Raising A Soul Surfer by Rick Bundschuh, Cheri Hamilton

cords.” Even I refused to use a leash, as I was a very strong swimmer. But the kooks with leashes were getting a lot more waves, while hard-core guys were swimming after their boards. Eventually, almost every surfer went out and bought a leash.
    Tom, like me, had been harboring the idea of going to Hawaii. He loved the surf in California, but he longed to find even morechallenging waves—such as the ones he always saw in surf movies or magazines. The words of his Hawaiian shipmate, Rob, kept echoing in his ears. After only a year of school, on Christmas break, he took all of his savings and bought a round-trip ticket to Honolulu.
    He knew enough to get out of town, as Honolulu was called, and head for the countryside of the island. He was on the prowl for the bigger, more powerful waves. And they could only be found on the North Shore, where the surf breaks had familiar names that Tom had read about in the surf magazines filled with pictures of powerful pounding waves: Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay.
    Tom found a room to share with some other mainland transplants. Surfing the North Shore with them, Tom increased his skill level in bigger waves. Within two years, his roommates would become legendary big-wave surfers.
    A friend suggested that Tom shouldn’t leave the islands without checking out a more remote island in Hawaii. “Go visit Kauai,” he said. “That’s where you’ll find a more relaxed, slow-paced life.” And so it was his destiny, in response to a suggestion by a friend, and with just a few days left in his trip, that Tom landed at the Lihue airport on Kauai.
    At the time, the runway wasn’t big enough to handle jets, so you had to fly in on noisy, rattling prop-planes. The gate was a pavilion with a few benches and a chain-link fence. The luggage carousel was just a 20-foot-long steel-covered piece of plywood.
    Tom couldn’t help but contrast the Garden Isle to bustling Oahu. With his backpack and surfboards slung over his back, Tom hiked out onto the main street, a one-lane road that didn’t even circle completely around the whole island. To this day the sheer cliffs of the Na Pali coast make a connecting road impracticable, so not a whole lot has changed since that time.
    Tom didn’t know anyone, nor did he know where anything was; he just knew one name: Hanalei Bay, where the waves were supposed to be the best. But he was a resourceful young man with a sleeping bag, a little cash and a surfboard. It would be an adventure. So naturally he stuck his thumb out for a ride.
    It wasn’t long before an older Hawaiian guy in a pickup asked in thick Pidgin English, “Where you like go?”
    “Hanalei,” said Tom, mangling the pronunciation like so many tourists do.
    The driver motioned to the back of the truck and Tom climbed in. To his amusement, he found that he was sharing the ride to Hanalei with a couple of caged pigs and a load of pig slop.
    Amazingly, the guy (who happened to be Henry Tai Hook, the honorary mayor of Kauai’s North Shore) dropped him off in the center of Hanalei town. Tom thanked him, grabbed his gear and headed to the beach. For the next couple of days, he camped out and surfed the north shore of Kauai, hiding his belongings in the bushes while surfing.
    It took only those few days of breathtaking beauty, lush jungle, majestic waterfalls and crystal-blue waves to get Tom thoroughly hooked. He had his roommate in San Diego ship over the rest of his belongings. Then he enrolled in the small junior college and declared Kauai his new home.

    The early seventies were the beginning of a dramatic demographic shift for the state of Hawaii. The chieftains had eventually made surfing strictly a royal sport; commoners were forbidden from surfing under penalty of death. The local islanders, heavily made up of a pan-Asian and Polynesian people, had outnumbered the
haoles
, as Caucasian people are called.
    But the hundred-year-old agricultural economy that had made the island a melting