Surfing Detective 02 - Wipeout

me this with pride, since she apparently knew she looked ten years younger. A military kid, born “Mary Leavis” to an artillery captain and a nightclub dancer in Texas, she grew up in the Sixties bouncing from base to base. She later married and divorced twice, then changed her name to “Maya Livengood” when she became a free spirit in Hawai‘i drifting from island to island. Since then she had occupied herself swimming and diving and haunting the beaches of Hawai‘i’s famous breaks—and hooking up with guys like Corky who surfed them. To hear her tell it, she relished her “mellow” footloose lifestyle.
    “I’m into astrology,” Maya announced, with an artful flutter of her long eyelashes
.
“That’s how I knew Corky and I were right for each other. We were both water signs. He was a Pisces—a fish. And I’m a Cancer—a crab. His wife was all wrong for him. She’s an earth sign—Virgo the virgin—too distant and proper for a fluid, free-wheeling Pisces.” She looked at me intently. “What’s your sign, Kai?”
    “No signs for me, thanks. Whatever my horoscope says, I’m sure I don’t want to know.”
    “You’re bull-headed.” Maya shook her long hair. “What are you, a Taurus?”
    “You missed my point, entirely.”
    She got quiet again. But that ghost of a smile didn’t leave her face.

    The shuttle bus crested the rise into Lana‘i City—sixteen hundred feet above sea level—where the pines pointed into the sky like giant green arrows. The stately evergreens lent the plantation town an air of mountain serenity and coolness. Surrounded by these soaring Norfolks, grassy Dole Park lay at center of the village. A bank, a general store, a few diners, and other small businesses sat on the park’s perimeter with rustic sun-faded facades suggesting an earlier era. The village’s nearly deserted streets reinforced the sense of desolation that had set in at the airport.
    We stepped off the shuttle by the Kelly green Lana‘i Plantation Store, whose red tin roof covered gas pumps, a small convenience store, and the island’s only car rental agency.
    “It’s time you told me,” I said, opening the store’s door. “Where’s the map hidden?“
    Maya didn’t hesitate. “On Shipwreck Beach.”
    “Shipwreck Beach? That’s eight miles of sand and junk.”
    “Corky told me the map is inside a sunscreen bottle.”
    “Eight miles, and we’re looking for one sunscreen bottle?” I couldn’t help but sound exasperated.
    “There’s more . . .” Maya paused. “Corky told me to walk the beach to that stranded Navy ship—the huge one that ran aground offshore.”
    “That narrows it down some,” I said, a trace of exasperation still in my voice.
    By noon Maya and I were twisting down the sun-bleached highway to Shipwreck Beach in a Jeep Wrangler—rear-view mirrors, for the moment, empty. A conventional car would have done us little good on this rugged island, whose roads other than this narrow paved highway were mostly sand and dirt and mud. Soon we would need all four wheels pulling.
    The road wove down six miles to the blustery windward coast of Lana‘i. This remote wind-swept slope would be a great place to get lost. And never found. There were few signs of civilization here, not even such beginnings as lines for electricity, telephone, and cable TV. The sloping terrain, like the bleached highway, looked scorched. Stunted
kiawe and
red rock—that was it. Over the craggy landscape the wind howled.
    Before long Maui and Moloka‘i lay in the distance on the blue sea. Then the rusty hulk of the grounded ship came into view, listing and battered into a bare skeleton. Many years ago the Navy tried to sink the mammoth World War II liberty ship in the channel between Lana‘i and Maui. But the vessel had a mind of her own. She ran aground and all attempts to remove her failed. Today she still haunts the beach like a rotting corpse yet unburied by the sea.
    Unreal.
As unreal as the likelihood of our finding a sunscreen bottle on eight miles of beach presided over by this hoary wreck.
    As the highway bent down to the shore and the pavement turned to sand, we found ourselves driving along the beach on a powdery path bordered by kiawe thickets. The wind swirled a sand contrail behind us as the Jeep got squirrelly. I shifted into four-wheel-drive.
    Another mile brought a huddle of fishing shacks, erected of timbers washed ashore from capsized vessels, and the first human faces we’d