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HYDRAULIC
MACK
thrust in water Elijah Mack should have died that day. The day he first surfed the stationary wave at the Skookumchuck rapids near Egmont, Canada. The half-mile of unstoppable hydraulics behind one of the world's most monstrous and deadly tidal features had already claimed many lives and ships, and for Elijah, a surfer all his life, the odds were catching up. Surfer, thug, artist, father, all parts of Elijah Mack, all drowning in the name of river surfing, under a three-meter tide change of 200-billion-gallon, 30 mile-per-hour freezing Canadian whirlpools roaring through a flat, 80-mile inlet during the fall of 2003. Green mountains loomed between Elijah's sinking body and the sea, 100 miles away. Purple starfish clung to black river rock, and kayakers (having pre-warned Elijah not to tempt the waters), backpaddled frantically in attempts to save his life. The semi-psychotic strength that had enabled Elijah to survive a horrendous adolescence of drugs, violence, depression and homelessness was only an irony against Skookumchuck's eddy lines. Elijah managed to drag his buoyant, yellow, 6-foot Realm surfboard down with him when the ridiculous currents began to pull, and some time later the board spat upwards, alone, from out of the deep-green stretch of watery Russian roulette. There it hung in the air, catching the setting sun on its sharp, golden rail, cutting a wedge of moment, a slice of frozen time. Time enough for Elijah to make a miracle. Somewhere far down-current, deep in the suffocating brine, the grip released its rancorous hold. When Elijah surfaced from his morbid baptismal and struggled to shore, shaken but alive, he was a man born anew. Yet, a wind was blowing; something had changed. His sons Hurricane and Chance flooded his mind. He wanted to call home, but was afraid that something horrific had befallen them. As he maneuvered through rocks back toward the stunned kayakers, it occurred to him that his tentative life, so nearly taken many times in the past, had been returned to him once again, but at what cost? It was then, saltwater-drenched, shivering from a sense of something spiritual passing through the terrific landscape, that his cell phone began ringing. He picked it up and learned that his stepfather, Victor Maaher, the man who had raised him, was dead. "That was a critical moment," said Elijah, "when I really started to get my life turned around."
born in fire A year now after his near drowning and subsequent surf sessions at Skookumchuck, 34-year-old Elijah is president of the WRSA (World River Surfing Association — with a membership of 52), owner of Mos Faded Urban Barbershop, custodian of his two sons and one of the wildest, most intense members of our community you can possibly imagine. In W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, Maugham says that "people are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children … and the God they believed in." How true for Elijah, who stands like Maugham's character Elliot Templeton, uniquely individual, the human outcome of a past filled with good and evil, where good wins and where evil leaves scars. The details of Elijah's subtle make-up begin with his blood. Within every vessel of Elijah's body travels the blood of a surfer and an artist, voila his great-uncles, famous watermen Mickey and Dempsey Holder. Dempsey: A pioneer of life-guarding techniques in the '40s and '50s who surfed with Hawaiian board legend Duke Kahanomoku at Cardiff Reef, gave Elijah his gills to brave the heaviest surf.
Internationally famous big-wave shaper and big-wave event director Gary Linden recalls a day surfing with Elijah in '98. "Eli? He's a good friend. We surfed some waves at Todos one day. It was really big, and he charged it, catching one wave that I remember. He took off the north peak back side, so there was a really good view of him coming across the boil." Mickey: Founder of the Swami Surf Association in Encinitas, Calif., a gnarly merchant marine who mixed constantly with Alan Ginsberg and Jack Keroac, gave Elijah the artist's touch that his barbershop clients have come to know and value. UO head basketball coach Ernie Kent, who gets his cuts at Mos Faded, says, "An artist? Yeah he's an artist. You watch him work in there; there's a measure of art to what he does." In addition, both Dempsey and Mickey were anti-establishment, probably where Elijah got his edge of a thousand sharpened diamonds. Growing up, Elijah wasn't "all love," as his Eugene business partner Jason Thompson says he is these days. Nope, not all love back then, and that's putting it mildly. Elijah was once as fucked up as you can imagine. Back in 1969 San Diego, Jeffrey Simmerman, a hardcore surfer and weed-grower, placed some acid on the outstretched tongue of Karen Wyman. She did the same for him. Nine months later, a doctor was needed to cut Elijah from the womb. An all-American child living in shadows of shattering American dreams, Elijah spun helplessly through a tornado of California years, tossed through a gamut of destructive, hardening experiences. By the age of 17, Elijah had been kicked out of four high schools, two continuation schools and one outreach school for the worst of the worst. He'd been attacked by his step-father Victor Maaher, and in defense had beaten him down, was kicked out of the house. Homeless, Elijah crashed with some of the best surfers in the socio-economically impoverished city of Oceanside. Many kids back then aspired to emulate the "straight A" appearance of surf greats like Tom Curren and Mike Parsons, but Elijah couldn't have taken a more different path. Wendy Linden, Gary Linden's wife, remembers Elijah flailing in youth. "Tattoo-man!" She recalls. "Elijah's one of the grommets who grew up on Linden surfboards, struggling to find a niche in life. When he went up to Oregon he was asking a lot of questions. Eli had artistic talent that wouldn't be visible just surfing. I wouldn't have ever thought of hair for him, though! He's found his place. He's just a real good kid who really struggled." By 19, Elijah had more than 30 tattoos and had spent numerous nights in jail for fights, disorderly conduct and public intoxication. Instead of hanging out with clean-cut surfer types, his friends were gang members and punks. He began fighting fires during the summers, and winters he drank, got tattoos and surfed. During a short stint in Hawaii, Elijah found himself unexpectedly welcome in the habitually territorial, athletic subculture of Hawaiian big-wave surfing. The spirits of Elijah's great-uncles must have been invoked; one night at a dinner Elijah sat between Hawaiian surf legends Buffalo Keaulana and Dane Kealoha. "Surfing Rocky Point," said Elijah, "Johnny Boy Gomes gave me like five waves in a row. That guy's known the world over for not giving anyone waves." "And then I left," said Elijah, a foggy distance in his eyes. On return, one night before shipping out to his first season as a smoke jumper, Elijah gave himself a compound fracture in a San Francisco bar fight. His injury began his darkest years, though somehow in the those depths he managed to find fleeting spots of brightness: Elijah would sire two sons and complete beauty school, but at the same time if you were a drug dealer in Oceanside between 1993 and 1996, and four armed men smashed your door, stealing everything you had and telling you to leave town fast, and if somehow your frightened eyes strayed higher than the wrong side of a gun barrel pointed in your face, you might have seen the eyes of Elijah Mack staring at you from within a ski mask. In the end, Elijah had what he called a "misunderstanding" with hardcore gang members, and he fled with his wife, Brooklyn, to her family in Arizona, where for 90 days he never strayed beyond arm's reach of a pistol. GQ magazine recently published a profile of Elijah and his Eugene barbershop. When asked if Elijah worried that someone from his past might see the article and try to come find him, Elijah said, "Well, it certainly crossed my mind that someone might see that. But publicity for Mos Faded and the WRSA is a big part of what I'm doing now. If I were afraid of publicity, my work wouldn't be going anywhere. Plus, I don't think most of the dudes I knew back then pick up GQ." In Arizona, Elijah met his first mentors in the hair industry: Ali, Tyrone and Courtney, who worked at a barbershop called Nappy By Nature. He began to learn his trade. When Brooklyn left him one day, Elijah went over the edge. "I lost my mind and drove to San Francisco." He said. "I planned to kill myself by drinking and working as a motor messenger, hoping to get crushed by a city bus." Strangely enough, bad news provided a catalyst for Elijah's development into a human being. On Sept. 21, 2001, Elijah's cousin Troy McClure died, and Elijah went to his funeral in Mt. Shasta, Calif. "My mind was spun," he said. "I got into a massive physical confrontation with my stepfather at the funeral. I took off in a 1987 beat up Ford pickup with only $127 to my name, no license and no insurance, and ended up in a homeless shelter in Eugene." "That was the last time I saw my stepdad," says Elijah. "We had many good times, despite all the shit that went down. I know he loved me, and I know he took the bullet for me at Skookumchuck. It was his way of being there." The next day, Elijah got up from his cot at the shelter and went looking for work. Rodney Witherspoon was cutting hair in Eugene's N-DA-KUT Hair Salon when Elijah walked in, clean and dressed in the suit he'd worn to the funeral. "My fades are immaculate," said Elijah, looking Witherspoon in the eye, winning himself a job. A month later Elijah was staring at a wall in his rented micro-apartment dreaming of owning his own barbershop, when a memory came over him: Walking his dog along a riverside in Chico, Elijah was looking out at a smooth, stationary wave rippling in the river and thought maybe, just maybe he could stand up and surf it. Seized in a fit of action, Elijah jumped off the floor, grabbed his board and ran out the door. The World River Surfing Association was born.
the mission When you witness Elijah's athletic prowess on a river full of raging water, you know you're seeing something special. People shake their heads. "That guy's going to blow up," said one EW photographer, watching Elijah surf a river. It was almost as if you could hear a wick sizzling away ... It's a warm summer day, three years after Elijah surfed his first river wave, and the president of the WRSA is standing at the edge of the water, looking at Pipeline … in Idaho. Named after the famous Hawaiian surf break, Pipeline's also a popular kayaking wave on the Lochsa River. "It's the most incredible shade of blue and green I've ever seen," says Elijah, who through his avid dedication to the sport remembers details from every wave he's surfed. "You can see right down to the bottom. Even though it's June, the water is still in the low 50s from snow runoff. Pipe's powerful, and good for big cut-backs. Because it has an irregular surge that runs though the wave, it's easy to get caught and ripped out the back. Next year I'm taking a board with straps so that I can use the surge to project aerials. I know that one day straps will be the norm for all expert river surfers."
One day. The future of river surfing? I guess we better start at the beginning: At first Elijah called up Oregon River Sports and learned of a play spot called Clover Wave on the McKenzie River. By the end of 2002 he was working his ass off surfing river waves all across the Northwest, documenting his rides by setting a video camera on the shore. "With over 70 stationary waves under my belt I am the undeniable leader of this underground sport," says Elijah. "In the past two years I have established myself as the most knowledgeable and experienced stationary-wave surfer in the world. There are people who've been surfing the Isar River in Munich for years, and there are people like (world-famous kayker) Corran Addison, who kayak and occasionally bring a surfboard, and there are people surfing the tidal bore that flows up the Amazon River, but no one has done what I've done for river surfing on a grand scale, going out and finding and documenting waves to promote the sport. Not to mention forming an organization. River surfing is the new frontier sport, like surfing was in the '60s. You can still buy a surf vacation and get incredible waves, but the safari-type exploration doesn't exist in the surfing world anymore. I'm 20 years ahead of my time. " Dave Grove, a former Eugenean who just broke the world record for highest waterfall-drop in a kayak (about 120 feet), says, "What Elijah's doing is like the next thing. People used to wind surf, and now they're kite boarding. It's natural progression; he's taking it to the next level. There's a whole section of the industry that's not being tapped or touched. He's getting people to pay attention to the water and rivers around them. How important is that? There's hundreds of thousands of people with creeks in their back yards." "What I find difficult about promotion," says Elijah, "is that river surfing hasn't been embraced by the surfing or kayaking industries. Kayakers know about the waves but don't care about board-surfing them and surfers don't know a thing about it. No industry surrounds it, but I'm punching a hole in that. In the end, river surfing has more appeal than either of its two bigger sisters. In surfing, no one's creating more breaks. Think about it: The ocean's the skin of an apple. It's good, but there's way more on the inside than outside. There are people surfing a Snake River wave called Lunch Counter, outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., who have never even seen the ocean. Never. Do you know how many rivers there are in the world, how many undiscovered spots a person could surf?" Though the heads of surf industry may not have yet embraced the sport, some of the biggies are at least starting to listen: Gary Linden, of Linden Surfboards, says "That's where the growth is;" Bill Sharp of the big-wave film and event, The Billabong Odyssey, says "I like the sound of it. It's right up my alley" and Surfer Magazine recently took Elijah and some professional surfers to Skookumchuck to document a session. "I feel it's important to point out," says Elijah, "that I've done more for river surfing than any of these guys who get paid the big bucks. If I had even a quarter of the resources some of these people have, who knows what I could do? How far I could push the sport? I don't want to give the impression that they (Surfer) took me. I took their asses." Though Elijah maintains the big river-waves are out there, "I haven't seen anything," said Bill Sharp in a recent e-mail to Elijah, "that shows a wave bigger than 4 or 5 feet on the face. If you can show me ANY evidence of a 12 to 15 foot barrel I'll be there in a matter of minutes and will buy property." Well, Elijah, the wick's almost burned through. Hold tight to that video camera and get ready for an explosion.
E
& J's Mos Faded Urban Barbershop On Jan. 15, 2003, Elijah opened his barbershop at 960 W. 7th Ave. in Eugene. It's a small two-chair, hole-in-the-wall that Elijah shares with barber and friend Jason Thompson, catering mainly to the black community. From Mos Faded Elijah runs a small clothing line and a hair care products company, and he lives in a modest apartment beneath the shop with his two sons and his girlfriend Merryl.
A white man running a black barbershop is a unique concept in a state known for timber and an unusually high number of churches per capita, and creation of such a shop in itself is a bold maneuver. "He's the best guy I've seen, black or white," says UO tight end football player Tim Day, about the cuts coming out of Mos Faded, "It think it's great. In a place like Eugene, you don't usually find someone who can cut like we did back at home, like Las Vegas or California. You can't get the type of styles, a regular fade or shaping, blinding you up the way you want, but Eli's hip to all the new cuts and everything. Most of the people out there, they don't know the type of cuts we like. I went in there, he already knew what I wanted." Elijah greets everyone who walks into his shop better than you greet your own family. His forward, gregarious and coaxing manner makes the son that stands behind the father's legs step out from the shadows. He makes everyone feel like The Champ; posters of Ali fill the barbershop walls. And, interestingly enough, he makes the odd white client feel comfortable, out of his or her element, in the city's rare room where one might not understand the quickly slung and sometimes bigger-city colloquialisms. UO athletes fill blanks in Elijah's appointment-book and plastic chairs while they wait, and coach Ernie Kent says, "where to get your hair cut comes up in recruiting and I'm happy to be able to tell athletes about Mos Faded." "There's nothing like this in all of Oregon," says Jason Thompson, who'd been cutting hair in Portland without a license for about a decade, "just for the simple fact that a white guy and a black guy can come to the shop for an excellent cut by the same person. Usually you got just black men cutting black men's hair and white men cutting white men's hair, so it's always been kind of segregated. But you can come in and I can make you look like Brad Pitt, or if a black man comes in I can make him look like Denzel Washington." Elijah talks to me while leaning over a black barber's chair, his concentrated eye watching closely as he slides clippers up the back of a young boy's head. The child's generously-sized father is poured over the armrests in the next chair over, talking loudly into a cell phone. He holds a palm over the mouthpiece of the phone for a moment and applauds the fade Eli's cut into the hair of his 8-year-old son. A large print of Elijah making a sick drop off Big Rock is blown up in the background. "Boy … you is hooked up!" The Father hollers to his son. That's Elijah living one of his childhood dreams vicariously, I smile. The child smiles too, smiles despite his best efforts to keep it cool. Too cool, in his plastic cape. Too cool, just like Elijah, covered in tattoos. Elijah's cell phone buzzes from its resting place next to the medicine cabinet, under scissors and hanging clippers. He grabs for it the same way he grabs for the world, in one of many thousands of quick swipes, and turns back to the boy, "You want some pomade in that?" "You know I do, brother," says the kid, in a voice suddenly aged with confidence and dignity, looking at his father who nods. "You know I do." For more information about river surfing, E & J's Mos Faded Urban Barbershop, or just to contact Elijah to go river surfing, go to www.surfrivers.com,www.mosfaded.com or e-mail Elijah Mack at riversurfprez@surfrivers.com "I'll take you river surfing!" Says Elijah.
Eugene, Wave of the Future The WRSA seeks to build and promote a stationary-wave park in Eugene and has begun dialogue with the city. Steve Johnson, on the Mayor's Parks, Recreation and Open Space Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee, says "There's got to be some way to work this out. Some version of what Elijah's interested in can be created." Here's a short list of existing stationary-wave technologies: Waveloch – With installations in Durbin, South Africa, and San Diego, Waveloch shoots 100,000 gallons of water per minute up a curved, padded wall, resulting in a thin, quick wave for "flowboards." Drawbacks: Muy costly, and we want surfboards! www.waveloch.com Jump Hydraulic — "That's a technical term for a circulating hole," says kayaker Corran Addison. Placed in a river, "the water basically jumps over a rock. The problem is that people building these sites for kayakers don't know their asses from a hole in the ground," says Addison. Drawbacks: Unpleasant sounding, biologically confusing, but still viable if designed with user input. Tube6 — Created by physics and engineering students in Munich, Germany, this barreling wave is still a prototype. With plans to build a full-size wave by the summer of 2005, Tube6 is a deep, full wave for surfboards. www.tube6.com Drawbacks: Doesn't exist yet, but sounds and looks sick. Diversion — Water is channeled from a water source, then pooled and released in sufficient quantity over a contoured human-made river bottom, creating a controlled, enthusiast-designed wave. Drawbacks: The only thing drawn back's the water, holmeslice! "It's not so far away from what Park Planning already has in mind for the river," says Johnson. "The Alton Baker master-plan envisions more use out of the Willamette. Getting the kayaking element involved will be important." The WRSA wants a wave built especially for surfers. By that, Elijah means everyone, including kayakers. "Whether you're surfing, body-boarding or kayaking, laying down or standing up, it's all surfing." Says Elijah. "The WRSA promotes the concept of a wave park for everyone who wants to be involved and get amazing rides." One kayaker, Tim Patrick, also the Youth & Family Services Manager in charge of City Pools and the Outdoor Program, says "I think it's a remarkable idea. The WRSA is going along in the right manner, contacting the agencies that would be involved in the project, getting them on the same page. They need to talk to the main players with a common interest, and get their planners and engineers to look at the idea to decide the most feasible option financially, environmentally and mechanically, and then acquire funding." About options, Johnson says "I don't think it's impossible. If costs could be kept below approximately $200,000, the park could be built from existing park monies outside of bond measures." The WRSA is also applying for a Lane County Development Grant, "which is typically given," says Johnson, "when you can project a resulting economic stimulus to the city. When you're building an attraction such as this, it's very plausible that you're going to attract people to Eugene." The WRSA is suggesting $50,000 as the grant amount for creating some type of standing wave. Going to the city, the county and the state may be the best route for the WRSA to attain their wave park. "The city is more likely to get on board if someone else is matching their funds," said Johnson. "That way they can claim at least partial ownership to something bigger than they could afford on their own. Bringing more players to the table makes it more complicated on one hand, but it might make it easier as well." Strap your booties on Eugene, a wave park may not be far away. — Ben Fogelson
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