A day past the peak of a big summer swell, I was standing at the stairs above Sans Souci Beach, checking Inside Castles for leftovers, when a low voice called my name. A dark, broad-shouldered man stepped out of the shadows.
It took me a second to recognize Yoga Dude, a nickname by which my surf sister Grace and I refer to him, just between the two of us. A notorious local Pipeline charger, he sent ripples of excitement through the lineup when he showed up and became a regular at Suis for a time, but Grace and I were underwhelmed.
A couple of years ago, he vanished.
“Hi Gardner (not his real name),” I said. “Where’ve you been?”
“I was injured bad at Pipe. Couldn’t surf.”
I said I was sorry. He’d had a series of violent accidents at Pipe over the years. He was looking well, standing tall and straight, but despite his rakish smile there was a tinge of sadness in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.
“I’m OK now, I’ve been surfing Town, mostly Publics,” he said, referring to the steep, fast break on the shallow reef Ewa of Waikiki Aquarium. “I never go to Suis — I couldn’t stand all those groms.” He was referring to the invasion of very young surfers whom some have compared to locusts.
“There are fewer groms this summer, and they’re showing less pack behavior.” I paused, remembering that Gardner always paddled out with his own posse.
“All I care about is Pipe. I don’t need to sweat this manini s—,” he said, his brow clouding over with the dark mood that came over him sometimes. He’d shout at other surfers, threatening them if they so much as paddled for “his” waves. Once he chased after some teenagers, badly scaring them.
Gardner is one of the many local surfers who’ve proved their skill and courage over the years at Pipeline. In any given year, standout Pipe surfers who aren’t on the professional world tour or haven’t amassed enough qualifying points to enter the elite Pipe Masters championship might be chosen to compete in the Pipe Invitational in December. The top two scorers at the invitational get to enter the Pipe Masters with wild card status, and Gardner had achieved this a couple of times.
“I live for Pipe. That’s the only wave I want to surf,” Gardner said. “But Publics was so perfect the other day in that swell.”
When I first met him at Suis, eight years ago, he was telling everyone he’d moved back to town and was opening a yoga studio. He seemed very pleased with himself, tossing his shoulder-length hair as he shredded the Suis lefts. That’s when Grace and I started calling him Yoga Dude. Once he overheard us laughing at him, and frowned.
As a result, we were the only Suis regulars not to be invited to his studio-warming party. But over the years, what began as mockery became a term of endearment, for we discovered that Gardner was inherently a warmhearted, generous soul. He took us under his wing, coaching and encouraging us in the waves. Once he asked if I had children, and I told him about my grown-up son in New York.
“I have a son,” Gardner said. The boy was in elementary school in California, and his mother had custody, but Gardner hoped to have him for the summer.
THE DAY after I saw Gardner at the beach, my yoga class in Chinatown couldn’t get into the studio because someone had smashed the lock box, so a fellow student brought us to her condo building’s gym.
It was hard to relax and meditate amid the loud disco music and shouts of pingpong players whose balls kept pelting us.
“You can do this,” our teacher said. “Just let it go.”
She asked us to envision something we loved, or a cherished goal, and I remembered my happy surprise that morning when my son, leaving on a trip, texted me a photo of a book lying atop the clothes in his suitcase. It was my book, published long ago. My goal is to write another, but life — OK, surf — gets in the way.
“We went deep today,” the teacher said, and I thought of Gardner, whose stated goal is to go deep through a big barrel at Pipe but who may, like me, want more than anything to have more time with his son.
“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.
