Just Add Water: A Surfing Savant's Journey with Asperger's

228 Pages·2015·7.71 MB·English

by  Clay Marzo

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
In the Pocket
The Shorebreak Toddler
Rough Landing in School
Contests, Barrels—and a New Sister
A Surfing Family
School Daze
King Tide in Water, Ebb Tide on Land
Perfection
New Sensation
Playing on Camera
Storm Clouds
Photos
Diagnosis: Asperger’s Syndrome
Learning About Asperger’s
Just Add Water: The Movie
Cheyne and Me
Why Contests Stopped Being Fun
Why Is Living the Dream So Uncomfortable?
Life
Jade
Connecting with a Larger Community
Reading the Ocean: A Gift of Asperger’s
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Surfing Terms
About the Authors
Copyright © 2015 by Clay Marzo and Robert Yehling
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park
Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Marzo,
Clay.
Just add water : a surfing savant’s journey with Asperger’s / Clay Marzo,
Robert Yehling.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-544-25621-7 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-544-25317-9 (ebook) 1.
Marzo, Clay. 2. Surfers—United States—Biography. 3. Asperger’s syndrome—
Patients—Biography. I. Yehling, Robert. II. Title.
GV838.M375A3 2015
797.3'2092—dc23
[B]
2014034432

Jacket design by Patrick Barry Jacket photograph © Marco Garcia
v1.0715
To my family, and to everyone who struggles when told they cannot do
something. Get out there and do it—and make your world and ours greater.
1
In the Pocket
There’s a set! Look at the set coming! Look at the first one barreling . . . here comes one—
look at this one, dude! See how you go underground when you’re in there, then it throws you
into the shallow? Sometimes there’s a little left that goes into the bay, a re-form that happens
when it gets really big—but you’d rather surf somewhere else . . . you don’t want to surf out
here when it’s bigger than five or six feet. It gets too gnarly, closes out, and throws you on
that shallow reef. This is a small wave spot. It’s the steepest small wave around. It’s best
when it’s glassy, but the wind’s coming from a weird direction . . . see how the wave is balling
up?

That was a big set we saw earlier, so much bigger than anything else . . . that was the
north influence. The south influence pushes into the total wave shape. It breaks from two
directions here, sometimes at the same time. It gives me a thrill, this kind of wave.

The pristine waters off Maui’s west coast convey majesty and presence befitting
the ancient Polynesian Sport of Kings. They are about to be stirred by a tall,
angular magician with a swimmer’s build and moves that very few on earth can
match. Every time Clay Marzo enters the Pacific—nearly every sunlit hour of
every day he’s not traveling, if the waves cooperate—he paddles out to
commingle with his soul, which seems to breathe with gills. Waves come to him
as if silently summoned, enabling him to turn around, drop in, and unleash rides
so dynamic, outrageous, daring, and graceful that you’re left grasping for
superlatives. He speeds through waves like a dolphin, explodes off the top like
an attacking leopard, inverts and bends into impossible positions like an
Olympic gymnast . . . and always seems to land on his feet. Like a cat.
Such is the case on a warm morning charged with sea spray and crowded surf
spots, which can mean only one thing: the waves are pounding. The season’s
first major northwest swell has arrived, bringing waves up to forty feet at
infamous Pe’ahi, or Jaws, where tow-in surfers risk their lives as they tackle the
monsters calved by a disturbance in the Aleutian Islands, far to the north.
Meanwhile, at a break called Windmills, Clay Marzo sits with a videographer,
fifteen miles and a world away from the nineteenth-century colonial seaside
mystique of Lahaina and the luxury resorts on Kaanapali Beach. To the
southeast, Haleakala towers two miles above the island, a conic crown and
dormant volcano where Jimi Hendrix once played live, where silence surpassed
only by space exists.
Silence. Nothing suits Clay better. He is entirely silent as he faces west, his
hands smacking the steering wheel, his body twitching. He surveys the horizon,
then the lineup, where waves peel in both directions from their breaking point.
His mind works out the wave angles, where they break, how they break, and
how the current and ever-present trade winds impact them. When wave faces
approach fifteen feet, as they do at Windmills on this day, good choices can
become life-saving choices. His focus is laserlike, absolute. Nothing can or will
interrupt his concentration.
After studying the waves for forty-five minutes, Clay grabs his board and
moves toward the ocean. He walks away from his life on land, a mighty and
never-ending struggle between the way his brain is wired and the noise, crowds,
social interactions, expectations, anxieties, and facial expressions the rest of us
use to get by. He negotiates the everyday world clumsily, always a step off or to
the side, it seems. If he’s connected to it at all, which is often not the case. If the
activity of the moment isn’t about surfing, eating, basketball, music, or his
girlfriend, Jade Barton, he’s oblivious. Uncomfortable.
There’s nothing uncomfortable about the way he approaches the ocean. His
coordination while walking rocks and steep trails is superior, rhythmic, and
smoother than the way most people amble down the road. His eyes scan from
side to side, watching the action of every wave, calculating where to paddle out
and position himself. He throws himself into the frothing shorebreak, surfaces,
shakes his head a few times, yells out with excitement (or is it the relief of no
longer being on land?), and sets off in the direction of the neighboring island of
Lanai with paddle strokes that his videographer, Adam Klevin, calls “the best
I’ve ever seen. He would win every paddle battle there is. Hands down.”
Minutes later, a set of twelve-to fifteen-foot behemoths approaches. Clay
paddles into position. He notices a bump in the wave, a subtle shift beyond the
sensory range of most humans. He wheels his board around and strokes to a
point he’s already predetermined and anticipated through knowledge and
intuition. His deep, powerful strokes are those of a champion swimmer. His
instincts are beyond that. When a wave emerges and jacks up to its full two-story
height, Clay sits in perfect position. With a GoPro camera mounted on the back
of his board, he paddles hard, easily catches the wave, and looks down the line,
his right foot forward, the direction in which he faces the wave.
Let the show begin. Clay connects in a way one would imagine Mozart diving
into the wellspring of his latest symphony, Beethoven hugging the floor with his
deaf ear to feel the vibration of his Fifth Symphony, or Monet immersing himself
in French light. He races down the wave face as it peels behind him, seemingly
at one with it. Clay leans like a motorcycle street racer into a deep bottom turn
and propels himself up the face, then slots himself inside the pocket of the wave.
Just like that, he’s gone. Disappeared. Out of view. Spectators on the rocky
beach or in their cars wonder the same thing: is he coming out?
Seconds later he emerges, arms raised high, GoPro still in his mouth, the shot
of him scorching a nasty Windmills barrel certain to be played over and over on
his flat-screen later in the day. And soon, on video throughout the world.
Whenever Clay Marzo hits it big, the beach buzzes and the world finds out soon
enough. “Kid’s off the charts,” says Les Potts, a longboard surfing legend who’s
produced and witnessed plenty of greatness in his fifty years of surfing. “How’d
he find that tube?”
This is where rides usually end, where most surfers pull out and paddle into
position for another wave while story-building their ride to everyone else in the
lineup.
Clay is warming up for round two. His fans on the beach wonder, what the
hell is he going to do next? They cannot guess, but they know they may see
something no other surfer in the world will attempt, let alone execute
successfully. Anything is possible.
Clay whips to the bottom of the wave to gain speed and propulsion, then
smacks it off the top, getting a few feet of air before landing in the wave. He
throws the tail of his board sideways, like a skateboarder in a half-pipe, leaving a
rooster tail of displaced water, and descends onto the diminishing lip backwards.
Now it’s time for the Merlin moment, when a wizard’s instincts take over.
About to be swallowed by the massive turbulence, and while lying back almost
in a sleeping position, he whips the tail of the board back around. With cat-quick
moves and the flexibility of a long-standing yogi, he jerks to his feet, his reverse
throw-tail complete, and snaps a few more moves—Bam! Bam! Bam! He keeps
standing until his board sinks, slowly taking him down. Call it surfing’s version
of the denouement, when the hero rides into the sunset.
Clay shakes his curly dark blond hair, stretches out on his board, pumps his
fist in the air, and looks to the shoreline to see if his accomplices are watching.
“He’s putting on the show for you,” his friend Johnny says over and over again.
Clay rubs his hands together a dozen times, jazzed and ecstatic beyond measure,
and turns toward the horizon. A few minutes later, he wheels the board into a
rising peak, his last brilliant ride already deep in his prodigious cellular memory
banks. He throws down a few more moves that leave people on the beach
wondering: have I ever seen that before?
Therein lies a clue about Clay’s mastery, his gift, the difference between him and
his friends—many of whom, like him, are professional surfers. He tunes in to the
present moment, pours forth his entire spirit and knowledge, and blocks out
everything—thoughts, issues, what he ate, where he may have misplaced his car
keys or wallet, his next magazine photo shoot, friends on the bluff. His last
amazing ride. In this stressed-out world, he operates with a frame of mind that
treats every moment like it’s both the first and the last. Isn’t that what the
millions who take mindfulness, yoga, or meditation classes seek?
“Clay lives in the moment,” his behavioral specialist, Carolyn Jackson, says.
“Isn’t that what most of us want to do? Most people, when they watch Clay, they
want to be that deep down inside. They want to be the one that says ‘Get out of
my face.’ They want to be the one to flip off some social convention that they
cannot stand, but they do [it] anyway. They want to excel at one particular thing,
rather than spreading themselves out amongst a bunch of things. Well, that’s
exactly who Clay is.”
Whenever anyone sees a great surfer in action—or any great athlete with
superior technical skills combined with the grace of Baryshnikov—a few
questions may pop to mind: How can that person maintain such control and
poise? How does he or she develop the courage to ride large, snarling swells that
may have originated from typhoons or winter storms thousands of miles away?
How can that person look so masterful in everything from sloppy two-foot
shorebreak to twenty-foot giants that could crush and kill in one fell swoop (and
have)?
That perception increases noticeably when onlookers watch this twenty-six-
year-old son of lifelong surfers Gino and Jill Marzo. Eyes burst open like
cartoon characters. Heads shake, followed by “Holy shit!” or “What the f—?”
and other expletives, all compliments of the highest order. Wave warriors try to
figure out how he surfs with the nimbleness of a cheetah, the power of a bull, the
balance of a gymnast, the acrobatic prowess of a Cirque du Soleil star, the aerial
daring of Shaun White and Tony Hawk, the staying power of ultramarathon
legend Scott Jurek, and the inventiveness of . . . well, that’s where the
comparisons end. The prevailing global opinion was best summed up by a few
words in the 2008 Quiksilver documentary Just Add Water, which introduced the
world at large to Clay’s riveting story:
“Clay surfs amazing,” Tom Curren, the sport’s dominant figure in the 1980s,
said. “I don’t know how he does what he does.”
The greatest competitive surfer of them all, eleven-time world titlist Kelly
Slater, minces no words either. “There’s probably no one in the world who does
the stuff he does. If he’s not sleeping, he’s getting barreled. When I first saw him
surf, I’m like, ‘He knows things I don’t know. He knows things the guys I surf
with don’t know.’”
Maybe that’s why the surfing version of Young Guns II, the first movie in
which Clay appeared, at age fifteen, drew millions of viewers. Or why Clay won
“Best Maneuver” in the prestigious Surfer Poll Movie Awards at age seventeen.
Maybe that’s why Just Add Water, the documentary, sold 500,000 copies and
was seen by millions. Through these films, the unbelievable could be carried into
the realm of the believable via visual documentation. See it to believe it.
Clay is a hero to millions of surfers and others of his generation who
appreciate great wave riding and pushing the limits of athletic potential. Those
twice his age, or even older, revere him almost equally. “Clay Marzo? Mate, he’s
in another world,” says professional surfing’s first world champion, Peter
Townend, now in his early sixties.
New questions emerge for anyone watching Clay work his artistry on waves.
Even people who have surfed for fifty years, like Potts and Townend, scratch
their heads and ask, Did I just see that? Some observers even resort to the
absurd: Is he part dolphin? Are his neurons hard-wired to the primordial depths
of his brain stem, linking him somehow to the gilled creatures that came ashore,
grew lungs, and became amphibians? Does he glue his feet to the board? Do his
instincts enable him to anticipate what’s coming long before the wave fully
forms? Is he so deeply immersed in his relationship with the ocean that he and
the waves sense each other, breathe through each other, commingle for precious
moments, and enjoy a level of being neither can experience on land?
The fascination with Clay Marzo stretches worldwide, beyond surfing, even
beyond sports. He’s a hero to an entirely different group of people whose life
challenges are tougher than choosing where to paddle out the next day.

Soul surfer . . . the term is not often associated with youth. Surfers find a
thousand different ways to describe the soul-surfing experience, an inner and
outer life that revolves around the next dawn patrol, the next road junket to a
“secret spot,” the next swell. Some descriptions stand forever through the sport’s
most cherished movies: The Endless Summer. Five Summer Stories. Free Ride.
Step into Liquid. Thicker Than Water. Big Wednesday. Riding Giants. Other
monikers describe this communion: Free surfing. Expression sessions. Dawn
patrols. Pure stoke. Not only is surfing a graceful sport, but it also possesses a
sweet language filled with captivating imagery.
Since the late 1970s, when professional surfing began, thousands of riders
Clay’s age and younger have scanned the sea through lenses a little less rose-