MATT KINOSHITA LIVES
in a fresh, sunny ranch at the top of a hill in Haiku. The house has a big living room with a fold-out couch and plenty of floor space. Often, one or two or ten surfer girls camp in his living room because they are in a competition that starts at seven the next morning, or because they are practicing intensively and it is too far to go back and forth from Hana, or because they want to plow through Matt’s stacks of surfing magazines and Matt’s library of surfing videos and Matt’s piles of water sports clothing catalogs. Many of the surfer girls I met didn’t live with their fathers, or in some cases didn’t even have relationships with their fathers, so sometimes, maybe, they stayed at Matt’s just because they were in the mood to be around a concerned older male. Matt was in his late twenties. As a surfer he was talented enough to compete on the world tour but had decided to skip it in favor of an actual life with his wife, Annie, and their baby son, Chaz. Now he was one of the best surfboard shapers on Maui, a coach, and head of a construction company with his dad. He sponsored a few grown-up surfers and still competed himself, but his preoccupation was with kids.
Surfing
magazine once asked him what he liked most about being a surfboard shaper, and he answered, “Always being around stoked groms!” He coached a stoked-grom boys’ team as well as a stoked-grom girls’ team. The girls’ team was an innovation. There had been no girls’ surfing team on Maui before Matt established his three years ago. There was no money in it for him—it actually cost him many thousands of dollars each year—but he loved to do it. He thought the girls were the greatest. The girls thought he was the greatest, too. In build, Matt looked a lot like the men in those old Hawaiian surfing prints—small, chesty, gravity-bound. He had perfect features and hair as shiny as an otter’s. When he listened to the girls he kept his head tilted, eyebrows slightly raised, jaw set in a grin. Not like a brother, exactly—more like the cutest, nicest teacher at school, who could say stern, urgent things without their stinging. When I pulled into the driveway with the girls, Matt was in the yard loading surfboards into a pickup. “Hey, dudes,” he called to Lilia and Theresa. “Where are your boards?”
“Someone’s going to bring them tonight from Hana,” Theresa said. She jiggled her foot. “Matt, come on, let’s go surfing already.”
“Hey, Lilia,” Matt said. He squeezed her shoulders. “How’re you doing, champ? Is your dad going to surf in the contest this weekend?”
Lilia shrugged and looked up at him solemnly. “Come on, Matt,” she said. “Let’s go surfing already.”
They went down to surf at Ho’okipa, to a section that is called Pavilles because it is across from the concrete picnic pavilions on the beach. Ho’okipa is not a lot like Hana. People with drinking problems like to hang out in the pavilions. Windsurfers abound. Cars park up to the edge of the sand. The landing pattern for the Kahului Airport is immediately overhead. The next break over, the beach is prettier; the water there is called Girlie Bowls, because the waves get cut down by the reef and are more manageable, presumably, for girlies. A few years ago, some of the Hana surfer girls met their idol Lisa Andersen when she was on Maui. She was very shy and hardly said a word to them, they told me, except to suggest they go surf Girlie Bowls. I thought it sounded mildly insulting, but they weren’t exactly sure what she was implying and they didn’t brood about it. They hardly talked about her. She was like some unassailable force. We walked past the pavilions. “The men at this beach are so sexist,” Lilia said, glaring at a guy swinging a boom box. “It’s really different from Hana. Here they’re always, you know, staring, and saying, ‘Oh, here come the
giiiirls,
’ and ‘Oh, hello,
ladies,
’ and stuff. For us white girls, us haoles, I think they really like to be gross.
So
gross. I’m serious.”
“Hey, the waves look pretty sick,” Theresa said. She watched a man drop in on one and then whip around against it. She whistled and said, “Whoooa, look at that sick snap! That was so rad, dude! That was the sickest snap I’ve seen in
ages
! Did you see that?”
They were gone in an instant. A moment later, two blond heads popped up in the black swells, and then they were up on their boards and away.
DINNER AT MATT’S
: tons of barbecued chicken, loaves of garlic bread, more loaves of garlic bread. Annie Kinoshita brought four quarts of ice cream out of the freezer, lined them up on the kitchen counter, and watched them disappear. Annie was fair, fine-boned, and imperturbable. She used to be a surfer “with hair down to her frickin’ butt,” according to Theresa. Now she was busy with her baby and with overseeing the open-door policy she and Matt maintained in their house. That night, another surfer girl, Elise Garrigue, and a fourteen-year-old boy, Cheyne Magnusson, had come over for dinner and were going to sleep over, too. Cheyne was one of the best young surfers on the island. His father, Tony, was a professional skateboarder. Cheyne was the only boy who regularly crashed at Matt and Annie’s. He and the girls had the Platonic ideal of a platonic relationship. “Hell, these wenches are
virgins,
” Annie said to me, cracking up. “These wenches don’t want anything to do with that kind of nastiness.”
“Shut up, haole,” Theresa said.
“I was going to show these virgins a picture of Chaz’s head coming out when I was in labor,” Annie yelled, “and they’re all, ‘No, no, no,
don’t
!’ ”
“Yeah, she’s all, ‘Look at this grossness!’ ” Theresa said. “And we’re all, ‘Shut up, fool.’ ”
“Duh,” Lilia said. “Like we’d even want to see a picture like that.”
The next day was the preliminary round of the Quicksilver HASA Competition, the fourth of eight HASA competitions on Maui leading to the state championships and then the nationals. It was a two-day competition—preliminaries on Saturday, finals on Sunday. In theory, the girls should have gone to bed early because they had to get up at five, but that was just a theory. They pillow-fought for an hour, watched
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
and
Boy Meets World
and another episode of
Sabrina,
then watched a couple of Kelly Slater surfing videos, had another pillow fight, ate a few bowls of cereal, then watched
Fear of a Black Hat,
a movie spoofing the rap music world that they had seen so many times they could recite most of the dialogue by heart. Only Elise fell asleep at a decent hour. She happened to be French and perhaps had overdosed on American pop culture earlier than the rest. Elise sort of blew in to Hawaii with the trade winds: She and her mother had left France and were planning to move to Tahiti, stopped on Maui en route, and never left. It was a classic Hawaiian tale. No one comes here for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways. They run away to Maui from places like Maryland or Nevada or anyplace they picture themselves earthbound, landlocked, stuck. They live in salvaged boxcars or huts or sagging shacks just to be near the waves. Here, they can see watery boundlessness everywhere they turn, and all things are fluid and impermanent. I don’t know what time it was when the kids finally went to sleep because I was on the living room floor with my jacket over my head for insulation. When I woke up a few hours later, the girls were dressed for the water, eating bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honey Bunches of Oats, and watching
Fear of a Black Hat
again. It was a lovely morning and they were definitely ready to show Hana surfing to the world. Theresa was the first to head out the door. “Hey, losers,” she yelled over her shoulder, “let’s go.”
THE FIRST HEATS
of the contest had right-handed waves, three or four feet high, silky but soft on the ends so that they collapsed into whitewash as they broke. You couldn’t make much of an impression riding something like that, and one after another the Hana girls came out of the water scowling. “I couldn’t get any kind of footing,” Theresa said to Matt. “I was, like, so on it, but I looked like some kind of kook sliding around.”
“My last wave was a full-out closeout,” Lilia said. She looked exasperated. “Hey, someone bust me a towel.” She blotted her face. “I really blew it,” she groaned. “I’m lucky if I even got five waves.”
The girls were on the beach below the judges’ stand, under Matt’s cabana, along with Matt’s boys’ team and a number of kids he didn’t sponsor but who liked hanging out with him more than with their own sponsors. The kids spun like atoms. They ran up and down the beach and stuffed sand in one another’s shorts and fought over pieces of last night’s chicken that Annie had packed for them in a cooler. During a break between heats, Gloria with the crazy hair strolled over and suddenly the incessant motion paused. This was like an imperial visitation. After all, Gloria was a seasoned-seeming nineteen-year-old who had just spent the year surfing the monstrous waves on Oahu’s North Shore, plus she did occasional work for Rodney Kilborn, the contest promoter, plus she had a sea turtle tattooed on her ankle, and most important, according to the Hana girls, she was an absolutely dauntless bodyboarder who would paddle out into wall-size waves, even farther out than a lot of guys would go.
“Hey, haoles!” Gloria called out. She hopped into the shade of the cabana. That day, her famous hair was woven into a long red braid that hung over her left shoulder. Even with her hair tamed, Gloria was an amazing-looking person. She had a hardy build, melon-colored skin, and a wide, round face speckled with light brown freckles. Her voice was light and tinkly, and had that arched, rising-up, quizzical inflection that made everything she said sound like a jokey, good-natured question. “Hey, Theresa?” she said. “Hey, girl, you got it going
on
? You’ve got great wave strategy? Just keep it up, yeah? Oh, Elise? You should paddle out harder? Okay? You’re doing great, yeah? And Christie?” She looked around for a surfer girl named Christie Wickey, who got a ride in at four that morning from Hana. “Hey, Christie?” Gloria said when she spotted her. “You should go out further, yeah? That way you’ll be in better position for your wave, okay? You guys are the greatest,
seriously
? You rule, yeah? You totally rule, yeah?”
At last the junior women’s division preliminary results were posted. Theresa, Elise, and two other girls on Matt’s team made the cut, as well as a girl whom Matt knew but didn’t coach. Lilia had not made it. As soon as she heard, she tucked her blond head in the crook of her elbow and cried. Matt sat with her and talked quietly for a while, and then one by one the other girls drifted up to her and murmured consoling things, but she was inconsolable. She hardly spoke for the rest of the afternoon until the open men’s division, which Matt had entered. When his heat was announced, she lifted her head and brushed her hand across her swollen eyes. “Hey, Matt!” she called as he headed for the water. “Rip it for the girls!”
THAT NIGHT
, a whole pack of them slept at Matt’s—Theresa, Lilia, Christie, Elise, Monica Cardoza from Lahaina, and sisters from Hana named Iris Moon and Lily Morningstar, who had arrived too late to surf in the junior women’s preliminaries. There hadn’t been enough entrants in the open women’s division to require preliminaries, so the competition was going to be held entirely on Sunday, and Iris would be able to enter. Lily wasn’t planning to surf at all, but as long as she was able to get a ride out of Hana she took it. This added up to too many girls at Matt’s for Cheyne’s liking, so he had fled to another boy’s house for the night. Lilia was still blue. She was quiet through dinner, and then as soon as she finished she slid into her sleeping bag and pulled it over her head. The other girls stayed up for hours, watching videos and slamming one another with pillows and talking about the contest. At some point someone asked where Lilia was. Theresa shot a glance at her sleeping bag and said quietly, “Did you guys see how upset she got today? I’m like, ‘Take it easy, Lilia!’ and she’s all ‘Leave me
alone,
bitch.’ So I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ ”
They whispered for a while about how sensitive Lilia was, about how hard she took it if she didn’t win, about how she thought one of them had wrecked a bathing suit she’d loaned her, about how funny it was that she even
cared
since she had so many bathing suits and for that matter always had money for snacks, which most of them did not. When I said a Hana girl could have a pure surfing adolescence, I knew it was part daydream, because no matter how sweet the position of a beautiful, groovy Hawaiian teenager might be in the world of perceptions, the mean measures of the human world don’t ever go away. There would always be something else to want and be denied. More snack money, even.
Lilia hadn’t been sleeping. Suddenly she bolted out of her sleeping bag and screamed, “Fuck you, I
hate
you stupid bitches!” and stormed toward the bathroom, slugging Theresa on the way.
THE WAVES ON SUNDAY
came from the left, and they were stiff and smallish, with crisp, curling lips. The men’s and boys’ heats were narrated over the PA system, but during the girls’ and women’s heats the announcer was silent, and the biggest racket was the cheering of Matt’s team. Lilia had toughened up since last night. Now she seemed grudgeless but remote. Her composure made her look more grown up than twelve. When I first got down to the beach she was staring out at the waves, chewing a hunk of dried papaya and sucking on a candy pacifier. A few of the girls were far off to the right of the break where the beach disappeared and lustrous black rocks stretched into the water. Christie told me later that they hated being bored more than anything in the world and between heats they were afraid they might be getting a little weary, so they decided to perk themselves up by playing on the rocks. It had worked. They charged back from the rocks shrieking and panting. “We got all
dangerous,
” she said. “We jumped off this huge rock into the water. We almost got killed, which was great.” Sometimes watching them I couldn’t believe that they could head out so offhandedly into the ocean—
this
ocean, which had rolls of white water coming in as fast as you could count them, and had a razor-blade reef hidden just below the surface, and was full of sharks. The girls, on the other hand, couldn’t believe I’d never surfed—never ridden a wave standing up or lying down, never cut back across the whitewash and sent up a lacy veil of spray, never felt a longboard slip out from under me and then felt myself pitched forward and under for that immaculate, quiet, black instant when all the weight in the world presses you down toward the ocean bottom until the moment passes and you get spat up on the beach. I explained I’d grown up in Ohio, where there is no surf, but that didn’t satisfy them; what I didn’t say was that I’m not sure that at fifteen I had the abandon or the indomitable sense of myself that you seem to need in order to look at this wild water and think, I will glide on top of those waves. Theresa made me promise I’d try to surf at least once someday. I promised, but this Sunday was not going to be that day. I wanted to sit on the sand and watch the end of the contest, to see the Hana girls take their divisions, including Lilia, who placed third in the open women’s division, and Theresa, who won the open women’s and the junior women’s division that day. Even if it was just a moment, it was a perfect one, and who wouldn’t choose it over never having the moment at all? When I left Maui that afternoon, my plane circled over Ho’okipa, and I wanted to believe I could still see them down there and always would see them down there, snapping back and forth across the waves.