Before the Wind Picks Up
The photograph on this page was made at Sandy Beach a little after six in the morning, and it asked only one thing of us: that we be there. Sandy sits on Oʻahu's southeast shore, under the flank of Koko Crater, and its reputation is earned: the shorebreak folds straight onto the sand and has humbled generations of bodysurfers. That is the afternoon beach. Morning is a different beach.
Most days the trade winds arrive out of the northeast on something close to a schedule. Before they do, there is an hour when the water goes glass. Not calm — Sandy is never exactly calm — but glass the way water is glass before the day has laid a finger on it. The swell still moves, but it moves under a sealed surface, and you can read the ocean's whole intention in it. The bodysurfers who truly know the place are already in the water. They did not come for the glass. They came because the wave is cleanest before the wind gets to it.
Overhead, the birds have the sky to themselves. ʻIwa hang high and motionless on the updrafts, like marks inked on the morning. A heron works the wet rocks with the patience of someone paid by the hour. Nobody is performing yet.
Every day gives you one hour before the opinions start.
We built the practice on this hour, deliberately. The drawing gets done before the phone, before the door, before the part of the day that wants something from us. The first shirt off a run is the honest one — you see exactly what the mark is at full size, with no momentum to hide behind — and we have learned to give it what the beach gives first light: full attention, no audience.
This is the case for the morning side of everything. We hold nothing against the wind — the trades cool these islands, and we would not wish them away. But wind is the world showing up with opinions, and the hour before it arrives is nobody's but yours. What you do with that hour compounds. Draw in it and the line goes where you send it. Print in it and the batch comes out clean.
By eight the trades were in, the surface was chop, the lot was filling, and Sandy was turning back into its loud, dangerous, beloved afternoon self. We were already gone. The shirts from that morning's run were stacked and numbered behind the shop, the door propped open, white cotton lifting a little in the first of the wind — which is the only job we give the wind, and it does it well.