Kook

by Peter Heller

  “Our first remote camp in Baja, huh, Ting?” (Oh, that’s what we called each other. Cute, I know. You don’t really want to know the etymology, do you? Okay, it’s because I used to call my tiny niece Little Thing, or just Thing, and one day I entered the room and she was clinging to the top of the playpen and she yelled the greeting, “Uncle Ting!” Hey, you asked.)

  “It’s kind of scary.”

  “Road’s good.” It was. Sand, deep in spots, and pretty smooth. I downshifted into a garrulous second gear and we trundled up the road nice and slow. I stopped once and Kim got out and cleared a branch covered in thorns. We swooped down around a right bend, climbed steeply, and topped out with a broad view of the sea. The coast curved in a shallow arc to the north and that, below, us, must be the point of the rabbit. We stopped the Beast, got out, and looked. An onshore wind shredded through the thorny scrub and I thought I heard the beat of surf beneath it. I was excited. The way you are when you double up a hundred dollars on eleven and say, Hit me. This was what we came for. All this way. To camp down by the Baja sea and catch waves few other people would come so far to ride. Wasn’t it?

  The washboard road ended at a navigation light on a steel tower commanding a low bluff. On the north side was a curving beach, empty, and on the south was a dry sand wash banked on the far side by a high dune. A handful of fishermen’s shacks huddled against a hill above the beach. No people that we could see. Just below, barnacle-covered rocks tumbled into a seething rip. A dry wind came flat off the water and tore at a wave that shattered on the reef.

  Not the benign scene I’d imagined. A forlorn whitewashed ranch house sat back under the scraggly shade of an old live oak, away from the beach and the brunt of the wind. We stood beneath the steel tower.

  “There’s the left,” I said.

  “Huh,” Kim said.

  I was a little nervous, but I didn’t want to infect her. I started to sing “Little Joe the Wrangler,” which is a cheerful song about a kid who goes out on a cattle drive and gets run over by about a thousand stampeding cattle. I sang it now because I was worried, more than anything about bringing Kim into this harsh world of desert and backbreaking surf and wayward souls. It was harsh and it was real, and it was no joke. If I were a pro surfer, or a desert survival expert, or some former Navy SEAL, like George Hayduke, it would be a different story. But in truth, Kim knew just about as much as me about any of this. We would have to protect each other. So I started to sing. And Kim, who had been looking at the heavy, thundering wave, turned and said:

  “You a little nervous?”

  I laughed nervously. “Yeah.”

  “Me, too.”

  She didn’t offer any Everything is going to be fine, any lie. Because how could she know? She was in this with me all the way and she was my best friend.

  The wave did not look easy. There was a man surfing it, only one. Below us, on the near side of the arroyo, was a big pickup with a cab-over camper. Out in the middle of the wash was a green Volvo wagon. The hatch was up and a pink umbrella was planted in the sand, and a man sat on a low camp chair beneath it. On the far side, on the top of a dune, was a giant pop-up trailer, kind of a canvas mansion. That was it.

  I swallowed. Conejo. Up the track from the ranch house came a lone figure. He came slowly, stopping often. He held something to his chest. He wore a red shirt, white cowboy hat. We watched, fascinated, the way we would watch the slow progression of a snake. He crossed the arroyo and came up out of the brush. He was a blade-faced scrawny man in a bright red snap shirt who walked stiffly, cradling his sharpened machete like a dead child. He moved a few feet at a time, then paused, looked out at the sea under his fraying hat. The ocean was still foaming with whitecaps. It hadn’t changed since a few steps before. He wore narrow wraparound sunglasses. His skin was taut over his cheekbones, burnished there like wood. When he grimaced he showed a few teeth. A few steps, stop, a few more steps. He ended up fifteen feet from where we stood, still without a word, and looked out at the sea. This close, we could see his shirt was stained. He didn’t say anything, just let the wind play with the loose straws of his hat. It occurred to me that he moved exactly like a predator. Kind of circling in. So slowly that its prey didn’t notice the growing proximity.

  I called out. Introduced myself. The head turned.

  “Victor.” Pause. “Todo”—he waved an arm—“este rancho es mio.” All this land was his. “No problema, no problema. Muy tranquilo. No bandidos.” He patted his machete, spread his mouth into an unsettling rictus. Then he waited. Didn’t move closer or away, waited with the stillness of a wolf.

  “Ahh,” I said finally. “Cuanto por un noche de encampamento?”

  “No problema” Victor said. “Treinta pesos, no problema.”

  I gave him a hundred. “Cuatro noches, me falta veinte.”

  “Okay, okay, no problema. Muy tranquilo.” He must have been half drunk. His face, even with the impenetrable glasses, was at once sharp and blurry.

  El rancho. There were no cattle, no fields. Not many surfers. Kim and I walked down to the pickup. Two lawn chairs, a stone fire ring, a fishing rod corded to the side of the camper, a board rack above it holding two shortish boards. This guy must have been here for a while.

  His name was Jamie. We hailed his truck from fifty feet away, which is good camp etiquette, and he came out of the camper blinking from his nap. He was in his early fifties, a master electrician from San Clemente. He had been here six weeks. He did it every summer. Cleared his schedule of jobs, drove down here, camped, and surfed every day, with the wave mostly to himself. He was built like Tarzan, had curly blond hair down over his collar, eyes mineral-blue. Deliberate and kind.

  “Yeah, Victor,” he told us, pulling another chair out, opening it for Kim. “He’s harmless. Collects the camping fee. A remittance man, I guess. His family didn’t know what to do with him, so they sent him out here. Strange cat, but he won’t bother you.” Jamie’s speech came to a halt and he looked out at the sun-dazzled water. I realized that he didn’t carry on many conversations out here and wasn’t in the habit of keeping one rolling. No need. There was plenty of time to communicate anything that needed saying. I laughed. Couldn’t help it. Everyone out here seemed to be on stop-and-go time. It was a little like the pacing in a dream. Jamie turned his leonine, handsome head. Misinterpreted my laugh, smiled, said, “Victor keeps the bandidos away with his machete.” Jamie took a neoprene shirt off a short clothesline and folded it, put it on the step of the camper. He had the fastidiousness of people who live alone for long periods of time. “Do you all want a Coke? Or a beer? It’s cold.”

  I saw that the man out in the middle of the sandy arroyo under the umbrella was Asian. “That’s Eddie,” Jamie said. “They’re camped on that dune way to the north. That’s his cousin Freddie out on the wave. No kidding.” The man was reading a book. Occasionally he looked up to remark his cousin’s progress. Jamie was watching the surfer, too. So was I. So was Kim. He was the only thing, really, to look at. Compact, tearing it up on the fast overhead left in a full wetsuit and booties. “He’s been surfing for hours. A little too windy for me.”

  I’ll say. Felt like a gale. The wave, though, jacked up hard against the point and was strong enough to hold its shape even with the wind pressing on its back like a hand.

  “How long have they been here?” I asked.

  “Almost a month.”

  I looked at the man reading his book in the wind-shivered pool of shadow in the middle of the dry arroyo at the edge of an empty ranch in the remote Baja desert. The lone surfer. Jamie and his truck. The wind. Victor the remittance man collecting the fees. Only something as crazy as surfing could have brought them all together. Brought us together.

  The half dozen meager fishermen’s shacks up against the dune to the north must have been temporary. Not much more than some planks and scraps of corrugated metal for a roof. It was all a bit surreal.

  We camped right under the lighthouse on hard ground
and surfed for four days. Well, I did. It was too strong and fast for Kim. There was nothing friendly about this break. There was a terrific rip just off the shore, and it swept over an ankle-deep shelf of sharp reef. You had to carry your board and walk over it. Hard enough to walk at all in that current. It was hairy.

  Out at Conejo, nobody woke up too early. It wasn’t like you had to get out at first light ahead of the crowd. The second morning, about nine, Kim and I paddled out together. She was being very brave. The wave was just too fast and heavy. After a few minutes of fighting the current and getting shoved back in, she called, “I’m getting out!”

  “Okay, be careful,” I yelled. “The rocks are sharp.”

  I watched her. She tried to get out where we’d gotten in, and stood unsteadily on the razor-edged rocks in the strong current. She tried to pick up her board, and got knocked down, lost her grip. She struggled to standing in the lull of the outwash and I saw blood on her hand. Jesus. She was standing, half bent over, unbalanced, trying to hold her board again and scared. I saw her face dissolve in tears. I saw it and paddled as hard as I could, then ran over the rocks, slipping, trying to keep from breaking my own board, grabbed hers too, said loudly, too loudly, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re all right! You’re okay, sweet, just undo your leash, I’ve got your board.”

  I didn’t know if I did. We braced together against the next push of foam. “Okay, now you can walk, wait for this whitewater to go through. Okay, okay, now walk carefully, good, you’re all right.”

  It freaked me out probably more than it scared her. To see her so vulnerable. Simply unable, for all her effort, to get in safely. Things can happen out here, they can happen fast and spin out of control. It changed me.

  We talked about it and decided we’d stay a couple of days because we’d come all this way and the wave was perfect for me to learn on. Jamie was a good coach and he told me where to sit and when to take off, and I made some hard fast drops down some waves that were over head, and managed to ride a few out along the left face. I used the 6–4 a few times, because the wave was certainly fast enough. I missed a lot of waves and wiped out a lot. It’s just very very hard to catch a wave. The strength it takes—that burst off the blocks—and the timing are unforgiving. They can’t be fudged. Their effect—moving for a split second at the speed of the wave, in just the right place—cannot be gotten at in some other way. You are exactly here, right now, with that burst of power, or you aren’t, and mostly I wasn’t.

  At night, Jamie made a fire and the three close camps gathered around it and drank beer and pop. The big trailer on top of the dune was occupied by a clean-cut blond couple from San Diego. They had been camping on the dune for a few days. He had a nice shiny new four-door pickup. He surfed a little with the rest of us, was pretty good. And helpful, encouraging. He said he was a mortgage broker. She said she was a boogie boarder, but I never saw her go out onto the waves. Pretty, blond, chatty. I remember having wondered, the second day, that if they weren’t on the waves much, what were they doing here with their rig that looked like a house? The point was windy and hot and dry and worried by the constant tearing and thundering of the surf, and there were prettier places. It seemed to me like solely an outpost of surf.

  Waves have personalities. You can quantify a wave, say how tall it is, describe the interval between it and the next in seconds, say whether it is hollow and fast or mushy and slow. And on different days at the same break, with a different wind, a different swell coming from a different angle with more or less force, these measures may be very different. But every break has a spirit beyond the metrics and standard characterizations. Every spot where a wave forms. So that Seal Beach, for instance, may be knee-high and gentle as a rabbit one day, and twelve feet and rubbing its back against the underside of the pier’s high deck the next, actually shaking the ground with its weight, but its underlying spirit is cheerful, accommodating. It radiates goodwill. It may get drunk with the power of the Pacific, but it is not a mean drunk. It may wrestle you to the ground and thump your chest, but the next moment it will be helping you up, grinning with irrepressible cheer, buying you a drink. With salt on the rim.

  Conejo was not like that. Conejo was a misnomer. If it had been named by a surfer it would have been called Punta Lobo. Conejo came at you lean and hungry. It came at you straight, long-legged, locking eyes. When the wind blew against it you could see its ribs. It came with one fixed idea: to eat or die. To grab you by the neck and shake you. That Italian, the one who had sent us here with his description of it as accommodating and sweet, he must’ve been high.

  Sitting beside Jamie on the 6–4, which I was determined to ride if not master, we watched the wolves come. With the wind on our backs. Here was a beauty, tall, regal, an alpha wave. As we sank into the trough ahead of it I said, “Can I get this?”

  “It’s yours. You’ve got it.”

  I rocked back on the tail, bringing the nose out of the water. I reached for the rail with my right hand and pivoted. Looked back once over my shoulder at the looming thing, took two strokes, and was gone. Lifted and dropped. Rocketing in a free fall that left me somehow standing. I may have shouted. I probably did, I’m such a kook. I crouched, pressured the left rail against the face, and swooped back, all the way back up to the lip, the propulsion like a jet engine. For a moment I felt like a bird. And then I hit the lip where it was already folding. Instead of getting out ahead of the pocket, doing this move a few feet farther into my own future as a surfer, I had boomeranged back right into the snapping jaws. I flew airborne. The wave landed on top of me and drove me to the rocky bottom. Tumbled me along it. In this state, tucked and rolling, several thoughts occurred to me.

  One, I hope I breathe soon. That would be good.

  Two, I am as helpless as a rock in a landslide. Three, My board, the one with the extra sharp, shortboard spear of a nose, the one that has the destroyer on it, is attached to me on a short leash, and if I am being tumbled, it is, too. Somewhere really close by. Way too close. I tucked tighter and covered my head with my forearms.

  Four, I really hope I breathe any second.

  The wolf released. Made his point. I flailed for the brightness, for the sun coming through all the champagne. And popped up. Yay! Big breath. But oh, shit! Just seaward and right on top of me was a four-foot flash-flood wall of whitewash from the wave behind mine, which must have been even bigger. Somebody had told me, “Hey, don’t ever take the first wave in a set. Sets come in three or more. If you fuck up on the first one, bro, you’ll get hammered by the next ones. Right in the impact zone. Right there, where it’s all fucked up!”

  The guy who had told me this seemed really enlivened by the prospect. Happily, he said, “And if you get caught inside, and worse comes to worst, just turn around, belly the back of your board straight in. Don’t be no hero. Run!”

  That was the first time I’d heard the phrase “caught inside.” Sounded like bank-heist lingo. Now, for the first time, I knew what that was about. Ride a wave all the way along the face, kick out over the backside, and you finish at the end of the line, down where the wave has exhausted itself. The wave is spent, you are spent, everybody is happy. But screw up and wipe out right in the heart of the wave as I had just done, and you are bobbing right at ground zero. You are right where everything is happening. Impact zone. Where all the energy is loosing itself. You are this little head in a soup of white, looking up at a collapsing building. It’s like jumping off the bow of a fast frigate, as opposed to the stern. I had barely enough time for one breath, and then I was run over, tumbled again, shoved down. Didn’t last as long. When I came up I was converted. I believed. There is a Wave. I was so happy to live. I gasped. I bellied onto my board like it was a life ring and paddled it feebly toward shore, then let the rip carry me north, north to where the wave petered out. Away from the thoughtless violence. Away from the terror and the madness.

  Taking several gulping lungfuls, I shook the salt burn out of my eyes, then
turned and paddled back out into the surf. One stroke at a time.

  I think that’s what it takes. To learn to surf. Just plain idiot doggedness. If you have that, you don’t have to be smart, quick, strong, or good looking. All of that will come. At least the strength will come.

  “How was that?” said Jamie when I got there. His handsome, creased face, his blue eyes like some kind of tourmaline. He’d caught two more waves since I’d been gone.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  On the fourth night we made popcorn and watched a surf movie on the laptop called North Shore and crawled up into the top to sleep.

  Wind. All night snapping the canvas walls. Groaning the Beast on her frame. She sounded like a boat. Heaving into the seas and the wind. Which was what she was doing, parked beneath the lighthouse on a rise too small to call a bluff, facing the sea and the weather head-on. The light, unprosaic on a steel tower, washed our bed every twelve seconds. The flapping canvas muted it, but in the passing illumination I could see Kim’s face as she slept. The planes of her high cheeks framed by a sweep of her night-dark hair, her bowed lips, her large eyes, beautiful even closed and dreaming. Her colors were ruddy and warm and dark. Mystery.

  That is what I feel when I am with her. More than anybody I have ever known. Odd, because she is so open a person. She hides little; I would say she hides nothing, but we all know nobody hides nothing. If she is hiding, it is her own bafflement at her parents, who did not treat her as she saw other parents treat their children in this new country. She, the first child born in the States. They, her parents, speaking no English, working fifteen hours a day at the Chinese restaurants they started, Kim translating for them and working in the restaurants beginning when she was six. There wasn’t much time in her family for affection.