Just Add Water: A Surfing Savant's Journey with Asperger's
288
Just Add Water: A Surfing Savant's Journey with Asperger's
288eBook
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Overview
From childhood, it was obvious that Clay Marzo’s single-minded focus on surfing was unique, his skills otherworldly. But the deeper reasons for this obsession didn’t become clear until his late teens, when Marzo was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.
Marzo was already a surfing phenom, winning the National Scholastic Surfing Association championship at fifteen, but it was tough for him to relate to his peers and fit in. Only while surfing did he truly feel at peace. Just Add Water is the remarkable story of Marzo’s rise to the top of the pro surfing world—and the personal trials he overcame in making it there. Unflinching and inspiring, it is a brave memoir from a one-of-a-kind surfing savant who has electrified fans around the world and whose story speaks to the hope and ultimate triumph of the human spirit.
“Marzo is one of the most amazing surfers to come along in years. He’s fantastic—and so is this book. Great stuff.” —Peter Townend, 1976 world surfing champion
“An intriguing read for any surfer, and details the life of Clay Marzo with tact and illumination. Writing the biography of one of Hawaii's most exceptional surfers is a great responsibility, and Yehling did so in a real, raw way that captures the reader's attention.” —Freesurf
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544253179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In the Pocket
There’s a set! Look at the set coming! Look at the first one barreling .?.?. here comes one—look at this one, dude! See how you go underground when you’re in there, then it throws you into the shallow? Sometimes there’s a little left that goes into the bay, a re-form that happens when it gets really big—but you’d rather surf somewhere else .?.?. you don’t want to surf out here when it’s bigger than five or six feet. It gets too gnarly, closes out, and throws you on that shallow reef. This is a small wave spot. It’s the steepest small wave around. It’s best when it’s glassy, but the wind’s coming from a weird direction .?.?. see how the wave is balling up?
was a big set we saw earlier, so much bigger than anything else .?.?. that was the north influence. The south influence pushes into the total wave shape. It breaks from two directions here, sometimes at the same time. It gives me a thrill, this kind of wave.
The pristine waters off Maui’s west coast convey majesty and presence befitting the ancient Polynesian Sport of Kings. They are about to be stirred by a tall, angular magician with a swimmer’s build and moves that very few on earth can match. Every time Clay Marzo enters the Pacific—nearly every sunlit hour of every day he’s not traveling, if the waves cooperate—he paddles out to commingle with his soul, which seems to breathe with gills. Waves come to him as if silently summoned, enabling him to turn around, drop in, and unleash rides so dynamic, outrageous, daring, and graceful that you’re left grasping for superlatives. He speeds through waves like a dolphin, explodes off the top like an attacking leopard, inverts and bends into impossible positions like an Olympic gymnast .?.?. and always seems to land on his feet. Like a cat.
Such is the case on a warm morning charged with sea spray and crowded surf spots, which can mean only one thing: the waves are pounding. The season’s first major northwest swell has arrived, bringing waves up to forty feet at infamous Pe’ahi, or Jaws, where tow-in surfers risk their lives as they tackle the monsters calved by a disturbance in the Aleutian Islands, far to the north. Meanwhile, at a break called Windmills, Clay Marzo sits with a videographer, fifteen miles and a world away from the nineteenth-century colonial seaside mystique of Lahaina and the luxury resorts on Kaanapali Beach. To the southeast, Haleakala towers two miles above the island, a conic crown and dormant volcano where Jimi Hendrix once played live, where silence surpassed only by space exists.
Silence. Nothing suits Clay better. He is entirely silent as he faces west, his hands smacking the steering wheel, his body twitching. He surveys the horizon, then the lineup, where waves peel in both directions from their breaking point. His mind works out the wave angles, where they break, how they break, and how the current and ever-present trade winds impact them. When wave faces approach fifteen feet, as they do at Windmills on this day, good choices can become life-saving choices. His focus is laserlike, absolute. Nothing can or will interrupt his concentration.
After studying the waves for forty-five minutes, Clay grabs his board and walks toward the ocean. He walks away from his life on land, a mighty and never-ending struggle between the way his brain is wired and the noise, crowds, social interactions, expectations, anxieties, and facial expressions the rest of us use to get by. He negotiates the everyday world clumsily, always a step off or to the side, it seems. If he’s connected to it at all, which is often not the case. If the activity of the moment isn’t about surfing, eating, basketball, music, or his girlfriend, Jade Barton, he’s oblivious. Uncomfortable.
There’s nothing uncomfortable about the way he approaches the ocean. His coordination while walking rocks and steep trails is superior, rhythmic, and smoother than the way most people amble down the road. His eyes scan from side to side, watching the action of every wave, calculating where to paddle out and position himself. He throws himself into the frothing shorebreak, surfaces, shakes his head a few times, yells out with excitement (or is it the relief of no longer being on land?), and sets off in the direction of the neighboring island of Lanai with paddle strokes that his videographer, Adam Klevin, calls “the best I’ve ever seen. He would win every paddle battle there is. Hands down.”
Minutes later, a set of twelve- to fifteen-foot behemoths approaches. Clay paddles into position. He notices a bump in the wave, a subtle shift beyond the sensory range of most humans. He wheels his board around and strokes to a point he’s already predetermined and anticipated through knowledge and intuition. His deep, powerful strokes are those of a champion swimmer. His instincts are beyond that. When a wave emerges and jacks up to its full two-story height, Clay sits in perfect position. He sticks a GoPro camera in his mouth (he and Klevin are filming), paddles hard, easily catches the wave, and looks down the line, his right foot forward, the direction in which he faces the wave.
Let the show begin. Clay connects in a way one would imagine Mozart diving into the wellspring of his latest symphony, Beethoven hugging the floor with his deaf ear to feel the vibration of his Fifth, or Monet immersing himself in French light. He races down the wave face as it peels behind him, seemingly at one with it. Clay leans like a motorcycle street racer into a deep bottom turn and propels himself up the face, then slots himself inside the pocket of the wave.
Just like that, he’s gone. Disappeared. Out of view. Spectators on the rocky beach or in their cars wonder the same thing: is he coming out?
Seconds later he emerges, arms raised high, GoPro still in his mouth, the shot of him scorching a nasty Windmills barrel certain to be played over and over on his flat-screen later in the day. And soon, on video throughout the world. Whenever Clay Marzo hits it big, the beach buzzes and the world finds out soon enough. “Kid’s off the charts,” says Les Potts, a long-board surfing legend who’s produced and witnessed plenty of greatness in his fifty years of surfing. “How’d he find that tube?”
This is where rides usually end, where most surfers pull out and paddle into position for another wave while story-building their ride to everyone else in the lineup.
Clay is warming up for round two. His fans on the beach wonder, what the hell is he going to do next? They cannot guess, but they know they may see something no other surfer in the world will attempt, let alone execute successfully. Anything is possible.
Clay whips to the bottom of the wave to gain speed and propulsion, then smacks it off the top, getting a few feet of air before landing in the wave. He throws the tail of his board sideways, like a skateboarder in a half-pipe, leaving a rooster tail of displaced water, and descends onto the diminishing lip backwards.
Now it’s time for the Merlin moment, when a wizard’s instincts take over: about to be swallowed by the massive turbulence, and while lying back almost in a sleeping position, he whips the tail of the board back around. With cat-quick moves and the flexibility of a long-standing yogi, he jerks to his feet, his reverse throw-tail complete, and snaps a few more moves—Bam! Bam! Bam! He keeps standing until his board sinks, slowly taking him down. Call it surfing’s version of the denouement, when the hero rides into the sunset.
Table of Contents
1 In the Pocket 1
2 The Shorebreak Toddler 9
3 Rough Landing in School 21
4 Contests, Barrels - and a New Sister 35
5 A Surfing Family 49
6 School Daze 69
7 King Tide in Water, Ebb Tide on Land 85
8 Perfection 99
9 New Sensation 111
10 Playing on Camera 123
11 Storm Clouds 137
12 Diagnosis: Asperger's Syndrome 151
13 Learning About Asperger's 161
14 Just Add Water: The Movie 169
15 Cheyne and Me 183
16 Why Contests Stopped Being Fun 199
17 Why Is Living the Dream So Uncomfortable? 213
18 Life 221
19 Jade 229
20 Connecting with a Larger Community 241
21 Reading the Ocean: A Gift of Asperger's 251
Acknowledgments 265
Glossary of Surfing Terms 267