The Wave

I saw the original The Poseidon Adventure at a very impressionable age. It was on a grainy black and white TV at my dad's house, but I was way too young for it and it took me years to recover from the thought of an ocean liner being turned over in the middle of a night-time ocean. It didn't help that I'd already been on an ocean liner and had looked over the side at churning waters. I had no doubt that the ocean was capable of tossing up the worst and taking me with it. Years later, I was just fine reading and then watching A Perfect Storm so obviously I was cured of cold-sweat nightmares. In other words, I pounced on reading Susan Casey's book The Wave. In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean.

I had read Susan Casey's exploration of great white shark behavior and the ongoing research into it in The Devil's Teeth. As she did in that book, she divides this story into science and freaky human obsessions. Yeah, there's science in The Wave, but really it just feels like an excuse to get into the heads of big wave surfers like Laird Hamilton and his crew. Not that there's anything wrong with that. These people are crazy! But oh, it's such a great crazy. There are people out there who's sole goal in life is to successfully surf 100 foot waves. Repeatedly. Oh sure, they'll settle for a 70 foot wave--if they have to. Apparently 50 feet is about the limit for traditional paddle-out surfing. After that, you need to be expertly towed out by jet ski. Susan Casey isn't really exploring surf mentality, though, but she does get to hang out with the big wave crowd and discover how much they know about these so-called freak waves.

She doesn't really get into traditional tsunamis which are generally triggered by a known something (earthquake), but she's interested in the sudden strange waves out at sea that are capable of splitting a ship in half (she includes pictures). When you read about these cargo ships and what they endure out at sea, it's a reminder of just how powerful water is as a force. You expect a surfer will get pounded, but when you see that waves can take apart a giant ship, it's something else. Suddenly The Poseidon Adventure doesn't just seem like a cheesy 1970s disaster of the week movie.

It turns out that 100 foot waves are pretty common, much more so than was originally believed. If that seems a bit dull, try the recorded 1,740 foot wave that hit Lituya Bay in Alaska in 1958. There were no surfers there, but two fishing boats made it over and survived to tell the tale. Apparently, if you can't outrun a giant wave (and, really, you can't), your best bet is to gun in toward the thing and go up over the top. You just have to hope you don't discover--as this one fisherman did-- "to his horror that the wave's backside was nothing but a sheer vertical drop; the water had drained out of the bay so dramatically that its surface had been sucked below sea level." And that was only a 490 ft wave, though there were three more just like it, dumping on that little boat. The boats that went over the top of the 1, 740 ft wave also had to contend with raining debris (the ripped up forest from the bay). Hard to believe that some people seek out crazy waves and think about surfing them.

The Wave is armchair adventure with a little science mixed in. It's an easy read and an often gripping one. Probably just right for the winter months so that your psyche has time to recover before you hit the beach in summer.