by Peter Heller
The restaurant was crowded. Most of the surfers congregated there in the evenings to drink Coronas and eat overstuffed burritos. And check e-mails; the house had two laptops they kept on the bar and rented out, two bucks for fifteen minutes of wireless time. Tonight, a group crowded around a tall dark girl who expertly worked the keyboard and brought up screen after screen of satellite images. She sat on the stool in a bikini with an Indian sari wrapped diagonally across her torso. She wore black rectangular glasses. She sat very tall, not pretty in the sum of her parts, but she gave off an air of insupportable languor, in the way of very successful models. She traced her finger on the map. Kim and I got a table, ordered Sprites, and I wandered over. I could hear flies hitting the blue zapper behind the bar.
“How close, bro?” said a boy in nothing but board shorts and a Dos Equis.
“Yeah,” said his buddy. “Ground zero or what?” They held their beers to their stomachs and craned over the group.
She turned her head slowly, chin high, and looked at the guys like they were two bugs who were interrupting her lecture and should sit in the back of the class. That was all. She didn’t deign to answer. She actually cleared her throat. “As I was saying, the path projected here is simply an aggregate of wind-speed probabilities for any quadrant at predetermined distances from the center of the storm’s current position. That’s what these different colors represent. Right now we have a forty-five percent probability of hurricane-force winds early on the day after tomorrow. That is, seventy-five to ninety-five miles per hour.”
“Yeah, but is it gonna rain, bro?” said the boy, tenacious. He was a surfer. If you don’t keep paddling for the peak of a wave, you’ve ceded it to another guy. “I mean, are we gonna be able to get outta here, cross the rivers and shit?”
Her long fingers came to rest lightly on the keys like a pianist’s at the end of a piece. She studied the boys for a moment, raised one mordant eyebrow, unconsciously touched her glasses back to position as she wrinkled her nose, turned back to the screen. Silence. Everybody waited. She spoke to the local fisherman behind the bar in rapid, colloquial Spanish and he nodded, smiled, slid open the ice chest, and brought out a dripping Pacifico.
She twisted her head, stretching her slender neck, and let it settle in perfect balance at the top of her spine. “This is currently a Category Three storm,” she said softly, making everybody lean forward. “Attendant rains could be on the order of ten inches in twenty-four hours. That would be enough to cut the roads, yes. If the projected track proves out. The storm could deteriorate or shift direction.”
“Shit!” The two boys raised and clacked their bottles. “Sick! We better get the fuck out of here tomorrow!”
On the way back to our table I bumped into a young Australian surfer musician I’d talked to the night before. His name was Colin and he had a band called Beerfridge in Margaretville, wherever that was. “Who is that chick?” I said.
“What? La Profesora? She’s been holding court right there all afternoon, mate. She knows words that are only legal at university.”
“Yeah, but who is she?”
“Some biologist. Been coming here for a couple of years. Doing a study on manta rays or something out at some island. She knows all the fishermen. They don’t charge her for Internet, either. That cunt in the corner is her squeeze.” He pointed with his beer. Sitting there with the hooded watchfulness of a bouncer was a muscle-bound Latino with black braids down over his shoulders, earrings, eyebrow studs, skull rings, black tank top, and nonstop tattoos. He looked like an outlaw biker gang enforcer, like my youngest sister’s high school boyfriend Claudio.
“That guy surfs?”
“Oh, yeah, they both do. Not bad. Longboarders. Me and Maggie are over there, come on and join us.”
“Okay, we will.”
That night an errant wind slapped the canvas. I couldn’t hear the bats. We lay in the dark and talked about getting out ahead of the storm. I argued for staying put. The waves were too good, we were learning too much. Plus, we could just as easily get pummeled on the way back south.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Kim said.
“The hurricane could flip over the Beast, maybe carry it over the edge. We could land on top of La Profesora. Her legs would stick out.”
“C’mon. Do you think it’s dangerous?”
“Yeah, maybe. Tomorrow after surfing we could look for a room in a house.”
She digested that. “Good idea. Remember: precious cargo. You are a married man now.”
La Profesora’s prognostication had its effect. I got up later than usual, which meant after sunrise, feeling groggy. I knew from my experience on a ship in Antarctica that pressure drop affected my sleep; we are all walking barometers. I made coffee and wandered across the bluff. Half of the trucks were already gone. Other campers were packing up. Nobody wanted to get cut off out here. Most people had jobs. There were masses of dark clouds over the hills inland, and flocks of terns were crying along the cliffs. I wasn’t sure if that had anything to do with the storm.
It must have been stirring up the sea. I walked to the edge with my mug and saw the waves at Third Point coming in clean and tall, just overhead. A dozen surfers already out, but not the twenty or thirty of the past days. That was good.
When I paddled out I found Big Bill right next to me. His hair was still dry. His eyebrows lowered like two storms. His mustache drooped with a dangerous indifference.
“Peter,” I said.
He grunted, kept an eye on the incoming waves.
“It’s like Key Largo around here,” I said. “Stuck in the hotel with the hurricane coming.”
Bill swung his heavy head. “Great movie.” His voice was like a D9 picking up road base. “Edward G.’s apotheosis. Completely overshadowed Bogey. Never better, in my mind.”
Did Big Bill just say apotheosis? I can’t even say that.
You just did.
I didn’t mean to.
I smiled. Tightened up my voice, drawled out one side of my mouth like there was a cigar stub stuck in it, “ ‘I want more, see? Rocko wants more, more.’ Or maybe it’s more like Treasure of the Sierra Madre. All of us waiting in the hole.”
“That was a passion play, wasn’t it? Book’s even better.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, the author, B. Traven, interesting story. Nobody ever really knew who the sonofabitch was. German anarchist, British prison. Showed up on the movie set impersonating his own agent. Course, John Huston had his suspicions.”
“Huh.” Here came a set. We could see it coming, we were in position, and we both turned our boards. Bill would take the first. No better time than now.
“Hey, Bill,” I said. “Did you knock that guy down yesterday?”
“Fucker owes me. Did all kinds of construction for the asshole and he says I didn’t do the work. Fucker better pay.” He rocked his board forward and took off on the cleanest, sweetest wave.
The clouds massed over the water. The wind came up. By dark it was shoving and scooping the canvas sides of the camper into a filled sail. The Beast was beating upwind. Just after dark the air cooled and the first raindrops pattered against the sides.
We huddled down into our flannel bags and waited for the storm. We had loaded everything, so that if the wind got bad we could drive off of the exposed bluff. We had looked for a room, but the gringo couple that owned the campground wanted $100. I had tried to explain that we just needed a safe place to throw down our sleeping bags for the night. Nope: $100. Screw that.
The patter thickened into a steady downpour. It drowned out the rush of the waves. It lashed the canvas. The Beast shuddered. We waited. The rain was so loud we gave up talking. I reached out and felt for the keys on the plastic ledge. They were wet. I put my hand against the cloth; it was wet and cold and the wind pressed from the other side. It was like pressing palms with the storm. Not too bad yet, not enough to run. The volume of the rain, the sound of it, rose. Didn’t seem
that was possible. If I listened closely I could hear voices in the roar. A rising and falling of harrowing force. Nothing I would lash myself to the mast to resist.
Our bed shook. With the next whomp of gust, I had an image of the storm as a great beast nosing and sniffing the van, the bluff. My pulse quickened. I had the keys tight in my palm, ready to jump. We were already wearing shorts. We could drive away right now, to someplace more sheltered. I thought of the water streaming off the rocky road that led off the bluff, that would be okay; but the soft sand track out to town could be getting swamped. So many of the greatest decisions in our lives boil down to when to stand and when to flee. So simple: Now? Now? Or now?
Big storms do what waves can do: they draw us taut like a bow. Leap? Or hold?
I usually loved storms. Now I was scared. Had we waited too long? I held Kim’s fingers tight in one hand and the keys in the other. The temperature had dropped so quickly it was like another season, but not one that I knew; a season of night that smelled of gusted salt and mineral earth. Shhhhhhhhh. Between the battings of the wind I thought I could hear the enraged surf. Maybe not. It might have been my own thumping blood.
As suddenly as it began, it stopped. The deluge subsided to gentle sweepings of rain. We lay in the sleeping bags and listened. Could this be the eye? Was that the full brunt of the hurricane? Didn’t seem likely. We slept. When we woke, the sky was a washed blue streaked with high thin horsetails and the waves thundered in just overhead high, row after row.
APEX
We had been surfing now for seven solid weeks. Every day. Except for getting married, not a single day off. Sometimes twice a day, often two or three hours at a stretch. Everywhere we went we were usually the most beginner of the beginners at every break. Almost. I was seeking out faster waves now, where there were no real beginners. But I kept myself in the role of neophyte. Kim struggled, building strength and timing.
We surfed another two days at Scorpion Bay, with a post-near-hurricane swell that sent in head-high perfect rollers, and then the waves dropped off just as if someone had shut a spigot. The points were like a lake. We packed up and drove back to Pescadero. When we rolled in to Jaime’s surf camp on an afternoon in late September I felt spent and happy. We fell into the swimming pool and floated around, relieved not to have to watch for set waves. An hour later Jaime said, “Peter.”
“Huh?”
“You look tired.”
“I do?”
“Around the edges. Nothing serious. Thought you’d want to know.”
“Thanks—Jaime?”
“Yes, Peter.”
“Even through the screen?” We were talking through the little window of the shower door. The communal shower was twenty feet from our palapa and I was taking the first hot wash I’d had in two weeks. “You can tell I’m tired through the screen?”
“You ought to go down to the Costa Azul,” Jaime continued. “Give yourself a break. It’s—” He stopped. He was standing outside the shower door and our faces were a foot apart, separated by the screen. “Are you naked?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s frigging weird.”
He was wearing his goofy tennis visor, blinking at me. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. “Wash behind your ears,” he said, and walked away.
The Costa Azul is between Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo, in the tourist corridor at the very southern tip of Baja, about an hour away from Pescadero. We decided to try a reef break called Old Man’s because it was supposed to be easy. This whole coast had been devastated by wall to wall condos and resorts. We had to park the Beast in a steeply sloped pocket of a parking lot crammed between hotels, where she balanced precariously between a Hummer and Mercedes SUV.
We followed the pedestrian steps down into a gully, went through a tunnel to the beach, which was more like the front patio of a hotel. Hotel employees with big arms and red uniform T-shirts rented out surf boards while spectators in bikinis on reclining chairs ordered drinks from waiters. We allowed our eyes to drift out to the wave. Must have been forty pink-faced longboarders bobbing out there, all gringos. No, there were three local kids. One guy was clearly teaching a class; he was paddling along his line of surfers and exhorting like a drill sergeant, urging one after another to take off, giving them a shove. Surfers who knew how to surf were catching the bigger waves farther out and slicing through the crowd of hapless human flotsam as they bombed down the line. Well, okay. Surfing is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world; in some respects, this was the future. We waxed up, waded in, jumped on, and paddled out.
For a few minutes I sat just outside the crowd, waiting for something bigger and wondering why Jaime had sent us straight to Kook City. And then a set wave rolled in and I knew why. It was a revelation. The wave itself was lovely. It was a right. It came in from the south and heaved up against the reef, bulking itself to impressive heights, and then it developed slowly, like a patient lover. For once, I left Kim alone; usually, when we are on the same wave, I yell all sorts of coaching tips and inspirational slogans, urge her on like a soccer husband. She hates it. She gets mad and paddles off and won’t talk to me. This time I watched her with a kind of awe as she paddled around the group of kooks, keyed off the breaking peak of the midsized waves, got herself in a priority position, and took off. Chest up, trimming perfectly, then driving her head down and popping up. She zipped away on the longest ride, making it all the way to the shallow coral ledges. All I could see then was the back of the wave rolling away, and just over its lip, slinging toward shore and sliding right, her fencer’s back hand; sometimes it gestured with the twisting birdlike flourishes of a flamenco dancer with castanets. Sometimes I saw an occasional black braid flying as she arced up to the top of the wave. Remarkable. Then she’d paddle back out and do it again. She did not look fatigued in the least. She paddled steadily, with easy strength, chest up. When she caught a wave, she parted the flock of beginners like a peregrine diving through ducks. Fuckin’ A, that’s my girl. I was so proud.
I paddled way way out, far beyond the beginners where one other confident surfer waited for a much bigger set. Eventually one came and I caught a ride that rivaled the Scorp in length, long and easy and smooth. I turned on the face and slalomed through beginners.
Back in the blazing parking lot, we loaded up with a fatigued happiness, a kind of shared pride we hadn’t yet had before, and it was special. We high-fived.
“Alto cinco.”
“Alto cinco.”
All the work. The tumbles, the fear, the newness, the strain and exhaustion—it was paying off. Slowly, in its own time, surfing was giving back to us.
The next day we packed up, left a lot of our stuff in Jaime’s room, and headed over to La Paz for our flight home. Dang. Just when we were getting the hang of it.
THE COVE
I had to go home to tend to other work projects. They also involved the ocean and, in particular, the fate of its largest inhabitants. I had seen whales in Antarctica swimming in great numbers, the spouts—the small misting breaths of babies and the tall jets of the big adults—staggered out to where an iceberg marked the edge of the world. Hundreds of humpbacks, swimming close by us, unafraid. Pairs, mothers and juveniles, cruising by, playing, rolling, fins, eyes, flukes—the exhalations in small explosions, sometimes groans and whistles. I thought how these whales make over 620 social sounds, how they can call each other by name, how they have three times the density of spindle neurons that we do—specialized brain cells that are thought to be responsible for empathy, grief, love, language. How their population is less than one one-hundredth of what it used to be before industrial whaling, how they tangle in abandoned fishing gear and drown, are struck by ships, starved by warming and pollution. They are critically endangered and I was trying to expose how the Japanese want to target them in their illegal commercial quotas, rip them with explosive-tipped harpoons.
I learned more about how the oceans are dying and how all of us
, every nation, every individual, contribute. The heedless abuse, rampant overfishing, sloppy energy use everywhere, me among the worst, leading to carbon emissions, leading to warming, to acidity, to the wholesale death of reefs and plankton. The sea cannot defend herself.
Then, when we were about to fly back to Mexico, I got an e-mail from a guy who had been one of National Geographic’s top photographers for eighteen years and was now making a movie about the dolphin-killing cove at Taiji. Trying to expose the slaughter and shut it down. His name was Louie Psyhoyos and his film company was called the Oceanic Preservation Society, or OPS. He had backing from Jim Clark, the billionaire founder of Netscape. He had read some of my writing about whaling and he wanted to meet me.
Kim and I drove up a leafy, prosperous street against the foothills of Boulder. Louie’s wife, a former ballerina, motioned us across the backyard, a field, really, scattered with apple trees. In back was a studio. We stepped through the sliding glass door into a room lined with bookcases and large plasma computer screens. It was like NASA in there. Someone hit a switch and electric shades hummed up and let the clear late autumn light stream through the windows. Six or eight guys, all in their twenties and thirties, in black T-shirts, stepped forward to shake my hand. Louie introduced himself. He was a commanding dude, tall, broad-shouldered, with a lean face, crew cut, and intense green eyes. Maybe early fifties. I looked around the room. There was an esprit de corps, a quiet confidence and seriousness among the men that made me think of the French Resistance. Louie said they were going back into the cove in a few weeks. Dave Rastovich, perhaps the most famous surfer in Australia, was going to bring a bunch of celebrities to Taiji and stage a “Paddle Out” ceremony, basically a surfer’s funeral, in the middle of the killing cove, and OPS was going to film it. The celebrities were going to charge the cove and hold the ceremony for murdered dolphins, whom they consideredthe original surfers. Hayden Panettiere, the young star of the TV show Heroes, was coming, as was an Aussie television star named Isabel Lucas, and Karina Petroni, the top U.S. woman surfer.