5
What is a wave anyway?
We know one when we see one, but what is it?
The physicists call it an “energy-transport phenomenon.”
The dictionary says it's “a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.”
Adisturbance.
It's certainly that.
Something gets disturbed. That is, something strikes something else and sets off a vibration. Clap your hands right now and you'll hear a sound. What you're actually hearing is a sound wave. Something struck something else and it set off a vibration that strikes your eardrum.
The vibration is energy. It's transported through the phenomenon of a wave from one location to the other.
The water itself doesn't actually move. What happens is one particle of water bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on and so forth until it hits something. It's like that idiot wave at a sports event-the people don't move around the stadium, but the wave does. The energy flows from one person to another.
So when you're riding a wave, you're not riding water. The water is the medium, but what you're really riding is energy.
Very cool.
Hitching an energy ride.
Billions of H2O particles work together to transport you from one place to another, which is very generous when you think about it. That last statement is, of course, airy-fairy soul-surfer bullshit-the wave doesn't care whether you're in it or not. Particles of water are inanimate objects that don't know anything, much less “care”; the water is just doing what water does when it gets goosed by energy.
It makes waves.
A wave, any kind of wave, has a specific shape. The particles knocking into one another don't just bump along in a flat line, but move up and down-hence the wave. Prior to the “disturbance,” the water particles are at rest, in technical terminology, equilibrium. What happens is that the energy disturbs the equilibrium; it “displaces” the particles from their state of rest. When the energy reaches its maximum potential “displacement” (“positive displacement”), the wave “crests.” Then it drops, below the equilibrium line, to its “negative displacement,” aka, the “trough.” Simply put, it has highs, lows, and middles, just like life its own self.
Yeah, except it's a little more complicated than that, especially if you're talking about the kind of wave that you can ride, especially the kind of giant wave that's right now rolling toward Pacific Beach with bad intent.
Basically, there are two kinds of waves.
Most waves are “surface waves.” They're caused by lunar pull and wind, which are sources of the disturbance. These are your average, garden-variety, everyday, Joe Lunchbucket waves. They show up on time, punch the clock, and they range in size from small to medium to, occasionally, large.
Surface waves, of course, give surfing its name, because it appears to the unenlightened eye that surfers are riding the surface of the water. Surfers are, if you will, “surfacing.”
Despite this distinction, surface waves are the mules of the surfing world, unheralded beasts of burden not incapable, however, of kicking their traces from time to time when whipped into a frenzy by the wind.
A lot of people think that it's strong winds that make big waves, but this really isn't true. Wind can cause some big surf, blowing an otherwise-average wave into a tall peak, but most of the energy-the disturbance-is on the surface. These waves have height, but they lack depth. All the action is on top-it's mostly show; it's literally superficial.
And wind can ruin surf, and often does. If the wind is blowing across the wave it will ruin its shape, or it can make the surf choppy, or, if it's coming straight in off the ocean, it can drive the crest of the wave down, flattening it out and making it unridable.
What you want is a gentle, steady, offshore wind that blows into the face of the wave and holds it up for you.
The other kind of wave is the sub surface wave, which starts, duh, under the water. If surface waves are your middleweight boxers, dancing and shooting jabs, the subsurface wave is your heavyweight, coming in flat- footed, throwing knockout punches from the (ocean) floor. This wave is the superstar, the genuine badass, the take-your-lunch money, walk-off-with-your-girlfriend, give-me-those-fucking-sneakers, thank you for playing and now what parting gifts do we have for our contestant, Vanna wave.
If surface waves lack depth, the subsurface wave has more bottom than a Sly and the Family Stone riff. It's deeper than Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein combined. It's heavy, my friend; it ain't your brother. It's the hate child of rough sex at the bottom of the sea.
There's a whole world down there. In fact, most of the world is down there. You have enormous mountain ranges, vast plains, trenches, and canyons. You have tectonic plates, and when they shift and scrape against each other, you have earthquakes. Gigantic underwater earthquakes, violent as a Mike Tyson off meds, that set off one big honking disturbance.
At its most benign, a big beautiful swell to ride; at its most malevolent, a mass-murdering tsunami.
This is a disturbance, a mass transportation of energy phenom, that will travel thousands of miles either to give you the ride of your life or fuck you up, and it doesn't care which.
This is what's rolling toward Pacific Beach as The Dawn Patrol gets out of the water this particular morning. An undersea earthquake up near the Aleutian Islands is hurtling literally thousands of miles to come crash on Pacific Beach and go Ka-boom.
6
Ka-boom is good.
If you're Boone Daniels and live for waves that make big noises.
He's always been this way. Since birth and before, if you buy all that stuff about prenatal auditory influences. You know how some mothers hang out listening to Mozart to give their babies a taste for the finer things? Boone's mom, Dee, used to sit on the beach and stroke her belly to the rhythm of the waves.
To the prenatal Boone, the ocean was indistinguishable from his mother's heartbeat. Hang Twelve might call the sea “Mother Ocean,” but to Boone it really is. And before his son hit the terrible twos, Brett Daniels would put the kid in front of him on a longboard, paddle out, and then lift the boy on his shoulder while they rode in. Casual observers-that is, tourists-would be appalled, all like, “What if you drop him?”
“I'm not going to drop him,” Boone's dad, Brett, would reply.
Until Boone was about three, and then Brett would intentionally drop him into the shallow white water, just to give him the feel of it, to let him know that other than a few bubbles in the nose, nothing bad was going to happen. Young Boone would pop up, giggling like crazy, and ask for his dad to “do it again.”
Every once in a while, a disapproving onlooker would threaten to call Child Protective Services, and Dee would reply, “That's what he's doing-he's protecting his child.”
Which was the truth.
You raise a kid in PB, and you know that his DNA is going to drive him out there on a board, you'd better teach him what the ocean can do. You'd better teach him how to live, not die, in the water, and you'd better teach him young. You teach him about riptides and undertow. You teach him not to panic.
Protect his child?
Listen, when Brett and Dee would have birthday parties at the condo complex pool, and all Boone's little friends would come over, Brett Daniels would set his chair at the edge of the pool and tell the other parents, “No
