By Amy Waeschle
“I’m fascinated by genius,” Susan Casey said via cell phone as she left the offices of O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, where she is editor in chief. “First the shark researchers, this time it’s the wave scientists and big-wave surfers.”
Photo by: Malene Thyssen, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene
Susan Casey’s latest book, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, chronicles the big wave-chasing superhero Laird Hamilton and his posse as well as the top scientists around the world studying big waves. Her previous book, The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival among America’s Great White Sharks, introduced us to scientists Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson and the group of great white sharks known to frequent the Farallon Islands.
One could make a case that Casey’s attraction to genius is her weakness; she willingly puts herself in harm’s way for the sake of the story. “I like telling stories no one has told before,” Casey said. “It’s important to me to take readers places they won’t go on their own.” In The Devil’s Teeth, the boat Casey charted and anchored in the Farallon Islands broke free in a storm, nearly taking her with it. In The Wave, she rides on the back of Laird’s Jet-Ski in 30-foot surf; she survives the hazing dished out by Laird’s tight-knit group of big-wave surfers—men who flirt with tiger sharks for fun. “It helped that I’d been in some intense situations.” Casey holds her own through it all. “At the time I was psyched,” she says of the boat incident in the Farallons. “As an athlete, I’m used to going beyond my comfort zone. Physical discomfort doesn’t dissuade me.”
A lifelong surfer and a former world-class swimmer who attended the University of Arizona on a swimming scholarship, Casey may be the perfect journalistic match for Hamilton. In the opening of The Wave, Casey and Hamilton swim off of Maui’s north shore in the surging open ocean to size up the fan-shaped reef responsible for Peah’i, or Jaws, Hamilton’s beloved big wave. “It was important to Laird that I was a swimmer,” Casey said. “If something went wrong, it would have been my experience as a swimmer, not a surfer that would save me,” Casey said.
Casey first met Hamilton while working at Outside magazine at the dawn of tow-surfing, a sport that Hamilton himself pioneered. “We hit it off,” said Casey. “We both love the ocean.” Over the years their orbits intersected and a friendship built on mutual respect bloomed. Casey ghost-wrote Hamilton’s book Force of Nature. “I loved writing as Laird,” Casey said. So why didn’t Casey write The Wave solely about Laird Hamilton and his gang of big-wave junkies?
“I didn’t want to write a surfing book,” Casey said, even though she was drawn to stories about waves since experiencing a surfing accident in college. “The waves were small but this one just tossed me. This little wave had so much power. The next morning I woke up sick and went to the hospital. I had ruptured a kidney,” Casey said. Years later, after her involvement in big stories such as Into Thin Air, The Perfect Storm, Mark Foo’s death at Maverick’s, and one titled Life’s Swell in 1998 which eventually became the movie Blue Crush, Casey found the spark that would become The Wave. “I read a story in The New York Times about missing ships. It haunted me.”
Casey wanted to explore the science behind big waves. Huge tankers were disappearing; oil platforms were crumbling. Were waves getting bigger over time? Could climate change play a role? She connected with scientists like Dr. Dave Levinson, a climatologist for NOAA, and Dr. Penny Holliday at the Southampton Oceanography Center. Casey attended The Tenth International Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting and Coastal Hazard Symposium held at Oahu’s Turtle Bay Resort. The symposium not only “temporarily tripled the north shore’s per capita IQ” but also considered the question: Are our oceans getting stormier?
Wave science leans heavily on quantum mechanics, atomic physics, and complex mathematics. One can imagine slide shows packed with squiggles, symbols, exponents, and tangled formulas that make college calculus look easy. But Casey capably sintered the complex information and presented it in layman’s terms. “We’re pumping more energy into the system. More energy makes bigger waves. Steeper waves, and steeper waves are more unstable.”
There’s still no smoking gun, though, on the relationship between climate change and big waves. “We only have data from the last few decades [to make comparisons],” Casey said. And waves are extremely difficult to study and even harder to predict. But the tides might be turning. In 2010, Oregon State University reclassified its “100 year event” wave height from 33 feet in 1996 to 46—possibly even 55—feet. This 40-percent jump in wave height is already damaging coastal regions in Oregon and Washington with erosion and flooding. If coupled with any drop in land level due to a subduction zone earthquake—something that occurred in Sumatra in 2004—the impact on shorelines could be enormous. But one could argue that this is just a worst-case scenario. After all, Casey’s scientists seem unable to demonstrate exactly how our changing climate affects the size of our waves. “But all the scientists I talked to about this are scared,” Casey said.
What’s even scarier—or at least spookier—is Casey’s near-prediction of the recent tectonic upheaval in Japan. While researching The Wave, Casey met with The University College of London’s Dr. Bill McGuire, the so-called Prophet of Doom who, in 2000, stated that “things had been eerily quiet on the tsunami front, particularly in Indonesia.” Four years later, Indonesia suffered a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that killed 240,000 people. On March 11, 2011 Japan was hit by a 9.0 quake and subsequent tsunami. According to McGuire and other scientists, things won’t be quieting down anytime soon. “People think with climate change what’s going to happen is things are just going to get hotter,” Casey told Esquire magazine. “But that isn’t really the whole story at all. When glaciers melt, the weight on the tectonic crust is different, and that’s the definition of an earthquake. When the tectonic plates are springing up or being pressed down, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen.” The bottom line? “Every scientist I spoke to who had studied this thinks we’re in for a wild time.”
In the meantime, Casey admits missing the lifestyle of a big-wave junkie—anticipating those magenta blobs on the weather map and hoping they morph into the kind of waves that make Laird happy. “I’m still waiting for a big day at Jaws,” Casey said. “If it happens, I might even go!”
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Amy Waeschle is a freelance writer and the author of Chasing Waves: A Surfer’s Tale of Obsessive Wandering. She lives in Poulsbo, Washington.
