by Peter Heller
“Okay,” I said again. “Let’s look at this wave and figure out a plan. Okay?”
She nodded.
I had done something right in a previous life. I was very lucky.
“I am Jean-Pierre,” Jean-Pierre said when we paddled up. “I am glad to see you out of the hospital.”
“Me, too.” I thanked him for the juice, the thermometer, the aspirins. He was a strong man, wiry and densely muscled in his back, with trimmed gray hair and blue eyes.
“Well.” He waved his arm in a broad welcoming gesture. “Another day in this paradise. If I learn to surf as well, then, so, it is a desert to the rest, eh?”
I laughed. “Dessert. Yes.”
“I have not young gasoline in this engine,” he said, patting his belly. “I am sixty-two.”
“Sixty-two? You don’t look a day over fifty.” He really didn’t.
He frowned, narrowed his eyes, looked at me sideways, not sure if I was mocking him. “Well, you say. My girlfriend, she keeps me young.”
“His girlfriend is thirty-five,” Kim said as if it were a point of personal pride. “Well, he wouldn’t say exactly, but we played a game and I narrowed it down pretty close. Right, Jean-Pierre?”
“So you say.” He shrugged, smiled. He was a trip. I was already glad he was camping next to us.
“Look at us, talking like chickens,” he said. “Here comes a wave for us, not for the others.” He turned his board. “Do you want?” he said with great courtesy to Kim.
She shook her head. “Not ready yet.”
“I try.” He said it as he was taking off with a great flail of his arms. He caught it. Stood up, hunched forward like a man charging out of a trench, and stiff, arms held out like a tightrope walker. And went away down the line.
There were seven other surfers out there, four gringos, three Mexicans, and Jean-Pierre, who sat inside the rest, maybe thirty yards in toward shore where he could pick up the leftovers like the meekest wolf in the pack. Kim liked to get safely outside the break at a new spot and just paddle around on the rolling swell, taking in the sights. I guess it was her way of sussing it out. Maybe I would have benefited from the same kind of patience. I watched the other surfers catch the set waves and whiz by me on their way left across the face of the wave. I was on the shoulder, which meant that everyone was coming toward me down the line and the only wave I could get was the tail end of one they missed or let pass. By waiting down-wave at the far, far end of the lineup, you accomplished two things: you signaled respect for the locals—See, I’m not barging into your scene like I deserve to surf or breathe the same air or anything like that—and it gave you time to watch how the waves broke, where the peaks were, how the pack interacted. Did they all paddle aggressively toward the peak as it humped up and revealed itself—as in a competition? First one to get position wins? Or, as at most breaks, did they sit in a loose line and take their turns, paddling back to the end of the queue after they caught a wave?
Anyone who writes anything about surfing, or teaches it, always advises: when you get to a new break, sit down for half an hour at least and study it. Kim and I had just done that—for two minutes.
So now I vowed to be patient and study, sitting on my board. That lasted for three surfers. As the fourth was taking off on a beautiful, shoulder-high drop, I said, “Fuck it,” and paddled out to where the rest were waiting.
As it turned out, I had a nemesis out there. He was somewhere in his fifties, large, with a gray beard and bushy gray eyebrows. I’d say his head was too big for his body, but then his trunk was thick and broad, with a big gut, too, that was not flabby in the least but seemed a perfectly proportioned part of the system of self-propulsion that was Otto. Eyes of indeterminate seawater, a flashing, darting, severe expression, hungry and full of secrets and mischief. He was Dionysian. He had an outsized voice that resonated past the roar of wave:
“Fuck! This swell is fucked up.”
“How so?”
“If you can’t see it, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Well, for one thing, it’s coming from three directions. That’s fucked up. Either peaks with no wall or it just closes out. Fucked up. You sit in one place but you might just as well sit over there. Again—”
“Fucked up.”
“The sets come in from the south, past that rock at the end of the island. About 210.” He meant degrees. “That’s good. But then sets come in from the west and from the northwest. See, like that.”
“That’s really fucked up.”
“Yeah, well, maybe here’s one, I’m taking it.”
Of course, I had position on him. It was just where I stopped to drift, I didn’t mean to take the priority spot, but he took off right in front of me as if I weren’t even there. Didn’t even look over his right shoulder to see if I’d caught it. Nope, he took off like he owned the wave, which right then I guess he did. He had the strangest style. He dropped in like he was falling into disaster—body off balance out ahead of his board, right arm sticking way up behind him to counteract. Looked like a rodeo rider about to be bucked off. No way he was going to make the bottom turn, but he snatched his ride back from catastrophe and swooped up to the lip, then cut and turned aggressively all down the line. On his paddle back out I watched him stop to talk to Jean-Pierre, who sat at his spot inside just floating around, not catching anything.
I tried to make nice with Otto, but my overtures didn’t get me far.
Me: “Nice ride. Late takeoff. The wave was breaking on your back, but you made it.”
Otto: “Yeah, well. You do what you gotta do.” Turns his board, begins to paddle away, an off-pink slab of a man on his pointy 7–6.
“Hey, Otto?”
Looks over his shoulder. I paddle after him. His expression is like a big dog who looks back and can’t believe a little dog is trotting behind, trying to chase him down the street.
“Yeah?”
“Are you retired?”
“Nah, never worked. I couldn’t get the hang of it.”
“How did you—?”
“Trust fund.”
“Ahh. But you surfed all your life?”
“Nah. I did a lot when I was a kid, growing up in California. But then I got into drugs and that kind of became my thing. Then I got clean and sober and came back to surfing. About twenty years ago.”
I actually stopped paddling and sat up and stared at his retreating butt. “Oh …” I said, to the pads of his feet.
One after another the rest of the surfers in the lineup took off on long rides. And then I was alone, watching the open ocean and the undulating horizon. Watching for the lift of a bigger swell. And this feeling overcame me, a sense of focus I had not had for months. Intense, almost as if I could conjure the wave or the wave could conjure me. The connection with the sea I had missed so much. It came with a surge of relief. It had been way too long. And then here it came, a lifting of the dark water, a promising steepness, a long wall and no one else there. I pivoted, paddled like a maniac, remembered to drop my chin, and felt the lift and glide—release. Hopped up.
I made the drop, fell to the bottom of the face, then swooped up along it in a reflex bottom turn. Oh, yeah! I didn’t rebel-yell this time like the kook of kooks, but was filled with glee. Kept it to myself. This was what I remembered: unadulterated joy.
Once, on my second day at the río, Otto yelled at me. I had just been paddling back to the lineup. He was zipping down the face fast. I had nowhere to go. Stop, sprint straight ahead, it didn’t matter. Suddenly the wall was right over me and Otto was on me in a split second, unable to get around, wiping out. He came up foamy, disheveled, and irate.
“Look!” he barked. “You’ve got to get your shit together and learn to stay out of the way. You should be good enough now to figure that out.”
I apologized and paddled away. But it burned. I felt humiliated and aggrieved. I mean, I had had nowhere to go, he should have turned around me. Also, it�
�s okay to cut a beginner some slack. Especially if it’s clear that he wants to be courteous, wants to learn and obey the rules. Who was this guy, to yell at me like he was the abusive father I’d never had?
I tried to shrug it off. One good thing about surfing is that even if you miss most of the waves and get yelled at, you still get tumbled and your body still provides you with boosters of endorphins and dopamines. I thought, When you’re on the pity pot and deep in your self-centered angst, what’s the best way out of it? Service! That’s what they told me in AA. Go be kind to someone else. So I paddled down to where Kim was sitting beside Jean-Pierre and helped guide her onto a wave.
“Paddle! Paddle!” I yelled. “This one’s for you! You can get it! Dig! Put your chin down! Down!”
She missed it and sat up, yelling, “Don’t shout at me! It gets me all confused! Don’t coach me!”
Well, that felt better.
I paddled back to where Otto was still dominating the waves. The guy hadn’t let me get a wave all morning. If I was anywhere near him, he just dropped in on me cold like I had no rights, like there was never such a thing as surf protocol, as etiquette, as even a thing called simple kindness. At first I let him do it, figuring: new wave, new spot, new old muscles, and most of the waves I go for I miss anyway because my timing is way off. I had learned to just accept the fact that the good surfers around me were also keen judges of my ability, and if they didn’t afford me any respect and took off right in front of me, it was because I didn’t really deserve any.
But there were locals and there were locals. Otto just wanted every damn wave he could get and he didn’t give a shit if anybody around him was struggling. In his book we shouldn’t have even been there.
So Otto was local numero uno. This was typical of expat gringos who had staked out a wave for several decades. I learned to be wary of them. To stay out of their way until I was pretty confident that I would catch the wave I was going for. But when that happened, I knew I would have to carve out a place on the wave or I would never get a ride.
The next time Otto cut me off, I’d had enough. I just kept going and rammed him. He came up yelling that I’d hit him and I told him that maybe he better stay away from me from now on and stop cutting me off. It was the oddest thing: he was nice to me after that. Over the next few weeks I even began to appreciate his keen intelligence and humor, and he began to give me some of my most valuable lessons about reading waves, taking off, turning. Underneath his crusty surface he was solid and kind. I guess he just couldn’t suffer complete fools. Go figure.
A few days later, I paddled up to a Mexican sitting on his shortboard staring gravely out to sea. The whole week we’d been there he had kept to himself, paddled silently by, reserved, hunting the peaks of the waves and finding them. His thick black hair was cropped straight across his forehead and he wore a short brush of a mustache. I introduced myself.
“Good morning, Pedro,” he said in thickly accented English.
“Como se llama usted?”
“Johnny Be Good.” He seemed vaguely amused. He was compact the way a tank is compact. He swiveled his head toward me and I was struck by lively green eyes. “Did you see the shark?”
“No. Was there one?”
“Right here. One …” He made a scythe out of air.
“Fin. You didn’t get out?”
“No, Pedro. He does not bother me.”
I didn’t know how to take that. The shark does not ruffle Johnny Be Good because he is hard to ruffle, or the shark does not bother him in a more literal sense by biting his leg off? It seemed at the moment an important distinction. If the sharks here generally went about their own sharky business without sampling pieces of surfer, that would be good to know.
But the discussion was closed. Johnny pulled his board under him and took off down a textured wall lined out for a hundred yards.
That left me alone with my imagination and a sea of opaque dark water. What was I supposed to do? There was a shark around here. Or maybe it was just a Mexican psych-out. I didn’t think so. Johnny had caught his own waves all morning and no one had gotten in his way. Otto left him unmolested. He had no reason to be blithe. So, should I paddle straight down to Kim and tell her and then proceed smartly to the beach? That would freak her out, probably for days. But then, I believed in the ethics of complete disclosure where it involved medical issues or top predators. But then, the shark did not bother Johnny so it shouldn’t bother Kim and it would only bother me in the sense that I let it occupy a berth in the marina of my head; unless, of course, it chewed off my foot.
I decided to keep mum and keep a lookout, which Kim may not forgive me for after reading this. I sat on my Bruno torpedo-nose destroyer longboard and scanned the water, pretending I was looking for waves, but every wind riffle and benign silver bullet of a flying fish gave me a start. And then the big black thing popped up right off my nose, maybe twenty feet away. I jumped. Probably groaned. It was round as a melon. It had eyes. It looked like E.T. It was a sea turtle. She was curious. She appraised me and submerged and must have been, judging by her vanishing shadow, at least four feet long. That relieved me. I figured that where sea turtles were looking so relaxed there probably was no longer a shark.
Every morning, early, there was the same group out on the water: Otto, Jean-Pierre, Johnny Be Good, a few other Mexican guys, Kim, and me. A nearly full moon, still bright, sank into a rose haze over the sea as we dropped our boards into the slow water of the lagoon. We paddled across slowly, in soft cool water that shimmered with greens from the cane and magroves on the far bank. At water’s edge I could see willets, sandpipers, egrets, a boat-billed heron, and a pair of yellow-crowned night herons, plovers, royal terns all strung out along the water. Tight formations of pelicans flew just over and the high, angular frigate birds. Small fish flipped the surface all around us like slow raindrops. The mountains brooding upstream. The shear and thud of surf. Right then, truth be told, paddling easily with Kim beside me on the glassy water, I didn’t care if I ever caught a wave. Or ever learned to surf. Or ever wrote a book. The surface of the estuary tilted in sunlight. The air was cool. The feeding fish made soft flicks. The circle of our awareness expanded gently outward like the rings of a pond-tossed stone; and at the same time, with equal and opposite persuasion, the morning entered into us. I shouldn’t speak for Kim. It did for me, and she stopped paddling, too, and we just drifted and listened. The sense of peace was so strong it seemed to ring like a sustained, resounding bell. I was happy. Love is a strange thing. At that moment it was undiscerning and pervasive. I loved Kim, I loved the willets, the coconut husk bobbing out to the salt, the crocodile that was somewhere around because they lived here, too. It struck me that taking in the morning lying down, spread out on water, was a completely different, more vulnerable experience than propped up and in command of two legs.
The waves were coming in with more energy, with longer intervals between them, which meant they were traveling from farther off, from their inception in storm. Some of the sets were overhead, about seven feet high on the face. Kim caught one of those, while Jean-Pierre yelled and cheered, and I could just see her high back hand zinging left down the rail of the lip, waving, grabbing at air.
The tenth morning I surfed until I could no longer lift my chest. I surfed until glass-off. There’s a time in the late morning when the offshore wind lies down and the sea becomes dark and smooth. More oil than glass. A molten mirror that moves the light in sliding negatives, sheen and shadow slipping past each other with the undulations of the swell. Only minutes: the ocean holding her breath. Catch a wave in this hiatus and it is like skating down an oil-coated slide. Smooth. And then the sea breathes out. The wind has shifted onshore and it is gentle at first, barely texturing the face of the wave. The cresting lip no longer tremors and folds back while the rest of her body falls forward. Now she is all falling into herself. As the wind stiffens, the wave throws her hair forward and tucks her chin and curls over her tende
r womb. The wind presses on her back like a great insistent hand. With more and more force. Until she lets out a gasp and lies down.
Why surfers get up early.
ADDICTION
Surfing is an addiction. I read a book once called Love and Addiction. If I remember right, the author seemed to believe that these two powerful emotional states were deadly enemies, like love and fear. That one, in fact could not exist in the same room with the other. Lying there in the cot in the dark under the clamorous palms, listening to tiers of surf overlap each other, I knew that the two were compatible—like alpha wolf pups.
I was becoming addicted to surfing. I loved it also. With a deep, abiding, wholesome love.
Like all users, I was blind to the downsides of my addiction. If I pulled muscles, got sunburn or bitten by bugs, I didn’t give a damn. Kim, however, was emphatically not addicted. She liked surfing sometimes, especially when the other surfers were nice to her and she caught some waves. But all in all she could take it or leave it. And she suffered from things I didn’t even notice.
We slept in the screen room but bugs got in. They slipped in when we slipped out. As fast as we unzipped and zipped the door, they were faster. One or two mosquitoes harried our sleep. They ended up eschewing me and biting Kim. Every day we piled sand around the base of the walls so there was no gap on the ground. Kim had taken to dressing in long pants, long-sleeve shirt, wide brim hat with bug net when we lingered at Café Jean-Pierre at dusk. Still the no-see-ums and mosquitoes found a way. Before she walked the hundred yards of beach at dawn from the tent to the water, she slathered repellant all over her legs, arms, neck. For three minutes of walking. Still the sand fleas plagued her long calves, her vulnerable ankles, her neck, throat, ears, eyes. They mortified her by biting her eyelids. Her skin angered, swelled, reddened. She scratched and it bled and wept. A single mosquito bite could become a welt the size of a silver dollar. The itching magnified, crescendoed—should have, like all things that crescendo, ceased. No way. The nit of a sand flea, the ones that peppered my ankles as I walked to the water and forgot about a second later, they grew like miracle seeds in fertile soil. They bloomed lush flowers of itch and sting. When Kim undressed in the tent at night and said, “Ting, I have twelve more bites,” pointing them out up and down her body, standing on one leg and bending back the other knee to point to calf and foot, leaning the fall of her hair away from her face to show me the swollen tender place beneath an ear; when she did this she was not being a wimpy drama queen; she was trying in some impossible way to quantify for me her suffering. On our sixth night she lay on the cot, spreading lydocaine on her legs, and began to cry. To herself, quietly. It tore me like a serrated knife.