by Peter Heller
Vultures ventured out over the river and onto the beach. Especially if there was a dead dog rolling in the tide wash. Pink headed, in the way of a raw wound, they landed on the dog. One hop, tentative, then a surge of whitewater rolled and washed the carcass and the birds lifted off, alighted tried again. It was clear they knew they were not seabirds. Not even shore birds, really. They just loved dead things and this dead thing happened to be awash.
We decided to camp in a palm grove on the south side of the lagoon. Lining out northward across the bay were a series of clean waves. We could watch them from our camp. Nothing else. No houses, no hotels. Just the curve of the shore out to the spuming cliffs of Punto Final—Last, or Final, Point.
It was late November. In another month the dry season would really take hold high in the mountains and the river would lose its push and no longer be able to vanquish the sandbar and release into the sea. It would become a lake. But now it still flowed unimpeded into the salt, met the dissipated surge of the breaking waves with a fine chop at low tide. It may have been knee-deep. At higher tide, or with a big incoming swell, it lay down and let the ocean flood in with the rhythm of the break.
The engine had barely shut off when I slid out of the Beast and walked for the first time into the shade under the coconut palms. I took one look at the river, the bay, the backing mountains, and my spirit went prostrate in relief. Here we were. Here was an actual wave. Here was no reason to move.
We set up our supersized screen room tent with the roll-down canvas walls and I spread out a tarp on the sand, still in a feverish daze from what I was recognizing now as a month of real stress. I lay out one of our flannel sleeping bags for cushioning and collapsed, plunged into a rocking, dreamless sleep.
When I woke, Kim was holding a real glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. The sun had dropped nearly to the sea and was flooding through the screen, the gold color of the juice. In her other hand she held a thermometer.
“Where did you get that stuff?”
“Jean-Pierre.”
“Oh.”
“He’s in the VW parked by the road. He’s so cool, Ting. He’s like sixty-something and he’s down here from Quebec for the whole winter learning to surf like us. Here, lift your tongue …”
The orange juice was delicious, sweet, floating with seeds. The thermometer tasted like rubbing alcohol.
“You should see his rig. He’s a builder in Quebec, he speaks funny English. He outfitted the whole thing himself. It’s got a shower, Ting. Hot water. And this shaving mirror that extends off the back door. Isn’t that cool?”
“Hmp—”
“Keep it under your tongue. He has a wine cellar in there—”
“Hmp?—”
“Well, it’s just a little three-bottle wine rack, but he calls it the wine cellar. ‘Ah, come wiz me, I show you ze wine cellar, ah-hah!’ He’s a hoot. ‘Welcome to Café Jean-Pierre,’ he says. He has an espresso maker, of course.”
“Wumph?—”
“His girlfriend is coming to visit in a couple of weeks. She’s like thirty years younger. They drove down here together, but she doesn’t like the beach much. Here—”
She yanked out the thermometer, held it up to the blood rays of the setting sun. I could hear a cacique in the palms, a strangled guttural shriek. I could hear the throb of waves. Where had we landed? Some kind of paradise. Complete with a New World Frenchman with a milk steamer. Praise the Lord.
“A hundred and one-point-five, Ting. Kinda high. Here, take some aspirin with the last sip. Good. You wanna go back to sleep?” I dropped off again. At some point I woke in deep dusk and I heard Kim laughing up by the road. Another voice: “You tink it not true, something like dat, I cannot believe myself …” Through the screen I could see that she had set up our raft-trip table, the one that unrolled, with the screw-in legs, and set the lantern on top. I could see the shadows of two lawn chairs and the desultory curve of the hammock between two palms. A deep smile warmed my fluttery guts. Home. Home is sweet.
I slept for two days. On the third I woke in the early dark and shook myself off like a dog. Did a quick scan, checked all systems. Head? Check. No longer felt like an oven. Felt clear, cool. Stomach? Check. Hungry. Limbs? Weak, but steady. Looking for action.
I looked over at Kim. In the first wan light I could see ants crawling on her face and neck. Oh, boy, not good. I brushed and blew them off. She stirred, protested. Today we’d drive to town and buy two cots. Nothing wrong with cots. Marital relations are possible on a safari.
I shook her shoulder. “Hey, hey.”
“Wanhproughhdf.”
“Hey, let’s go surfing. Remember that?”
“Frwbrdmh!”
“Great, okay. I’ll get our boards. I’ll wax yours. We have cereal, right? And powdered milk. In the blue cooler, right? You’ve been eating it. And coffee? Get up, Ting. Do your hair and stuff. Surf, Ting, surf!”
She burrowed down into the bag and covered her head.
The first morning back always takes a while. What had become in Baja an unconscious and swift rhythm of preparation was once again a halting stumble from board bag to wax box. From duffel—where were all those extra leashes?—to clothes container—somewhere in this one were our rash guards. Where did we shove the sunscreen? And then, while Kim put in her contacts and braided her hair, I had to stop and look again through the ringed trunks of the palms in a kind of dumbstruck awe. River mouth, sand spit, beyond them the whole curve of the bay. And now, in the first strong light, I could see a wave ripping in front of the boca, kind of dumpy, but farther north, out toward the middle of the bay, a clean left. The wave rose, shivered, crumbled, then sent a tear of white unreeling across open water. The line of spume caught the rising sun full-front and was lit like a cornice of snow. It reminded me of a Himalaya at daybreak. The early breeze, which I couldn’t feel here but must have been blowing down the river valley and over the beach, was gaily spraying back the lip. Already there were half a dozen surfers bobbing out there, and I watched them catch the wave. It was fast, but not too fast—a three-month beginner on top of his game could probably catch and ride it. Looked about shoulder-high this morning. Perfect. I watched a longboarder paddle for one and catch it. Drop down the face, trim out dead sideways halfway down the wall of water, and ride it straight down the line, arrow-straight, all the way across the front of the bay, must have been a quarter-mile ride. Wow.
As I watched I saw a compact man walk through the grove with a funboard, maybe 7–6. He had thick gray hair and the slightly humped posture of men who have worked with their backs all their lives. He looked over, waved, smiled. Must be the famous Jean-Pierre. How cool to drop everything and come all the way from Quebec to learn to surf. To be sixty-plus and do that. I marveled. Hey, wait—it was just what we were doing. And I had felt ancient, beginning to surf at forty-five.
We had to paddle across the river. We hefted the boards and walked under the trees to a bank of tumbled stones. Mangroves crowded over them. We skirted the branches. A green heron, hunched on a limb, stretched in readiness for flight.
“Stay cool. Passing through.” The bird eyed me with what could be malice, settled back. I reached out, touched a leathery leaf, tasted my finger. Salty. Amazing that these trees sink their roots straight into the tide. Many species deal with the extra salt by excreting it in a crystalline dust on the surface of their leaves. Mangroves are the nursery of the sea. Thousands of species of fish, birds, crustaceans, insects, and mammals shelter and breed in their roots and limbs. The forests clean the water by trapping sediment in their roots. Yet so few of these mangroves are left in the world. Coastal development has devastated them. Studies show worldwide mangrove loss of between 30 to 70 percent in just the last thirty to forty years. Half of what is left is in poor condition. At the same time, the estuaries they shelter are being radically degraded by pollution and engineering, or simply filled in and eliminated. I could hardly bear to think about it. This morning I wanted to start
having fun again.
The river was cool. The water limpid. I could hear a cicada buzzing in the trees and the wash of the surf on the other side of the rising sand. As we cleared the bank and paddled out into the middle of the lagoon, the sweep of the Sierra inland was revealed. The mountains were high. Now, this early, they were shadows, a great rugged bulk shouldering a sky streaked with wisps of burning rose. We could see the deep cut, the long furrow in the foothills that must be the river valley. The first sun poured down it and lit the jungle on the far bank of the lagoon, which reverberated with green. Three egrets flew out of the trees, right over our heads. They did to the sunlight something different than the waves, just as white, but cupping shadow with each deep beat of their wings. Upstream, a dead tree stuck out of the river covered from end to end with preening pelicans. A frigate bird, circling high, peeled out and dropped, skimmed the lagoon, flicked a furrow in the water. Probably drinking.
Quietly, we paddled beneath it all. Clambered onto the sand on the far side and walked up the beach on gravel washed with foam. Small smooth stones, shiny and wet, beneath a steep cutbank of sand. We could hear them roll and sift with each rush of the inshore break—a deep crushing sound as the water pushed over them, a higher, lighter hiss as it sieved back. I couldn’t keep from watching the bay: beyond the inshore chop the clean wave rose up and defined itself. It took the roughening touch of the wind across its face and frayed at the top, in spuming white.
We laid our boards on the sand and watched Jean-Pierre paddle out farther down the beach where he could more easily get around the exhausted shoulder of the wave. He paddled like a beginner, like we all do in the first few months—a lot of arm-waving and flailing but the board not moving very fast. Also, he lay with his torso on the board and his chin almost touching it, as if it cost too much effort to lift his chest, which in the beginning it does.
“See?” I pointed. “Looks like we might have an easier time going out up there. Where Jean-Pierre is going.”
“Whateva.”
“Aren’t you jazzed, to get back in the water?”
She pursed and pushed her lips out like a little kid pondering whether to dump the flower vase off the side table. She rubbed her nose with the flat of her palm. “Let’s see. ‘Jazzed.’ I just got—Hold on.” She pointed a finger at one ankle at a time, up each leg, around to her back, to her ear. “Eight new mosquito bites. And we haven’t even gotten in the water.”
“Yeah, but there are no mosquitoes in the water.”
“Whateva.”
“C’mon, Ting, put your leash on, let’s go. Follow me out.”
“You’re always rushing me.” She was serious now, and mad. “I’ve got to stretch.”
“Ting. First the hair. Then sunscreen every inch. Then stretch. We’ll be lucky to get out there at noon.”
I sounded peevish, I know. I should have been grateful she even agreed to come down here with me. I mean, she wasn’t even having a midlife crisis.
I was becoming torn with frustration. The waves looked really good. In half an hour there would be more surfers, probably. Every cell of me wanted to charge into the water and get my first wave in months, but it would be very bad diplomacy to leave Kim standing on the beach to fight her way out all alone at a new break on this first morning. It would be outrageously selfish, bordering on dangerous neglect.
I bent down, strapped the Velcro cuff to my ankle, and picked up the board.
“I’ll wait in the water,” I said.
What an asshole. What I was really saying was: if I were single and not married and not responsible for anyone else, as has been the case for most of my self-absorbed life, then I would have been out on the waves almost an hour ago.
I glanced back to see what effect that last volley might have had. She shook her head. When she’s really pissed and frustrated she doesn’t make faces like white women do. Her face becomes a disciplined mask, very still in all its parts, but somehow energized, which might be betrayed by the flash or luster of her eyes, or a deepening of her color. Some unsuspecting soul might interpret it as passivity or emptiness. Pity that soul. I knew her well enough to hold my breath. I also happen to think she is very beautiful when she is very mad. The incandescent stillness, the meticulously harnessed fury, had their charm.
I was not such a fool as to get her mad just for the fun of it.
She said, “That’s like when you say, ‘I’ll wait in the car.’ Does it ever get us there any faster? Does it?”
I was half turned toward the water. I looked at her in her tight long braid, her blue lycra shorts, and egret-white rash guard—long-sleeved to protect her skin from the sun. She had a terrible fear of how the sun would age and break down her smooth unwrinkled skin. It was cultural. Chinese women in Denver often went for walks in broad-brimmed hats. Given this phobia, it was especially generous of her to come out here surfing with me. I could see a couple of the eight new bites on her legs where she had clawed them and made red, angry hash marks. She suffers much more than me, than anybody I know, from mosquito bites. She’s not making it up. A bite I wouldn’t even notice swells up on her, turns hot and mean, lasts for days. Once we did a long canoe trip on a wild river that flowed into Hudson Bay. The mosquitoes up there are legendary. For weeks before the trip Kim tried to change her body chemistry to make it less delicious. Bananas, vitamin B, garlic. When we flew in to Thunder Bay the Canadian customs official asked if we had any food or plants. Kim pulled out a string of garlic bulbs. Nobody had eaten a whole garlic bulb in Canada since it became a nation.
“Just this,” she said happily. The man stared. Maybe he thought she was going to open an Italian restaurant. “I hear it’s good for mosquitoes.”
He looked at her a moment longer, pitiless. “Good luck with that,” he said finally, and waved us on.
Now I looked at the streaks of her new bites and I relented. Sometimes I catch myself being a person I wouldn’t tolerate for five minutes at my own kitchen table. Being a thoughtless, self-centered jerk. When it happens, when I catch that glimpse, I puddle on the floor—the beach—in shame. I wonder how she tolerates me. Couldn’t she do so much better? There are a billion guys who would help her put on her sunscreen, who would learn how to French-braid hair and carry her board out here along with their own, and who would let her take all the time she needed to get situated in the water, just to have the privilege of her company on a trip like this. Instead of this maniac who thinks she needs to toughen up, who thinks every day is some sort of Outward Bound character-building exercise.
“I’m always on four-wheel drive with you,” she said again, frustrated to the core.
I used to take that as a compliment. Now I was beginning to hear it as a plea to listen to her for once, to moderate my pace a little to accommodate a mate who was not me. We don’t get to mate with versions of ourselves, unless we meet at the Olympics or something.
I put down my board. “You mean I’m being manipulative and pushy when I should be treating my very game surfer wife with the tenderness and generosity and compassion she deserves.”
I could see, by the rise and fall of her chest, that she was breathing hard and that, whatever I’d just said, I’d said in the nick of time. She shook her head. It was not when she was at the height of upset that she let the tears come, it was when the storm was passing, when she felt safe enough to relax. Her eyes were wet now.
“That’s right.”
I trotted back to the rise of sand where I had been ready to abandon her. I touched her shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
She pouted. Not fake, real. Like a kid.
“I’m really, really sorry. You’re so game. To do any of this. I’m such a dick.”
She wouldn’t look at me. “That’s right.”
Why couldn’t I have seen that she was nervous? Probably really scared of getting back in the water in a strange spot after all this time.
“Ting.” I hugged her. “I love you so much. I’m so sorry I get so—so mea
n.”
She bent her head and pushed it into my chest, which meant she was on the verge of forgiving me. It was then, at this moment, that my love for her barreled in like a rogue wave and overwhelmed me. I’d never been with a woman who forgave me. Without exacting some flesh, or offering the words but keeping back the substance like a bad treaty. When Kim forgave me, she simply forgave me and moved on. She was much too light a spirit to carry around a grudge. It was so novel, so like a sweet and cool breeze. She was very patient.
“You’re not mean,” she said against my rash guard. “You’re obsessed, thoughtless, and rude.”
“Thanks.”
She lifted her arms finally and squeezed me back. “Gentle,” she said. “Be gentle with me.”
“Okay.” She lifted her face and kissed me. Her lips were soft. No lingering tenseness. She was just the loveliest thing ever.