Day Of The Kooks

Every kook has its day. Or so they say.

The word, and concept, of “kook”, a beginner or inept surfer, is something that is unique to the occupation of surfing. It is derived from the word “kukae”, which, in the Hawaiian language, means “shit”. It is one of a handful words originating from Polynesian languages that have made their way into common usage in the English language. Others are kava, booze made from the roots of a plant, popular and widespread in remote areas of the Northern Territory, and taboo, stuff you’re not allowed to do or talk about, like marrying your cousin, unless of course you’re a member of a European royal family, where incest is the preferred way of having sex and where inbreeding,  mental retardedness and having two heads are considered valuable and worthwhile contributions to humanity’s gene pool. Ubiquitous around the world now, tattoo is the world Polynesians used to describe the designs they had etched under their skins with ink, a practice that had existed among pagan European societies 6,000 years ago, but had fallen into disuse by the time Euro explorers made it into the Pacific in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Current academic theory on the subject veers towards adherence to the proposal that tattooing was banned with the advent of christianity in Europe, which viewed bodily decorations as being an altogether too aesthetically pleasing practice to be able to be tolerated. It was suspiciously viewed as something that made people more attractive for sexual purposes, and was therefore considered wholly unacceptable on the basis that it had the potential of being a source of joy, inspiration and happiness in people’s lives, qualities that were not deemed acceptable under christian doctrine, being, as they were, counter productive to the principal christian objectives of suffering, being miserable, and making other people’s lives hell.

A word the Polynesian origin of which is less well known is the word “wiki”, as in Wikipedia, my favourite webpage. Wiki means “fast”. This therefore allows us to construct the approximate and hypothetical pan-Polynesian term “wiki kook”. It means “fast shit”.

It was a term we’d come to be all too well acquainted with on this day, unfortunately.

I’d taken a spare five minutes to check out the surf from on top of a lookout on a low crag (a word, incidentally, of Gaelic origin, meaning “rock”) that we have here near our surf break. I was amazed to see long, straight and perfect lines of swell rolling into the bay and past our pointbreak by the silver light of the full moon, and I bolted like mad, bursting with enthusiasm and eager anticipation, running into the surf under the black blanket of the night sky.

I threw myself manically into the water, started paddling like mad, and discovered that my fingers got stuck into the sand. Sheepishly I stood up again. The water reached up to my ankles. What? It didn’t normally do that. I looked a bit closer, past my blind keenness and overstimulated senses, and noticed that not only was the tide out, it looked like it had made a long shopping list, had an appointment with the hairdresser, and was intending to spend more than a few good hours standing in line outside the employment office, potentially with a one-way ticket around the world in its pocket.

I’d never seen so much sand.

So walked over a barely covered sandbank where under normal circumstances I’d be chin-deep in water, dragging my board behind me in fine professional style, and waded onwards, hundreds and hundreds of metres out. Eventually the water reached up to my waste, at a point on the beach approximately halfway to New Zealand, and I lay on my board again to have another go.

I spotted the black shape in the dark that I knew would be The Uncle, champion of the abandoned and the fatherless, and paddled over. I pulled up next to him, straddled my board and looked around. Above us, black sky, the Milky Way, and the bright almost-full moon. Disconcertingly shallowly below us, lots of sand. The fluid medium in between, the water, where we’d fancied we might get some rides, conspicuously light-on.

...’How low is this tide!’ I exclaimed by way of greeting, feeling an irrepressible need to state the blatantly obvious, one of my many strong conversational points.

   ‘Really fucking low,’ grumbled The Uncle, whose outlook on life is not so much determined by the age-old conundrum of whether the glass is half full or half empty, but rather characterised by the fact that there is no glass to begin with, and the art of making glass from sand hasn’t been invented yet.

   ‘Right’, I nodded in agreement, and looked around for a second assessment. Over there, near the point, I could make out a few dim shapes. Looked like we had been snaked again. This was the second time that our full-moon gatherings had been gate-crashed. Didn’t these invaders know that this was our time on our patch? Normal, sane human beings were supposed to be in bed and not show their faces at our break until well after sunrise and we’d be finished. Whatever was the world coming to.

Sure enough, with the next wave that arrived one of the shapes took off like greased lightning, and we could see clearly the outline of a boogie-boarder, lying flat inside the hollow, and, to our great disgust, we watched as the roof curved over the top of him, locking him inside of the tube, and off he went, VROOOOM!

Even in the dark I could see my reflection in The Uncle’s outraged eyeballs. It was green, with envy.

   ‘Well, that’s us fucked, isn’t it,’ I stated with feeling. The Uncle nodded his agreement glumly. It wasn’t looking good.

It wasn’t the presence of the boogie-boarders that was thwarting us. That can be negotiated and worked around. It was the speed and power with which the waves were breaking, and the complete and utter lack of anything resembling a depth of water underneath them.

We tried.

A wave came through, the Uncle paddled like a man pursued by tax collectors, and, as I watched from the sidelines, he pulled into the hole in what, on any other day, would have been a perfect take-off. He dropped down, jumped to his feet, got smashed in the back of the head by a wall of whitewash moving at supersonic speed, got picked up like a ragdoll, catapulted head over arse forwards and downwards, and, as he got dragged and tumbled down into the maelstrom (a word, by the way, of Scandinavian origin,indicating an ocean-current eddy of monstrous proportions where dragons lay in waiting to devour unsuspecting wayward sailors and their ships) of whitewash and sand, less than ten centimetres deep, his board got spat out like an indigestible component of the wave’s breakfast, drawing a perfect beeline to the moon overhead before crashing back down again violently mere inches from his head.

I stuck my head underwater so he wouldn’t hear me laughing at him. He’s sensitive like that.

   ‘Blubblubblub pppffffrrrrtttshhhh.’

   ’Yeah, that was good mate,’ I eventually said, after having regained the ability to breathe air through my ears. ‘Now watch this, I’ll show you how it’s done.’

And with that I paddled furiously for an oncoming wave, eyeing it up and down critically, aiming for the perfect spot in which to position myself, far away enough from the violence of the short sharp sudden break, yet close enough to the heart of the action to be able to, majestically, no less, slide into the hole of the wave and ride it out victoriously.

Timing everything meticulously just right, I paddled, glided, jumped up ... and got smashed sideways by the crest of the wave breaking so ferociously fast and suddenly that it made the high speed trains of Japan look like dilapidated donkey carts. I disappeared into an avalanche of black water and white foam, ground my face into the ocean floor, and came back up again with a mouth full of sand.

...’Spurrrrfft,’ I said eloquently, as I spat the sand out, narrowly ducking my board, which was, like a heat-seeking missile, finally landing far too close for comfort.

The Uncle had the great grace of not saying a word, which would have been pretty hard, considering that he seemed to be holding his head under the water and blowing bubbles, for some bizarre reason.

Dejectedly we drifted down. The moon shone down on us unpityingly, and with murder in our hearts we watched the boogie-boarders catch barrel after barrel, their glowing smiling faces illuminated by the moonshine. We shouted praise and congratulations at them, with good social grace, and laid plans to knife their tyres as soon as we got out of the water. Four per car, five if they had their spare on the backdoor.

It was impossible to get on a wave on our longboards. In these conditions, our big planks of 9’6’’ and counting had no hope in hell. The sea gurgled and slurped disdainfully as it drained still further off the sandbank, exposing the hardwood ribs of Chinese ships sunken here 600 years ago and not seen since.

I went over the falls, the deadly leading edge of the braking wave, more times than I could count. I managed to scrape to my feet a couple of times for a couple of seconds, before stacking it in inches-deep water. There did not seem to be any way of riding these vile feral things from hell, or, if there was, I hadn’t heard of it.

Neither had The Uncle, I thought glumly, as I watched him resolutely strike out towards yet another suicide event. A wave came roaring along from behind him – strange how very small very shallow waves can make sounds like bulldozers hell-bent on crushing environmental protection proponents at a blockade – and he flapped his arms hysterically, trying to stay on the good side of it, hyperventilating all the while. The waters rose up behind him, he looked over his shoulder with a last glance of desperation born from sleep deprivation and chronic poor judgement, and as the crest started to crumble, he rose to his feet like the Kraken from Davey Jones’ Locker. Due to some unnatural instinct never given any sign of before or since, he bent down low, folding his nose backwards over his right knee.

And, with the moonlight falling down on his face, eyeballs popping out and swivelling around in circles with manic apoplexy, a look of sheer stupefied disbelief on his face, the crest of the wave bent over him, arcing gracefully into the shape of a roof, and, highlighted by a stray moonbeam framing him inside of the perfect tube, The Uncle rode his longboard through a barrel barely big enough to hold a five-year-old on a boogie board. A ride of sheer and utter majesty and triumph.

For about two seconds.

Then reality caught up with the world, the wave cottoned onto the fact that it had been hoodwinked into cooperating, clearly having lapsed momentarily into an unacceptable state of user-friendliness, and with renewed effort doubled its onslaught and crushed The Uncle like an extra virgin olive.

But he made it, fair and square. For those two or three glorious seconds he was right inside that barrel, on the most impossible day with unrideable waves we’ve ever seen. He was in the barrel, and I was there to bear witness.

We’ll have to call him The Barrel Master now.

Wiki Kooks indeed.