Moonlight Paradise
Original painting by Wyland ©2003.
6
SAILING
SPIRITS
Of Neptune’s empire let us sing . . .
Thomas Campion
Last One Standing
We were long-lining for halibut out of Kodiak, Alaska, in the late winter. It was my first commercial fishing trip, and I didn’t know if I could handle it. The skipper had a big debt, and he needed money. His plan was to fish the early season when the halibut were still far offshore, before the other boats got going, and maybe get a higher price for his fish. He only had one problem: His boat was too small. His was designed for inshore work in protected waters and summer weather, not a cold winter ocean fifty miles out. He had one experienced crewman, a nice kid in his twenties named Abe. Why he took a chance hiring me, a middle-aged newcomer, I’m still not sure.
As we left harbor, he spelled out what he expected of me as a green crewman. I was surprised at how easy it sounded. “Just don’t lie down,” he said. “Some of the toughest-looking sons-of-bitches you’ve ever seen can’t take hard fishing. They get tired, seasick, scared, whatever. They end up laying down and quitting. You stay on your feet and keep working, and you’ll be okay.”
Don’t lay down? Sure, I thought, no problem. The skipper showed me what to do. I had to pull an anchor out of a rack, attach a buoy, then tie on the ground-line and chuck it overboard. Then he’d drive the boat slowly away from the anchor, paying out ground-line while Abe and I attached baited hooks to it with little snaps. We laid out miles of gear this way. That’s what long-lining means. It’s dangerous work. You can get hooked in the clothing or the hand and get dragged off the stern by the gear. “Hooks and bait go in the water; fishermen stay in the boat.” That was another one of the skipper’s simple rules. We had ice on deck, a northwest wind and breaking seas. Staying on board made sense to me.
Abe and the skipper had been fishing for years and could move about casually, even with the deck rolling thirty degrees on a side and pitching out from underfoot with the occasional fore and aft wave. I couldn’t. I had to hang on all the time. Just walking across the deck became a workout. My arms got tired from taking my weight, doing work my legs do ashore. I got clumsy, banging into things . . . and falling down. The skipper checked on me. I was worrying him. All he said was: “Don’t fall into the ground-line reel.”
I didn’t fall into the big reel, but as the day and the night and the next day wore through I took some body bruises and scrapes. I mashed a hand, but didn’t break it. I got weak. I tried to shake it off, to reach inside myself and gut my way through the work. But by morning my guts were in rebellion, and my strength was gone. I kept swallowing, moving around, gulping fresh air, anything to keep the seasickness down.
Sunrise was beautiful with calming seas, but for me it was too late. I had had it. After working forty-eight hours, I needed a break to heal my stomach and hug my bruises. I dragged another anchor aft, but Abe and the skipper did the job of tying on the buoy and getting the set going. I couldn’t. I began snapping on hooks, carefully, trying to concentrate. But nausea took control, and I collapsed in sickness over the rail. Then again. And a third time with nothing left to toss, just ugly dry heaves as my stomach contracted. I slumped on the rail for support and stared at nothing.
I now understood what every exhausted, seasick sailor knows instinctively—that they can be healed simply by lying down. It was the one thing I’d been told not to do, and I wanted to do it badly. I wasn’t thinking about my bunk either. That was much too far away. I wanted to sink straight down to the deck, seawater, fish slime, bait and all. I wanted to rest on that wet piece of steel more than I could remember wanting anything.
The ground-line kept hissing out over the stern. Abe kept snapping on hooks. I wasn’t moving, and he became concerned. “Why don’t you take a break?” he said. “I can finish baiting this set, and you can, uh, maybe lie down for a while?”
There it was, the one thing I wanted. But if I took a break and lay down “for a while” I wouldn’t get up again until we were docked and it was time to pack my bag and go look for another job. He knew it. I knew it. I thought about it. I thought about how good just a little nap would feel. Maybe later I could get back up somehow. Maybe. Then I thought about returning to harbor with fish in the hold but no share of them mine. I thought about taking a little charity paycheck from the skipper and not meeting his eye, then walking away down the dock, with my bag in my hand and my tail between my legs.
Then I thought about it another way. I knew I couldn’t stand and work. But did that mean I had to quit? Kneeling isn’t lying down. Neither is crawling on your hands and knees. I wiped the goop off my chin with the back of my gloved hand, then answered Abe. “Nah,” I said, “No break for me. I throw up about this time pretty much every day.”
Abe laughed and shook his head. Then I laughed, too, and the ground-line paid out without our snapping on any hooks at all until the skipper stuck his head out of the wheelhouse.
“What the hell is going on?” he yelled. “Do ya think we can catch halibut on a bare ground-line?”
I was pretty worthless for the rest of that trip. I was too sick, cold and dizzy to walk, so I actually did end up working on my hands and knees, ruining a pair of rain pants and soaking my legs in water and fish slime. I kept throwing up, too, all the way back to harbor. But for some reason the skipper didn’t let me go when the trip was over. He paid me instead and kept me on for another trip and then another until I got the hang of things and turned into a real crewman. I asked him about it toward the end of the season, when I’d been with him long enough to be comfortable talking.
“Why didn’t you fire me after that first trip, when I was so worthless and you and Abe had to cover my work?” I asked.
The skipper smiled. “Easy,” he said. “Because you wouldn’t lie down.”
Phil Lansing
Reprinted by permission of Harley Schwadron.
Geriatric Genocide
It’s hot, windy and scary as we stand here on the west end of Maui, Hawaii. The eleven-mile channel between here and the island of Molokai looms as a disquieting obstacle for us and our sailboards. We can see out in the center of the channel that the heavy wind is blowing the top two or three feet right off the big Pacific swells.
Barbara Guild is a little apprehensive because she is sixty-four years old, and we’re going across and back on sailboards today. Her husband, Don, is more apprehensive because he’s the youngest of us at sixty-three. I’m the senior citizen of the group at sixty-five, and I’m apprehensive because the chase boat driver we hired to follow us got busted last night with the wrong stuff in his glove compartment and is sleeping it off in the slammer in Kahalui. That boat was supposed to be here in case any of us got in trouble. Now we’re on our own.
The pros sailboard back and forth across this channel as though it was a small local lake. “NBD” as they call it. “No big deal.” But the combined ages of the three of us total 192 years. It’s different for us.
We won’t drown, we know that. We’ve got all the right safety gear and flares and stuff. But if we don’t make it across the channel and back by winter’s early dark, we might have to float around all night somewhere in the chilly, rumored-to-be shark-infested ocean west of Molokai. Not a happy thought.
Now or never, I think, as the Walter Mitty in my soul takes over again, and we step onto our boards and sail out, leaving the warm, safe sands of Maui behind. It was Walter, of course, who brought us all here.
The first mile or two is a hoot and a half as we’re all hooked in and flying. Don’s flashing across the swells as he chases his wife of thirty-five years. It’s like being kids again. Fifteen minutes off shore, the wind really comes up, and I take off like a cut cat dipped in turpentine.
It’s a rush to fly down the face of a big swell and scare up flying fish. Most of them explode from the water and flash past my head like bazooka shells. One somehow ma
nages to alter course at the last instant and zings between the mast and my front leg. The adrenaline rush of watching the fish is indescribable, and the distance flashes past.
In no time, it seems, there are the breakers of Molokai ahead, and I remember I have to pump the sail hard at exactly the right moment to make it through the reef. I hope I still have the reef figured out right. Automatically, my brains clicks back into 1941 mode when I first started surfing at Malibu and learned what it meant to catch a certain wave exactly right.
Success! I’m through the reef and on a glassy wave all alone. Like riding a bicycle, it all comes back.
“I made it! Yes!”
As I drag my rig up onto the tiny, eight-foot-wide beach, my friends are already scarfing down lunch and getting ready to head back. I was way behind them, and it’s already four o’clock. There’s no time for me to do much more than wolf down a couple of fig bars for energy and start right back.
But my sixty-five birthdays have already taken their toll on the way over, and my body feels like it’s part of an eighteen-wheeler’s roadkill on I-70. It creaks and groans in protest, but adrenaline helps me sail back out through the shallow reef with all of its colorful sea life flashing in the clear water below my board. The wind is light, and soon I’m out on open water and heading back.
Piece of cake, I think. (Piece of cake, I fervently hope.)
Outside the surf line, ever so slowly, as if in deference to my age and my continuing existence, the wind begins to fill, and I ease into the trapeze, then the straps. Before I know it, I am really hauling. Looking back, I can’t see any other sails over my shoulder. I’m alone and flying.
In no time, I’m out into the heavier channel wind and moving so fast I’m almost hypnotized by the hundreds of flying fish I’m scaring up. Try to describe that euphoric feeling to someone, and you’ll fail. Nobody else could possibly understand.
Nearing Lahaina I see a big, tourist-hauling catamaran ahead of me, roaring downwind toward home port with a boatload of sun-baked day trippers. With a little course adjustment, I could sneak up on their starboard quarter and grandstand a little. After all, I’m a senior citizen on a sailboard, just finishing a round trip to Molokai and back.
Go for it, my adolescent brain whispers. Yeah . . . why not?
I’m about a hundred yards away before any of the lobster-red tourists see me closing fast. Now it’s final-decision time. Shall I really grandstand? Accelerate hard and sail right in front of the boat? Or should I take their stern now, waving as I go by, then jibe and shoot across their bow, waving again? I opt for the full showboat route.
I zip by their stern with my bald head gleaming in the afternoon sun. Senior-citizen-at-the-attack mode. But as I start to pull off a clean jibe and cut back, my tired, old body remembers that it was run over by that eighteen-wheeler today. Everything hurts, and nothing works.
I perform a rare, Olympic-style, nine-point-five catapult and plant myself facedown with a splat. Right in front of the audience.
Amidst the hoots and hollers of the Kansas catamaran crowd, I manage a water start and slink away in the direction of the Lahaina shore. Glancing back, I can now see two small yellow dots in the distance. Don and Barbara’s sails. Good. I relax, knowing that my friends are not dead after all. I couldn’t go back if I tried.
But will we make it in time to call off the Coast Guard? We had left instructions at a local office that if we hadn’t called in, safe, by 5:30 P.M., the Coast Guard should be notified. It’s already ten minutes after five, and I still have a hundred yards or so to get to the shore. Suddenly, there’s no wind, so I’m swimming my rig in and it’s taking forever.
Finally onshore, I start a desperate, dead-run hunt for a pay phone. Slipping and sliding, I lope through the lobby of the closest hotel, a quaint, pink, eleven-story high-rise. I find the phone after recovering my dignity from three consecutive butt slides on the ivory-slick, fake-marble floors, but the Hawaiian phone operator won’t take my Colorado calling card. Swell. I’m beat, still harness-clad and disheveled from all day in the water and probably look like a homeless old bum or a mental-hospital escapee.
Swallowing what little dignity I have left, I somehow manage to panhandle a quarter from a passing senior-citizen type in a polyester dress and nurse shoes. The call gets made.
Too tired to even clean up, I remember the ten-dollar bill in my pocket and lurch to the expensive convenience store, buy a six-pack of Diet Coke and a six-pack of ice-cream sandwiches, and collapse on the beach to wait for Don and Barbara.
Ten minutes later, the three of us are sitting by our rigs, feeling the wind drop fast and watching as the sun slips into the sea. Don and Barbara look as bad as I do. And we all hurt. All over. Everything on our bodies hurts.
We can hardly talk, but Don mentions, matter-of-factly, in a quiet voice, “You know, Warren, for awhile out there today I thought we were committing geriatric genocide.”
“Yeah . . . probably . . .” I say, “but where else but on the ocean could three senior citizens pull a stunt like that without getting arrested just for being too old? Not on the road. Not in the sky. Thank God there’s still someplace where you never get your license lifted just for being ‘over the hill.’”
Warren Miller
A Shot at the Title
Ninety miles off the west coast of Sumatra, the tiny Indonesian island of Nias is heaven for professional big-wave surfers. Twenty-foot waves wrap around a submerged rocky shelf and zipper evenly closed over a distance of nearly half a kilometer. The raw power and consistency are hypnotic.
I had never surfed when I arrived on the island two weeks earlier, but I liked the title “Surfer” better than my current one, “Punk.” The transition was simple. I splashed benignly about on waist-high waves falling off a surfboard I rented for a dollar. The only two “rules,” as I was told by a pro from Melbourne, were, “No more than one person per wave and never turn your back on the ocean. But it’s surfing, mate,” he winked. “Just have fun.”
And dangers? What if you hit the bottom? “Impossible,” said the Melbourne pro. “It’s forty feet deep out there. If you’re held under, just remember: There’s a flotation device—your surfboard—tied to your ankle.” He referred to the leg-rope, or leash, surfers use to remain connected to their boards. “Just grab the rope,” he said, “climb it to the surface . . . and you’re saved! Tidak ada masala!” He grinned, patting me reassuringly on the back.
Tidak ada masala means “no problem” in Bhasa Indonesia, the national language. It’s something of a countrywide motto. Everyone says it. I said it all the time myself, almost continually even. “No problem” was a good attitude, I reasoned, for the experienced, veteran traveler I was so quickly becoming. Road washed out by landslide? Well, tidak ada masala. Typhoid? Hey, a little typhoid never hurt anyone, tidak ada masala. It would still be another six weeks before a compassionate teacher in Java corrected my pronunciation. I had not, evidently, been saying “no problem” but something more closely approximating “not smelly” or “not unanimous.”
The ocean reveals itself gradually. Spend half an hour just fifty feet offshore and it’s clear a different paradigm exists. Terrestrial prevailing logic no longer prevails. In an ocean rain shower, “Not enough sense to come in out of the rain” is a senseless proposition. If you’re in the equatorial ocean when it rains, there is zero incentive to be elsewhere. You were warm and wet; now you are warm and wet. Often in Nias it rains daily, and when it rains the ocean becomes an instrument. Drops strike still water, and the sound is bells. Syncopated, atonal—an aquatic gamelan orchestra. Surfers, we sit motionless on our boards, rain falling through us into the sea, willing conduits, lulled to trance, grateful in the serenade.
Lagundri is unique among the world’s big wave surf spots. Usually, large surf carries a self-regulating feature. Paddling a surfboard out from the beach through the break or impact zone is generally only capable for those who have the skill to be out there in the fir
st place. It’s a life-saving filter on days with big waves. Weaker surfers and punks are left to flail about in the shallows.
But in Lagundri there is something called “the keyhole.” The keyhole is a rocky shallow reef, which juts out perpendicular to the shore providing the point for the famous Nias “point break.” To access the surf all you have to do— all anyone has to do—is walk out to the keyhole at the end of the point past where the waves are breaking and hop in, tidak ada masalah.
But such a hop is irreversible, resolutely irreversible— tragically irreversible—because you then have to make your way back to the beach the only way possible: through the surf. The keyhole allows any punk at all to jump in right next to the pros.
For weeks the surf has been small, playful even, and a hop into the keyhole has resulted in no great threat. But overnight a swell arrives. Waves explode offshore with a force that shakes the bamboo losmen high on the beach.
Surfing a twenty-foot wave might be compared to jumping off a burning two-story house, landing square on your feet, and then having the blazing house chase you down the street.
For the experience level necessary to be in the water today, my two weeks of small-wave frolicking leaves me, by a conservative estimate, a decade shy. But with a mindless hop from the keyhole, I’m in the water.
The ocean is sentient. The messages it sends are often whispered, indirect, carried on a current or suspended in mist. Other times, however, the sea’s communiqués are harder to miss, even charitable. This is illustrated by my first wave today, which neatly strips me of my shorts and what feels like most of my body hair.
“Go home, punk,” is seldom more clearly articulated.
I heed the warning, whimper audibly either “not smelly” or “not unanimous” and paddle crazily for shore—not merely turning my back on the ocean, but mooning it as well. So much for the second rule of surfing. The universe, evidently, takes a dim view of repeated transgressions.