all tats, which is cool, I guess, since he is, after all, a seaman, following in a long tradition of body art. But he’s from that generation that made statements of conformity with tattoos, and like every child shunning the acts of their parents, I’ll just mention that I’m ink-free.
“Daddy,” I say, but he’s still, his Scottish face bulldozed. He stares at me in the moonlight, gears meshing, and then breaks into a rueful smile.
Minutes later, we’re on the ground and in the house. Greeting us is a pleather couch, Daddy’s super-ugly recliner, some big oak furniture, and ratty pile rugs, all in a glorious fur ball spectrum of beige, which is what his personality’s become on those stupid meds. Mom’s dying sent him into a deep dive a couple years ago, and he bought all this new stuff to get his mind off her, and this is what it’s come to. I can’t count the number of dirty dishes and empty chili cans stacked on the kitchen counter. I suppose I can’t expect him to take a vacuum to the place in his condition, pick up the dirty clothes piled in the corner of his bedroom and throw them in the laundry. This is bad, because he keeps his place shipshape when he’s well.
It kills me to see him like this: a shadow of the man who once barked out orders to thousands of men and women from the bridge of the supercarrier he commanded in the Persian Gulf and later on the Great Lakes during the U.S.–Canadian oil-sands skirmish. As a powerful Navy officer, he’d had direct contact with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for Christmas’s sake! And now, at age fifty-six, a civilian retired from the navy, that immense responsibility has been reduced to a day job selling yacht supplies with Pacquiao at a tiny company on Shelter Island while answering to a Bimmer-driving a-hole boss half his age. Granite on deep water, the crew called him. But that was long ago, before the meds, before Mom died.
We sit down, and Pacquiao whips up some coffee, which I pass on.
“We’ve got to adjust your meds,” I say.
“I’m fine, little girl,” Daddy says. “Perfect. The meds are fine.”
“That is so not true,” I say, giving him the stink eye.
He taps his ultramobile. A holographic e-party invite with a happy cartoon swabbie pumping a detonator plunger hovers above the screen. The gist of it is that the carrier my father commanded—the USS Hillary Rodham Clinton, originally commissioned as the USS Nimitz in May 1975 and renamed by President Obama during his last year in office—is to be sunk off the coast of Florida in September, after the Olympics, to make a dive site. He and the rest of the crew are invited for one last party on the vessel before it becomes a choice destination for scuba divers and barracudas. Clearly, this is what set him off.
“The petition failed,” Daddy says. “Goddamn Washington pencil dicks and their budget cuts.”
“She can be a floating museum,” Pacquiao says. “The Midway’s a museum.”
“Well, yeah, that was the plan. At least we kept her off the auction block. Goddamn scrappers would strip her and sell her off to China.”
“Can they do that?” I ask.
“That ship was my third love, after you and your mother.”
“Bad day at the office, huh, Captain?”
“You rest. I see you tomorrow,” Pacquiao says.
“Later,” Daddy says as Pac slips out the back door.
I lean in over the kitchen table.
“I’m coming with you to the doctor tomorrow after my photo shoot. So don’t give me any junk about it.”
Daddy waves me off.
“Don’t even think I’m not coming, Skipper.”
2
Google “Mafuri Long.”
Click video.
And voila!
That’s me, surfing the monster of all waves—an eighty-foot beast. I’m like a tiny knife slicing through a gigantic wall of blue that’s rearing up behind me, a total H2O Everest. Scale? Picture me standing next to an eight-story building. In 2023, I became the first “chick” to win the Nike XX Big Wave Classic: one of the few women in history to surf a wave that big, the only one to do it officially. I followed Daddy’s advice before we left the dock for the open sea. “Don’t ride that horse with half your ass,” he said, sending me off with a fist bump. “Go after it, cowgirl.”
The freaky part is that the wave is a hundred miles off the San Diego coast in the middle of nowhere. The surf spot’s called the Cortes Bank, where the fish around you are the size of Volkswagens and very big things can swallow you whole. The only way out there is in a decent-size boat, and the only way to be saved after a serious wipeout is to be rescued by that decent-size boat or plucked up by a Coast Guard helicopter, which one big-wave legend experienced firsthand after a three-wave hold-down. The bank sits just under the water and can kick up epic hundred-footers. It’s one of the biggest, scariest waves in the world, and I mastered it: little five foot three sandy-haired me.
You’d usually have to wait until winter for a wave like that, but weather patterns are so crazy with the globe heating up the last few decades, it’s monumental—like, who can predict? I had no clue how ginormous the wave was. I mean, nobody anticipated it—not my surf coach, the safety team, the other surfers, or the pilots in the choppers circling above—but a tiny voice inside and the never-ending elevator ride up confirmed it was going to be borderline cataclysmic. When the wave hit its peak, I was staring down a seventy-five-foot vertical drop, fear shrieking inside me. Ride or die, that’s what I thought. Like, seriously, flinch on a wave like that and it’s bye-bye, girly-girl. I went supersonic after that, faster than I had ever gone before, my legs feeling the board’s feedback full force, completely in the zone, focused, the entire ocean an angry fist beneath me . . . Then I pulled out of the wave.
When the video hit social, it ping-ponged around the world, out into space, and back again, sending up a collective girl-power supercheer, pretty much locking up a ton of cash in surf sponsorships and placing me on every news feed from here to Alice Springs. Jax—that’s what people call my dad—says I have a gift. He says he noticed it the first time I stood up on a wave in Sendai, Japan, back when I was five and we were surfing together, years before that tsunami leveled the place.
The sponsorship money let me set my marine biology degree aside for a while. I couldn’t find a job in the field anyway. Let me restate that: I was offered one at SeaLand San Diego straight out of UCSD, basically to put on a carnival show with a thirteenth-generation orca after her act was reintroduced, but I passed because that isn’t science, and a creature like that should be ambushing seals out in the ocean and not squeaking for mackerel treats in a man-made swimming pool for some spoiled kids’ amusement. So the money lets me spend my days training, and my eyes are on the big prize when the Olympics begin on August 4.
It’s around 8:00 the following morning, and I’m out in the water at Mission Beach for a photo shoot, which I do on occasion for sponsors that include Google, Target, and Nike. Today it’s ad posters for Nike, in partnership with Target, who will put them up in their stores or something. I really don’t pay attention.
We’re an hour into the shoot and Jax’s episode last night still troubles me even in the bright, post-dawn sun. A photographer named PK is trailing me in the water while the hipster-kook art director in wannabe surf garb, a Parisian beret, and sunglasses
