Sunday Drive

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Nothing in my life has had more lasting influence on me than music.

It’s quite amazing how many “forgotten” memories I can recall when I hear certain popular songs from my past. I can very easily come up with over a hundred songs that instantly drop me into the arms of some delicious moment, going all the way back to my small kid days. There were so, so, so many great songs that I just could not get enough of, songs that captured me, that got me singing along, moving to the rhythm, creating my own harmonies, and songs that had me sitting with closed eyes feeling powerful new emotions that swirled around in my mind, and even in my physical body. Song upon song upon song, each playing its part in molding me into who I am today.

I am so thankful that I grew up in an innocent time in the history of rock and roll. And true to my sunshine-pop nature, it was perfectly fine with me that none of it had much poetic depth. I get my depth from reading, thinking, meditating and talking with people of like mind. For me, music is for soothing and pleasing my soul. It’s the sound. It’s the emotions and thrills and energy that it evokes within me. Melody, harmony, rhythm. Lyrics were always secondary, if that. This may seem just really dumb to some, but that was who I was, and to a large extent, still am today.

Whenever I hear Acker Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore,” for example, I am almost literally, and immediately, transported to the island of Hawai’i.

It was dark and quiet out on the old road at five o’clock in the morning. I was in the eleventh grade at a fairly new college prep school. Our dormitories were on a hillside surrounded by the rich deep-grass pasturelands of Parker Ranch.

My surfing buddy, Tommy Holmes, and I slipped out of our dorm and headed down through the pasture to the road that wound its way up into Kamuela town. Our intention was to hitch a ride from there, across the long high lands of Mamalahoa Highway, and down into Kailua-Kona, where my family lived, a forty-five mile journey. I had a couple of surfboards at home, and Tommy and I had planned to surf down the coast at spot called “Banyans” for the day. But first we had to catch a ride.

We stood without speaking in the crisp pre-dawn air, hoping for some car or truck to come by. I’d brought my small Hitachi transistor radio along and we listened to soft wake-up music on KPOI as we waited. Tommy was sitting on his heels and I was looking at the stars when “Stranger on the Shore” came on the radio. The amazing thing is that even to this day, decades later, that particular recording of that song has the power to take me right back to those exact moments in time. I can so clearly remember standing in the grass along the roadside, looking up toward Mauna Kea with the soft glow of morning silhouetting its stately magnificence. A billion stars were still visible in the clear, razor-sharp sky, as Acker Bilk’s breathy clarinet flowed sweetly from my small transistor radio. It was the perfect song at the perfect time for that singular moment in my life. It’s impossible for me to hear that song and not feel myself being there, which to me is incredibly amazing.

About ten minutes later, we caught a ride on a milk truck making a morning run to our destination. It was a deafening ride. Milk in those days came in glass bottles, and they rattled and banged all the way down to Kailua. My ears rang for a half hour after the milk truck dropped us off.

Tommy and I spent the day surfing waves that barely had the right to call themselves waves. But who cared? We were on the water, and that’s what mattered most.

Another song from that same year brings another surfing memory to mind — Brian Hyland’s, “Sealed With a Kiss.” Again, I was with Tommy Holmes, but this time it was summer and I was spending a couple of weeks at his place in Honolulu. One day, Tommy heard that the surf on the North Shore was up, and he wanted to get in on the action.

We tossed our boards into the bed of his blue Datsun pick up and headed up and over the Pali to a surfing spot on the other side of the island called Velseyland. We parked on the side of the road and picked our way through a cow pasture to the shore. The surf was up, all right, and it was raging. The whole coastline was shrouded in a white salt mist that floated inland from the thundering surf. Giant waves rose and fell in whomping explosions in one long line for as far as I could see.

“Awesome,” Tommy said, as he dropped his board on the water and paddled out. Jeez, I thought! He’s crazy! No way I wanted to head out into that stuff. You could get killed! But I’d never live it down if I didn’t. Inside, my smart voice was screaming, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

But I listened to the dumb one instead, and headed into the water.

Wave after wave marched in, first as lines far offshore, then as growing hillsides, then as mountains that curled up and thundered down in wild, concussive explosions. How the heck was I going to get past them? I slowed and waited for a smaller wave that I could race toward and hopefully climb over before it broke.

When a few smaller lines began to develop I started paddling out as fast as I could possibly go. The waves looked even bigger being under them and they scared the spit out of me. At the steepest point passing over one wave I was nearly vertical, but I managed to fall over the top to the other side. I kept paddling farther out because I knew bigger swells were on their way, and I sure as heck didn’t want to get caught up in them.

Tommy managed to catch a few rides without losing his board and having to swim in. In those early days of surfing no one had ankle tethers. If you lost your board, you had to swim to shore to retrieve it. “Come on!” Tommy yelled over the thunder of the surf. “It’s wild!”

Right. I waited for a smallish swell. But small didn’t exist that day. I sat out there on my board for a half hour, thinking nothing other than how I was going to get back to shore without getting killed.

I waited. And waited. And waited.

But there was no easy way back. I’d have to pick my battle and fight it. When the smallest monster rolled in, I went for it. I tried to surf the unsurfable.

Big mistake.

I raced down its face, angling left, lasting maybe five seconds before the whole mass rolled and crashed down over on me. I flopped onto my board and grabbed on for dear life.

The weight and fury of the crumbling wave was unimaginable. The force ripped my board right out of my hands. I curled into a ball as tons of boiling ocean drove me down. I feared being dragged over the sharp coral below, or being held down so long I ran out of air. I didn’t hit the bottom, but I did run out of air. At the last second the ocean spat me out. I gasped and tried to swim for shore, fighting frothy water and a current that wanted to suck me back out. Tommy was nowhere to be seen. And my board had vanished.

I was completely out of energy by the time my feet finally hit sand. I slogged and dragged myself up onto the beach and crawled toward the naupaka bushes that lined the shore. I lay on my back, coughing and spiting and clawing for air. A few minutes later I sat up and searched for my board. It was floating around in shallow water, close enough to grab. Amazingly, it had no new dings in it.

We drove home an hour later, Tommy tapping his thumb on the wheel to some unheard song in his head. I was completely drained, and half asleep. But that didn’t stop me from building a fiction about how great it was to surf 12-foot waves at Velseyland.

These are the kinds of memories music evokes within me. Powerful and everlasting. Looking back, I have to smile at some of the things that come up.

The truth is, I was kind of a twit, a true stranger on the shore of my life. But twit or not, I did take a five-second ride on truly scary killer wave. And I’m sticking to my story.