sunday 9/26/99

Dawn patrol again. Swell's backing off but still fun, chest high and glassy at Puaena with nobody out but me, two uncles and a honu that kept popping its head up to check on us. Leilani came down and sat on the sand with a thermos of coffee and a towel over her shoulders like a grandma. She doesn't surf, she paddles canoe, and she says surfers are all show-offs who can't go in a straight line. She's not wrong.

After the shop closed I drove over and picked up Aunty Pua and took her to Ali'i. She hasn't been down to the beach since March. Not once. She lives five minutes from it. We didn't say much. She took off her slippers and held them in her hand and walked right down to where the water comes up and let it run over her feet, and I stood back by the truck because it felt like hers.

When she came back she said, "Eh. He still stay out there, you know. Not sad kine. Just, he stay." I said yeah. I don't know if I believe it but I said yeah.

I'm not done being mad at the ocean. But we're talking again, me and it. That's more than I had in August.

monday 9/20/99

I went out.

First real north swell of the season started showing yesterday afternoon. You could hear it from the shop, that sound the reef makes that you forget all summer. The surf line on the phone said four foot Hawaiian and building, which is head high, bigger on the sets. Everybody in the shop was buzzing, guys pulling boards off the wall, waxing up right on the counter. I didn't sleep. I lay there listening to it all night.

Five-thirty this morning I took Keoni's yellow board off the wall in my room and drove to Haleiwa. Same place we did the paddle-out in March. I sat on the tailgate for like twenty minutes. Then I just went.

Paddling out felt like my arms belonged to somebody else. Six months. Out past the break it was all glassy and orange from the sun coming up, and I sat there on his board and let about ten waves go by. Couldn't do it. Then one came that was just right, like somebody sent it, and I turned and paddled and I was up.

I don't really remember riding it. I remember kicking out and sitting down on the board and crying so hard I couldn't breathe. That's the one good thing about the ocean. Nobody can tell when you're crying in it.

Uncle Boy, who has surfed that break since before my dad was born, paddled over to me. He didn't say anything about Keoni. He just said, "Welcome back, boy," and paddled away. That was the right thing to say. Old guys know stuff.

I caught maybe six more. Came in at eight, opened the shop late, and Clyde didn't even give me stink eye about it. Everybody knows.

friday 9/17/99

So there's this girl. Leilani. She's in my Hawaiian language class in town, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she lives in Waialua, so since the semester started we've been riding together to save gas. She corrects my pronunciation the whole drive. I say Haleiwa like a haole tourist, apparently. She makes me put the 'okina in everything, that little glottal stop. Hale'iwa. See, I'm learning.

She knew about Keoni. Everybody out here does. She never once brought it up, which I noticed, which I liked. But yesterday after class we stopped for shave ice on the way home and sat on the tailgate, and she said, real quiet, "You can talk story about him, you know. To me. If you like."

So I did. I told her about his laugh, which was so loud and stupid you'd hear it over a set breaking. How he couldn't keep a pair of slippers more than a week. How he taught me to duck dive when we were seven by holding my board down with his foot. We sat there till the shave ice was just colored water.

Then she drove me home and said "a hui hou," until next time, and I sat in my truck in the carport for a while being happy. I haven't been happy in a while. It felt weird. Good weird.

sunday 9/12/99

Aunty Pua called the shop Thursday and said Sunday dinner, six o'clock, "and no make excuse." So I went. First time since spring. I've been ducking her. I know that's junk. I just couldn't look at that house.

She made beef stew and rice, Keoni's favorite, which I think she did on purpose so we'd both cry and get it over with. Makana stayed in his room playing Nintendo the whole time. He's twelve. He's mad at everybody. I get it.

After we ate she took me out to the carport. Keoni's boards are still up on the rack Keoni built in tenth grade, four of them, and she took down the yellow one, the 6'4", the one he rode more than all the others, and she put it in my hands.

I said, "Aunty, no can. I no go out anymore."

She said, "I know. Everybody tell me. He'd be so mad at you, Kai. Sitting on the sand all summer like one old man." Then she said, "No go for you, then. Go for him. He no like his board just sit."

It's standing in the corner of my room right now. I keep looking at it.

wednesday 9/1/99

Couldn't sleep again. Drove down to Ali'i at like midnight and sat on the steps of the lifeguard tower and yelled at the ocean. Actually yelled. My grandpa would slap me. He always said you show respect, the ocean gives and it takes and it's not yours to be mad at.

But I am. Keoni knew that water better than anybody I ever met. He respected it. He watched it for an hour before he paddled out, every time, like a scientist. He wasn't some tourist from the mainland who didn't read the sign. And it didn't matter. That's what I can't get past. It didn't matter at all.

Everybody keeps saying "at least he died doing what he loved." I hate that. He also loved his mom and plate lunch and Hendrix and bad kung fu movies. That doesn't mean he wanted to leave them.

The water was flat and black and quiet and it didn't say anything back. It never does. That's kind of the whole problem.

sunday 8/22/99

Flat for three weeks straight. The North Shore in summer is basically a lake. All the waves go to town side. The shop is dead, just tourists buying boogie boards and asking where the big waves are. I tell them come back in December.

Slow days make me think about March. So I'm going to write it down, the paddle-out, because I never did.

Keoni went out alone on a big day in March and he didn't come in. That's all I'm going to say about that part.

A week later we did the paddle-out for him at Haleiwa at sunset. I don't know how many people. More than a hundred. Guys from every break on the North Shore, guys he didn't even like. His whole canoe club took Aunty Pua and Makana out in the canoe. Everybody had lei or plumeria around their neck or in their teeth. We all paddled out past the break and made a big circle and held hands, board to board, and it went real quiet except for the water slapping.

The kahu said a prayer in Hawaiian and then in English. One of the uncles chanted. Then everybody threw their flowers into the middle of the circle, and we all splashed water up in the air and hooted as loud as we could, for him, because that's what you do. The flowers just floated there, all these colors on the water, and the circle slowly came apart.

Nobody tells you that paddling back in is the worst part. You turn around and the beach is there and you have to go back to it without him.

sunday 8/8/99

Flat. Flat flat flat. Sold six bars of wax and a pair of slippers all day. Didn't have anything else in me today. Pau.

monday 8/2/99

OK. My English teacher last spring made us keep a journal for class and said "keep going after the semester, it helps." I did, in a notebook, but my handwriting is junk and I can't read it back. So now it's here. Clyde, my boss, lets me use the computer at the shop after we close.

Who I am: Kai. I'm twenty. I work at a surf shop in Haleiwa and I start fall semester at the community college in town in a few weeks. I was born out here and I'll probably die out here, that's how most of us are.

Keoni was my best friend since kindergarten. We learned to surf together at Ali'i on one borrowed board, switching off every wave. We were going to go to Indo together next summer. He was going to be a firefighter. In March the ocean took him.

I haven't been in the water since. People keep asking when I'm going back out, and I say when it's big again. Which is a good answer in August, because in August it's never big.