the couple, whom I’d never met before, Willy and Wes drove me up the road and dragged me out to Sunset. 

The outside was a big mess of steel-gray water. The shorebreak was cruel, the riptide like the log jam ride at an amusement park. It deposited us amid huge swells that steepened but never broke. There was calm for a few minutes. Then a set of glassy widow’s peaks, three or four times overhead, crashed down with a violent thud and peeled across the reef. 

The lineup was inscrutable. One set would break deep. The next would swing wide and thunder across the inside section. Just when I thought I was sitting way too far out, the horizon lifted, and out another 100 yards from me a guy on a red gun bulleted down a silvery face. Willy and Wes were long gone. The shore looked like it was a mile away. When a closeout set mowed through the lineup I bailed my board and swam for the bottom. Under black clouds of wash I kept my eyes open, just like the “Tips” column in Surfer said you were supposed to. I groped—then groped some more—before finally breaking the surface and getting that first glorious gulp of air.

 “From my first visit to the North Shore in ’78,” Tom Carroll told me recently via phone, “I just loved Sunset. Back then there was no such thing as all these other giant waves, so Sunset was kind of the Jaws, and Waimea was the Nazaré. I miss Sunset being a part of the World Championship Tour because it’s an incredible test—of strength, of our ability to judge waves, of equipment.”

I remember Ian Cairns saying how he’d start off each North Shore winter by purposely heaving himself over the falls at big Sunset. And I remember reading an interview with Rabbit where he talks about learning to enjoy the poundings. I copped many totally unenjoyable poundings at Sunset, despite my lineup marker: a white cottage about a half-dozen houses up from the parking lot that Bruce Raymond put me on to.

I’m pretty sure that house is still there, though it was hard to distinguish amid the overgrown foliage and smothering Airbnb homes along that stretch. I wondered if the original owners had any idea how useful it was to us surfers. But then maybe only a few of us used it. “Keep it a secret,” Bruce had told me, and I did.

My first brush with Sunset came in the summer of 1980, when my dad brought my brother and I over for a Town visit. We knew the North Shore was typically flat at that time of year, but one morning we decided to drive out there anyway. On my lap I had an issue of Surfer with an ad for Bradshaw Surfboards that included an address. We followed it to what we thought was the Bradshaw surf shop, but was actually his home. 

We knocked and Ken opened the door, reducing us to stutters. He invited us in, showed us some boards, and introduced us to one of his team riders, Jason Magers. “Fourteen and already charging big waves,” said Ken. We walked over to the Sunset parking lot to check the surf. A red convertible pulled up alongside us—a tourist-looking guy at the wheel, his girlfriend riding shotgun, an airport lei hanging from the rearview mirror. 

Here was the mythical on every front. They drove me up the road  and dragged me out to Sunset. The shorebreak was cruel. The outside was a mess of steel-gray water.

“Hey, you guys know how to get to Sunset Beach?” he shouted.

Jason walked up to the car and pointed towards Kahuku. “About five miles up the road,” he said. “Can’t miss it.”

Across the channel from Sunset, Kammieland was sloppy and torn up from the wind. The surf spot is named after Kammies Market, a North Shore institution from 1961 until it shuttered in 2006. You never knew who you might run into in the parking lot. There were the obvious stars—Dane, Lopez, the Ho brothers—but there was also an underground crew who were recognizable less by face than by name: Jack Reeves the glasser, Tom Nellis the shaper, Adam-12 the big-wave charger, et al. 

I remember watching Gary “Kong” Elkerton here in 1982. At that time he was the hottest upstart on the scene, a big, feral kid from Australia’s Sunshine Coast who’d recently won the Pro Junior. A Quiksilver ad following the event showed him gouging a backside hack so fierce and on-rail that he was practically laying in the water. The wave was only head-high but his spray was like a chunk of Niagara Falls. “The Beast is Unleashed,” went the tagline. At Kammieland he did hacks of that very sort, but the waves were triple overhead. I’d never seen such big-wave shredding. I never even knew it was possible.

That was the year the IPS became the ASP. My brother and I, along with a few NSSA pals, managed to scam our way into the board meeting after-party at the Kuilima Hotel bar. We kneeled on stools and watched the dance floor, awestruck. There was Cheyne. There was Tom Carroll. There was Joey Buran, the “California Kid,” boogieing with a girl whose legs went up to his neck. He sang along to Joe Jackson’s “I’m the Man,” his thumbs pointed inward on the “I’m the man” part. 

The next morning we hitched a ride from Log Cabins to the Kuilima condos. Our friend knew where Rabbit, Kong, and Chappy Jennings were staying. We were determined to say hello. We knocked on the front door but no one answered. We tried the handle—open. Stepping into the bright room, the smell of vomit immediately whacked us in our faces. 

A village of empty beer bottles cluttered the coffee table. A quiver of Allan Byrne guns stood in the corner, their deep six-channels giving them a Batmobile-ish look. Boardshorts and towels were scattered everywhere. On the kitchen counter a bong sat next to a mess of bloodied bandages. The sliding glass door that opened onto the golf course was ajar. Parked haphazardly next to it was a golf cart, with muddy tracks leading back to a series of donut gouges on the grass. There were many little moments that stoked my pro surfing dreams. That was one of them.

I passed the row of beachfront homes at Monster Mush, a lesser-known break. Up ahead was Peter Cole’s house, where I’d interviewed him a few years back. His living room had a warm, old-soul vibe and so did Peter. One of the OG North Shore pioneers, he’d bought the home in 1962 and devoted his surfing life to Sunset. 

“I’ve always liked a shifting peak and dynamic ocean,” he told me over a cup of hot tea. “On a north-northwest swell, Sunset’s one of the best waves in the world. You get a horseshoe, a curl, a wall, a place to turn, a steep takeoff.”

I could almost see a current of trimline pulsing through him as he leaned forward on his sofa and recounted rides. He told me that he never surfed with a leash. “I contend that the leash ruined surfing,” he said. 

The “good old days” is one of the great curses of a long surfing life. No matter what era, it seems to have been better in the previous one. You Should Have Been Here An Hour Ago goes the title of Phil Edwards’ book. I remember meeting Miki Dora at a Quiksilver dinner in France in the late 90s. When I told him that I grew up surfing Malibu, he looked off to some faraway place. “It was the garden of Eden when I first got there,” he said, and proceeded to wax nostalgic about deer on the beach and fish in the creek. 

Rocky Point was the next spot on my walk. It has long been a photo studio of sorts. The lefts break into a rip that creates highly puntable sections. The rights zipper in carve-inviting delirium. The action happens close to shore. The tripods, which are always there, were scattered across the sun-scorched lava rocks as I ambled past. I could hear the thrum of motor drives as a long-haired kid on an old single-fin soul arched off the bottom in a manner that was less soulful than self-congratulatory, the retro rider’s version of a claim.

In the nook where you paddle out to Gas Chambers, a young father laid his toddler on a boogie board and pushed him down the slope. The toddler cackled. Gas Chambers was messy. So was Pupukea. These are less popular breaks, yet they’re positioned prominently. Houses line the narrow curve of beach. There’s the sense of hanging out in someone’s backyard here. 

The first time I visited the North Shore, I was surprised by how tightly sandwiched together all those mythical breaks were. When the current’s strong, which it often is, you can ride three or four different spots without even realizing it. I was also surprised by the way you just rise to the occasion. For most of us newcomers, we were riding the biggest waves of our lives. Yet in the collective testosterone whirl—in the name of coolness—you didn’t talk about it. You kept your elation to yourself.

Nearing Ehukai Beach Park, I noticed that the ocean had seemingly taken a bite out of many of the backyards. I asked Darrick about this when I caught up with him. “It’s the tiny summertime waves,” he said. “These little ripples hit the beach, starting from Kammieland. It undermines the berm and it starts caving in.” He described a series of tropical depressions that stripped away 100-year-old native trees. “Houses are going to go into the ocean in the next ten years,” he added. “It’s all about global warming.”

At Ehukai, head-high lefts rifled machine-like across a shallow sandbar. A band of aerialists pumped, pumped, pumped and threw big rotations. The beach was packed with tourists who’d likely shown up to watch the Pipe Masters, but it had been called off for the day. Girls in skimpy bikinis and guys in Brazilian sungas glistened on the sand. Samba music blared from the backyard of a beachfront house, where a coterie of shirtless men sipped beers and poked at a BBQ. Three large Brazilian flags were draped from the roof. 

A friend of mine who’s lived on the North Shore for over 40 years told me his nickname for this stretch is “Little Rio.” There’s lots of jiu-jitsu on the North Shore. A recent scrap between Hawaiian Tanner Hendrickson and Brazilian Michael Rodrigues got major play on social media. A few days before my walk, at the Coffee Gallery in Haleiwa, I got into a long conversation about it with the photographer Steve Sherman. He said something that struck a chord: “The North Shore is the Wild West, and to this day frontier justice still exists. There’s probably no other 10 miles in America where frontier justice can still reign, where there’s no lawyers lining up.”

Next door to the Brazilian pad sat Kelly Slater’s spacious home. Next to that I passed the modest cottage where the Florence brothers grew up and, before them, Jamie O’Brien. The backyard was grassy, with a tree house to better check the surf. At the base of a tall palm tree that bends beachward there was a big wooden sign: “No sit. Falling coconuts.”

I met Jamie in the early 90s. He tore apart Ehukai slop on a board that looked about four-feet long, then would trot straight up to his backyard trampoline and practice his flips. A decade or so later I met the Florence brothers. In that very same backyard, hair still wet from the surf, they practiced kickflips on their skateboards, often with a sandwich in hand. 

That’s pretty much the drill for the kids here: building sandcastles blurs into frolicking in the shorebreak blurs into heaving over the ledge at Pipe, all with a sense of play that harkens back to the ancients. As I passed the house I was reminded of Eyes to the Sea, a film by Todd Messick, shot in the winter of 2000. In a scene set to “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac, a bunch of North Shore kids slither down a Slip ’N Slide that drops from the houses to the water. There goes cherubic 9-year-old John John. There goes (then) six-time world champion Kelly Slater. There goes John John laying on Kelly’s back—crawling to his feet, standing up, surfing on Kelly’s back.  

He said something that struck a chord: “The North Shore is the Wild West. There’s probably no other 10 miles in America where frontier justice can still reign.”

I walked up to the Ehukai Beach Park to use the restroom. In the parking lot I found 1968 Duke winner Jock Sutherland sliding a coat hanger down the driver’s side window of his pickup, his son Gavin on the shotgun side guiding his father to the door handle. The park buzzed with surfers, tourists, and event security. In the late 80s, the Pipe Masters operations center was a modest scaffold and a couple portable trailers where ASP staff tallied heat sheets by hand. Today, it’s a mini village complete with a mural of a giant Pipe tube and one of those sculpted, faux waves with a board for tourists to pose on. They were lining up to get the shot.

I sat for a while alongside the lifeguard tower that looks out to Pipeline and wondered what that job might be like. I spoke with Mark Cunningham, who lifeguarded there for nearly 20 years. “I got to live and work at Disneyland,” he told me. “I got to work alongside Roger Erickson, Terry Ahui, and Darrick Doerner, and former world champion Jimmy Blears. And the Aikau brothers were down at The Bay for a while. And Tiger Espere was a city and county lifeguard. I rolled into the tower shortly after Butch Van Artsdalen left us. I was like, ‘Holy fuck, I’m sitting where Mr. Pipeline sat, and now I’ve got his job.’ It was neat to be a part of that chain of surf and lifeguard history. 

“Everyone thinks of the North Shore as surf, surf, surf, but there’s a whole wonderful community that sends their kids across the street to Sunset Beach Elementary School, and there are births and deaths and marriages and divorces.” 

He nodded toward Rocky Point. “When I first started working here in ’76 there was Fred Van Dyke on his deck overlooking Pupukea, and next door to him was Flippy Hoffman drinking his coffee. And you’d jog up to Sunset and there was Peter Cole oceanfront at Rocky Point, and you’d go down to Pipeline and there was Warren Harlow. All these legendary surfers from the 50s and the 60s who’d bailed on California. And there was no sponsor supporting them. It was just the absolute passion for the beauty and the power of the North Shore. They said, ‘I’m planting my flag right here, and I’m raising my family here.’”

I continued on, wading through the tourists. Their eyes were aimed at Pipeline, but the action was pretty slim. To my left was the Johnson house, where the late Jeff and his surviving wife Patti raised their sons Trent, Pete, and Jack. In 1992 I watched a handsome kid bolt from this backyard, slip on a jersey, and paddle out to his Pipe Masters heat. He tore it up. I don’t remember how he finished in the event, but he was a Pipe charger of the highest order. Then he face planted on the reef, went off to college at UCSB, and quickly ascended as Jack Johnson, the musician. 

A couple of houses down from the Johnson’s is the former Gerry Lopez house, now the Volcom house. Growing up in LA, where coastal real estate is insanely expensive, I always thought it terribly unjust that 99 percent of the Angelenos who lived on the beach never partook in the great resource that is the surf. When I heard that Lopez had owned that house on the North Shore—spitting distance from the Pipeline barrel—I liked the world a tiny bit more.

Next to the Lopez/Volcom house sat the Pipe access lane, next to that another Volcom house, then the Quiksilver house, then the Red Bull house, then, I believe, the Rip Curl house. Some of these team houses have existed for decades. Some have recently shuffled around. They all bustle with the building blocks of the North Shore surf dream. They all look out to Pipeline/Backdoor, which, as I stood at the shoreline, served up a slightly overhead right. Filipe Toledo speed-lined across it and air reversed in the closeout with a mien of boredom. 

In a few days the swell would jump up for the Pipe Masters World Title showdown, and Gabriel Medina would deliver a can’t-put-a-foot-wrong performance. But I was not yet there. I was remembering Pipe Masters past: Michael Ho’s backhand barrels with a cast on his right wrist in ’82, Tom Carroll’s “Snap Heard Around The World” in ’91, the legendary Slater/Machado high five in ’95, the ridiculously deep A.I. barrels throughout the 2000s. I was remembering another Pipe Masters lay day back in the 80s when I looked out to Third Reef and saw, dreamlike, Herbie Fletcher towing Martin Potter into a massive wall, long before tow-surfing was a thing.

And then I ran into Herbie in front of the RVCA house at Off The Wall. He was shooting photos. I asked him what this stretch used to be like. 

“In ’67 I lived in the house where John John lives now,” he told me. “We’d look up the beach here and see perfect rights. We got to surf here with no one out—no footsteps on the beach—until about ’69. We didn’t like photographers around. We tried to keep it a secret.” 

A wave peeled across OTW and Herbie snapped a sequence. He stepped away from his tripod and continued. “The winter of ’67/’68—that’s when tube riding really started here at Backdoor. We’d shape boards between sessions, glass ’em at night, and get ’em out there the next day. You could make a board for, like, 20 bucks. Everybody hung out at Kammies Market. That’s where the post office was. We’d check our mail there, hang out, and talk in the parking lot. Then we’d go surfing. There wasn’t much else going on. No businesses, no nothing. I got lucky and found a job cleaning the mud out of Comsat Road. Two days work kept me going for two weeks. Not much to eat. Lots of coconuts, oatmeal, papaya, pineapple, peanut butter.”

I continued on toward Rockpile, another lesser-known spot that can serve up big, meaty lefts. The sky was a heartbreaking shade of blue. The sun was hot on my back. Passing the glorified shorepound known as Insanities, I watched a tourist go over the falls on an inflatable pool toy.

The surf world that I came to in the 70s oozed a countercultural, slightly dangerous vibe. Great characters and original minds abounded. As surfing grew, it adopted mainstream tropes—the Surfer Poll felt like the Oscars, the surf movie premiere followed the Hollywood red carpet/VIP model, the big surf companies announced the acquisition of a new “athlete” in a stodgy press release that could have come from Goldman Sachs or Walmart.  I’ve always felt dissapointed by this. Where was that idiosyncratically surf thumbprint? Where was the spirit of those Greg Noll Surfboards ads featuring, “Da Cat’s Theory of Evolution”? 

I took a piss behind one of the rocks at Rockpiles, a picturesque outcropping of black, shiny lava. Floating in a tide pool was a limp red water balloon. If I’d had a giant slingshot, I could’ve shot that water balloon straight inland and hit a skater mid frontside air at the Banzai Rock Skatepark, opened in 2014. 

There was a time in the 70s when Tony Alva and Jay Adams made frequent trips to Hawaii, and the surf/skate cross-pollination blossomed. And then there was a time in the 90s when skating was leaning so street that it had little to offer surfing, and vice versa. Banzai Rock Park comes at the perfect epoch in history. Awash in vert, it serves as a trick incubator as Kalani David, Noah Beschen, Greyson Fletcher, the Florence brothers, and many others can testify.

The beach gets wider at Rockpile, and wider still as you approach Log Cabins, a sketchy, sometimes below-sea-level wave. John John’s new house sat hidden behind pine and palm trees. So did the place where my brother and I stayed during our first winter visit in ’82. I took a seat at the crest of the berm that dropped to the shorebreak. The sun hung low over Kaena Point. A stripe of gold twinkled across the water. The waves were sloppy and shapeless—there was no one out. When a set broke it emitted a warm, briny vapor.

I remembered an afternoon during that first visit in ’82. The surf was a solid 8 to 10 feet and the wind was howling onshore. I looked out to Log Cabins and saw a guy heave himself over the ledge of a doubling-up monster and eat shit badly. He did this repeatedly. It was like a death wish. After his surf, he came up to the house to say hello to one of the guys who lived there. I was both inspired and tormented to learn that he was younger than I was. His name was Brock Little. We became friends. 

 I stayed with Brock and his family for a few winters in a row at their rustic home up in Pupukea Heights. Palm trees poked through bedroom windows. Geckos scampered across walls. Roosters crowed in the morning. Exotic birds sang unfamiliar tunes. For me, coming from Los Angeles, it was like stepping into The Jungle Book. 

We hitchhiked, rode in the back of pickups, took off our “slippers” before entering homes. I met Jimmy who lived with his parents and grandparents across from Alligator Rock, and Ronald with the hot sister who lived near Point, a spot few non-locals knew of. There were languorous meals at the backyard picnic table—shoyu chicken, two-scoop rice, mac salad, fruit punch. There was a session at a secret outer reef where the water was silky smooth and lefts peeled off into an enchanted bay. 

On any given afternoon you might find Tom Carroll fixing dings on the lawn. Marvin Foster and Mickey Nielson might show up with a few six-packs. Soon we’d all be standing around the BBQ, talking story.

Through Brock and his brother Clark, I got a window into the North Shore that never made it into the surf mags and movies. It was tight-knit and down-home in a way that my glossy, materialistic Los Angeles was not. There was a simplicity and innocence to their lifestyle. Families seemed to extend beyond bloodlines. “Aunties” and “uncles” were everywhere.

Brock got sponsored by Gotcha and quickly rose up the ranks at Waimea Bay. I got sponsored by Quiksilver, won a few amateur titles, and joined the pro tour. From 1986 to 1992 I would stay at the Quiksilver compound, aka Ke Iki Hale, which was a couple hundred yards down the beach from Log Cabins. A trio of apartment blocks, the place bustled with great surfers. 

On any given afternoon you might find Tom Carroll fixing dings on the front lawn, or Richard Cram returning from one of his iconic frontside cutbacks at Off The Wall. Local boys Marvin Foster and Mickey Nielson might show up with a couple of six-packs. Soon we’d all be standing around a BBQ, talking story. We haoles adapted easily to the Hawaiian style. I’m pretty sure we all brought a little bit home with us, too. I know I did.

There were lots of big changes during my winters at Ke Iki Hale. When I first started staying there, Rabbit and the Bustin’ Down The Door crew were fading out, while Carroll and Curren and Kong and Sunny and Hardman were peaking. Soon after came the first tremors of the Momentum Generation. I remember sharing a Ke Iki bungalow with a 16-year-old Kelly Slater. We ate entire pints of Häagen-Dazs in a sitting, and stayed up late drawing on our boards with colored pens.

I had a make-or-break moment in the 1990 World Cup at Sunset. I’d been on tour for about five years and my results were middling. The World Cup was the final event of the season. I needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat. I’d been creatively visualizing my run to the final, my epic performance, the oversized check held overhead, the champagne shower.

I came in from an early round heat, took a seat in the competitors’ area, and awaited the results. I’d gotten a couple good ones in 8- to 10-foot waves, but I wasn’t confident. Seated next to me on the mini bleachers was a familiar face.

In my early Malibu days there was a homeless guy who lived behind the bathrooms at First Point. He was there everyday. He’d sit on the beach next to an old, beat-up single-fin and watch the waves. We never spoke to him. Occasionally he’d grumble incoherently. He seemed mentally unsound, his board a kind of security blanket. We never saw him in the water. Then one day he was gone. 

I hadn’t seen him for several years, and suddenly there he was, sitting in the competitors area, raggedy and unwashed and gaunt-faced, a black sheep amid the bright-eyed pro surfers in their sponsors’ garb.

He tapped me on the shoulder.

“Jamie?”

“Yeah.”

“Jamie Brisick?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m John. I used to see you at Malibu.”

“I remember.”

“You were a good surfer. You, Willy Morris, Allen Sarlo.”

I was blown away. I’d spent those years thinking this guy was out to lunch, and in fact he was watching, listening. I was reminded of the Juicy Fruit scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. 

“You live here now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said John. “Behind the take-away place next to Kammies.”

He looked older, hollower, scruffier. His skin was sun-ravaged. He smelled as if he hadn’t showered in weeks.

“Still surfing?” I asked.

“When I can,” he said. “Don’t have a board.”

My heat results were announced. I did not make it through. I said goodbye to John and made my way back to Ke Iki Hale. 

In those days, when we got knocked out of an event, we typically booked a ticket on the next flight home. I did exactly that. I packed up my gear, said goodbye to my Quiksilver brethren, and headed to the airport. On the way there I pulled into the Kammies parking lot. By this time it was dark out and the take-away place was closing. I asked the girl behind the counter if she knew where I could find John. She looked at me funny and pointed toward the back.

At the time it felt like some grand gesture. With hindsight it seems contrived, as if I were trying to force an exclamation point on the end of a quiet career.

I found John in the shadows behind the take-away place. He was sitting in his makeshift abode, a blue tarp covering a floor of cardboard.

“This is for you,” I said, and handed him the board, a 7’2″ Al Merrick gun that I’d hardly ridden.

John didn’t smile and didn’t say much. He took the board, and I headed to the airport.