In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives [sic], of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen [sic] would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surfing once, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surfing thoroughly.
— Mark Twain from the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), 1866
EXT. NORTH SHORE SURF HOSTEL - NIGHT
Nothing has changed. German, American, Argentine, Australian accents ping-pong off each other on a low-lit outdoor deck beneath coconut palms. A mounted TV by the beer fridge plays World Surf League reruns. An old dude reads in the corner.
TOMMY: (entering) The good thing about this place is the toilet seat’s always warm.
APRIL: Ha ha.
TOMMY: Pua’ena’s supposed to be pretty good tomorrow morning, no?
FLAVIO: We’ll see.
TOMMY: Did you surf today?
FLAVIO: Eh (shrugs, looks depressed).. I looked at ‘Ehukai but it was too big and messy.
TOMMY: Pipeline? Must’ve been gnarly! Seems like it’s going to get better this week.
APRIL: Yeah, that’s what it says.
FLAVIO: The wind’s been breaking it up. No one was even out at Waimea or Sunset.
APRIL: It’s got no form. It’s been like this for weeks.
TOMMY: You know something’s wrong when no one’s out.
FLAVIO: Even the locals.
TOMMY: (without conviction) The wind’s gotta switch up eventually.
They all turn to the TV and watch shortboards bobbing over giant swells somewhere off Portugal.
BERNEY: (Looking up from his book) Yo this dude Maui was something else — he snared the sun, discovered fire, cooking… he even picked up the sky, it used to be pressed right up against the earth, that’s why leaves are hella flat, and then Maui came along, this Odyssean Polynesian demi-god type dude, and lifted the sky up off the ground to the tree tops, then again to the mountaintops, then all the way up to where it is today! Herculean, yeah?
MAUI: D’you ever hear about the open ocean swimmer who had daydreams for dinner?
Berney looks around, startled. Everyone else continues watching TV.
EXT. ʻEHUKAI BEACH (PIPELINE) - DAY
Dudes and dudettes sit around drinking coffee, squinting, watching the huge, windy surf.
APRIL: Look at that.
TOMMY: Oh shit.
FLAVIO: it’s so chopped up.
TOMMY: It’s all onshore.
APRIL: It’s normally pretty defined, breaking out past that point (points), but now it’s all over the place.
TOMMY: There’s something (points)… Nevermind.
FLAVIO: I wonder if Waimea is working .
APRIL: Nah it needs a bit more to fill in.
A surfer treks up the beach with his board.
APRIL: How was the stoke?
SURFER: (raises eyebrows, exhales, shakes head, walks on)
FLAVIO: At least you were charging.
TOMMY: Let’s go get some spicy ahi poke in Waialua. I needa go to the sugar mill anyway to trade in for a longboard .
BERNEY: (appearing from nowhere w/ book in hand) Did you guys know Hawaiian royalty traced their bloodlines on the mother’s side? They have all these epic queens — Emma and Liliukalani—
APRIL: obviously
BERNEY: But so reckon this: it wasn’t really an equal rights type place, back in the day — wives couldn’t even eat with their husbands (though they were all polyamorous), but then Kamehameha I’s son became king, after daddy unified the islands, and got hammered at a feast1 and sat down to eat with the women and broke the tabu (our word taboo came from the Hawaiian!)... and all this literal seconds before the first missionaries arrived and -- this is what Mark Twain reported in 1866 -- (reading from book) “and the missionaries made the natives permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there... what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food... compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature.” Ha!
APRIL: Not sure they’d have called it “lolling.”
A CRASHING WAVE: Facts.
BERNEY: The craziest part is Captain Cook, who was the first white man here.. once they realized he wasn’t a god (because he groaned or something), they just lopped off his head! Twain, the white man himself, says (reads from book): “Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook’s assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went… he was cordially received… lavishly supplied… he returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment… perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished god Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of limitless power…”
APRIL: Sounds about right.
TOMMY: wind looks like it might be shifting at sunset, we could try the north-facing coast?
EXT. SURF HOSTEL - NIGHT
TV playing late night news on California banking crisis. BERNEY looks up from a book as the crew troupes in, sandy but unfulfilled.
APRIL: Lani’s was all blown out.
FLAVIO: It just couldn’t hold its shape.
TOMMY: Holy close out! I might need a different board (grabs the remote and changes the channel to WSL)
BERNEY: Get a load o’ this, though (holds up book). Queen Liliukalani wrote a book and says her royal great-grandaunt was an early Christian convert (reading): “she plucked the sacred berries from the borders of the volcano, descended to the boiling lava, and there, while singing Christian hymns, threw them into the lake.. [breaking] forever the power of Pele, the fire-goddess.”2 Gnarly, right? I mean, how did that happen? Like Rome.
APRIL: Those Christians, man, always gave 110 percent at the office.
BERNEY: And the capitalists, too. I mean, the Queen was betrayed — I kid you not — by the “Committee of Safety,” made up almost entirely of American, annexationist, business interests, i.e., the white male foreign element in Honolulu. It was 1897 or something and the Queen released some kind of declaration of Hawaiian independence; the Committee deemed this “revolutionary,” determined “steps had to be taken to form a provisional government,” and invited US troops ashore, whereupon Her Highness, imprisoned.3
APRIL: Can we not? It’s too soon.
BERNEY: But the real battle was in the language. check it (picks up another book): “Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hawaiian language was discarded as inadequate to the work of ‘progress.’ After the political coup of 1893, the U.S.-identified oligarchy outlawed public and private schools taught in the Hawaiian language, and English became the only acceptable language for business and government.”4
APRIL: As Foucault said, “the tyranny of globalizing discourses.”
BERNEY looks impressed.
TOMMY: You know, speaking of battles, the bombers would’ve flown right over the north shore on the way to pearl harbor in December 1941.. and everyone always asks: what was the swell like that morning?
APRIL: Shutup, Tommy. By the by, did y’all know Hawaii wasn’t even a state until 1959?
BERNEY: No way… wait but the japanese in Hawaii, i’ve heard they’ve been hella colonialist, too, no?
APRIL: Yeah dude. Here, you need to read a book.
APRIL hands BERNEY “Nā Wāhine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization.” It starts raining.
TOMMY: It’s raining.
FLAVIO: Sherlock alert.
APRIL: … that means the tradewinds are here.
FLAVIO: Yeah?
APRIL: Wind switched up, it should be offshore tomorrow.
Everyone looks around, astonished and hopeful.
TOMMY: Turn ‘n burn baby! Time to charge Chun’s!! Dawn patrol for days!!!
BERNEY: Let’s get it.
Beat.
EVERYONE ELSE: You surf?!
BERNEY: Nah, I just came all this way to hear you talk about it.
The rain picks up. BERNEY opens the book he was handed. A wave crashes in the distance.
“Probably the first time whiskey ever featured prominently as an aid to civilization” - Mark Twain, Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands (1866)
Liliuokalani (Queen of Hawaii 1838-1917), Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898)
Exhibit in The Bishop Museum, Honolulu
Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (2004)
Turn ‘n burn 👏🏼
Sounds about right...I've never been there but it definitely sounds about right.
--D.M.