Kook

by Peter Heller

  On our fifth morning we were putting on sunscreen, waxing boards in the sandlot below the high point. Still early, before eight, but power marimba was pounding out of the restaurant and the chuffs of diesel machinery and screeching of steel-tracked dozers was coming down from the top of the bluff. Overnight they had planted a row of full-grown palms up there. Workers with bandanna masks were crawling over a high rock-faced stem wall they were building along the cliff edge. Fancy arched doorways and stone steps. Down here, the waiters already seemed hepped up on something, moving a little too fast in and out of the tables, giving each other props, banging fists, gold earrings twinkling. There was juice here, the juice of progress.

  Not at Rosa’s taco stand. The shack looked like Cannery Row. On the sand, under the deep shade of the thatch, four local men took their ease and shared a bottle next to the stacked patio tables. They might have slept there.

  A breeze, still cool, stirred the frayed ends of the palm roof and the waves crashed and thumped with a reassuring rhythm. A bulldozer coughed to life in the parking lot. As we watched, a beefy gringo in a Ralph Lauren powder-blue polo shirt and safari hat walked toward us. He wore a gold watch. He half nodded, flaring his sunburned nostrils as if we were tolerable riffraff, then turned and waved the driver to the beach. I think the white guy was the architect and project manager for the rich Mexican. I’d heard him bragging at the bar about some fish he’d caught and he had an Australian accent. Maybe South African, I don’t know. He walked ahead of the dozer onto the sand. Then he spoke to the driver, pointed to the taco shack. We watched with horrified fascination. He wasn’t. Unh-unh. No way.

  Two of the loungers seemed to be asleep. The dozer driver chunked the machine into low gear, lowered his blade, and came at the shack. The two others, the ones still drinking, startled themselves to standing and backed out into the sunlight blinking, not even a peep of protest. The blade hit a corner post of the palapa awning and it creaked and collapsed. The driver lowered the blade and slowly shoved the roof in on itself. A few seconds later the sleepers flushed like two quail. Unfriggingbelievable.

  Kim’s mouth hung open. They could have really hurt those guys. This was like the South African townships, apartheid era. Maybe that’s where the architect learned it from. It was like Israelis vs. Palestinians. Except this was just a taco shack that had been there for years. A local lady from Pescadero.

  I trotted over to the architect. “You could have killed those guys! What the hell?”

  He looked at me like I was a bug. “They had time. I’ve told them for days. No more squatting. That roof is just palm thatch.”

  “Jesus.”

  I asked Jaime about it later and he pushed his visor back and said, “It’s sad, Peter. Rosa has been there forever. Has all her permits. It’s progress.” I couldn’t tell if that was an endorsement, an objection, or just acceptance. Some local surfers, kids from Pescadero and Todos, told me out on the waves that they hated this guy and his resort. They said locals from the area used to love to come to Cerritos and picnic with their large extended families. Rosa sold her food. Now, though the beach is still technically public, the locals don’t feel welcome. I could see why. In fact, all the Mexican coastline is public up to twenty meters past the mean high tide line, open by law to all citizens, but of course it doesn’t work out that way. Private owners and resorts are very good at blocking access and running people off. As witnessed.

  Later I was sitting in the lineup, looking for another fast left, and a local kid named Rolo, an engineering student wearing a thin gold chain, about twenty-three, told me that the local surfers don’t feel welcome here anymore, either. The break is usually crowded with gringos. He said the gringo surfers from California were not respectful. Damn. While we were sitting there, we saw a new four-door blue pickup charge up and down the beach.

  “You see that?” he said. “That’s El Jefe’s boys. They are not supposed to drive on the beach. They crush the turtle eggs. They don’t care.”

  Kim got a couple of good rides, which made both of us happy. The swell was pretty mellow, the waves about shoulder-high, and she loved the escalator ride back out. If she turned straight and rode the whitewater all the way to the beach, which she loved to do, she just got out, put the board on her head, and walked back up to the corner of the point and took the riptide express.

  So in the bright sun blare of midmorning it was with a happy body fatigue and mixed emotions that I zipped our boards into their bags and shoved them into the van and we drove back up the sand road. Cerritos was leaving a bad taste in my mouth. The surf was fun, the “progress” pretty rough. The same drama was happening all along the coasts of Mexico, had been happening for decades. Had been happening, for that matter, on coasts all around the world for the last fifty years. Mangroves yanked out, marinas trenched, wetlands drained and filled, resorts built, local people displaced. It’s exactly what was happening back in La Paz, where the people who lived there had finally put their collective foot down.

  We had stayed with Jaime for ten days. We could hardly bring ourselves to leave. In the morning, early, I made us instant coffee at the outdoor stove and watched a faint blue radiance wash over the stars the way a tide covers rocks. We had cereal with powdered milk. We rolled five minutes down to Cerritos and nosed up to the sand. Surfed for a few hours. Drove back to Jaime’s, jumped in the pool, took a hot shower. The little dachshund greeted us like royalty, licking our shins.

  “Security!” we called him. His best buddies were two pit bulls from the hood. All three of them showed up like a gang in the gateway. Jaime yelled, “You two get out of here! Cholo! Sic ’em!” Security wagged his little tail, then wheeled like a dervish kielbasa and yapped at his bros, who shrugged and loped off. Kim and I clapped. Jamie drove us around on errands, told us again that one day he’d like to be mayor of Pescadero.

  For our big, second breakfast we drove a mile into town and had plates of machaca, salted shredded beef, all mixed up with scrambled eggs. Hand-patted tortillas that tasted almost like crepes, and big mugs of café con leche. And that was our day. That was all we really had to do. The rest was elective. We read, went for walks, got Jaime to show us more beaches. We were in some kind of Baja trance. I never wanted anything to change, except to get better at surfing. And then the south swell thundered in like a herd of buffalo.

  THE SCORPION’S TAIL

  On our eighth morning at Cerritos—which we were loving, except for the music and attitude emanating like a toxic smoke from the restaurant—we drove up to the new tall chain-link fence that had been erected across the road with a sign that said PUBLIC WELCOME. The gate was open, but its very existence implied that it could be shut. Since when do you have to tell the public they are welcome on their own public beach?

  We trotted down to the water and gazed out at a different Cerritos than the one we knew. It was marine mayhem. There were no surfers on the water. Was it because it was so early? No. It was early, but the waves were breaking out past the point. They were making sounds we’d never heard, angry sounds, sounds like gods at war, and they were whiter than we’d ever seen before—and the whole inner bite, where the escalator had been along the shore, was one churning washing machine of confused foam. Did I mention that the waves were big? Really, really big.

  This was our conversation:

  Kim: There’s nobody out there, Ting.

  Me: That’s because it’s early yet.

  Kim: I dunno, Ting. Those waves look big. It looks really rough.

  We both fell silent to watch a wave like a floundering freighter tear itself open on the point and dump its cargo of foaming snow. It sounded like muffled artillery. Like charging elephants, if the elephants were albino and exploded just before they crushed you.

  Me: Am I tough enough?

  Kim: I’m serious. I’m not going out there. No way.

  Me (pulling out my shortboard): I’m going. Just to check it out. Look at that one. There was a shoulder. There! You could ride
that … sort of.

  Just then, Jaime’s pickup pulled in, throwing dust. His longboard stuck out the back, but he never touched it. He looked at the water for three seconds from his front seat, shoved the stick on the wheel up to park, cut the engine. He got out, swaybacked, adjusting his visor, smiling to himself and waving to us.

  “What are you doing with that board, Peter? Giving it a tan?”

  “Uh, well, I was just gonna check out, you know, the swell.”

  Jaime shook his head. “Nobody can say you don’t have rocks for brains. That right there is worse than a waste of time. Did you notice there was nobody surfing, Peter? No locals?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Yeah, Ting. You never listen to me.”

  “You should definitely listen to her.”

  “You should listen to Jaime. And me.”

  I was putting the board back.

  Jaime said, “I have an idea for you guys. You guys should drive up to Scorpion Bay. This swell is perfect for the Scorp.”

  “It’s like seven hours, isn’t it?”

  “About five—” He looked at the Beast. “Yeah, seven. Or eight. What do you care, you’ve got, what, another month down here? What’s seven hours? You can take the boards you want and leave the rest in my shop, and whatever else you don’t want to carry. I’m telling you, it’s a great wave. Kim will love it. C’mon, Peter, listen to your elders for once.”

  I looked at them, back and forth. Kim had her hands on her hips.

  “Great. Great idea!” I said.

  “Follow me back to the camp, I’ll help you guys move your boards.”

  Why was he being so sweet to us? We weren’t even citizens of Pescadero; we couldn’t vote. He was walking back to his truck. I said, “Jaime?”

  “Yes, Peter?”

  “Even if you don’t become mayor for a while, to me you are mayor.”

  “Thanks, Peter. That means a lot to me.”

  Scorpion Bay is maybe the most famous surf spot in Baja. The name lifts heads, invites comments. The place lives in most surfers’ minds as a legend, as a perfect wave. A ten. Most surfers have never been there for the same reason Kim and I passed it up on our way south: the hooked bay is thirty miles down a rough dirt road that fords two rivers. And when you get there, there has to be a decent swell to excite it, and the swell has to be just right—surging in like a gift from the south-southwest, muscling out of a narrow arc of 180 to 215 degrees on the compass rose. With a good forecast on Wetsand.com, with a powerful stoke to surf a perfect wave, and a good strong vehicle with big tires and some lame excuse to your boss, you might load up in San Diego and drive sixteen hours south and however many hours it takes to negotiate the dirt road, and then you get there and the swell has shifted a bit, or dropped off, and you are surfing a knee-high bump. You coulda had a V8. You could have gone to Disney World, ridden the log flume.

  But if the stars are lined up and everything is right, there’s no rush quite like the Scorp.

  We drove back up the main Baja highway, and then thirty miles through the most jarring washboard dirt I had ever experienced. There was no speed or part of the road where I could find relief. The boards, the windows, our teeth rattled painfully. I had pulled over and let fifteen pounds of air out of the tires. It helped, but not enough. After two hours, I thought all of us—Kim, me, the Beast—would vibrate apart at the seams.

  It was evening when we hit smooth blacktop. The sudden silence, the tarmac hum, was almost a shock to the system. Bones, teeth settled back into their sockets. The Beast pulled herself back together with audible creaks—springs, bearings, joints. Smell of tar still hot from a sun now setting. We could see the ocean down a cactus draw, stone-blue and still. I could see the moon, soft, rising. That was strange, too. It was rising over the Pacific.

  “Kim.”

  “Huh?” She was half conscious. Either she had fallen asleep or she had washboard PTSD.

  “Kim.”

  “Huh?” She pushed the towel back off her head.

  “Where is the sun setting?”

  “That’s silly, where it always sets, over the w—” She craned her neck out the window. “Behind us. Weird. It’s setting over the land.”

  “Look at the moon. Rising over the Pacific.”

  Disorienting. Of course, it was because the coast made a big hook here, like a scorpion’s tail.

  We followed the road into a small town called San Juanico with one dirt main street. We asked some kids where to go, and they pointed us out of town through the other side. “El faro,” they shouted after us. The lighthouse. We wound past a hill of what must have been gringo houses, fancy bungalows with palapa-thatched palm roofs. We snaked in and out of a draw, following the sand road through the brush. The sun was low, burnishing the road, the cacti, the bark of the small scraggly trees, with a ruddy warmth. We broke out of the mesquite and Mormon tea and then we saw it: the bay. It was enormous, hooking around to our left and running out along a coast that marched into a shadowy distance of headlands and ridges.

  We followed the road out along the edge of a bluff, the sea on our left, the cliffs getting higher as we climbed toward the lighthouse point. On our right, a thatch-roofed restaurant, a few cabins. Campers scattered in their rigs all up the bluff. We pulled into a gap in the mesquite between a travel trailer with Christmas lights strung around the awning and a Volvo wagon presiding over two dome tents. A bald guy stirred a pot on a folding table next to the car. He lifted his spoon and waved. Beyond the Volvo was a fancy pickup with a cab-over camper and a custom surfboard rack at the back. A tall, dark, handsome man and a petite, blond, pretty woman sat in lawn chairs beside the pickup drinking cocktails in plastic tumblers and watching the moon over the water, looking just like a Cialis commercial. The man sported a white tennis visor, so I figured they were from San Diego.

  We climbed out and stretched. The air was soft and warm like brushed flannel. It smelled like creosote and flowers and the tang of some sagey herb, and there was a damp scent of recent rain. The ground was fine dust and dry, but in this desert the ground can be dry minutes after a shower. We walked to the edge of the cliff and peered over; we were high enough up that a tumble over the edge would mean certain death. There was the sea, oddly unfamiliar. She felt at the moment like a girl you have known for a while but see in makeup for the first time. I don’t know why. And right below us was the wave. One of the waves. We had heard there were several. On our right, the cliff jutted out to a shallow point. Dark rocks tumbled out into the water, forming a reef. That’s where it started breaking. As it pushed in, it shaped itself into a wall. A perfect slate-blue wall. Straight as a chalk line. And long. Mother of God, how long it was. The break ripped white along the face of it as evenly as the tear tab on a FedEx pack.

  I grabbed Kim’s hand, the way people do in the movies when they’re struck by the beam of the alien spaceship.

  “That’s a ten. That’s like a perfect wave. That’s, that’s unfriggingbelievable.”

  There was the moon rising over it, shinier now, like a peso. Behind us, the sun blazed, firing the clouds over the sea, streaming colors, unrepentant. That’s what it was: the sun and moon were reversed, they each occupied the other’s gate, and the sea, everything really, seemed somehow off, touched with strangeness. I felt the soft wind at the back of my neck, the breeze that always stirs just as the sun hits the horizon, and realized that it, too, had flipped. The evening wind flowed off the desert instead of the other way. It shouldered up against the wall of the wave, standing her up nicely, brushing her hair back. I’ll be damned.

  “We need to look at a map.” I felt as if we had gone to heaven, one of those heavens that imitates life, but doesn’t get it exactly right.

  Kim swatted her leg. “Damn! I thought there might be just one beach, just one.”

  “Look.” I pointed below us. A large pale bird flapped slowly, coming in off the water. Rose on a vestigial thermal. Lifted up over the cliff edge, right over our
heads. Snowy breast caught the blood light. Carrying a fish in talons. An osprey, winging home to a stick nest somewhere. She carried the fish headfirst like a missile. The tail moved. The fish was alive. I wondered if it could see. What a strange last sight for a tuna.

  The Cialis couple, it turned out, was from San Diego. I walked over while Kim armored herself in her bug shirt, bug pants, and big stylish hat.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.” They smiled and lifted their tumblers. When they smiled they showed their teeth.

  “Nice camper.” I nodded to the cab-over pop-top in the back of their white Toyota Tundra.

  “We were just going to say the same thing about yours,” he said. “We had one just like it. ’Eighty-six?”

  “’Eighty-five.”

  “Sweet!”

  I noticed that they had stowed their boards under a drumskin green tarp extended off the side, to keep the harsh sun from breaking down the fiberglass. My tarp shed off the Beast always flapped and luffed and I held it out with rocks, but theirs was staked out with little stakes. From a corner of their camper a clothesline stretched to a pole, guyed out and staked as well. Hanging on it were her green bikini, his black board shorts. Her pink rash guard. Was it envy I felt? I usually threw my wet shorts over the driver’s-side mirror. They seemed to dry just fine.