North Shore Utopia

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The North Shore isn’t always as idyllic as you might imagine.

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Text and Photos by Stéphane Robin.

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Music by Drew Sparrow.

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Hawaii’s not somewhere you just turn up by chance, as the pros know all too well. They come because of the waves, the kudos, or both. Others are driven by a myth: they come to find answers, goals, challenges. Drew was 25 and surfing off the mainland, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to experience all this times ten, make his own boards and launch himself into an adventure in the sunset. I had come to lose myself once again in the seven miles of the North Shore. It was December and the contest season was reaching its peak, but something wasn’t going right.Fierce squalls ripped across the beach. The line-up had disintegrated. No one was interested in the scant few on-shore metres. The surfers had had enough of getting their ears pounded. In the distance, a couple of guys were paddling in a yellow dugout canoe. The spray was splashing into their faces. I was almost cold. The sun came out at irregular intervals. The sand was damp. It had been raining all night. At times, I’d thought the curtains of my digs were going to be ripped off. Was this a normal December? It’s possible; the swell came and went. Even in Hawaii, there are years with and without. It was Sunday. In ten days it would be Christmas. I didn’t know if that made any difference. To be honest, I couldn’t care less. The first decorations lit up the houses at night. Somehow, it was all or nothing, like the rest of society. There were some guys coming past doing stand-up paddle. The wind was ideal for down wind. A hundred metres further on was the pipe master, playing against the intermittent swell of the wind. It was a contest like many others, but with no waves and no challenge. This year, Mick was the champion and the rest were nothing to speak of.In the team house, people killed time, and the Mac had become their best friend. There were no waves so they surfed the net:Myspace, Facebook, Youriding, Youtube. The riders were like everyone else, living in a parallel world of avatars, self-adulation and fiction.A mixture that provided distraction from the all too bitter reality. How did they manage it, just staying inside a house when they were 20 metres from the sea? Surf overdose or just blasé? “This is not the place for me to be,” was the non-stop refrain in my car. That song would be a hit, for sure. Without realising it, Drew had become a storyteller. Drew Sparrow was my room mate: surfer, shaper, singer searching for the ultimate place to live. In that song, he took you with him on a journey to a world where things were possible. It made you feel like you were really there with him. You could imagine yourself getting on that plane and landing in Hawaii, aloha hello goodbye.But all those possibilities seemed to evaporate with one glance at the line-up. The waves were bad, so you had to do something else.Run, fight or get laid? That was still better than wandering from place to place like that Spanish lot who couldn’t come to terms with the idea that there’s good and bad in Hawaii.The wonderful mixture of dream and superstition remained. In a shaping room set up right at the back of Owl Chapman’s place, Drew was sawing around the outline of his third board. That’s why he’d come here – to find an answer, to learn to shape, to escape that “strange feeling” that drove him to board that plane.Half covered in dust, he explored the endless possibilities of the electric planer. He had come here with a bag full of tools, but his own tools weren’t much good.The foam resisted his efforts and the Surform hurt his hands, but he still carried on. Double concave or boxy rails – he didn’t know which yet, but it didn’t matter. He would write Sparrow on it in pencil, and that alone gave it a certain magic.I turned back towards the beach for a moment. The wind played a soft note on the bottle I held in my hand. The line-up had filled up. A few photographers were capturing on celluloid what was already history – the history of December 2007 in Hawaii, the Triple Crown, its myths and legends. A young couple went down to the beach from a house on the seashore. They were playing with a dog and disappeared in the glow of the sunset. Behind them, someone was doing a colossal air, the last before the beer.On the Kam Highway, the dense traffic rolled slowly forwards. No one could get past 25 km/h. In the Foodland car park, it was much the same. That’s where I met Drew, who had just bought his pack of Island lager and some vegetables. The checkout clerk fired the words at me like a pistol: “Makai Card?” “Always!” and I held out a piece of paper that saved me a bit on my bill. “You save 8 dollars tonight mister Robin,” and I wanted to say, “For real?”We went back to our digs. Nothing had shifted, despite the strong wind. On the first day, I had tried to open the door with the key I’d been given. But it had turned out to be wasted effort, because it was open anyway. You just had to give the doors a good strong push. I put my shopping away in the fridge. Drew grabbed himself a beer, turned on the amp and stretched out against the wall. His trousers were still full of resin – shaping was a really dirty job. You could hear the neighbours shouting, and tins clanged into the metal dustbin. Tomorrow he had to go back to work at ThirdStone, the ultimate hardcore workshop at the Haleiwa Sugar Mill. There were always more boards to repair. It didn’t pay badly – when he actually got paid. He learned a lot at John Carper’s and was well paid, but he thought the guy was a bit weird. And this was someone who would have liked to watch Glen Minami and see the way he shaped by hand like in the old days. But first, the rent had to be paid. It’s $ 800 a month for a room here – daylight robbery, just like everywhere else. “Why why why? Is this really the place for me to be?” mused the guitar while the rain got stronger and the night closed in outside.The gusts of wind shook the walls. The dampness forced its way in through the windows that I wasn’t able to close. This house would certainly be torn down in a few years. The wood was rotten and the ceiling about to cave in. I still keep asking myself how I could have got into something like that. I was paying full price for it and I could have got something better, but I didn’t. I had gone all out for the plan B option, with all its second-class heroes and unpleasant surprises. When I booked my room by e-mail, the owner pointed out to me that it was an old shack. To begin with, we had agreed on a studio built onto his house, then he suggested this place for a slightly cheaper price. It was his mother’s house, and she went off to Costa Rica after I arrived. My money was, so to speak, financing her holidays, but I didn’t know that at the time. When I arrived, Dolly, the old woman, moved into the living room. She planned to sleep on an old mattress that she had put down, with half a dozen brightly coloured cushions. I thought it was a joke at first, but it wasn’t. I had to phone Mike Latronic to sort things out. Drew secretly gave a wry laugh, because he’d been sharing the house with Dolly for two months. He poured himself another glass of gin with a slice of grapefruit and listened to her stories that had neither beginning nor end. She had totally caught the seventies wave, and was having trouble getting off it…Drew had found this place through a small ad at Foodland, where everyone meets everyone. Because he was fed up with camping in the rain, he agreed without thinking too hard about it. For him it meant the difference between staying here and returning to his home state of Georgia. And as the journey had cost him twice as much as he’d planned, he now had to redeem what he’d spent. It wasn’t his fault. At the check-in with his electronic ticket, the ticket machine told him: “You can select an upgrade,” and he said, “Great, I’ll do that,” but actually it wasn’t free and was only a suggestion. So he travelled to Hawaii in business class. Drew living it large? Not any more, although the house was directly behind V-land, one of the best waves on the North Shore. That was a good thing in itself, but when you had to take on the whole community of local surfers to catch a good wave, he was starting to doubt whether this was really much of an advantage…The wind was still blowing and I heard the deafening roar of the waves. I really wanted to take a look. It was raining so heavily that we were surrounded by water and the garden was like a swamp. And then I couldn’t sleep with all the noise. Drew appeared at my door looking a bit scared, poured himself another glass of gin and put the TV on to get some information. “Snow storm in Alaska, torrential rain in Michigan, blocked roads in Honolulu – is this global warming?” Then just as I was about to get up from my bed, the power failed. It was a total black-out, and we were left sitting in the dark! That was one thing we hadn’t had so far. Above our heads, a piece of the house came loose with a huge roar. Drew yelled out: “It’s the end of the world, man, what the fuck? Are we all going to die now?”Not even a week at the North Shore, and I was already drifting towards the abyss on a psychedelic lump of earth. But like in a cheap serial, the real losers always escape in the end..S. Robin.