Not us. Kim and I had a spider the size of my fist hanging in the corner and it was better not to flick the bulb on in the rough bathroom in the middle of the night because the lightning evacuation of the roaches usually took place over our feet. We weren’t there for luxury accommodations, though, and were used to these nighttime companions. For the most part, we wanted to sleep early. The plan was to get out just after dawn before most of the other hard-partying surfers. But …
One of Pablo’s initiatives, after bringing in a lot of money from the surf competition and from Sean Collins’s group, was to hire a music teacher for the school kids, and buy over twenty band instruments. Each child selected to take part in the band was given a strict lecture by the teacher on how it was a great privilege and that they had to take care of their instruments as if they were their own little brothers and work very hard so as not to impugn the honor of the town. These kids took their marching orders with the seriousness that only a ten-year-old with a tuba can attain. The whole orchestra got together every night on the veranda of the school and clashed out a din that shocked the nocturnal wildlife into traumatized silence. It sounded as if they were all tuning at once.
On the other hand, it was probably better than Leon’s quarters. The first dawn we picked him up at his shack, he emerged looking ragged.
“What’s the matter?” Kim asked. “You look rough.”
“My roommate,” Leon said. Smiled sadly with one half of his mouth.
“Your roommate?” Kim’s face lit with a sly, womanly smile. “That was fast. El Tigre. Rowwwr.”
“Him,” Leon said. “I think.”
Kim’s mouth fell open.
“Like this big.” Leon spread his arms. “Iguana. He comes out right over the bed. All night I was afraid for my toes.” He smiled. He knew iguanas didn’t eat toes. He used to hunt them when he was a boy.
The wave at dawn was glorious. Suddenly I could really see it, empty of crowds, clean as sea glass, goose-bumped with the offshore breeze. The humps of the swell rolled in and accelerated as they hit shallower water and when they got to the point they heaved into a vertical wall and released. The sheer beauty, unadorned with surfers, was somehow like seeing a famous celebrity or model skinny-dipping in a mountain pool, without trappings or entourage, moving in the pure beauty of her God-given skin.
Leon and I both caught waves. I couldn’t believe it. They were just overhead and fast and I made the drop just off the point and stayed ahead of the crashing pocket that was sometimes a barrel. Wow. I used the 6–4 destroyer and I was so excited. Kim had more trouble. The swell was building and it was faster than the day before and she got hammered.
Over the next few days the swell grew. The period between the waves lengthened and the sets grew to head-and-a-half-high, maybe eight feet on the front face. The increase in height was accompanied by a noticeable increase in power. Wading out along the rocks of the point and waiting for the lull to launch, I made sure that I didn’t mess up like the first day. Next time it might not be only the board that broke. And as the waves got bigger, the crowd at the point got more aggressive, more impersonal. This was all business now. As I paddled out, around the shoulder, I had to be extra alert to make sure some set wave didn’t bring a nearly breaking wall right on top of me—with a surfer on it. That was always the danger: that I might find myself pinned against the face of a set wave, not strong enough to paddle over it and get out of the way fast enough, and either get rolled by the break or sliced in half by an Israeli.
This felt like real surfing. All the strength I had built up over the past few months now had a reason to surge and galvanize. So did the judgment and the conditioning that asked our minds to be unafraid. It was tough with the big crowd at the point. I sat inside them and made myself be patient, forced myself to wait for a good wave that some pro screwed up. On the third day I caught a wave that was well over my head and rode it way down the line, yelling the whole way. On the fourth day the waves were bigger still, but Leon decided that we would head down the coast and find something Kim could do. I thought that was incredibly generous.
We got directions from Pablo to the “Lighthouse” and drove an hour down the highway, and up a maze of sand roads. The dry forest was lovely. Big oval leaves lay over the dirt track like any road in New England in the fall, except that these had fallen from desiccation rather than cold. The forest trail petered out into a vast sand plain of dry riverbed. An old rowboat sat bleaching and forlorn. Shallow pools lay stranded in the flats and the tire tracks divided, either way threatening to bog down in soft sand.
We got to a dozen fishermen’s shacks at the mouth of the dry river, just pieces of corrugated steel and frayed plastic over posts. A few rusty pickups. Relentless sun and sand fleas. The bay was wide, with a rock bluff and a lighthouse at the far end, shimmering in heat waves. The water was smooth, mirrorlike, silvered blue in the long sun, the bay protected from the swell that was hitting Barra by a large headland to the south. This looked like a lake. The surface of the bay barely breathed, the swell was languid, small, the sound of the waves breaking on the shore soothing, inquiring. How could we possibly surf here? But it was somehow welcome, this respite; like a vacation from the pressure and power of Barra. We would just paddle around out there, find some little wave by the lighthouse point, enjoy the day and the scenery.
A heavy unshaven man in the nearest shack promised to watch the van, no problem. Leon pulled out his shortboard, a 6–8, so I took mine. I carried it and Kim’s heavy longboard and we started up the beach, taking our time, breathing the windless air that was a cocktail of salt and dry forest rot and desert tang. We walked for half an hour, to the lighthouse, and we paddled out and tried the little rights coming off the rocks. They rolled across the whole inlet, so we could catch them almost anywhere, and Kim got a couple of long rides, which made me happy. A large dead leatherback sea turtle floated around with us in the middle of the bay, breaking the silvery shimmer with her lifeless shadow, and there was so little current that we could use her as a buoy marker, for she barely moved in the smooth water.
Hours later, exhausted, happy, wickedly thirsty, we walked into the fish camp just as several pangas pulled in with their catch. Leon asked for a large fish to offer Pablo, one that we could all eat it at his restaurant tonight. He held his hands apart, two, then three feet. The fishermen shook their heads. One balanced a tub on the gunwale, tilted it toward us. It was full of ten-inch mackerel and sierra. Babies.
“What about the big ones?” Leon asked.
Heads shook. “No. Ya no.” Not now. What they meant was, No mas, not ever, but they wouldn’t say it.
INCOMING
That night, before dinner, Pablo took Kim and I bird-watching. We walked along hedgerows of guanacaste, caoba, cedro trees, and through fields of pasture and bananas. Pablo was a terrific guide. He knew the local names for every bird, and the English and Latin. We saw tiny pygmy owls perched on limbs, watching us with swiveling heads that were barely big enough for the round black eyes. We saw flycatchers and a brilliant red-and-green-breasted trogon. Bright red tanagers. Pablo showed us the banana fields treated with chemical fertilizer. They grew quickly, he said, and fruited quickly, “But now look.” The leaves were slack and burned, the plants stunted. He showed us another grown the traditional way, manured by cattle and burned off by fire. The trees were vibrant green and large. “You don’t have to be a specialist to see the difference,” he said.
I loved our walk, but to tell you the truth I was having trouble concentrating. I was thinking about guess what. It’s not that I was turning single-minded, but I knew that we had one more day here before we had to head back up the coast. Leon had to get back to his shop and begin planning a big surf competition that he was organizing, and we were booked to fly home in less than a week. The original concept of this trip was to see whether I could go from kook to a big hollow wave in six months. I had one more day. As if to oblige, the swell had been building without letup
.
From the parking lot back at Barra, we could hear the roar and the deep bass of the waves exploding. Our last morning. Kim wanted to take a day off, so Leon and I got ready fast. He decided on his shortboard, but I unsheathed the gun, the 7–6 single-fin Bruno had made for just this.
The sets were coming in double overhead—faces of ten feet or more. They broke in heavy collapsing tubes, then ripped down the line with clean snowy tops that spumed back in the wind. We walked up the beach without talking.
“Ready, Pedro?” Leon said as we waded into the foam. “Careful. Be ready to move.”
The crowd had thinned considerably from the previous days. We paddled straight to the point. All the waves were big. One after another, the surfers caught them. Leon turned and took off on a sweet hollow ten-footer. I tried the next, stalled at the bottom, and got swallowed, tumbled all the way into the shallows, grateful just to breathe.
I tried again and again. Took off on waves that were already breaking. Was I too eager? Impatience breeding impatience. It couldn’t end like this. The wind was coming up, laying a low chop against the swell. It was coming off the ocean, straight into our faces. We had been out there for hours. It was getting harder and harder to paddle out because the waves were getting bigger and more serious and the stiffening wind blew spray into our eyes and stung and blinded us. Most of the surfers went in. Then I did, too.
Kim and Leon and I ate lunch under the tent of the restaurant and watched the sets roar in. I drank a Coke, finished an omelet. I convinced myself that it was okay. I’d caught something like a nine-foot face on my shortboard the other day. Pretty good. Pretty good for an old guy. Pretty good climax to our trip. I ordered another Coke and watched the wind drive over the backs of the waves at the point. They were so big they seemed to just shrug it off. They were big and empty of surfers and they heaved shoreward in relentless self-destroying ranks.
I stood up. I must have surfed for four hours already that day. Muscles fatigued, relaxed.
“See you guys in a while,” I said. “Leon, you want to go out again?”
“No, too windy. I am tired. Hey, Pedro?”
“Yeah?”
Leon looked at me. He was the one who first taught me how to paddle for a wave, how to watch the peaks, be patient, but go. When you go, he had told me, go like your whole life depends on it. He looked at me, then the corner of his mouth came up in a half smile. “Take off at a good angle,” he said.
I paddled out with my eyes closed most of the time against the burning spray. Squinted them open every few seconds to gauge the incoming walls so I wouldn’t get annihilated. A flock of terns swarmed a bait ball. They cried and wheeled and dove. The buffeting and rush of the wind competed with the tear of the waves. It was kicking up foaming whitecaps. I sat, bucking on the chop, and watched the swell shatter against the farthest rocks thirty feet away. The wind drove the spume far up the onto the broken boulders, drove spray into the arms of cacti, and the bent and shivering brush. It seemed very wild out there. The waves, when they formed, heaved up from far out and reared dark and sudden and the size of houses.
Suddenly I found myself with just two other surfers. I’d been watching them for days and they were both world-class. One was Anglo, one Mexican, neither wore a rash guard, and they both had tattoos. And they were sitting inside of me. For the first time, I was the one farthest out, the one poised for a set. Nobody between me and the horizon but birds. The next wall rolling in was mine. It was a set wave, eleven or twelve feet high.
“Go!” one yelled. “It’s yours.” They’d been watching me, too. They knew I was a beginner who was trying hard.
I started to turn the gun. “I hope I can catch this!” I shouted.
“You got it! You got it!”
I paddled as hard as I could. I angled right, the way Leon had been coaching me, and thought, Chest up, pop up fast!
That moment when the wave overtakes you and the speed of the board is no longer from paddling but a force greater. Thousands and thousands of times greater. And the board accelerates. And it’s faster than you can imagine. And the wave drops away like a cliff.
I popped up, amazed. I was standing and the wall of the wave lined out ahead of me, blue and clean. Without thinking I laid in a bottom turn and rocketed to the lip and came off it in a wide arc. Wow. I did it again. When I hit the lip the G force shocked me and buckled my legs. The board skipped down the face. I crouched: at the very bottom I looked up the wall. The double sense of speed and stasis. It blocked the sky. It was and ever shall be: mountainous, dark, quivering. And charging with breathless velocity, accelerating over me in a folding rush. Set the edge and swoop to the top, sheer flight, onrushing sky. Turn back. Another, tighter this time. The speed of it, the sense that the bay, the beach, the hills, flew to meet me. One more cut, try a more radical tighter turn, maybe a cutback, and—I lost balance. I wiped out. The break caught and tumbled me and rolled under and past. It didn’t matter. I came up into the spangled sunlight yelling with pure joy. Looked back. I was a long way from the takeoff. Months of work and frustration, car breakdowns, broken boards, bruises, none of it mattered. I lay my arm over the gun and drifted in the whitewater. I could see the swarming birds in the blue air. I could see one of the two pros taking off on a steep wall.
The rip carried me south. I’ll drift, I thought. Rest. Let the current take me opposite the restaurant. Then I’ll get out.
Did I do it? I did it! Rode the wave. I loved it.
I loved the wave, the pros, the birds, the wind, Kim, the world, Leon, omelets, the wind, my arms—
SLAM!
Sudden tumble. Inside shore break. Underwater, and I heard a crack like pool balls. A sear, a blow. Back of the head. Explosion of black and light like cartoon lighting. Oh, fuck. Do not black out! I yelled at myself. Do not faint! That’s death. Nobody out here, nobody can see. Struggled. Lunged for air. Breath. Reeled in the board and held it while feet kicked and scrabbled for the bottom. Stood, braced against the wicked current that tore down the shore and staggered out onto damp sand. Phew. Reached back, back of my head, and pulled my hand away covered in blood. Fin must have sliced it open. Stung a little, but mostly the torn scalp was shocked to numbness.
I laughed. I was alive. What a dumbass.
Get all cocky and fuzzy, pat myself on the back and forget where I am for one second and the ocean knocked me silly.
Pay attention.
For my own safety. Because it is the only way through. Because the things I love are fragile and only here for a little while.
Another inshore wave folded and thudded. The wind blew the spray over me. Closed my eyes, let it buffet and soak me. The wave shook the sand. Heard the thresh and boom and, very faint, the cry of a tern.
This is how I make a life. There is no next Thing. Just this—thud and shudder—and this
EPILOGUE
The afternoon of the Wave, I got six neat stitches from a doctor in Huatulco. Kim and Leon and I booked into a five-star resort for two nights to celebrate our trip. We wandered the shaded paths and read the little signs about the butterflies and birds; the hotel was all-inclusive and we ate everything in sight. A few days later Kim and I found a home for the Beast and flew out of Mexico.
I live on a lake in Denver. In the warm months, in the early mornings, before the boat rangers arrive, I paddle an old surfboard across it. Every once in a while I look over my shoulder and imagine a swell: the wave coming in, rising up to curl and break and carry me with the speed of a seal into certain joy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my first readers, deepest thanks. Lisa Jones, Janis Hallowell, Helen Thorpe, Pete Beveridge, Rebecca Rowe, and Jay Heinrichs all read with great attention, speed, and fury. Lisa and Helen, you guys rock—you were always there with perspective, encouragement, and bang-on edits.
Nancy Carter, especially, gave of her love and profound insight in the hardest time. Thank you, sweet dance partner.
Ian King, you are a wr
estler. And a keen reader. Thank you for your tremendous insight and attention. Thanks, too, to David Halpern for being there from the beginning: advisor, rigorous editor, friend; you are the very best ally. And to Kathy Robbins for years of support.
At the Free Press I’d like to thank editors Wylie O’Sullivan and Leah Miller. Wylie believed in this from the start and encouraged me when I was exhausted and waterlogged.
William Heller, a.k.a. Cuz, thanks for the help with the Spanish.
To Mark Lough and Sascha Steinway: I’m grateful for old friends with bent ears.
Several companies gave us important material support: Smith Optics has been great over the years. Thanks to Inno for the fine locking surfboard rack, to Jack’s in Huntington Beach, and to Katin, for gear. Thanks to O’Neill, to Las Palomas Hotel in Tepic, Las Brisas Hotel in Huatulco, and most of all, to Mike Vavak at Ocean & Earth.
The whole undertaking depended on the kindness of many people. Nathan Myers at Surfing magazine was a great help, and a Guardian of the True Path. Robert Howson at Harbour Surfboards in Seal Beach gave generous hours of perspective and insight. Francesca Dvorak and German Agundez showed us a world nocturnal. Thanks to Lili Pérez and Edgardo Pérez for all the warm hospitality and help. To Pam Lough, too, for her generous hospitality, and to Lidice Ortiz for the same. To Helena Pless for everything. To Tony Garcia and his family for showing us the ropes. Terry Ann Watts, you were a champ. Jim Pyle, thanks for helping me retrieve the Beast from deep mango country.
Peter Heller, Kook
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