The Best American Sports Writing 2014(116)
It’s a tragic change of behavior, for man and shark. Gazzo is pro-cull, but he doesn’t want to see a shark massacre. And he believes CHARC had better hurry up with its study, or the surfers and fishermen will take out the sharks, poaching them by night. “All species have a survival technique, whether it’s speed or size or coloration,” Gazzo says. “Ours is intelligence. What’s incredible in this story is that we’re using intelligence to protect a species that is killing us.”
Alas, we are both too smart for our own good and not nearly smart enough. Our manipulations of nature are perforce shortsighted: we are blinded by both its vastness and its proximity, its constant flux amid illusory stability. As the Marine Reserve scientists have pointed out, kill the bull sharks and you might get something worse. The world as we know it—and as we have loved it—depends on its predators for balance, yet we keep choosing the unknown world without them, the brave new world with as-yet-unpredicted monsters in it.
With our own monster fleets, floating cities hauling humongous nets, we have ransacked the seas, perhaps irreparably. Enormous catches feed our growing populations, and population increase means increased pollution. Our success predestines our peril. It’s a bitch. Here on Réunion island, suffering its own successes, its steep volcanic slopes draining the effluvia of a burgeoning population, all the unforeseen dangers of bad stewardship of the environment are embodied in one beady-eyed, piggish thug of a fish. Which seems to be thriving, for a time, in our shit. Or maybe our sins aren’t so much good for them as survivable. Like a macro version of a super-virus, bull sharks are a symptom, and a consequence. They’re what you get in the sea when you’ve lost just about everything else: the last shark swimming.
ALICE GREGORY
Mavericks
FROM N+1
THE AIR SMELLS FAINTLY of salt water, and strongly of bonfires, diesel fuel, and weed. Seagulls squawk, the sky on the horizon is just turning green, and the air is cold in that prankish West Coast way that’s impossible to take seriously and pointless to dress for. Once the sun comes up and the fog burns off, it’s going to be a perfect day.
It’s 6:00 A.M., high tide, and I’m a 30-minute, eucalyptus-dense drive south of San Francisco in Princeton-by-the-Sea, a tiny village with some of the biggest waves in the world and not much else. Shadowy figures are perched in the beds of pickup trucks; they speak in low voices and occasionally take sips of coffee. I’m sitting on the ground in the near-dark, waiting for a surf contest to begin.
An unusually steep, unusually deep Pliocene-epoch sedimentary reef rises half a mile offshore. This is where Mavericks breaks, where from November to March waves can top out at 100 feet, making them roughly 10 times the height of what most surfers would consider “big.” Sharks are common, as are riptides and exposed rocks. Accomplished big-wave surfers—famous ones—have died here.
Some years—when tides and swells and winds and storms combine infelicitously—the waves here fail to break at anything above 20 feet, which means for Mavericks that they are hardly waves at all. If the conditions aren’t right, the contest doesn’t happen. When it does happen, the Mavericks Invitational is announced a few days ahead of time, and even in this case the plan is provisional at best. The inconvenience is unavoidable; one elemental change can ruin the wave.
It’s Sunday, and the Mavericks Invitational was announced on Thursday, which means that 12 of the 24 competitors had to buy plane tickets—from Los Angeles, Hawaii, Brazil, and South Africa—fast. The other 12 live less than an hour’s drive away, and would probably be surfing here today, contest or no contest. They all know each other, and most surf together regularly. On this winter morning, it’s been three years since the last invitational.
Compared with most professional athletes, these guys are ancient. Matt Ambrose of Pacifica is 40. Shane Desmond and Ken “Skindog” Collins, both from Santa Cruz, are 42 and 43, respectively. At 31, Shawn Dollar, also from Santa Cruz, is one of the youngest competitors. He also holds the world record for the biggest wave ever paddled into (61 feet, a scale at which almost every other surfer would opt for tow-in). I ask Dollar why the surfers at Mavericks are so old. “It’s scary as shit,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “It takes you years and years and years to break down fear. Put a 16-year-old kid out there? He’s probably going to drown.”
Surfers have the odd habit of saying “I drowned” when they mean “I almost drowned.” Drowning, after all, feels like almost drowning until it feels like nothing. When I ask Dollar to explain the sensation of almost drowning, his answer, and the way he holds his face as he says it, makes me feel that the question is an intrusive one. “It’s just depressing and lonely,” he says, not making eye contact. “The lights start turning off, literally. It blinks in your mind and goes black. Pretty soon, it’s just lights-out and you’re done.” He pauses awkwardly. “It’s really fucking weird.”