No Man Is An Island

At the intersection of modern science and Hawaiian tradition, Cliff Kapono is uniquely poised to affect positive change along his home coastlines and beyond

- Todd Prodanovich

I was sitting on my board at the opening of a river mouth just outside hilo, hawaii, getting jostled in cloudy, brackish water by sizeable swells that had looked much more manageable from the shore. Now in the lineup, the unruly surf was only made worse by backwash as waves warped and crashed on a sinister row of boulders just 10 yards inside. “Hey, don’t get too far out!” yelled Cliff Kapono, who sat on my inside, an anxiety-inducing distance from the rocks. “The current will pull you out, and the closest place to paddle in would be…” He paused for a moment to think. “Just don’t go too far out.”

I nervously scratched against the current until I was next to Kapono, who then informed me that I shouldn’t paddle too far inside, either. In addition to the boulders, he said, there were also jagged chunks of concrete and rebar that lurked just below the surface—remnants of the sugar industry that had long since withdrawn from this particular valley.

Outwardly, I nodded like I understood completely. Inwardly, I wondered why Kapono had taken me to a deathtrap masquerading as a surfable wave—until he swung around on an ugly-looking 6-foot lump, smoothly linked a few well-timed pumps and then blasted a clean frontside air somewhere in that extremely narrow safe zone he’d described.

It made a perfect kind of sense that Kapono would find that middle ground and turn it into his own personal dance floor. Kapono is a great surfer, sure, but more broadly speaking, Kapono’s life has been defined by his ability to deftly navigate the spaces between, to find a middle ground where few others could—and use it to do incredible things.