The Backhanded Homage

A surf exploration through the Shumagin Islands, Alaska

It started as a friendly game of beer pong. 

I’d bought a miniature version of the drinking game at the only liquor store in Sand Point, a port town on the outer reaches of Alaska, before boarding a boat and setting off for a week-long surf trip through the Shumagins, a rarely explored cluster of islands roughly 500-miles southwest of Anchorage. 

We were playing in the Milo’s galley after dinner. It was 11:30 p.m., but on this May evening, sunsets lasted about five hours, and tones of the blue gray arctic sky still illuminated the portholes as we set up the game on the dinner table. The game is played with two teams of two. Ten cups are arranged in triangular form, like bowling pins, on each end of the table; the goal is to toss a ping pong ball into the opposing teams’ cups. When you make one, the opposing team must remove that cup and take a swig of whiskey. First team to get a ball in all of the other team’s cups wins.

The cups were shrunken and the balls were the size of marbles. Combine those difficulties with a swaying ship and a general lack of skill, and it took 15 minutes before anyone sank a shot.

Steve Hawk was on the opposing team. The lanky 66-year-old former editor of Surfer magazine wore a frayed blue sweater,  black spectacles and pajama bottoms. Hawk is a writing mentor of mine and edits a lot of my stories. Over the past few years we’ve became friends through a series of murderous red lines striking through my superfluous, excessive, verbose, repetitive, unnecessary, pedantic, run-on sentences. Some friendships are born from chit-chat. Ours was born from cutting clutter.

Hawk is normally soft spoken, observing the world through weary, yet curious eyes. But now that the single-malt was out, the geezer was throwing shade. I had missed a series of tosses and the tiny ball was already becoming a spheric metaphor for my own inadequacy. Also, I can sometimes be a little competitive, so when Hawk described my throwing style as “dainty,” I decided that the only logical response was to destroy him—thoroughly and in public. 

“Losing team has to strip down and polar plunge.” The remark came from Jon Rose, who stood nearby holding a Budweiser, a mischievous grin spreading across his face. Rose, who resembles an aging fighter jet pilot, is well known for founding the organization Waves For Water, a humanitarian aid group that has provided clean water to more than 3 million people around the world. He is less known for his skills as a shit-stirring mastermind. 

“Fuck you, Jon, you’re not even playing,” someone said. I can’t remember who. Might have been me.

“I’ll jump in with the losing team,” Rose responded, nonchalantly, dousing gasoline on an already heated game.

By this time, my partner and I had landed balls in eight cups, and, leaving only two left, we were sure that victory was near. Hawk and his partner went on a run and brought the game to a tie. My eyes became icy. My whole life—and perhaps two of my past lives—had been leading up to this moment. 

Then, we won the game. 

Not because of me. I didn’t make another shot. My partner pulled through. 

Minutes later, Hawk stripped to his shorts, climbed up to the top deck of the ship and silently walked the plank. The air and water were both in the 40s, and Hawk is the skinniest old guy I know. After he plunged and emerged from the starlit sea, euphoric and rosy, he looked at me and said, “I’m just happy I got to see your competitive side come out.” 

I shrugged my shoulders theatrically, with my hands up like I was serving pizza.

“When people are impulsive,” he said, “they reveal themselves.”

A Day of Waves

Earlier that day, we’d seen bald eagles, orca whales, stellar sea lions, otters, and that geeky, brightly-beaked Alaskan state bird known as a puffin. And when the sun showed itself, the water turned from gunmetal gray to tropical turquoise, with swaying bull kelp the only reminder of our northern latitude. 

The wave was called Yulie’s, named by the first guys to surf it. It was a right-hand reef, chest-high and rippable. Swells refracted off a jutting cliff down the beach, a rolling wedge would meet the crest and slingshot you into a four-turn wave.

Rose paddled out first, took off on a wave, threw a few rooster tails of whitewater and kicked out on the inside. I paddled out on a zippy little 5’6” quad, looking a bit like a fubsy ninja, my forehead, eyes and mouth the only parts of my body not sheathed in rubber. In terms of speed and power, the wave reminded me of a Santa Cruz point break. Except for the fact that, besides our crew, the nearest surfer was probably 300 miles away, on Kodiak Island.

Hawk came out on a standup paddle board. “Are you a happy boy?” he asked, rhetorically, before stroking into a mechanical little peeler.   

As Rose and I sat out the back, we chatted about how sick it was that, at 66 years young, Hawk was still getting after it, annually booking this trip to search for new waves off this frigid coast. When most California surfers get to be his age, they migrate south to Mexico or Costa Rica, drinking margaritas and marinating by the pool. Hawk prefers whiskey and snowmelt and places that have a barrier to entry, where you have a chance to find a wave that no surfer has ever ridden, and, if you get lucky, maybe even name it. We surfed until our paddle muscles betrayed us before heading back to the Milo.

The Milo

The Milo is a 58-foot decommissioned fishing vessel captained by Mike McCune and his wife, Wendy. They are in their mid-60s and about the happiest people you’ll ever meet.

McCune spends most of his time at the helm, leaning back, his feet on the wheel, munching a box of Lucky Charms. He has thin white hair, sharp features and an easy laugh. He grew up surfing in Hawaii, then moved away to go to college. At age 21, he traveled  to Alaska to work the “slime lines” in a cannery, where fish get gutted. He’d fly back home with a grip of cash. But he liked Alaska. “People up here care about what you produce,” he once said, “not how you posture.” So, he moved to Alaska fulltime to skipper a variety of vessels, from small skiffs to giant seafood processors, and eventually became a partner in a land-based fish-processing plant, overseeing his own slime line. In 2009 he bought the Milo and slowly transitioned from fish to surf.

The Milo is the only multi-day surf charter in Alaska, and in the past few years, business has been good. Mike and Wendy have barely had time off, moving from one group of surfers to the next. Despite the demand, the operation is anything but impersonal. Communal dinners, a shared bathroom, and acoustic music late into the night. 

Rachel is the deckhand. She has jade green eyes and brown hair thick enough to bend a comb. She surfs, sings, paints and routinely wacks fish on the head with a wooden bat. Over dinner one night she told a story about the time she and some friends released three pigs into the hallway of her high school. In a stroke of near-genius, they painted a number on the side of each pig: one, two and four. 

Once, Rose grabbed and ate a dessert cookie before dinner. She glared at him. I prayed for him.

Behind the kitchen is a steep staircase that leads to what used to be the fish hold, now the wetsuit room. (Smell hasn’t changed much.) From there, open a heavy, water-tight door to enter leading to the engine room. Just beyond the engine room is the tiny forecastle, where five us slept on bunks. 

“When that diesel engine comes on,” Hawk had warned, “you’re gonna think that the world is ending.” It’s true. The first morning, I was shaken awake by a violent mechanical howl, and my first thought was, “Oh, my god, the world is ending.” 

Islands

One morning, we motored to a cobblestone right-hander. On shore, two sister mountains, about 500 feet high, were joined by a sand spit, making the coast resemble a giant dog bone. The cobblestone formation jutted out from the center of the spit and perfectly shaped waves rolled along its bank. Unfortunately, they were ankle high. So, Rose and I decided to fill our dry bags with snacks, hop on standup paddleboards and head to shore. White sand squeaked under my feet as I lugged the board above the high tide line. Like me, Rose enjoys moments of splendid solitude, so we set off in different directions to hike the sister mountains.

As I started hiking to the top, my feet and ankles sank into the brownish beige tundra. The islands are covered in it. From afar, they look desolate, as the wind-whipped land makes it difficult for trees to grow. But up close, the ground is full of life. Seagulls scurry. Crabs waddle. And herds of feral cattle, bison and a few caribou roam. No bears.

After a few wheezing pauses, I made it to the top of the mountain. Below me, the shoreline dropped precipitously into cobalt blue. The Shumagins have surf potential partly due to its deep outer sea floor. When storms fan across the sea, this depth allows the rolling swell energy to maintain power, rather than fracture and disintegrate. One reason Hawaii has powerful surf is because the sea floor surrounding the islands is extremely deep. But unlike Hawaii, the Shumagins seldom receive big groundswells from distant storms. The storms that create surf up here are usually nearby, which means that big waves most often come with bad weather. 

We had good weather our whole trip. 

As I looked out across the spit toward the sister island, I thought about the Aluet people. The ones who lived here, and possibly sat on this very perch, more than 4,000 years ago. Tools, carvings and human skulls are still scattered along these shores.

I walked to the steep section of the cliff to look over the edge. But, like some sick joke drummed up by Darwinism, heights cause me to lose my balance. And suddenly standing erect felt as easy as riding a unicycle on a tightrope. I sat down and slid away from the cliff until the queasy feeling in my stomach subsided.

New Wave

That night, Wendy and Rachel cooked dinner. We drank wine, played music and told stories. For Hawk, I think the trip was a throwback to his days at Surfer magazine, and our conversations often circled the axiom of wave-riding. 

I know some people who are slowly dying from seriousness. It’s a pernicious creep, as they snip off parts of their personalities deemed childish—humor, mischief and play.

Save to say, there was none of that creep on this trip. Time and again, I was reminded of writer Anne Lamott’s quote: “Laughter is carbonated holiness,” and it occurred to me that perhaps beneath every good surf trip there lies some sandy-footed version of God. (Author’s note: May all surfers use this argument when pitching a surf trip to their partner.)

The next day we motored to a new island, one that Captain Mike had yet to explore, which meant that none of its waves had ever been surfed. The wind was slack. Tiny lines of swell sloshed and echoed against dramatic cliff keyholes. I stood on the starboard side of the Milo, anxiously tapping my hands against the railing.

Down the beach, I saw something. Between two jutting rocks was a scalloped sandbar and small right-hander. It wasn’t much, but it was a new wave. Hawk sauntered over and whispered, “You might want to get out there before anybody else does.” I snuck down into the wetsuit room, spastically wrestled into my 5-mil, jumped off the boat, sprint-paddled to the peak, and, for the first time in my life, rode a wave that had never before been surfed. As I sat out there, looking at the Milo on the far reaches of Alaska, I thought about what to name it. It only seemed right to name it after Steve. A thank you for inviting me on the trip, and for his mentorship—and as a warning to any future opponents who feel tempted to talk shit during beer pong. And so it would be called Dainty Hawk.