Soaring: The Spiritual Journey of Pioneer Surfer Woody Brown
Posted on April 21, 2008 @ 3:48 PM
It occurs to me that the lean old man sitting next to me — with sun-weathered skin, piercing blue eyes, the shock of white hair, and a near-perpetual and almost toothless smile — is very likely what some would call a transcendent being. Since I’m not exactly an expert in transcendent beings (although I’ve been in the company of a few people who claimed to be such blessed individuals), I can’t be sure. But who more likely? The arc of this man’s life — his path — seems to have dragged him, kicking and screaming, straight into the arms of revelation. Two falls from the sky, a dozen or so near-death experiences here or there, encounters with the paranormal and/or astral planes, the powerful loss of a soulmate, miraculous survivals against great odds, and finally, as a 40 year-old agnostic, Woody Brown experienced contact. When he told me about it, and when he did, it was like hearing the other shoe drop. It all made sense.
After the war, Woody returned to Waikiki Beach and created the first modern catamaran based on the asymmetrical-hulls concept by the ancient Polynesians. He partnered up with a young Hawaiian, Alfred Kumalae, who was all set to head down to Hilo with his boat-building partner, Rudy Choy, to work on a conventional keelboat. But Woody’s project intrigued Kumalae, and he begged off the Choy job to join Woody in researching Polynesian multihulls at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum,then build the prototypes and the first catamaran.
Wood said: “When he came here and discovered the islands, Capt. Cook said, ‘They built fine canoes, but of course they were all bent out of shape.’ When I read The Canoes of Oceana, I saw that the catamarans were asymmetric; really, they were hydrofoils in the water, and Cook didn’t even understand what a hydrofoil was, and then he called ’em dumb savages!” Woody laughed and slapped his legs. “Isn’t that amazing? We’re so arrogant — the human race, especially the white man, y’know?
Woody and Alfred first built a 3-foot model of their catamaran, then a 16-foot version they could sail and test. It worked beautifully, so they set out to build a 38-foot version, working right across the road from Waikiki Beach on an empty lot owned by a wealthy man named Tenny. The Manu Kai (Sea Bird) was framed in wood, sheathed in plywood, and covered with fiberglass. By current standards, she was ultralight.
“When we launched it [in 1947], we had 20 beachboys pick it up and carry it across the road and down to the water — this 38-foot boat!”
Woody Brown was in love with flight, and now he was flying on water — after all, one was so much like the other. “The only difference,” he told me, “is that water isn’t compressible, so it has to follow around the curve no matter how steep it is, and that’s what they call a hull speed on the boat — if the curve on the boat is too great, it can only go through the water just so fast. So I made my catamarans just l-o-n-g and slender. The regular boats are 2 to 1 or 3 to 1, width to length. Mine was 20 to 1, so my hull speed is almost unlimited. I could do 40 miles an hour, and the other boats could do 5 or 6! So I would fly by ’em, which doesn’t make ’em very happy, since they spent a lot of money to get that yacht!”
Everybody wanted a ride on the new cat, and that was good news for Woody and his struggling family (he and Ma Brown had two kids by then). “I worked with the catamaran five years,” he told me. “It was beautiful! I make my living makin’ people happy — what more wonderful way of life can you live than that? I’d take ’em out and give ’em these thrill rides on this 38-foot catamaran, and we’d catch ocean swells and fly down the slope — no other boat in the world could do that, y’know? And the people would whoop and holler — AAIIIEEEE! WOOOHOOO! And they’d tell us, ‘Woody, that’s the greatest thing we’ve done in Hawaii!’ They were mostly rich tourists, and they’d come back three, four times, ride on my catamaran at $3, $3.50 for a one-hour ride. So I could make a living, see?”
But, inevitably, man’s baser instincts came into play. As Kumalae and Choy teamed up with Warren Seaman and moved on to fame and fortune as C/S/K Catamarans, competition came to the beach. When the beachboys and some other regulars saw Woody making a living, they wanted a shot at the lucrative tourist market too. “I understood everyone has to make his living,” Woody said. “I didn’t object to that. In fact, I helped them to get their catamaran and build it, but then they got mean and nasty, like all humans.” There were price wars, threats, even guys warning Woody’s customers not to go with him — his boat was too dangerous! “Finally I told my wife, I can’t take this shit anymore; I don’t need this kind of life. That’s how I bought the farm up here in Kula and started farming.”
* * * * *
The area called Kula is on the west slope of Haleakala. At the 4,000-foot level where Woody and Rachel bought a small farm, there is a commanding view of the narrow neck of Maui, from Kahului on the North shore to Maalaea on the south. Back in the early 1950s, Woody had the best waves all to himself.
“When I came here, there was one surfing place — Ho’okipa, and the city had built lockers for the boys there, and they rode just way up in the corner there where the waves don’t get too big, by the pavilion. But I liked to ride big waves, and I had a board that could ride the big waves.”
The locals had hollow Blake-style boards or the old slide-ass swastika, “so they never rode big waves; their deal was 7 or 8 feet, pau, that was the end, but I liked the 10, 15, 20-foot waves. But this one boy, Donald Chimura, he was kind of interested in my board, and so I helped him build one like it, and we went all around the island here finding new places — Honolua and Maalaea and all over — and he and I were the only ones that would go out in these big waves.”
Meanwhile, he was truck farming in Kula, working the land, growing vegetables — cabbage, carrots, string beans, tomatoes — driving them to market, making 40 bucks a month, sometimes more, and going surfing when the swell was up. And then he told me the story:
“I was still riding big waves, so one day I was out there in my yard working on my surfboard,” he began. “Now, you won’t believe all this, boy!” and he laughed, then continued. “So, I’m workin’ up there, quiet, there wasn’t another house for a mile around; you could hear a pin drop, see. So I’m workin’ the surfboard, and all of a sudden this voice says, ‘What’re you doin’?’ And it kind of startled me because nobody around, but ...” and he slaps his thighs for emphasis, because he knows how this sounds ... “I just say, ‘Whoa, I’m just workin’ on my surfboard.’ I mean, it was said in such a nice way, just like some guy standing there who really wanted to know. So, a couple of minutes more, then it said, ‘What for?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m making it faster, so I can get across these great big waves.’ And then it blew my mind, see? Then it said, ‘But you can’t take it with you when you go.’ Who-who-whooooo!” Woody was laughing with the shock and thrill, remembering.
“That just BLEW my mind out! Because I don’t believe in God — I believe in this world here, and the flying and the surfing. But now he’s blown my mind, and I said, ‘Well, what can you take with you when you go?’ And the awful answer was, ‘Nothing!’” And then Woody was laughing again. “That blew my mind totally. So I said, ‘Well, then this world is a damn lie and a deception! It has no real meaning at all! What good is it if you can’t take anything with you?’ And so I was blown out, you see? I SAW you can’t take it with you when you go.”
Woody’s life changed from that moment on. Suddenly he had no faith in anything. He thought he was going to die, literally, then, “Wait a minute!,” he realized, “I can’t die; I’ve got a beautiful wife and two children — it’s my fault — I created them!” He searched his mind, considering the great men of history — Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, even Einstein — and finally came to rest on Jesus, who died to save us, said “turn the other cheek,” and “love and forgive your enemy.” He was led, he told me, to understand that Satan was the power of our “separate” thought, which kept us from understanding God, who sees everything in wholeness. What Woody came to know, understand, and finally, fully experience is that, “God is love.”
“That’s what Jesus told them on the Mount,” Woody explained, “love and forgive your neighbor. Nobody will do it. The Church doesn’t do it. So, in other words, nobody will do it. I DID IT, you see? Maybe I’m a fruit, but that’s beside the point. I DID IT.”
Further communications followed — not merely voices but large letters that, hearing it from Woody, reminded me of the HOLLYWOOD sign, proclaiming further mind-blowing and divine facts to Woody: “There was no such thing as good and evil! Because Love takes the place of all these things. Love for ALL and every single one. Yeah! Then I thought, this Love must be God. It’s simple as that. Because if we all loved each other, it’d be paradise right here, wouldn’t it? You would have 4 billion people lookin’ our for you! What would you have to look out for yourself for? It made good sense.”
* * * * *
Woody drifted back and forth between Maui and O’ahu over the next 20 years, working in the catamaran business as a builder, owner-operator, and hired captain. He still surfed some big waves (although the Dickie Cross experience scared him for quite awhile) and was one of the surfers on that big Makaha wave, which caused such a sensation when it hit the mainland papers in 1953.
Along about 1971, Woody told me, he hooked up with an airline pilot who said the government was selling surplus training gliders for $800, so they bought one together and had it shipped over to Mokulei’a, on O’ahu, where Woody rebuilt it to “modern” standards and returned to the skywaves for a last fling.
“Well,” he told me, “you’re not supposed to go over 12,000 feet without oxygen, but I went up to 20 — with no trouble! I’d be up there for five or six hours at 20,000 feet, and you’re not supposed to be able to do that. But one day I got in a wave that took me up above 20,000. In fact, it was so damn strong — it was a double wave, back on the ridge behind, and the fetch between the two [ridges] was just right, so that one wave built the other one up behind it, and, boy, I went up through 20,000 feet so fast, and when I got to 21 thousand, I began to get the warning — I mean, the instrument board got fuzzy, and I realized what was happening, and I said, ‘Hey, I gotta get down now!’ Well, I couldn’t get down! The lift was so strong that I was diving with the spoiler open and everything, and I wasn’t comin’ down, I was still goin’ up! I got to about 22 thousand before I could get out of the wave, but I got down okay.”
* * * * *
Ninety years isn’t a long time in the history of the world, but it’s a long life for a man, and Woody’s has been fuller than most, full of the kinds of things that define what it is to be human, but I doubt he would have become the man he’s become if he hadn’t been a surfer. Woody’s life deserves a book, a big book So much of what he told me is fascinating and deserves to be told: tales of the early days at La Jolla and San Onofre, his wanderings through Hawaii in the early 1940s, his developmental work on the catamaran and the subsequent “wars” at Waikiki, the Manu Kai’s record Trans-Pac crossing, his many solo sessions in big surf off Maui, his work with the elderly at the Hale Makua care facility in Kahului (biking up the road to work at age 87!), his eventual reunion with his first son, Jeffrey Sellon, and on and on.
“Woody Brown is a combination of Howard Roarke from The Fountainhead and Forrest Gump,” Ben Marcus told me recently. “He’s the guy that’s always kind of on the fringe of history, from washing Charles Lindbergh’s plane to being one of the guys in that Makaha photo. He’s there and he’s very influential, but he just doesn’t care about fame. He just likes to do things right. But he’s very Forrest Gump; I mean, look at the times he moved through. He’s interesting.” He’s more than interesting, though. He’s the true spirit of surfing.
“Hobie came for a ride on my catamaran, and he liked it so much, he said, ‘I wanna build one, Woody!’ and I said, ‘Fine, go ahead!’ He went and did it, and he made a fortune! But I wasn’t interested in makin’ money. I was a freak all my life, you see? The Lord kept me away. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been kept away from people. I didn’t go to parties and get drunk; I’m stupid enough already, why would I want to get more stupid for? So I was a loner. I didn’t get involved in the good-and-evil deal, trying to beat the other guy and be better than everybody. I was just interested in nature, and nature doesn’t do those things. Nature has certain laws, and as long as you understand those laws, why you get along fine, and you can do things that other people can’t do, because they don’t understand nature, see? That’s how I could make all these records in boats and airplanes and surfboards — because I understood nature, and I worked with it. Now, there’s no jealousy, there’s no hate, there’s no good and evil, there’s no ‘me better than you’ and all that — I just kept away from all that. And if you look back on my life, you can see how the Lord was setting me up for this, writing these books, like The Gospel of Love.”
* * * * *
That’s Woody’s work now — writing down what comes to him from a God that requires unconditional love for all. And that’s Woody’s work too — living those words.
* * * * *
One summer many years ago, when the surf was flat on the north side, Woody found a good little spot out by Lahaina near a place called Laniupoko. “I guess I didn’t want to fight the whitewater all the time, so I found this place that had a deep hole inside, so when you lost your board, it didn’t go up on the rocks. And not only that, but there was a little channel between the surfs to go out where it didn’t break unless it was tremendous. So that was neat; I loved that. They called it Woody Surf because I was the only one that’d go out there.” He cleared a path through the rocks to the waves, and he made it a matter of some ritual to clear that cleft of white sand when he returned each summer.
In January of this year, I watched Woody secure his leash around his waist and walk his board through this path. Then he smoothy hopped into a knee-paddling position and stroked out to the peak, where he rode wave after wave, looking fluid, controlled, and thoroughly at home.
We talk about our heroes, but a hero (though quasi-divine according to the Greeks, who came up with the term) is a dead man, and Woody Brown is not a dead man. Far from it. He’s got more life in him — has lived more and done more and carries more — than just about anyone I’ve ever met.
Now almost 90, Woody tells me, “I think death is a great and wonderful thing to look forward to.”
And I remind him of what Bob Dylan wrote: “Just remember ... that death is not the end.”
* Note: In Paul A.Schweizer’s 1988 book, Wings Like Eagles, The Story of Soaring, Woody Brown is cited for setting a national distance record of 280 miles at the 1939 Southwest Soaring Contest. Woody’s Bowlus kit sailplane was called the B-100 Baby Albatross; Thunderbird was Woody’s “pet name” for the glider.
** The first “European” attempt at a multihull was a crude 30' catamaran designed and built by Sir William Petty and launched in Dublin on September 22, 1662. Dubbed Simon & Jude, King Charles II instructed she be renamed The Experiment. With her twin cylindrical hulls, she beat all comers in a race organized by the Royal Society. in 1876, Nathanael Herreshoff beat the entire fleet with his 25’ catamaran Amaryllis at the New York Yacht Club’s Centennial Regatta and was promptly banned from future races. In 1937, Eric de Bisschop, a French explorer and ocean sailor, built the forerunner of the modern catamaran (a 35' double canoe) on Waikiki Beach; he named the craft Kaimiloa and sailed her around the world and back to France, an epic voyage of 264 days.
*** If you found Woody’s photo album, please return it — no questions asked! Contact LongBoard for routing instructions.
**** Woody’s choice of automobiles was in line with his passion for aircraft. Carl Breer, chief engineer for Chrysler’s Airflow, tested various automobile shapes in wind tunnels in an attempt to reverse the lift effect of an aircraft wing, pressing the vehicle more firmly against the road for more stability as its speed increased. A 1934 ad for the Airflow stated: “You have only to look at a dolphin, a gull, or a greyhound to appreciate the rightness of the tapering, flowing contour of the new Airflow Chrysler. By scientific experiment, Chrysler engineers have simply verified and adapted a natural fundamental law.” Unfortunately for Chrysler, the Airflow was not a success. First car with an aerodynamic body to be put into large scale production, with its 8-cylinder, 125-bhp engine and a maximum speed of 147 km/h, even in 1934 the car cost upwards of $5,000.
***** The Gospel of Love: A Revelation of the Second Coming by Woodbridge Parker Brown with Dorothy Esson Stockman, Courier Publishers, Honolulu, 1980. Note: Woody only has a handful left, but send a note to LongBoard if you’re interested in a copy, and if he gets enough requests, perhaps he’ll do a reprint. As he says, “God has to grow.”
© Drew Kampion, 2001
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