Kook

by Peter Heller

  “Matt.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do we have any beer?”

  He got up, shuffled back to the truck in his flattened flip-flops. “They’re not real cold,” he said over his shoulder. I noticed there was only one surfboard on his roof rack.

  “Whatever. Set the cooler down. Why do you keep getting up?” She huffed out an impatient breath. He handed her a warm beer and I heard the two tabs spit. He sat back down next to her in a low camp chair.

  “Matt.”

  “Yeah?”

  “This beer is not ‘not real cold.’ It’s fucking hot. Don’t they sell ice up there?”

  He puffed his cheeks, blew. “I dunno. Not really worth it for the last two beers.”

  She looked at him, exasperated. And then she smiled; from a distance. It was tender and I saw tears in her eyes, which she blinked away. “It’s okay,” she said. “I guess the English or somebody drink it like this.”

  The sun hit the water and a breeze sprang up as it often does just at sunset and blew their fire into scraggly flames.

  “Fuck.” He set down his beer, reached forward quickly, and with two forks managed to grip the edge of the boiling tin can and slide it away from the flames. The girl opened her mouth to speak, stuffed it. She threw a longing glance over her shoulder at the restaurants up behind us, then looked away, out at the water, swung her foot. I smelled burned beans.

  I thought I could read the whole scene and it made me a little sad. I blew away the fiberglass dust I had just sanded, and squeezed out a dollop of Solarez liquid patch, scraped it flat over the ding with an old VingCard, spread a piece of Saran Wrap over the curing fiberglass, and stretched it taut and smooth. Probably still enough sun to kick off the resin. I got up. We had stacked the shorter boards against the front of the van and now, in our expansive parlor, we emptied a can of corned beef hash into a frying pan. I fried four eggs on the other burner. Kim sat on the rear seat and cut up an avocado and a tomato on a plastic plate. While the eggs spat, we watched the night pour an amber syrup over the darkening sea. Right now, almost everything made me think of food. We were starving.

  We had surfed about three hours today, two in the morning and another when the wind dropped in the afternoon. I was so proud of us. The wave was slow enough, with a nice sand bottom, and Kim had caught one long ride straight into the beach. She paddled for it and I yelled and miraculously she caught it. Her snow-white Bruno board catapulted down the face—these waves were about shoulder-high—and miraculously again she didn’t purl the nose or somersault. She popped up, stance wide. Once she’s up that’s usually all she wrote, almost nothing can budge her from her determination to get to the beach. I saw the back of her head and her long black braid over the back of the wave, receding, and her signature victory stance: back hand held up high behind her like a fencer, left held out ahead gesturing at the shore. I could see her hands shaking the air with excitement and I knew she was yelling.

  The next morning I woke early, with the silent camp still in the shadow of the hills. I nudged Kim.

  “Hey, Gidget.”

  “Huh?” She curled up and snuggled more deeply under the flannel sleeping bag. All I saw was a spray of dark hair. She was not a morning person.

  “Maybe we oughta get out early before the crowd. Give ourselves a chance.”

  “Uhghuuh.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  I swung down. I glugged water out of our blue can into the old-style enamel coffeepot, shook a handful of grounds out of a Peet’s bag, and put it on to boil. Cowboy coffee. From way up here the ocean looked almost flat. The lighter blues moved in what seemed rivers of color and the slightest breeze sanded across them and darkened them back to a near-cobalt. At the fringe, along the beach, the waves ripped the blue into a blazing feathery white. While the coffee water heated, I watched them. They threw up mist that hazed the break and I could hear the overlapping impacts rise and drift like a battle smoke of sound and I knew that the waves were bigger than they seemed from up here. They were unraveling in both directions. I searched for the peaks: where the swell pushed up the highest and broke first. Many were split peaks, with a snowy line coming off both sides of the hump. Some broke left and some right. A surfer could go in either direction. In many places the sections curled over themselves in a simultaneous dump. In those cases, even the best surfer in the world would have no place to go.

  I moved a lawn chair out to the front of the van on the cliff edge and just watched the waves breaking. I was less interested in the surfers than the waves. Somebody once famously said that a tennis player wouldn’t sit and watch the tennis court for hours but that a surfer could watch waves all morning and be happy. It was true.

  I smelled coffee. Hopped up, made it just in time to see the upwelling water crack the floating grounds and boil through like lava. I twisted the flame off and got our bowls and mugs out of the cupboard under the sink.

  I’d been on too many long wilderness trips with just a backpack or a kayak to worry about keeping food cold; it wasn’t a habit, so our little fridge was stuffed with surf wax and Kim’s contact lenses, and the red camping cooler was full of cereal boxes, cans of hash, and powdered milk. It cut a lot of complexity out of our lives, not having to worry about cold milk and ice.

  I poured the two mugs, added milk powder and a teaspoon of honey to each, snugged on the lids, and raised one hand up to the second floor. Coffee in bed is about the nicest little thing we can do for anyone.

  “Room service.” With the other fist I knocked against the bottom of the bed.

  “Uraghur.” I felt a warm hand fumble over mine, take the mug, and retreat. It was like feeding bats.

  I went back out to the chair. I liked sitting and watching and drinking coffee in the quiet.

  Waves work on the spirit. They have a sound that we mimic in the blood: throb and drum of contraction and collapse, the rush and hiss around it in constant surge and recession. Up and down the shore the surf is a congress of overlapping percussions that swell like cicada song in the trees.

  I wanted to learn to read waves. Waves were a new language. They had a lexicon and a syntax.

  Sitting in my lawn chair, watching the shadow of the cliff retreat to the edge of the sand, I reflected that my best attempts at benefiting from the acquired knowledge of surf culture consisted of paddling up to some surfer and saying, “Hey, I’m pretty much a kook”—this was to disarm him so he treated me tenderly—“is this a left or a right?”

  I mean, I couldn’t really tell. Seemed like surfers from near this spot were going either way. This question elicited one of two responses. It was a good litmus test for potential friends. Nice people, people secure in themselves, people with generous hearts and a sense of humor, these people laughed or grinned and said, “It’s a left. Pretty fast takeoff. On that board you might wanna move down the shoulder a little.” The other response was to look at me with wolf eyes, the wolf expression that says, Is this fool worth eating or not? These guys said nothing, and took off on the next wave.

  Everywhere we went I tried to mix with the locals and pick up valuable surf knowledge. In this way I would make up for decades of not having grown up surfing, not having a surfing dad and a surfing older brother.

  So I did not just sit and drink coffee as I watched the waves. I bent myself to studying them.

  I watched the peaks, but they seemed to shift around. As soon as I decided exactly where I would sit in the water, a bigger, better wave would form up twenty yards away. Was the tide going up or down? That should be easy. There was a broad line of damp sand at the edge of the beach that must have been left by a retreating tide, so I figured the tide was on the ebb. I was feeling proud of myself for gathering this one nut of fact when a set wave barreled through and washed foam up and past my wet sand line. Okay, needed more study. I looked at the wind. Not strong enough to blow off the tops of the waves either way, so I wet a finger in my mouth and held it up and it got cool faster on … all s
ides at once. Well, I was blocked by the van. Let’s just assume the breeze was offshore, since it was morning. (A simplified explanation of this relationship is that in the morning, the sea is usually warmer than the land because the mass of water holds the heat better and the land has been cooling off all night. The warm air over the ocean rises and creates a vacuum that pulls in cooler air from land, thus creating an offshore wind. In the afternoon, the whole process is reversed.) Tide, wind, peaks—what else? Riptides. Was there a riptide? Of course there was a riptide. You can find them by looking for currents or plumes of cloudy, sandy water between the sections. They often ran from the beach right out through the break. When you were on one, sitting on your board, you sometimes didn’t notice until you turned around and saw that every other surfer was sitting way, way inside of you and the beach was receding into a thin line and you were heading inexorably to Seoul. Whoops. Then the thing to do was to paddle sideways down the beach—parallel to it—until you were out of the plume.

  Kim and I had both been in many rips in the last month. None of them were really scary, but we learned fast that it was useless and dangerous to try to paddle straight in against them. We quickly tired. We could paddle ten or twenty feet to the side and the force would quickly dissipate. So I looked for rips. There seemed to be one river of sandy water up the beach, but I couldn’t really tell. So much for my reading lesson.

  When I got back to the Beast, Kim’s feet were hanging down from the top, which was a good sign. The couple next door was also stirring. They came out of their dome tent blinking. He went to his truck and came back with their breakfast of granola bars. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her sorority sweatshirt and looked at the sea with a joyless abiding. I got two enamel mugs and the coffeepot and stepped over to their cold fire ring. I offered them each a hot cup. I was surprised at how fast they said yes.

  They were from San Diego. They were high school sweethearts, dating since their senior year. He had been the best surfer in the school. After graduation and a summer of parties, she went to UCSD to study hotel management—she loved to travel. He did not go to college. He wanted to pursue his surfing, go pro. He worked on and off as an electrician’s assistant. He had hoped to get on the World Qualifying Series and travel, but it was extremely competitive. He struggled to make ends meet and to surf as much as he could.

  She had just gotten an internship at a five-star hotel in Italy. This was their last interlude before she came back next summer.

  It was the end of something. Written in their every action. She declined the granola bar he offered her with near-disgust, and then put her arm around his waist and rested her head against his shoulder. He held himself like a tree as she leaned. It was his role now, he had been frozen into it. She was breaking it off and there was nothing he could do. But when Matt stretched on the light neoprene shirt and took his board off the roof, his body recovered its elasticity and animation. In that one movement he gained his strength, like Popeye eating spinach. I always loved that: how people got bigger than themselves when they reentered their world of mastery. This was something he understood. Whatever else happened in the world, whatever pain and confusion, he could get on his surfboard and paddle out into the waves where his dance partner waited with breathless power. The girl saw it, too, and in a moment of relief came alive to him, and I saw her smile for the first time, a genuine smile that gathered light, and saw in an instant why he had loved her.

  He stepped over to the Beast, said to me kindly, “You want to come out with me? Maybe I can give you some tips.” I had told him about my project.

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks. Just a sec.”

  I threw all the shorter boards into the bus, told Kim to come down and find us when she was ready, jumped into a shorty wetsuit, and picked up my 8–6 where it was leaning against a chunk of wood. I never used sunscreen unless Kim was watching.

  “I’ve got some wax,” he said, and we tucked our boards under our arms and walked barefoot down the steep track.

  Matt watched the wave as we walked and steered us down to the water’s edge. We crunched over a line of dead seaweed. Small crabs skittered over the damp sand and disappeared into tiny holes. Long strands of wet kelp glistened on the beach. Their ends were tailed with rubbery bulbs of air. Matt’s board was a 5–10 and seemed tiny for his height. He had a half bar of wax in his fist that he’d been clutching to soften it up. The morning was still cool. He tipped his board up over his left thigh and ran the wax over it cursorily, glancing at the wave. He handed me the wax.

  I set my board on the sand and made light passes back and forth, and then broad circles, over the places where my feet would land. One long session could wear off fresh wax and my landing spot had worn thin. Also two smooth holes where my bony ribs set when I paddled. I loved the stuttery scrape in my fingertips as the wax passed over the old bumps, the squeak when it hit virgin board. It sounded like some wood-slide percussion. Usually I just waxed the hell out of the whole board, but I didn’t want to be a kook right away in front of Matt. Either the way he’d done it was the way pros waxed, or he was running out of the stuff. I handed him back a sliver and he stuck it in the pocket of his board shorts.

  He squatted, Velcroed the leash to his ankle, gave me a half nod, and jogged into the water. He hit the whitewater, dove onto his board, and began paddling in one fluid accelerating motion. When he met the first wash of incoming foam, he arched his back and let it pass beneath his body without loss of speed, and at the next, bigger push, a two-foot-high wall of whitewater, he buried his nose and himself in a duck-dive, let the wash pass over, and came up on the other side paddling, with an undiminished slug of forward momentum. He moved through the water like an otter.

  I won’t talk about how I moved. Duck-diving was not an option because (a) my board was too big to shove underwater, and (b) I didn’t know how to do it. A longboarder has a couple of options when paddling into a breaking wave. You can turtle—grasp the board near the front in both hands and flip upside down, letting the avalanche of whitewater pass over, then flip back again and keep paddling—or you can keep paddling forward if you think you can punch through the barely breaking peak, or you can ride up and over the steepening shoulder. Another alternative, of course, is to do what I often did without meaning to—get caught off guard and do the kook-a-matic. Yell, get knocked off the board, lose your grip, and roar inshore at high speed in an antipersonnel projectile of tumbling kook and leash and board. Slab of board, knife of fins. Hanging rope of leash. Destroyer.

  This is a very irresponsible way to surf. One should never ever let go of the board. Sometimes in a big wipeout it can’t be helped, but as a rule this is verboten. I met one kid who said that his surf coach in grade school used to make them all surf without leashes so that they had control of their boards at all times and reflexively grabbed them when they wiped out. It’s a bad feeling to be in a big wave and have your board heading to the beach without you, so they learned fast. In any event, I was a lot slower getting out than Matt. He had already caught a long right and was up again beside me by the time I got past the break and was sitting near the peak. It was nice to watch, his ride. He did that thing that good surfers do—the crouch, the aggressive leaning forward into the next move as if breasting a stiff wind, the legs and board almost acting independently of the torso, working the wave as the head and shoulders fare forward as if driven under sail like a figurehead. The effect is dynamic and graceful.

  When Matt sat on his board he was in the water up to past his waist. Not much flotation on that little thing. Still, the board, being mostly foam, wanted to surface, so when he spun to take off he let it rocket up from between his legs like a watermelon seed. At the same time he grabbed it and got a boost of speed. Like grabbing on to a bolting horse.

  I wanted to straddle my board in one smooth motion like Matt, so I shoved it down and under me and widened my legs so I could leap into the saddle like an Arapaho, and I overshot. The board squirted back behind me
and I landed on my face in the water.

  There is no smooth way to recover from a move like that. You come up beside your board, blink the water out of your eyes, get on it again, reach down and back to free a loop of leash from your right foot, and do all this while looking far out to sea, scanning for the big tuna run, or the signs of a tropical storm. Because by then you cannot even look at the other guy—or worse, girl. When you kook out and pull a move like I just had with Matt, well, it is very hard to be on the same ocean, much less act like an individual who is entitled to hold up one end of a mutual, collegial conversation.

  I did sneak a look at Matt. He was smiling, unperturbed. “I used to do that, too, when I was learning.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Five.”

  We rode the swell. I thought how easygoing he seemed for a guy who was spending his last day or two with his high school lover.

  “I noticed when you were paddling out,” he said, “get forward on your board a little. You wanna have the nose kinda just clear of the water. When you lie back it stalls the board and slows you down.”

  “Okay, cool. Thanks.”

  We talked quietly and I asked Matt, who had nearly been a pro, if the great champion Kelly Slater was really that good, or if it was hype. The guy had won eight world championships.

  “He’s special,” Matt said. “People say he has a special relationship with the ocean, and it’s true. He goes for places in the wave other people are scared of, and he makes it look easy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. His body is like made for surfing.” Matt was getting excited. “He’s got these giant flat feet, kind of like suction cups. Like newt feet. They just stick to the board. And he has this low center of gravity. Short legs. When you watch him he’s like a dolphin or something. He’s that at home.”

  When Kim paddled out, the three of us sat in the lineup. I swung my toes in the cool water. Down past them the sun sprayed into the green depths. A flight of minnows skipped over the surface. I could see the Beast at the top of the cliff, her roof jacked at an angle, and our little bedroom window, the four surfboards clinging to the rack. Kim paddled hard and caught a long ride to the beach. I thought, This is how it’s supposed to be. Fun.