Ehukai

Laie-Hauula, Hawaii, 1973

On the way to Japan, the family stopped in Hawaii. It was supposed to be a two week layover while Dad finished up business in NY, The Roppongi Club.

Roppongi is a district in Tokyo that is well known as the city's most popular nightlife district among foreigners, offering a large number of foreigner friendly bars, restaurants and night clubs,

By this time, my dad was a jewelry/gem dealer, doing lots of deals on 47th street in New York City. Having made several trips to Japan, he found that Japanese businessmen would go out, hang out at hostess clubs and drink into the night. These kinds of clubs did not exist in New York, but Japanese businessmen did, so my Dad made a destination for them. The Roppongi Club took up an entire floor in the Lexington Hotel on 48th street and Lexington Avenue. It included a hostess club, a steakhouse, a mahjong parlor, a shiatsu parlor and a miniature-golf course on the terrace.

We packed my mother, Hannie, my aunt Sacha and 8 boys, into two hotel rooms at the Waikiki Surf West, a small hotel with a swimming pool. Two weeks passed. My mother came to the realization that my Dad wasn’t coming when he said he would. We would need a better solution than hotel rooms.

We all got into two station wagon taxies and drove around the island in search of a place to live, a big enough house. We found a realty in a small town, Laie, on the windward side of Oahu. For $600 a month we rented a beachfront house. My life had taken an incredible turn for the better. The transformation from the concrete jungle of 46 W 96th street, half a block to Central Park, to 55-609 Kamehameha Hwy right on the beach, was nothing short of a miracle.

Laie turned out to be a Mormon town. No Alcohol. No caffeine. Everything closed at 8:00 pm. It was home to the Hawaii campus of Brigham Young University (BYU) and the Mormon Temple. At BYU they would not let me borrow books from the library because “my hair was below my ears.”

What’s left to do under such a circumstance? Surf! And when the surf’s not “up.” Dive! Not scuba, that would cost money. We didn’t have a lot of money.

I learned to surf in Laie bay, at a local break called “Genegators.” Surf breaks are often named after something on shore near the break. The surf break was named after a 1930s movie star who had a house on the beach at a time when there were no other houses and the only way to reach Laie from Honolulu was on horseback. Her name was Janet Gaynor.

I soon made friends that would take me to surf the North Shore. The North Shore is famous for Sunset, Rocky Point, Banzai Pipeline and Waimea Bay. I surfed Gas Chambers, Pupukea, Haleiwa. They were no quite as gnarly as the breaks where the pros surfed.

A newcomer to the sport I was not comfortable in waves that were much bigger than me. These were the days before leashes, devices that connect your ankle to your board with some 6 feet of line with a little stretchy part to keep the wave from causing injury as it tries to take your board with it on its way to shore. It was also the days before there was a reliable surf report.

One day I was out at Gas Chambers. As the day went on, the waves grew in size to the point where I could not surf them. They became too big for me to surf. It was afternoon and it had been awhile since I caught a wave. I thought to myself, “I really don’t want to get stuck out here after dark.” The current would eventually pull me out to deeper waters. My surfboard and I would be dragged off into the ocean in the dark. That could easily make me “lost at sea.”

I made up my mind to tackle one of the more reasonable waves in the next set. Waves come in sets, something like five waves in a row with the middle one being the biggest. I took off on the first one, but I did not have the speed to stand up and reach the bottom of the wave. The wave pulled my board out from under me. I was in free-fall at this point. I dove straight down and entered the water far below the lip of the wave which was now passing above me distorting the blue Hawaiian sky. My plan was to enter the water and swim towards the back of the wave, then surface. This maneuver worked perfectly. I ended up behind the wave in the blue water. At this point, I had no board and I was behind the waves that were too big for me to surf, not good.

There was a rip-tide channel between Banzai Pipeline and Gas Chambers, in front of Ehukai Beach park. It was so strong that waves were not even breaking in this channel. I tried to swim behind the waves, in the direction of the channel, but after swimming for some time, I realized that I had made no headway. There was a current that moved the water along the shore at about the same speed as I could swim. This was clearly not going to work. The only way out was in. I would have to swim through the whitewater on the reef. Between me and the white water were the towering waves. My only choice was through the waves.

I tried body surfing a very large wave, but it was too big to bodysurf. It picked me up and I went “over the falls.” The wave crashed into the whitewater below. It threw me around like a leaf in a cup of tea. It would take me some time to figure out which way was up. When I figured it out, I would swim up to the surface to get some air before the next wave hit. The next wave would once again pick me up and send me flying over the falls. After the third time I went over the falls, I found myself in the churning white water over the reef.

I was in a strong longshore current moving the whitewater off the reef and into the rip-tide channel. If I ended up in the channel, the rip-tide would drag me right back to the deep blue water outside the waves. I would have to start all over. I needed to avoid this at all cost.

By this time, I had been swimming for quite some time. I was really tired. One hundred feet of whitewater was still between me and the beach. Then I got a cramp.

The back of my right thigh muscle froze and sent my brain a sharp pain signal. My muscle was on fire. It was useless, I thought, “If I continue doing what I’m doing, I will surely die today.” I was facing death. Time slowed down. “Am I really going to die here?” I thought.

I’ve had several near death experiences. They all seem to feature time slowing down combined with a moment of clarity. My next thought was “No, I’m not going. I still have stuff to do.”

Whitewater is lighter than water, that’s because it has bubbles in it that give it its white color. Water with bubbles is lighter than water without bubbles. Ships have been sunk because they entered water with bubbles and were no longer able to float. I was in whitewater.

I was exhausted. I was having difficulty swimming the whitewater. I got a cramp. I was in really deep shit.

I took some “slow-time,” to think through my predicament. I could not longer depend on the muscle that was cramping. I had to find other muscles, ones I had not yet used. That was it! I had to change to a different stroke that used new muscles. I switched to a backstroke, my mother’s stroke. While this meant that the remnants of waves would pass over my face and cause me to swallow water from time to time, it gave me enough energy and speed to get across the longshore current and onto the beach.

I literally crawled onto the beach and out of the reach of the waves. Waves cause water rush up on to the beach and slide back to the ocean dragging whatever they find with them. Tourists regularly get pulled off the beach and drown because they underestimate the power of the surge. I crawled as far as I could up the beach and collapsed. I felt like Robinson Crusoe. I could see my board in the distance, by Ehukai Beach park, being dragged into the ocean by waves and re-deposited on shore by subsequent waves.

It took me a good 15 minutes to regain enough strength to be able

to get up and walk to my board.

I survived.

I still had stuff to do.