On a recent windy evening, when I checked Suis after work, the ocean was a choppy, baleful green, and there were seven people out. But I saw a set from shore, so I went.
When I saw who was in the lineup, my heart sank.
It was the pack of midteen groms — to be distinguished from the little preteens, so lightweight on their potato- chip boards you can shake them off if they drop in on you.
This gang had muscle and moves: They paddled right in front of me as I went for a wave. They must have assumed I was a mom who would back off rather than bust their butts. They outraced me for sets and paddled around me to snake my waves. Half the time, they took off too deep and wiped out.
“How old are you?” I asked a curly-haired kid as he paddled by.
He frowned. “Fifteen.”
I wondered whether, if I revealed my advanced age, they might stop fighting me tooth and nail for every single wave.
But they could see I was old.
And did I want their leftovers? Their pity?
No. I wanted them to follow surfing etiquette. Which wasn’t going to happen.
As usual, the whole pack went for every wave, whooping and laughing like seven greedy dwarfs. I was the only female and far from a Snow White.
Being greedy is not the Hawaiian way as I learned it from kupuna like Rabbit Kekai, the former Waikiki beachboy and surf contest officiator who died in May, age 95.
Just the other morning, it seems, I saw him sitting on the wall at Sans Souci with his pals, a gang who’d earned their tans, their laid-back attitude and their smiles.
When I was 15 and a pitiless grom, I used to see Rabbit out at Tonggs. He and my first surf teacher, Uncle Shippy Kealoha, taught us rules. When you’re paddling back out, head for the shoulder, not where people are riding. If you’re caught in the impact zone and a surfer’s charging down on you, turn turtle, using your board as a shield (never as a weapon).
After you ride a wave, don’t race back out and grab the next one from somebody who was waiting.
More than 20 years passed before I saw Rabbit again, this time out at Queens in a frothy summer swell.
He regarded me with his big, deep-set eyes. “I know you,” he said, and I felt honored and reminded to behave.
The other morning out at Suis, there was a young woman from Japan on a soft-topped longboard. She floundered onto a wave, wiped out, clambered back on her board — and then just floated there, motionless as a giant jellyfish, in the impact zone.
I could hear Uncle Shippy’s stern voice in my head. “Kids. Remember. The only time your board should be parallel to shore is when you’re riding the wave.”
The surfers steered around her, but someone could have gotten hurt. Eventually the waves and current carried her shoreward, and she finally started paddling to avoid running into the table reef, marked by a skeletal Christmas tree. In a post-holiday tradition for at least 45 years, someone sticks a fir tree upright in a rusty pipe at the edge of the reef, where it stands until it’s replaced with a fresh tree the next year.
At Suis, “went past the tree” means the ultimate ride.
Later, seeing the woman on the beach, I introduced myself and demonstrated in the shallows how to turn turtle and keep the nose of her board pointed at the horizon.
I had to face it: I’m a kupuna now.
The other evening, as a set wave rolled in, a guy in his 20s — a former Suis grom — caught my eye with a nod, acknowledging that he was too deep. So I went. Carving around the groms as they paddled out through the impact zone, their eyes widening with alarm when I didn’t back off, I rode that gift all the way past the Christmas tree.
“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. It appears every other Sunday. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.
