1
Hear Jen scream.
Jen Stonebreaker, that is, hollering over the whine of her jet ski, towing her husband into a wave taller than a four-story building.
“For you, John—it’s all yours!”
She’s twenty-one years old, stout and well-muscled, with a cute face, a freckled nose, and an inverted bowl of thick orange hair she’s had since she was ten.
She’s a versatile young woman, too—the high school swim, water polo, and surf team captain. The class valedictorian. A former Miss Laguna Beach. With a UC Irvine degree in creative journalism from the School of Humanities, honors, of course.
Right now, though, Jen is bucking an eight-hundred-pound jet ski on the rising shoulder of a fifty-foot wave, her surf-star husband, John, trailing a hundred feet behind her on his signature orange and black “gun” surfboard, rope handle tied to the rescue sled, which skitters and slaps behind her.
Welcome to Mavericks, a winter break in the cold waters just south of San Francisco, with occasionally gigantic waves, sometimes beautifully formed, but always potentially lethal. These things charge in and hit Mavericks’ shallow reef like monsters from the deep. A surfer can’t just paddle into one; he or she has to be towed in by a jet ski or a helicopter. One of the scariest breaks on Earth. Ask any of the very few people who ride places like this. Not only the jagged, shallow rocks, but sharks, too, and water so cold you can barely feel your feet through neoprene boots.
Mavericks has taken the lives of professional, skilled, big-wave riders.
Riders not unlike the Stonebreakers, Jen now gunning her jet ski across the rising wave, looking for smooth water to deliver John into the steepening face of it, where he will toss the rope and—if all goes well and the gods are smiling—drop onto this wall and try to stay on his board, well ahead of the breaking barrel that, if it gets its chance, will crush him to the rocky bottom like a bathtub toy.
He throws aside the tow rope.
Jen guns her two-hundred-fifty horses, roaring and smoking, up and over the wave’s huge back, and lands momentarily beyond its reach, the rescue sled bobbing behind her.
She’s got a good angle to watch John and help him if he wipes out.
She feels the tremendous tonnage of water trying to suck her back onto the wave and over the falls.
Thinks: Nope.
Throttles hard and away.
Steadies herself on the bucking machine, off to the side and safely out of the way of the monsters, where she can watch John do his thing.
The next wave lumbers in—she’s always startled by how fast they are—and she sees John astride his big board, racing down the smooth blue face of his wave, legs staunch but vibrating, feet locked in the thick rubber straps glued to his board. He carves out ahead of the lip then rises, backing up into the barrel, casually trailing a hand on the cylinder as he streams along just ahead of the crushing lip—John’s signature move; he’s one of the few guys who does this daredevil-in-the-barrel thing, looking cool on a fifty-footer. He’s twenty-six years old, one of the top ten big-wave riders in the world.
Jen hears the barrel roaring closed behind him. Like a freight train or a stretched-out thunderclap.
Jen smiles.
Jen and John. John and Jen.
Look at him, she thinks. This is it. This is why we do it. Nothing we’ll ever do will match it. Not love. Not sex. Not being a mother or a father. Not seeing God. Not mountains of money. Nothing. Nothing can touch this speed, this perilous grace, this joy, this high.
Then it all goes wrong.
The thick lip lunges forward like a leopard, taking him by the head and off his board.
The sharp orange-and-black gun hangs in the air above him, the leash still fastened to John’s ankle, then the fins catch and the board spears past John, missing him by inches.
He’s lifted high above the ribs of the wave, then pitched over the falls, pulled down by his board, into the raging impact zone.
Jen checks the next wave—well fuck, it’s bigger than this one—then steers the jet ski closer to the wall of whitewater that owns her husband.
A bright red rescue helicopter swoops down, close enough to tear foam off the crest of that wave.
Two rescue skis cut wide semicircles around the impact zone, their drivers looking for a way in.
And two more of the tow ski drivers, bucking the chop in search of John.
The seconds zip by but John doesn’t surface. His broken board launches from the whitewater, just two halves hinged by fiberglass. No leash attached. Which, in spite of John’s quick-release coupling, could mean the absolute worst for him—the damned leash is still fastened to his ankle, virtually unbreakable, easily caught on the sharp reef boulders lurking just feet below the surface.
Jen watches for any flash of shape or color, his black trunks, his orange helmet—anything that’s not whitewater, swirling sand, and rocks. Anything …
She knows with the wave closing fast behind her it’s time to plunge into the mayhem.
Feels the monster pull of it drawing her up.
Circling tightly, checking the rescue sled, getting ready to go in, she pauses one fraction of a second and thinks—among darker thoughts: I love you more than anything in the world …
And in that split second, the next wave lifts her from behind and Jen feels the terrible vertigo of a coming fall while clinging to an eight-hundred-pound personal watercraft.
Her personal deathtrap.
She cranks the ski throttle full open, digs a hard U-turn into the face of the wave. Jumps the lip and flies over.
She’s midair again on the smoking contraption. Below her, no John in sight. Just his shattered board bouncing in the foam on its way to shore.
She lands behind the wave and speeds a wide arc to something like safety. Rooster-tails to near where John went down. Can’t get all that close.
She’s lost precious time. Precious seconds. A lot of them.
She grinds through the whitewater as best she can, crisscrossing the worst of it. A surge of heavy foam catches the jet ski broadside and flips it.
She keeps hold, lets another wall of whitewater crash over her before she can find the handles, right the beast, and continue searching her blinding world of foam and spray.
Smacked by the chop and wind, she clamps her teeth and grimaces to draw air instead of brine.
In shallower water, she searches the rocks below. Hears the scream of the other watercrafts around her, voices calling out. The big-wave people mostly look out for each other; they’re loose-knit and competitive but most of them will lose contests and miss waves to help someone in trouble—even of his own making, even some reckless trust-funder wannabe big-wave king with his own helicopter to tow him in and pro videographers to make him famous.
It’s what watermen and waterwomen do.
Jen keeps waiting to feel him behind her, climbing aboard the rescue sled. She knows it’s possible: John has trained himself to hold his breath for up to three minutes underwater.
But not being pounded like this …
As the minutes pass, hope and fear fight like dogs inside her—a battle that will guide the rest of her life.
We are small and brief.
We are the human passion to stay alive, made simple.
She helps work John’s body out of the rocks.
2
Looking Back—
WHO WAS JOHN STONEBREAKER AND WHAT WENT WRONG AT MAVERICKS?
A big-wave surfing contest left one of the world’s premier professional surfers dead. But who was he and why did he die?
BY JEN STONEBREAKER
Part one of a special series for Surf Tribe Magazine
They filmed the deadly 1999 Monsters of Mavericks, and they wrote about it and talked about it, but they never got deep into the barrel of what happened, and why.
How could they? Fifteen dead in Columbine. War in Kosovo. Bill Clinton impeached. Y2K, when the world’s computers would crash and the economy along with them.
The world was a busy place then, but crazy surfers riding giant waves weren’t exactly a crucial part of it.
That day, there was a shifting cast of fifty or so people near or in the water for the spectacle of a freakishly large northwest swell: contestants and their tow partners, boatloads of reporters, photographers, videographers, and a famous novelist, all trying to do their jobs but keep out of the impact zone, where the waves break; also rescue teams, and three contest “officials” in a helicopter circling overhead.
There were a few hundred spectators up on the cliffs above Ross Point, using binoculars and giant-lensed cameras for a view of the action.
The day was cold and bright, and the visibility excellent except for the impact zone, which was a churning cauldron of whitewater overhung with a dense cloud of sea spray.
So, there are many accounts of the same sequence of events, many points of view of how and why what happened, happened. Much video and many pictures.
There is some truth in most of them. So why should I add another voice, twenty-five years later?
I’ve taken questions from various media, but never answered beyond what was asked, never gone into detail.
From the beginning there was a lot of speculation, some by investigators and reporters, some by family and friends, some by strangers and opportunists telling half-truths and lies in those early days of the Internet.
Why not write about all this until now? After all, I learned how to do this in college. How to put words down. It’s much easier than riding a fifty-foot wave. Or raising two sons. It isn’t rocket science, to write a firsthand report of an event you were a part of.
But my husband’s death was too sudden and too unlikely for me—his twenty-one-year-old wife—to understand at that time.
I did not understand.
I understood his broken bones and fractured skull and the seawater in his lungs, and the leash caught on the rocks and still strapped to his ankle.
But I did not understand the why of it.
I’m forty-six, and that is what I am hoping to do now.
* * *
John Stonebreaker was my new, five-doors-down neighbor when I was twelve. His big family had just moved onto our street, Alta Laguna Boulevard, in Laguna’s Top of the World neighborhood. He was seventeen and the second oldest of the Stonebreaker kids.
We Byrnes were a longtime Laguna family. My grandparents owned a restaurant on Coast Highway that I eventually inherited, redesigned, renamed the Barrel, and still operate today. My dad became Laguna’s chief of police. He was a tough cop but a cuddly bear at home. He believed—still does—that a cop should serve and protect. An oath he took very seriously. He believed that Laguna’s citizens and her thousands of summer visitors were his responsibility. His flock. My mother—an Olympic swimmer in the Montreal summer games of 1976—was a Laguna Beach High School girls’ PE teacher, and coach of the swim, water polo, and surf teams. She believed that an athlete should win. And a coach should make that happen. Trophies, medals, ribbons, scholarships. Win or stay home.
Don and Eve Byrne, née Braxton.
Mom was my inspiration and my belief.
Dad was my idol.
I was their only child.
John Stonebreaker at seventeen was thin, blond-haired, and blue eyed. A little dip-shouldered (the left) which made him seem casual and unconcerned with his appearance.
I first saw him on a hot July evening, wheeling a trash can from his house to the curb. He had just moved in. He seemed purposeful and focused, fitting that trash can flush with the curb, making a few small adjustments to get it right.
That night I asked Mom and Dad about the new family, trying to press them for information without spilling my curiosity about the boy.
Mom told me the Stonebreakers came up from San Clemente. They were renting here. The dad was a preacher who had just opened his own church in Laguna Niguel, in a storefront that used to be a donut shop. Mrs. Stonebreaker was going to be a counselor at the high school, so we’ll be working together, Mom had said.
Copyright © 2024 by T. Jefferson Parker
