A Native Son of the Golden West, California writer James Houston’s first novel, was published in 1971; he went on to write several other well-received fiction and nonfiction books, and his essays appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times. Native Son is set in the mid-1950s, and opens with California surfer Hooper Dunlap flying into Honolulu, where he tracks down his friend Jonas Vandermeer in a dingy Waikiki hotel room.

Joe is twenty-one, has lived in the sun for eight years on California beaches wearing no more than he wears this morning, an old pair of striped golf knickers trimmed above the knee. And Joe has never tanned. Nor has he burned, or even reddened. The sun can do nothing to Joe’s skin but assault each layer till it flakes away and hope the one below is thinner or newer or somehow subject to change. But Joe’s skin has never changed, always dusty white, sprinkled with blond hairs and stretched over knots and clumps and welts of muscles hardened in his daily wrestle with the sea.

He says to Hooper, “You want to go in the water?”

Jonas jumps up and stands over him, grimacing and blinking. “Jesus Christ, Hooper, why’d ya do that?”

Joe shouts, “That was a great board! A fan

“What’re you gonna do without a board?”

“Shit, you can’t rent a board. Soldiers rent boards. Summer coeds rent boards.”

Joe paces for a few moments, then slaps a fist into his palm and observes the action of his triceps in the long mirror on the closet door across the room.

“I really feet good this morning. I feel like getting wet. You know how it feels after you take a good, quick, heavy dump?”

“Well, let’s get going then. You can use my extra board.”

“I have to move my truck. The meters start at nine. I’ll meet you at the corner.” Joe is reaching for the blind.

And in a single silent stride and lift and ducking slide Joe is out the window, dropping into a net of vines, an albino Tarzan squeaking shut the rusty screen.

Jonas won’t surf at Waikiki. It’s against his principles. Not only soldiers and summer coeds rent boards and ride there, but also bank clerks on vacation, paunchy middle-aged men, canoes full of smirking tourists. Joe doesn’t consider himself a tourist. Nor does Hooper. They put themselves in a different, unnamed category of island visitor. And Joe does his surfing at Sunset Beach, forty miles through cane and pineapple fields to the north shore. They drive out there in his Reo, a onetime baker’s delivery van, a high metal box fitted inside with bunks slung from chains, decorated outside with movie posters and cartoons and random inked and painted slogans, and roofed with two surfboards that jut over the windshield like cannons on a gunboat.

See them shirtless side by side. Next to Joe’s white bulging wedge, Hooper is a bundle of sticks, his limbs coated, as Joe often jokes, with “Indian muscles,” hardly seen on the surface, but there, and waiting, somewhere next to the bone. Joe is weaving from side to side, ducking and stretching, as the traffic shifts in front of him, to find the best view among all the cracks in his windshield. And Hooper, with one lanky arm on the hot sill, is doing two things at once.

He watches this land they’re driving through, brown wood shacks of country towns, and road walls of sugarcane, meanwhile remembering earlier trips after waves in all the old cars they once owned, clanking from Los Angeles north to Santa Barbara, or south to Baja California and Mazatlan, clanking and sputtering and flat-tire cursing as far south as they could get without leaving the land, cars lashed with balsa boards, stuffed with bedrolls and diving gear—rusty station wagons, rickety Model A’s, abandoned laundry trucks, and taxicabs, and hearses. They had to be old and battered and barely running. The closer to dead the better. Some had belonged to Jonas, some to Hooper. The most treasured was the car that could travel the farthest on five cylinders, or four; three tires; or no lights. And the same measure applied to houses. And to clothing. And to food. Everything had to be old, or discarded, or cheap, or free.

Hooper’s father could never understand this, having been himself, at Hooper’s age, starving in Oklahoma, scratching hopeless soil for stillborn potatoes, and how lucky he was, coming west in the pit of the Great Depression, to find any work at all, and then when the war came along to land a job at Boeing. He’s a supervisor there, with a fine home in Glendale, and a congregation elder to boot, Brother Andrew Dunlap, a man much respected among those two hundred worshippers, most of whom traveled out with him from the South. World War Two made their dreams come true, the Korean War just multiplied their blessings, and Andrew’s still feeling lucky about the way things worked out, which is why he has told Hooper so many times how tough it was in those early days, eating cornbread and red beans all winter, hiking barefoot through deep mud to a country school that wasn’t always open when you got there. He tells such tales, of course, with considerable pride, having endured it all, and having prospered. And this is what Hooper remembers, the pride, the virtue of such denial. Sidestepping his father’s hardwon prosperity, he covets the ragged, the barefoot, and the cheap. But not the suffering. No. Sidestep the suffering too. Be ragged, but the farther south the better: Chickasha, Glendale, San Diego, Mazatlan, Oahu. Always someplace warmer. Someplace where it’s always warm, and the fields are filled with available fruit, and the sea with fish.

Now Joe is starting to talk about the waves they’ll ride today. But Hooper only half listens. He’s envying Joe this truck, wondering how he can top, or even match it. The upholstery is bursting, one running board drags on the pavement, the tires are bald, the horn seldom works, it reeks of oil and unwashed clothes and the pungent resin Joe uses to patch his boards. In Hooper’s eyes it is the ultimate vehicle. And he has to admit it’ll be hard to beat. He’ll just have to wait and see what comes his way. Meanwhile—and this comes to him just as they clear a final rise before the island slopes down to its northern rim—he figures he can at least stay even, since minimum investment and painless self-denial are the first terms of their bond and private legend, by having no car at all. Which Hooper instantly decides to do. And he is so relieved at one-upping Joe by bumming a ride in the very car he covets, and so taken with the look of this new ocean spreading out and up—the appeal water always has for him when the land falls away to reveal it—he yells out the window.

It interrupts but does not stop Joe’s loud explanation that this now calmly tropical stretch of sea curves north to Alaska, where earthquakes and winter storms make waves as high as houses, with nothing to stop them once they start until they hit this shoreline. Joe says he’s ready for them whenever they get here. They’re way overdue, as it is. And Hooper understands the loudness, the urgency in his description. It’s the way Joe used to describe Hawaii when they were both back home. These islands have the one natural resource that interests him. Not the coco palms, or the trade winds, or the spirit of Aloha. No. Oahu sits in the path of those northern swells, and it has the reefs that lift them to twenty-five, thirty, sometimes forty feet, shaped right for riding if you can get to where they break, and Joe’s one ambition is to catch a bigger wave than any other man has ridden.

Waves have never been this important to Hooper. Before he left, he sold his guitars and his surfboard, not only because he (1) needed the cash and (2) wanted no possession he couldn’t carry on his back, but also because he (3) wasn’t flying out here particularly to play music or ride waves. Yet now, listening to Joe describe waves he has already caught these past few months, the speed and steeper wall and seething tunnels you can shoot through, Hooper feels old juices reviving. And when they finally leave the sea road and break through a line of hibiscus flame and wind-tattered palms, and reach the spot, the nose of land that flares out onto lava reefs, and see swells humping blue and green peak and break with hoofbeats, curling and clattering and rushing white over inshore placid green, Hooper, and Jonas too, are unstrapping boards and waxing the surfaces frenzied, as if the last wave for all future time is scheduled to break in the next five minutes.

They slide down a short sandy cliff, leave the beach, and race for the lineup, boards aglitter in the near-noon overhead sun, their arms digging in like four adzes chipping at the water.

They swing wide to the left, paddle in behind the break, Jonas leading now, and suddenly stop, drop legs over the sides. Like that old-time statue of the hunching brave on his sagging horse, they sit hump-shouldered in a lull of surf, and wait, as if this in itself is enough, frantic paddle to end up perched offshore where sunlight ripples from the bottom, and a mile stripe of beach to edge volcanic ridges.

Waiting, silent, and after a while Joe explains the lineup.

“They peak fast, Hooper. It’s a fast takeoff, and you better only go right. Until you see how they feel. You go left and it’s pretty shallow over there. A lot of coral.”

A new set is humping. They watch it. Slyly Jonas adds, not to scare, but just to hone the edge of their sport a little sharper, since for him it isn’t sport at all, “Guy cut his legs pretty bad last week on the coral. Water was sucking up into his wave, and the tide was so low the heads were popping out in front of him. He got spooked and fell right into one.”

With underwater kicks Joe swings his board around, telling Hooper to try for the first one, take a short ride, and paddle back in time to get the last wave of the set. He isn’t that hungry. Hooper instead watches Joe take the first alone, to see how he handles it. He has never seen Joe make a mistake in the water. Joe always knows where the surf is best, where to wait, when to take off, how the reefs look, and why the currents change.

Joe flattens, waits a moment for the green slope to back-tilt his board, then one white plunge of arms and his board is sliding. He jumps to his feet, crouched, cuts right just as the wave center snaps up and over, an exploding tube, and from behind, all Hooper can see is shaggy blond hair shooting along the rim just ahead of each erupting section.

Ten seconds later, and his board slices back through the wave. Joe is nearly aloft with forward motion channeled into his pullout, white arms spread like wings for balance, feet lightly holding the deck. Then he’s flat again, paddling back like a water machine, as if pacing himself by a metronome, each stroke striving to move maximum water, just as each wave ridden is not simply a ride, but another, more perfect step toward what he came to Hawaii to do.

Daily Jonas scans each view of the horizon for any sign of change in the ocean’s face. On the sixth day, when he finally sees something, a flicker in the dawn light that seems to roll shoreward, but becomes, as Joe sprints to the water’s edge to watch it, nothing more than that distant flicker, on that day Joe climbs back in and gives himself up to the whimsy and appetite of his Reo. And the Reo makes one more lap around the island and out to Sunset Beach, where it comes to rest.

Witness the community Joe and Hooper just joined. This parking space—a stubbled clearing on the low cliff between two battered palms—which a week ago was empty, is now occupied by three other vehicles that function much like Joe’s: an old Ford station wagon, the kind with real wood paneling; a La Salle sedan, with a mattress where the backseat used to be, extending into the trunk; and a prewar Dodge pickup, with a plywood shed over its backend. They’re all nosed up close to the sandy precipice.

The owners are well known to Jonas. All come from California, all flew over about the same time he did, all are sitting out this unaccountable flat spell with the same apathy of outraged impatience, waiting through January for waves they expected in November. One or two are usually out here, or parked over at Makaha. This is the second time in history all four have arrived at Sunset on the same day. The first time it happened they named their mobile community 

, and in the breezeless heat of this Tuesday afternoon these are its citizens.

STANLEY MOREHEAD, called Sheepdog, baby-faced and trying to conceal it, not by growing a beard, but by letting stringy blond hair grow down to cover his ears and eyes, with no other part of him covered between the bridge of his nose and the line where his red pubic hair starts. A rotten pair of green satin basketball shorts hang from that line, and these reveal, as he hunkers at the cliff edge next to his station wagon’s front bumper, half his buttock cleavage.

BYRON BASSIAN, called Black Bass, a weightlifter in the off-season, has been known to shave everything and oil his body, although this isn’t necessary, since his body’s always chocolate brown and shining with sweat like a Turkish wrestler’s. He combs his black hair back, so it hugs his neck and scoops down and out Johnny Weissmuller style. He’s now lying on a blanket on the metal roof of his black La Salle, a beer can balanced on his chest.

WALTER CONQUEST is the only married man among them, and his truck, the pickup with the plywood shed, which was once a community showpiece—mats on the floor, shelves for food—is now going to hell. Walter’s wife flew back to the mainland last week to have a baby, at home, where her mother could help. Walter would have gone with her, but the surf was due at about the same time, and she understood, and he is still waiting for both events. Short, balding, husky, a miniature Black Bass bending over a surfboard set on two sawhorses behind his pickup, sanding fiberglass away to patch a tiny hole in the balsa. Sweat keeps falling from his forehead onto the sanded surface, and Walter keeps wiping it off with a red bandana.

Joe’s engine coughs and dies. No one moves. Stanley hunkers hypnotized by the sea’s absolute blue flatness. Black Bass is a chocolate corpse about to slide into it. The only sound is the 

 of Walter’s sandpaper. Palm fronds hang limp. Joe and Hooper sit surprised by the sudden stopping after the endless jolt and rumble of the drive, bodies dazed, eyes glazed, staring at hundreds of miles of nothing.

This morning on the radio, a newsman reported earthquakes in the Aleutians. Small-craft warnings are out. A new rip is running along the beach, and another runs straight out from shore toward the break, as if pumped from a great pipe under there. Signs. Portents. Shock waves pushing into the north Pacific are already giving southbound shape to ice water moving past the bergs, not the water moving, but the shape itself, fanning out, picking up speed. Some of them will hit Wake Island, some New Guinea, some Antarctica, some hit nothing, but swing around the Horn or south Australia and roll on till they dissipate, shape giving out, settling down weeks later, limp, finished, flat. But one band of these oceanwides will hit Oahu, pile up on reefs out there, piling till there’s more water than the shape can hold, and Jonas knows no man yet has ridden a wave as large as the one he’ll ride when the quake shocks and high tide and storm that’s due all hit at once.

Joe knows the story of Shorty Baker, in fact heard it from Shorty’s lips, and stored it away in his catalogue of wave lore, cross-filed under B for Baker, S for Sunset, C for close-out. It was late in ’54, the first year in modern times anyone tried the winter surf out here. Shorty was the pioneer, the same way he pioneered Makaha a few years earlier, and is said to have pioneered the Tijuana Sloughs right after the Second World War, riding an oldtime redwood plank. According to Shorty, in December of ’54 it just came up all of a sudden, overnight, bam, the biggest waves he’d ever seen. Shorty and two others got caught in a close-out set, and the rips started carrying them north, a mile or so in the direction of Kauai. Shorty knew the reefs and currents well enough to get everyone back to the beach, but it took two hours of hard paddling to make it, all of them vomiting their guts out, curled up on the sand and too sick to walk. And Shorty later admitted that none of them took off on the biggest waves that broke that day. Being out there among them was enough in itself.

Joe also knows the story of Holoua, a man of Kauai, whose house was washed out to sea in the great tidal wave of 1868. Tearing a plank from the wall of his living room, Holoua is said to have ridden the next wave, a fifty-footer, back to shore. This is, of course, only a legend. Even if it were true, Joe figures Holoua most likely rode the wave lying down. Which in any case wouldn’t count.

Jonas knows all the stories, likes to tell them, and hear them told, and to know that soon he too will be remembered in the backends of station wagons, all along the running boards of old limousines around the coastlines of the world.

The sun’s up, but still behind the mountain, three trucks at Sunset Automotive and six boards scattered, waiting, like rifles in a gun room before the alarm goes out. Oyster light of post-dawn tints them, two boards up against Sheepdog’s wagon, one on the ground, two on sawhorses next to Walter’s pickup, one at the cliff edge, resting on its skeg, uptilted. In this lot of dented cars and charred scoops of campfire and tin-can litter and rotten clothes hung from limbs in the breezeless morning air, these boards gleam like armor, like firetrucks, like shipboard cannon. Every deck is waxed for surefootedness, every onetime hole now patched and waterproof, everything else can go to hell but the boards stay sleek, slabs of balsa finely rounded, sheathed with fiberglass.

Now Joe and Sheepdog and Walter come tumbling from the trucks to stand among these boards, rub eyes, stare at the waves that have made sleep impossible. The ocean’s sigh and murmur that become a moan and growl is now a howl and grinding roar, and this isn’t surf anymore. It’s a stampede avalanche of water. The waves breaking a second time, fifty yards offshore, are the size of those they rode yesterday—now the first barrier to push through. The outside break is something none of them has ever seen before, except in pictures, and the pictures lied because they don’t make the sound, or show the heave of a whole ocean in front, behind, on all sides of the great waves.

There isn’t much to say. It’s what they’ve been waiting for. They stand in a row along the cliff for thirty minutes, watching it, timing the sets, stony-faced. Then Sheepdog and Walter, like deputy sheriffs called to duty, grab two boards from the armory, and kneel in the dry grass fiercely waxing their decks.

Jonas tries to fry some eggs, but can hardly squat over the tiny fire. He’s shivering with morning overcast, leaves the eggs to blacken in the skillet, and reaches for his board, waxes it, leads the others down the cliff path. They wait ten minutes for a short lull to let them get past the inside break, Jonas all this time squeezing at his sphincter to keep his bowels from falling out. Finally three boards hit the water, 

The current along shore is a river now, as wide as the beach. Beyond it, the surface chop itself is almost breaking, and the white water after each big wave breaks is as high as the cliff they park on.

Three is always the magic number, Sheepdog tells himself, paddling out. All good things come three. Bad things too. Trinity is nonpartisan, and three any way you look at it is the one to watch. Three blind mice. Three bears. Three strikes you’re out. Three little words. Rubadubdub three men in a tub. Three times this month the surf comes up. Today’s the third day of the third pulse. I’m third man paddling behind Joe and Walter, and every third stroke I push a little harder. One—two—THREE. One—two—THREE. I will wait for the third set after we get out there, and I will take off on the third wave of that set.

Three cars pull into the clearing just about the time the surfers reach the takeoff zone. Joe and Walt join Sheepdog in letting the first two sets roll through untouched, looking them over, every wave a twenty-footer and no one anxious to try till they see how things look up close. This gives the new arrivals time to hop out and set up cameras. Tripods on the cliff edge, telephoto lenses. One man, in a hooded sweatshirt, is making a movie. Another is looking for a sports feature to sell the Honolulu paper. More equipment is on its way. Shutterbugs and spectators.

The third car, a Model A sedan, carries three surfboards strapped to its roof and three more Californians who’ve been mainly riding at Waikiki and who would remain for a long time today sitting in this car, contemplating these outlandish waves, were it not that the third set is humping out there and someone has paddled over right in under the peak and has barely missed getting swamped by two waves the size of department stores and now seems ready to actually try for the third, from a position that would only be taken by a blind man who couldn’t possibly perceive what he’s getting into. He’s starting too late, it’s going to break on top of him. They leap from the car and run to the cliff edge waving, shouting, “No! No! No!” One runs back to blare the horn 

None of this reaches Sheepdog. He only hears the rumble all around of waves broken and threatening to break, he only knows that the third one is ready now, so it’s three hard strokes, and three strokes more. It’s one—two—three, and one—two—three, and one—two—THREE, and the wave of his choice scoops Sheepdog to its high crest.

Below him there’s no slope. A sheer wall. The wave lets go. The blond board plummets.

On shore the new arrivals are cringing. Their faces contort. Sheepdog seems suspended mid-face on the wave, floating, and the whiteness itself is suspended above, giving him one saintly moment of terrible grace, tiny brown body upright and waiting, with palms out from his waist, not Christ-like, but as if to say, “You see? You see?” before the tumbling wave falls all over him like ten thousand sacks of wet cement.

Overcast today, oyster sky turning pewter, the first lick of water at his instep and Joe’s scrotum draws, he has to hold his face together. Flesh feels old and loose and useless. Water colder than he’s ever known it in the islands, starts him paddling fast to keep warm, warm the chest. Pecs tight with little spasms as he hits the current that sweeps him toward the break. Easy to get out there now. Too easy. Double hard getting back, if you have to swim. Slow down then. Don’t paddle too fast. Save the calories. Save the arms for getting into waves fast. Get out fast too, on the first few rides. Less chance of losing it. Won’t have to swim so much. That’s what wears you down. Shorty said four out of seven is a good average in surf this size. Make four, swim for three, you’re not doing too bad. I can beat that. One thing at a time. First, get the takeoff wired. Then the long wall.

He watches Sheepdog’s Kamikaze drop, later sees him bobbing far inshore, boardless and hacking at the foam, trying to swim for it. On the fourth set, Joe tries a wave, like looking down a canyon, cuts a half-moon as he slides down, then up, over the top and out the back. Test flight. He paddles back toward the takeoff zone, still shivering, still cold and rubbing palms as he waits out there for Walter, who took the wave behind him and made it. Sheepdog is now far down the beach, dogpaddling against the rip, two hundred yards below the clearing, and still no board in sight.

By midmorning five more riders have paddled out. Two paddled back in after a few halfhearted tries. Two took wipeouts—neither as spectacular as Sheepdog’s since no one dares get that far into the curl—and called it quits. One man remains out there with Joe and Walter, a Hawaiian named Horse who works at Waikiki Beach.

The clearing has filled with spectators, lenses, more boards and battered cars. Down the coast road a quarter of a mile, where the trees open up, there’s another patch of cars, people perched on hoods with binoculars, a touring bus parked, a score of cameras, and lots of narrow-brim straw hats.

Joe’s shivering has stopped. He’s finding a rhythm now. And it’s easier to try the big ones when you know camera shutters are clicking whirring to record it all. No more legends. These rides will be preserved. Images to blow up later and measure with calipers.

Horns are honking too, all the time. It’s a way for spectators to get into the act. Cliff-watchers can see farther than someone in the water, so when a set starts to build outside, you send signals. One honk means take the wave right in front of you. Two means wait for the next one. Three honks means wait for the third, it’s the biggest, looks the best.

The waves are now five feet higher than when Joe first paddled out. And they’re growing. Each set seems bigger than the last, seems to peak a little farther out. Now a new set rises, and Joe and Walter and Horse paddle toward it, paddle hard, not to get caught when it breaks. On shore everyone is honking in unison ONE, ONE, ONE, which means the wave following is either too big or will break too far out to reach. Horse and Walter swing into position. But Joe thinks to himself, “Fuck those assholes,” and he paddles up the face of it, pushes through the slapping crest, drops to the valley, with a glump of his vital organs, arms driving into water marbled scummy white foam. He hears the horns again, blaring ONE, ONE, ONE, pleading 

. Again Joe paddles toward it, climbs the front, and blinks saltwater out, craning. From its spuming crest he sees the third wave bulging toward him, and beyond that the fringes of a fourth so big it’s already frothing, and beyond those stand others, like endless Himalayan ridges, clouding the horizon.

He sinks into this valley, thinking “Closeout set,” figuring wave number three will have to be the one, and doesn’t notice that all the horns along the cliff are silent. He sees the spot he wants, ten yards away, digs for it till the wave is bulked above him, jade green, foam-veined, cupped with silver from the graying sky. He swings his board, curved palms stroking for speed, looking back to judge the time, up and up and up to see the top. Stroking. Hard. Hard. Harder. A breath-grabbing lift, an instant glance down the deep well of it, then a thirty-foot fall, plowing to the bottom where his board catches, spurts out across the curving wall, and Joe knows he has it, hears the sharp clean hissing as it steepens and knows he can’t make a mistake. Hears the peak behind him thundering shut, while in front of him it opens wider, endless, still expanding.

And so intent is Joe upon the speed and balance, he doesn’t hear the horns that now begin to bellow, the choral triumph of squawks and beeps and 

. From the clearing, sweatshirted girls are yelling. Sheepdog is leaning on his horn and yelling, “Go Jonas! Go go go!” Grown men are shouting at the ocean. Engines roar. A Minnesota husband at the tour bus turns to sun-hatted wife, “That fella’s having himself quite a time out there.”

Quite a time, yes, and going all the way, flawless ride, milking it because he knows it’ll be the day’s last. He rides a hundred yards, and as the waves dwindles from thirty-plus to fifteen or so, just before the great swell grades out too flat to ride, jumps to another angling from the west, a renegade heap of whitewash, and he takes that ten-footer the other way, toward the crowd, now frenzied with delight, and makes it almost to the beach before he drops to his knees, board still moving, and starts to paddle for a five-foot lick of shorebreak that carries Jonas right up onto the draining sand, where well-wishers have already run down to meet him, cameramen pushing in close with expensive lenses to get every moment of this fantastic ride, from takeoff to beach-walk.

And Joe, as if he’s all alone somewhere in the South Pacific, bends and gathers up his board, and starts his slow stroll back along hard sand to the cliff path, dragging feet in the tide rush, glancing seaward from time to time, checking it out, ignoring all the hands extended, smiling once as he climbs the path. Without drying off, while the cameras whirr and snap, he breaks out a long can of Danish sardines, keys it open, and sitting on the sand-caked running board of his van he begins to eat them one at a time, his long-awaited breakfast, dark grease dripping off his wrist, running to his elbow, dropping to the hairy thigh.

EXCERPT FROM "A NATIVE SON OF THE GOLDEN WEST" BY JAMES HOUSTON (1971)

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