Levity: The Alo Slebir and Luca Padua Profile

“It’s a mess out here… I heard it’s a mess there too.”

– Aesop Rock

Three Americans in an Irish house. It’s a big house with a view of Mullaghmore. It was me and the other two were Alo Slebir, Luca Padua, two of the best young big wave surfers from the good ol’ you ess of A. Sleek looking surfboards by Paul Stretch covered the floor of the ample sitting room, both tow and paddle. We were all getting reading for another day of big waves in the middle of the best season in a decade.

“Look at us!” said Luca, “Thee Americans in a house in Ireland.”

“Want a coffee?” Alo asked.

I nodded.

“Three Americans,” Luca said again, “can you feel the freedom?”

We all laughed.

“I can fucken smell it,” said Alo.

And we all laughed.

The boys found this house on their own after turning down a less expensive option with a friend of mine who had several rooms to rent out. Alo turned the rooms down because my friend, who lives in the house, might not be pleased with Luca’s habit of waking up at four a.m. to do power squats while blasting The Star Spangled Banner on repeat through his portable speaker.

I laughed, but Alo didn’t. He wasn’t kidding, he was just explaining the logistics of traveling with his best friend.

I’ve spent half my life as an ex-pat. Maybe because the first half of my life, the half in America, I could hardly be described at a patriot. I grew up reading the literature of people oppressed by the American government, I cut my teeth on To Kill a Mockingbird, I read Roots, Beloved and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee before I hit high school. And, by then, I was re-reading Peter Matthiessen’s In The Spirit of Crazy Horse and listening to Rage Against the Machine on repeat. In the first week in that new school the principal jacked me up a wall by my neck with his fist raised in a threat of extreme violence if I continued to refuse to stand up and pledge allegiance to the flag. His violence only strengthened my resolve. And instead of punching my head off he had me report to his office every morning so the other kids would not see my little act of rebellion.

I left high school and went straight to Hawaii where I attended as many Hawaiian sovereignty rallies as my class schedule would allow. The American dream, if it ever was true, was only true if you had just the right kind of European decedents. And that “give us your tired, your poor, your hungry” was only ever a sentiment, and even that was now as extinct as Dodos.

In short, my dear beloved American readers, I am a sceptic of all things Stars and Stripes, I live here in the land of saints and scholars, feeling lucky that I have escaped the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But I will always love America, in a way. At least the idea of it. It’s a beautiful idea. “All men are created equal,” he said.

“Give us your tired, your hungry, your poor,” she said.

“I have a dream,” he said.

“It’s all just a two hundred and fifty year long April Fool’s prank,” I said.

Nailing down my love for my home country is like nailing a jellyfish to a wall. But there are things I miss, and things I love about America. But in this foul year of our lord, two thousand and twenty six, I usually try to ignore whatever it is y’all are up to across the pond.

I’ve become a practiced and professional ignorer. But now, my home country has bombed Iran who closed the strait which drove the global price of oil up. Farmers all over Ireland got hotter than deep fried tater-tots and, with last of their diesel, drove their giant American-made John Deer tractors to the main roads, fuel refineries, ports, public transportation and left them blocking everything. The gas stations have run out of gas. The stores are running out of food. And when yer granny’s ambulance can’t get to the hospital, shit gets hard to ignore.

And yet…

I love the idea of America. And there is no better embodiment of the beautiful idea of America than Luca Padua and Alo Slebir. I came to this conclusion at the tail end of the season and after all that freedom we smelled in that nice Irish house overlooking the waves.

First, it was a tow session, the waves being too large and windy to paddle surf. Luca and Alo gave plenty of room to the local surfers during the best of the swell and wind, only going on waves that no one else wanted. It was after everyone else went in that my admiration for two young fellow yanks started to really set in.

With an empty lineup, funky wind, and the tide making a wipeout all that more dangerous, the boys set themselves to work. Wave after wave, they learned the lineup and all the quirks. They learned positioning and pushed each other further and further back, hopping over foam balls inside thirty foot tubes, sometimes armed with a 360 in one hand, sometimes not. To my relief as a safety guy, they finally decided to head in, but only to fuel up the ski and head back out.

The waves were now even bigger but truly terrible, the wind having turned hard enough onshore to make Luca’s special forces' style, nipple-length beard bend up and tickle his nose.

He laughed, “My beard only does that when it’s twenty knots.”

The first wave after getting back out was one of the biggest of the day. The wind blew a section down on Luca, and he got scorped so bad he had a lump on the back of his head from kicking himself with his own heel. To my relief, the Americans finally called it a day.

Back at the harbour I asked Luca if he was ok.

“Lemme check,” he said. He picked up a large boulder over his head and sang the Star Spangled Banner one time through while doing squats. “I’m a little sore, but I’ll be ok.”

He then carefully replaced the boulder, stood up straight and gave me a stiff salute.

The first time I met Luca he was still a clean-faced teenager. He was nice and polite and gave me some tips on how to surf Mavericks, the big wave down the hill from his parent’s house in Half Moon Bay.

It was nearly ten years later before I met him again at my farm which is a couple fields over from Irish house that smells of American freedom.

“Luca?” I asked, but I was hesitant. The Luca I remembered did not have fire engine red hair, but the ginger with his hand extended looked more like Luca than the other fella who was smiling and saluting through a beard thicker than a fluffy loaf of Wonder Bread.

“I’m Alo,” Alo said, “that’s Luca there,” as he thumbed at the beardy fella.

“Fuck off", I said, and we all laughed. Luca at seventeen was a sweet looking clean-faced kid, and now he looked like he could take over a small but well-armed country single-handedly.

Alo is not as over-the-top Americana, but he is probably one of the most mainstream famous surfers now that he holds the Guinness Book of World Record for surfing the biggest wave.

He is, at the very least, the most famous big wave surfer that holds down a day job. When he’s not surfing Mavericks, or on a mission to surf one of the world’s biggest rideable waves, Alo pours cement.

Alo is not short for Alessandro, the name on his birth cert. Alo is short for Aloe, the plant and natural sunburn remedy which is what his classmates called him to his face in high school when he would come in to school sunburned, his red hair and freckles flaming. Alo is a little more worldly, a little more global. He has uncles and aunties just outside of Milan and his increasingly frequent trips to surf in Ireland have become a reason to hop over and visit them. He speaks Italian fluently and takes Luca with him on these family visits, helping Luca expand his culinary borders with Risotto alla Milanese, Cotoletta alla Milanese, Ossobuco, Mondegheli and other regional delicacies of the Italian alps.

Alo is not a big drinker, but he did indulge himself in nearly two full pints of Guinness with me last St. Patrick's Day in Ireland while they both described how Alo’s Italian family puts so much food in front of them that it turns into an ordeal of sorts.

The airline tickets to Ireland for the St. Patrick's swell were quadruple the normal price, it being a holiday where loads of Americans want to travel to Ireland, multiplied by rising fuels costs from the Middle East debacle.

Both Alo and Luca have a big travel budget, but not unlimited. They both work for their money outside of surfing. When they called me to ask my advice, I whistled hauntingly when they told me L.A to Dublin was close to three grand each way. “Yea,” Alo said, “that’s a lot of cement.”

Luca’s travel money comes from training basketball players in the off season, the same off season as his off season. He gets his training credentials from his mentor, Laird Hamilton. Basketball players jump for a living, but the human body has a finite capacity for how many time it can land from jumping that high before tendons and connective tissue start to fall apart. Luca’s training regime always involves immersion in the medium of water. He can strengthen his athlete’s ability to jump up, without the detrimental effects of falling back down again. Nutrition is a big part of it, something about raw milk, bull testicles and Laird Bars. I don’t remember many details. I was more interested in hearing about Alo’s auntie’s food over in Milan.

I could not write a profile on just one of these two young men. They are always together. It would be like trying to isolate the yin from the yang. For a while, if I wanted to communicate, I would wonder who to call. But I soon realized it didn’t matter. These guys will finish each other’s sentences. They fill in each other’s gaps. They carry each other on their shoulders. You can travel the earth for a thousand lifetimes and not find a stronger bond among human beings than these two have for each other.

The St. Patrick's Day swell at Mullaghmore turned out to be a paddle swell. Not huge, but intense. Green lines raced over the shallow reef in a rare way. Difficult. Technical. Most waves went unridden. Of those caught, very few were made. Most wipeouts resulted in an injury, but the vibe was gung ho as St. Patrick's Day is at the end of the surf season. When calculating the risks, there are always more reasons for the answer to be “go” at the end of the season. It will be flat soon. You will have time to recover incurred injuries.

But my trauma processor, my amygdala, started to overheat when I saw Alo pick a bomb from the pack of keen big wave surfers, make it to the bottom, and get snuffed by the boils. Alo was down deep. He was deep for a long time. And he stayed there. I knew how deep he was because his board was tombstoning, the phenomenon where the surfer turns into an anchor and pulls their own board straight down by the leash, making whatever part of the big paddle board stand straight up out of the whitewater like a gravestone. After thirty seconds of only half his board being visible, it sunk down further, till only two feet of the nose stuck up above the snarling white. After a couple seconds more, those two feet disappeared completely. The nose re-appeared for a bit, then once again dropped down below the surface before another wave broke right on top of where the board had tombstoned.

The last time I saw a wipeout this bad I had to dive off the rescue ski to pull a lifeless body up the last six feet to the surface and attempt CPR on the rescue sled while still out at sea.

“Here we go again,” my brain said to me. I waited for a visual on the victim and prepared myself.

Another twenty seconds went by. I took a deep breath to release some nervous tension. This is what I train for. I’ve done it before, brought people back from the brink. And I can do this again.

Then Alo’s board popped up fully, and half a second later, Alo himself.

“Whoo,” is all he said. He smiled. And started to paddle back out to the lineup.

All of a sudden I could hear Luca laughing. Luca knew he was gonna be ok.

“Dam,” I heard myself say aloud. And I had to think of what I was talking about.

I didn’t know what was tougher. Alo himself or Luca’s bit of levity.

It was then that I knew that these two young men were my new hope for my home country.

And, it was then that I knew that these two young men represented a metaphor of sorts. A metaphor of what America could be. They were signs of hope that America might very well one day make good on the promises and ideals it started out with. Each of them, alone, were capable, kind, empathetic, and generous humans. Each, like all people, were not perfect. Each held doubts and flaws and tics. But together they were more than the sum of themselves. Together, they overcame their doubts and flaws. Together, which they always are, they are tireless, relentlessly excellent and persistently making their own world a better place.

And here I was, an expat on a jet ski who had raged against the American machine for so long that I lost all hope of anything ever being good again, thinking that maybe - if there are enough of these kinds of humans in this next generation - maybe the American dream is still treading water.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote that the wave of the American dream crested and broke. The beautiful wave of America finally broke and rolled back towards the Pacific. That was more than fifty years ago.

But now, with Luca and Alo, maybe we can once again start looking for a set on the horizon. And if you are on a really high cliff looking towards Half Moon Bay with the right set of eyes, maybe you will see the tell-tale sign of that crest, that hope, that the wave of the American dream is there still, coming from a darkened horizon.