by Peter Heller
The day after we put Sergio back on the plane, a swell came in from the southwest and churned our sea to chaotic foam. From the tent, we could see lines of violent breakers strung all the way across the middle of the bay where no waves had ever been. The morning wind blew back their tops in long streamers of spume that would have been festive if we had not entertained the thought of paddling out among them. Kim didn’t, I did. I stood on the bank of the river taking it all in. The morning seemed to be composed of nothing but waves. A swell so big it made shallows out of what once had seemed deep outer bay and pushed against them and broke in tiers miles out—some submerged reef I had never seen before. I crossed the river and stood on the sand of the beach and looked straight up into the onslaught. Beneath my feet the sand shuddered. There were so many explosions that they merged into a throbbing white rush that cracked now and then like thunder.
I went back to camp and put on my rash guard, paddled back across. I passed Frank, a surfer from Massachusetts who had ventured out and turned back. He shook his head. “It’s chaos. Good luck.”
I walked down the beach, took a deep breath, and launched into a fast riptide. I paddled as hard as I could and cleared a steep wave fence, then angled the board south toward the river. I paddled and paddled. I saw Frank standing on the beach where I’d left him, but it couldn’t be, that was way up the shore. I looked over my shoulder. A strong north-moving shore current was sucking me to Punto Final. I dug harder; I must have paddled for half an hour. Then Frank was in front of me. I had paddled against the current until my back was on fire and my arms felt like putty and I was in line with where I’d started. Except that I’d gotten outside the big break. I thought I had. Then I looked out to sea and here was a set coming. I mean a set as I’d never seen one. The face of the first wave was at least nine feet tall. The second one looked over it and the third seemed monstrous. Instantly I positioned myself to go after the first wave. It was more about self-protection, fight or flight: I just didn’t want to meet that third wave in person. I rocked back on the longboard, pivoted, angled left, and as the first wave in the set barreled in I paddled like hell. Then it was beneath me. Then I was falling. Like off a cliff. Straight down the face in a drop like I’d never known. Then I was hopping up. Then the board was accelerating left, slicing across the face. The wave, the thundering maw, I had the sense of it, tearing and crashing just over my right shoulder. The lip of the wave was over my head. I flexed my ankles, weighted my heels just a little, and flew to the top of the wave. Lord, it was a face out ahead, tall and dark, but it had a slope, it was not a cliff, it was just like any other wave here but bigger. I swooped to the bottom, the whitewater engulfing my knees, I held balance, then went to the lip and over the top. Rode whitewater from the next wave into shore on my belly.
One wave. The wave of my life.
On the beach, Frank shook his head. “Double overhead,” he said. “I thought the current was taking you to the point. Glad it worked out. Nice ride.”
“Thanks.”
I felt bigger than myself. Not inflated, not big-headed, just proud and full of adrenaline and kind of incredulous that what I had just experienced had really happened.
“How long, how far did I ride it?”
“About seventy-five yards, I’d say. You made the drop, nailed the bottom turn, then roller-coastered.”
“Wow.”
We walked back to the river, paddled across. I looked upriver and saw a royal tern feint to the water, then peel upward in an effortless arc and catch the ruddy sun full on his snowy breast and I felt a great happy kinship overwhelm me. The tern and I didn’t have much in common except that we were both in possession of warm-blooded bodies that got hungry, ate, mated, obeyed the turnings of the stars, planets, days, and seasons, and we both evidently had a blast soaring around on currents. Also, our heads followed our eyes and our bodies followed our heads—number one rule in motocross, kayaking, mating, surfing, diving for fish. Hell, we had almost everything in common. We were both surfers. I laughed out loud. Frank looked at me over the silky water.
“Nothing,” I said. “That was just a rush.”
With a good instructor, one can learn to turn a pair of skis in the first hour. Or hit a tennis ball over a net. With surfing, if you have an instructor who gives you a great shove as the wave lifts you, it may take days and days before you can reliably pop up and ride standing straight into the beach. Weeks before you have the strength to catch your own waves on a regular basis. Months before you can do it with enough control to get ahead of the break and begin to ride across the blue face of a wave. And this is on easy, soft, slow, forgiving waves. Come every day, give surfing the best of yourself first thing every morning, and you might have a chance over several months of beginning to actually surf. Maybe.
It’s humbling.
We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed to a force much greater than themselves, which in this case is the wave, and submitted to the gnarly rigors of its discipline. They have allowed themselves to be shaped and polished by the sea. They have given themselves up to this greater force, day after day, year after year. Crushed and punished, battered into something tempered and resilient, and sharpened to an edge by constant refinement. They are warriors in the best sense: by bending to the often brutal demands of surfing they have transformed themselves into beings who can respond to great violence with grace and humility. And beauty.
Nathan at Surfing magazine had warned me that surfing is not something to conquer in six months or a year. “It’s a life path,” he repeated.
I was just starting to get it—around the time I decided I would step up, or down, to a shortboard. Maybe there is some crash course in surfing somewhere. I guess I was trying to devise my own on this six-month odyssey. But if I had learned to surf in a month, and could pay for the wave pool and get a perfect hollow ride every time, then …
I would not sit dawn after dawn on an undulating swell and watch the pelicans glide on the cushion of what pilots call ground effect so that wingtips skim a hairsbreadth off the water. I would not fall into despair at not catching a single good ride in three days. I would not learn to watch, to wait for my wave. I would not get smaller and smaller before the brimming sea, even as my own skills increased.
I would be a man who surfs, not a surfer.
OBSTINATE AND SHORT
Deciding that surfing isn’t really about surfing has certain advantages, especially if you’re forty-eight, a kook, and you choose to take up shortboarding.
Shortboarding is really hard. I took calculus in college as a kind of character-building experiment; I thought that before I became a graduate of an institution of higher learning I should know how to calculate the volume of a can of beans. I never did figure that out—I just read the label that said twelve ounces and dumped the refrieds into a frying pan. But I did spend four hours every night doing assignments that were supposed to take an hour. I was a freaking English major who didn’t even know what five to the negative one meant. I crawled into the professor’s office on week three and begged him to let me drop the class. I told him it was all I was doing all term, that I didn’t have time for anything else. The old bald bastard Sleznick got an impish smile and said, “What more could you want in life?” Well, I’d set myself the challenge and I guess he thought it was his job to not let me let myself down. He was a confirmed bachelor and a scout leader on the weekends and he had nothing better to do than help us all build character. I got a miraculous C.
Shortboarding makes that class look like drivers’ ed.
“If you are over thirty and just learning to surf, you will be a longboarder all your life.” The smug, patronizing words of a big sunburned beer gut in a sleeveless T kept ringing in my ears. He had been loading up his ten-foot Harbour board in the parking lot of Bolsa Chica, and I figured he was too stuck to
get in shape, had spent too many years slowing his reaction time with toxic substances to ride anything but a floating oil rig and he didn’t want to see a guy his age fly by him on a little board. Was that it? Or was it true? Other surfers in California had told me the same thing.
“Learn on a longboard. Then, as you get better, come down to something like an eight-foot funboard. Or even a seven-ten.” That was the standard refrain. Well-meaning, I’m sure.
A funboard is a practical, no-nonsense hybrid. It’s like a minivan. It has length, it has fatness, it has float, and sometimes it has, shamelessly, pretensions to a shortboard’s pointy glamour. It’s fun, you bet. You can paddle it if you are a little out of shape, and you can hop up on it if you are reasonably fast, but not that fast. Not fast enough for a you-know-what. You can turn it pretty quickly. You can have … fun.
I am not scorning it. I’ll get one when the time comes. But I wasn’t breaking my ass every day, surfing until muscles screamed and burned and arms became leaden and back muscles would no longer hold my head up, just to watch twenty-somethings from Orange County crank turns off the lip that were worthy of bats. I wanted to do that.
Which is pretty much how the first shortboards got developed in the first place: surfers experimenting with shorter boards in the late sixties and early seventies could do tricks and go places in the wave a longboard just couldn’t go. Think about a big fast barrel like the Pipeline on the North Shore. A surfer wants to drop in and stay high on the wave and tuck right up into the tube. A longboard just won’t fit there. It wants to drop down to the bottom of the wave where the surface is flatter. But a little shortboard, say with some rocker—a slight upward curving of the nose and tail—will fit high in the wave where it is most hollow. Add a hard-edged rail toward the tail that gives grip on the steep face and you have a tube machine. Also, shorter boards turn much faster, much looser, which to most surfers means: fun. In competition it means victory, and board design changed fast at the end of the sixties. In the 1968 World Surfing Championships in Puerto Rico, Fred Hemmings competed on a classic longboard and won, beating others on much shorter boards. At the next Worlds in 1970, Rolf Aurness won decisively on a 6–10 single-fin. My evolution as a surfer seemed to be haltingly following the evolution of the sport. At least in my dream. But I killed myself paddling the 6–4 that Bruno had made for me. I snugged into the lineup and watched everybody else go for every wave because I could not move the thing fast enough. I tried to take off as I would have done on a longboard, safely on the shoulder and away from the gnashing pocket, and watched wave after wave roll under me, heading for the beach without me, leaving like an unrequited lover arm in arm with someone else better positioned than me. I wore myself out taking off on these easy shoulders. Then in frustration I went right for the critical crest of collapse, I pivoted around just under the toppling tower, and got served. Got read to from the slamming book. Got baptized by five tons of loving water.
My shoulders cried out every night. I dripped salt water from my sinuses onto my dinner plate, all over my pillow. I couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying because I had water and sand packed into my ear canals. I lived in kind of a numb daze. But I knew in my bones that if I didn’t ride a decent wave on a shortboard before the end of the trip I would feel like a failure. I would have to write a book about how much I learned about getting whipped by the challenge I’d set for myself. I’d have to console myself by building a shack in Maine and filling it with Hudson Bay blankets and long novels and field guides like this midlife turkey I’d read about in the New York Times.
Was I a self-serious, middle-aged turkey? An SSMAT? I didn’t really give a shit, as long as I could ride a fast overhead wave on a 6–4 shortboard.
Joseph Conrad wrote that convictions are merely justifications for our passions. I took that to mean that it is unwise to trust people bursting with conviction. The worst are full of passionate intensity—Yeats. I never do—trust them I mean. Even if they are convictions I agree with. In the same way, people who try to convince me that they didn’t really want to get good at surfing, that all they wanted in life was to build the shack and get all Zen-y about it, I am suspicious of them; I think they are probably trying to put one over on me.
So if I tell you this surf trip is not about surfing, stay skeptical. It’s a way of hedging my bets.
It’s not. It’s about love. Of a woman, of living, of the sea.
It is. One hundred percent. All about surfing.
I was coming to realize I needed help. Paddling that little frigging destroyer board around must have been getting me stronger. But the days were mounting up and the waves I actually caught and rode down the line on the 6–4 were pathetically few. In three weeks I could count them on one hand. And even those felt lucky. When I did actually ride a wave, Johnny Be Good and a local kid named Cole went apeshit. They fired salvos of encouragement: “Andale, Pedro! Rápido! Tú puedes! Bend your knees. You will get it!” That meant a lot to me. The gringo expats, mostly crusty men older than me, just figured that if I got better there’d be another person catching their waves.
In any event, a wave can be so gratuitous, so kind, only so often. I was getting my ass handed to me. It was time to go back to school. I needed a coach.
It wasn’t hard to think of one. On an assignment a while back, I had met a pro surfer named James Pribram. We had quickly become buds. James, like me, loved to travel, especially into places and situations that were challenging and little-known. He also had a healthy streak of angry environmental outrage. He just couldn’t bear that whole stretches of coast around the world were being lost to careless development and pollution, and especially that the world’s great surf breaks were being destroyed one by one. When mangroves are torn up and seawalls built and river flows redirected, the hydrology changes and great waves disappear. Go extinct like the species of fish and coral that lie underneath.
James was known in surfing circles as the Eco-Warrior. He grew up in Laguna Beach, southern Orange County, and started surfing seriously when he was seven. It’s all he ever wanted to do. Now he surfed all over the world, and tried to solve local environmental problems wherever he encountered them. At thirty-eight, James had boyish celebrity looks coupled with surfer toughness and a celebrity air. He was half Czech. Black brushy hair, keen gray eyes, medium height, and ripped. So, as he walked down the street of a little surf town in Chile, being filmed, it was assumed that he was a celebrity. He had no problem getting a meeting with the mayor, and starting a local campaign to stop an industrial plant from dumping pollutants into a rich lagoon important to local fishermen. A few months later the company stopped. It was ballsy, imaginative work from a surfer who looked like a teen idol. In Laguna Beach he wrote a column called “Surfing Soap Box” for the local paper. The themes were almost always environmental, and James had had a big hand in forcing the city to be more responsible about its oceanbound treated sewage. In response, the Laguna Coastline Pilot got reams of e-mails, mostly from gorgeous SoCal young women who told James that he was their hero. Living large, James, my boy. His Eco-Warrior show had been on Fuel TV and in 2007 he received one of the most prestigious awards in surfing that was not about some contest: the John Kelly Environmental Achievement Award, given to the surfer who did the best environmental work. Kelly Slater has been a recipient, as has Rob Machado. One man, one vision, many problems solved with real effects for the locals.
I called him. When I asked if he could tutor me on the shortboard, he said, “Yeah, good timing, really. I just got back from a trip. I could get down there at the end of the week and stay a week. Sound cool?”
“You bet. I need help bad.”
I heard a quiet chuckle. “Surfing giving you a hard time?”
I hesitated. “Am I too old to be a shortboarder?”
James’s laugh this time was a bray, a short cough of derision. For such a lame idea. “No, bro, you are not too old to be a shortboarder. That’s all BS. A shortboard just requires some diffe
rent techniques. You have to get used to the timing. We’ll get you going. Don’t worry.”
I almost cried with relief.
SURFING AT THE END OF THE WORLD
What a dude. James came through the customs line at the airport in baseball cap on backward and Oakley shades, carrying a board bag (short) and a day pack. Nothing else. He moved in a magnetic field of cool. Other travelers glanced at him, stepped back a half step to get a better look; they didn’t know who he was but he was Somebody. I waved at him through the glass door. I couldn’t see his eyes through the dark glasses but he lifted his chin a half millimeter. Cool.
It was a two-thirty arrival. We got to the river at four-thirty.
James said, “Nice.” He looked across the boca to the tiers of wind-torn surf. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” I handed him Sergio’s Spider-Man pillowcase.
“Surfing, where do you think?”
“It’s afternoon.”
“And?” His voice was Czech tenor and ranged higher when he was incredulous or laughing at something I’d done that was particularly stupid.
“And the surf is all windblown.”
“And?”
“Nobody goes surfing now.”
“And can any of these nobodies really surf?”
“Well …”
That was the very first thing I learned from James: don’t blindly do what everybody else does. James believed most people are sheep and consequently will always remain at a sheep level of achievement and consciousness. James believed in stepping back and seeing things for himself. We unslung the boards, paddled the lagoon, and walked down the beach. Despite the wind there was a swell running and waves were forming. Mostly they were crumbling and breaking in chaotic random peaks, sectioning in long dumps of white that left a surfer nowhere to go. We got to a wide mat of beach pea that grew across the spit between the lagoon and the surf. A few palm fronds had been stuck in the ground here, dried and brown, as a sun shelter for the local fishermen who worked the surf with hand lines. I stopped.