The fracture made a lot of scary things you have to be worried about. Nobody wants to come across a green lady or a group of night marchers, but some of the biggest dangers in Lahaina don’t come from the monsters; they come from people themselves. Lots of survivors tried to make things better, like my grandpa, but lots decided to steal and take what they want also. One of the worst of those kind of people is Longboard Lei.
Nobody who lives on the water is safe from the pirate queen and her crew. They say that Lei took the weapons from all the old naval bases around the islands, and put them in a secret armory. They say that there are enough guns there to arm everyone on the island, but my dad says that it’s probably not true, and it’s just a story to make people even more scared of her.
What is true, is that Lei is a great surfer and ruthless. She hates cowardice more than anything else. In fact, if she attacks your village your best bet is to fight back. After an attack, Lei rounds up everyone who didn’t help protect their friends and they’re never see again, but she leaves the injured alone. There are lots of stories about how she got to be a good surfer and why she hates people who don’t fight back, but this is my favorite.
Lei was the daughter of a Kanaka fisherman. Along with her brothers and sisters, she would jump in her dad’s boat every morning and he whole family would go out far beyond the reefs to catch butterfish and mackerel. Her father would tell them all tales about the old world to keep them entertained. He’d talk of movies, traveling across the world in an instant, and how some people used do nothing but play games all day. Lei in particular loved hearing tales of the great old surfers, and would spend much of these fishing trips dreaming of a time when people could survive simply by being good at riding the waves.
Then Lei’s life changed forever. The fish had been harder and harder to find for months, and her dad decided to go out further than usual to look for them. They hadn’t traveled far from the usual fishing grounds when they were hit by a veilstorm. The sky changed color, the orange rain fell, and a massive surge built up beneath their tiny boat. A wave lifted them all high into the air, and the boat broke apart. It was the last Lei would ever see of her family.
The young girl awoke half drowned, clinging to a piece of wood, and floating in a cove. Something about being in the water terrified her, and she kicked as hard as she could to shore. She found herself on a rocky beach surrounded by cliffs. Lei sat for a while and considered her options. She decided to rest for a while and then swim around to see if she could find a better place to wait for help, but hours turned to days.
Every time she tried to go in the water, something inside her made her freeze. So she spent days catching slow crabs and prying snails off the rocks at low tide. She tried boiling sea water and catching the steam like her father taught her, but she wasn’t very good at it, and only collected enough water to make her even more thirsty. On the third day she began to see things and wondered how long it would be before she saw her family again. She watched the rope ladder fall down the cliff face and the old woman descend, but didn’t believe she was real until the coconut water touched her lips.
She was so thirsty that she spilled as mulch as she gulped. The woman said she had been watching Lei, and she was impressed. However, she wondered why whe never swam out of the cove to explore the island. Lei told the strange woman about her family, what had happened, and that she was scared. The woman hugged her close and said she understood because something similar had happened to her long ago.
She promised to help Lei and for the next few months the two were inseparable. While Lei talked about her friends and family freely, the old woman didn’t like to talk about her past. She told Lei that she used to be in movies and was a great surfer in her time. The girl assumed she was just trying to make her feel good until she arrived one day with a pair of crude surfboards. Seeing the skeptical look on Lei’s face the old woman said, “I was always better at riding them than building them,” and hobbled in the water. Lei was amazed! While she walked with a shuffle on land, the old woman deftly maneuvered her board in the water like she was part of the waves. It filled her with enough confidence that she ventured in the water too, and together they paddled out of the cove.
Lei saw that there were many tiny islands in the vicinity and the pair hugged when they reached the beach. For many years, the pair lived on the main beach and surfed every day. While she didn’t mind playing and swimming close to shore, she was still scared to venture out into the deep water. The old woman would take trips to one tiny island every week but refused to say why. She told Lei that if she was so curious, she could just swim out there herself and see. One night as the pair lay in their shelter the old woman hugged Lei close and told her that she was glad she had ended up on the island, and was happy that the end of her days would be spent with such a brave young woman.
The words burned deep inside Lei. As strange as it might sound, she always thought that she would be found. It never occurred to her that she might spend the rest of her life here. She decided that she needed to swim to the little island and see what the old woman was keeping there. It wasn’t a long swim, but Lei’s hands were tired from gripping her board so tight when she arrived. There was a tiny shack not far from the beach, and Lei was not prepared for what she found inside.
A beautiful but broken surfboard with a picture of a young woman who looked a lot like her old companion sat in the corner. There was a piece of driftwood adorned with shells and eight names carved into it with the words “Keep Kicking” underneath. On the wall hung a tattered wetsuit with the name, “Layla” written on the back. Lei was stunned. The old woman was the famous surfer Layal Kalani. Her father had told her stories of Layla. How brave she was, and how she was lost at sea and never found. As Lei thought about the stories, her family, and the old woman, her hands began to shake in anger.
The old woman had talked about not being afraid, but she had never tried to leave herself. She couldn’t believe that the stories her father told of the brave surfing legend who fought sharks, would just sit here and wait to die. She talked about courage but she had none inside her. Worse still, she wanted Lei to succumb to weakness and stay here herself. For the first time in her life she knew what was important. Her father was a good and hardworking man, but it didn’t matter. Her brothers and sisters were innocent and honorable but it didn’t matter. People talked of the bravery of Layla, the Queen of the Surf, but it was a lie. The only thing that mattered was not being a coward, and having the will to take and do what you wanted.
Lei put on the old wetsuit, kicked over the wooden memorial, and grabbed the largest piece of the broken board without a word to the old woman that had almost made her happy to stay on the island. They say her bitterness and anger only grew as she rode the currents. By the time she made land, the young daughter of a Kanaka fishermen was gone and Longboard Lei was all that remained. She would show everyone what someone could do when they didn’t give up and they were not afraid.
My mom doesn’t like when I tell this story to my brother because it scares him, and she says it has a terrible message. But I think it’s good because now he thinks if I get too mad at him for going through my things, I might turn into a pirate like Lei.
Akamai Mahelona
4th Grade
Pu`u School Lahaina
