by Peter Heller
“We can go out here,” I said. “The wave is that left out there.” I bent to strap on my leash.
“Whoa, bud.”
“What?”
“Were you going to look?”
“Why should I look? That’s the wave.”
James shook his head and emitted a high, derisive laugh. “You’ve got a lot to learn. Let’s look at this thing.”
I stood. The sun was hanging over the water, burnished and ready for a rest. The wind was stiff. James crossed his arms over his head to make a visor and just studied. After a couple of minutes I was going out of my mind. If we were going to surf, let’s go. Sometime before sunset.
James picked up his board. “C’mon.”
He started walking farther up the beach, toward the Liquidora, a circling, chaotic eddy of currents the locals avoided and which was particularly distempered this evening. It was foamy, peaking with colliding crosscurrents.
“Where are we going?”
“The best wave is over there, see?”
“Nobody surfs over there. That’s right out from the Liquidora. See? You don’t wanna go in there.”
James shook his head again and smiled at me like I was a refractory kid. “You are my surfing son,” he said. “You watch and learn. You don’t even have a clue how much you don’t know.”
I was touched.
That afternoon James taught me that there was a good wave way over here north of where everyone surfed; that it was possible to surf and catch decent waves in the blown-out choppy evening; and that he’d paddle right around me and take every good wave away from me if I let him.
It was really hard for me to catch a decent wave. When one rolled in and I was perfectly positioned and it had a shape I could probably use, James would take it. I mean really take it. The guy could surf. From behind I’d see the nose of his board break over the lip, followed by an arm, a head, and then everything would reverse direction, sometimes in the air, as he snapped a cutback on one rail, and he’d disappear. He went down the line with aggressive, single-minded grace, like a predator running and bounding over rough ground.
When he paddled back out I said, “Why’d you take my wave?”
“Your wave?”
“Yeah, I was sitting right there, it was perfect.”
“Son.”
“What?”
“As soon as you stop moving toward the peak, you’ve ceded the wave.”
“I have?”
“Yeah. Anybody else can go for the peak. If you want it, don’t stop paddling.”
“Yeah but this isn’t Trestles. This is you and me. You’re supposed to be helping me.”
Now his grin was broad, warm. “I am,” he said. “Here comes a wave. Go for the peak and don’t stop.”
That was something totally new. On the longboard I sat and waited for a wave. I paddled over to what I thought was the best position and watched the mountain of wave roll in, then I lay down, paused, adjusted myself forward or back on the board for the best trim, and finally paddled hard toward shore well out in front in order to get some speed before the wave got to me. Good strategy for a kook. Kook! I was ready to shuck the label like an old snakeskin.
James said, “Go! Go!”
I angled sideways and paddled directly toward the peak of the incoming wave, right at the crest where it first began to break, never stopping, and turned for the takeoff in one continuous arc. It didn’t feel anything like sitting and waiting for a wave. This was fluid, dynamic. The 6–4 was responsive, and when the wave broke and slugged the board and washed my back I was already up and flying away from it.
We walked back up the beach as the sun hit the water in a collapsing pyre like a burning ship, and sank. “Did you see the fin?” James said.
“What fin?”
“Big-ass tiger shark swimming right by us.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was catching my last wave in. Didn’t you see me waving my arms?”
“No. But thanks.”
Damn. This was tough love.
On James’s second day, he, Kim, and I drove to a point called Barra de San Miguel. There was another river boca here and a very large estuary surrounded by undisturbed mangroves. The river emptied beside a high dry hill at the south end of a long curving bay. A fishing village and a few palapa-covered restaurants perched beside it, and a fleet of pangas was beached on the sand. Birds everywhere. I could see them all the way up the lagoon, frigates and pelicans, cormorants, egrets, and herons, all hanging out in the top of the thick mangrove trees, enjoying the nesting and shelter the way it should have been all up and down this coast. The wave here broke only so often. It had a sand bottom and was popular with beginners. Seemed like a good place for all of us.
I parked the van on the soft sand under some palms beside a restaurant and jumped out. Rash guard, one dab of sunscreen on the nose, wax the 6–4 destroyer with ten swipes, and turn for the shore. I was so stoked to practice what James had just taught me. Kim had barely gotten out of the front seat. I turned around for my coach. Where the hell was he? I saw him down the beach, by the cut in the sand where the river crossed it, looking out along the point.
“C’mon, c’mon, Ting, James is already out there.” I leaned in through the open back door.
We were as locked into this tug-of-war as the Odd Couple. With as thick a skull as I have, I was just learning that it was a war I could never win. I could rant and tug all I wanted, but the tectonic plates, Kim’s sunscreen, the volcanism and glaciation, Kim’s bug dope and hair braids, the sedimentation, fossilization, mass extinctions, these would move apace. And at the end, millions of years would have passed, epochs, and she would look up, smile, walk to her longboard, and say, “Ready!”
But that didn’t stop me. “C’mon, c’mon, James is waiting!”
She glanced around. “His board is still in the back of the van.”
“It is? Oh.”
I sensed an alliance growing. Both James and Kim seemed to be always telling me to slow down. I frowned. What was with all these slow people?
“Uh, okay, well. I’m gonna trot out there and go surfing. You’ve got your key. When James comes back you can lock up.”
“Whateva.”
I trotted out across the wide flat beach to my new dad. He had tugged his shirt off and placed it on top of his head in a white roll like a turban. He crossed his arms on top of it in his signature watch position.
Really cool people have a way of standing still that draws attention. They can make stillness enigmatic. Their charisma, in relaxed immobility, gathers around them like a cowl, like weather around a volcano. We wonder what they are doing.
“What are you doing?” I said to James as I squatted on the smooth pancake sand and strapped on my leash. The beach here was so different than at Barra Llorona. It didn’t drop off a bench of sand to a steep soundboard of gravel. This was flat and gentle. The wave looked regular, relaxed.
“What are you doing?” James countered.
“I’m going surfing.”
“You just lost your heat.” He was talking about competition.
“I—I what?”
“You just lost your heat, bro.”
“Oh.” I was hurt. He forgot to call me “son.”
“Where are you going to position yourself?”
I stood, looked out at the wave. “Right next to that guy on the green fish.”
“He hasn’t caught a wave since I’ve been here.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve gotta watch, son. Come to a new spot, stop and take twenty minutes to suss it all out.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Where’s the swell coming from?”
“Uh …”
“What’s the period?”
“Uh …” I counted off Mississippis between the beginning of each break. “Eleven.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s coming from pretty far out in the ocean.”
“How big?”
“Chest-high.”
“How often do the sets come in?”
“I, uh …” I shrugged.
He turned his head and looked down at me with a mixture of disappointment and a kind of incredulity—the kind of look you just can’t stand to get from your dad. It was infinitely worse than getting yelled at.
“How big are they? Where do the set waves break?”
“Well …”
“How many waves in a typical set? Where is the wind coming from? What’s it doing to the wave? Look at the texture there. Is it going across the face? Is it holding up the wave?”
“Um …”
“How fast is the wave? Where does it section?”
“James?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you really do this? Or are you raking me over the coals because I’m just not living up to your expectations as a surfing son? I mean, is all this like when you read the manual to your new toaster and it has five pages of safety instructions? I mean, nobody actually reads them, they just plug the sucker in.”
He shook his head again, let out a laugh, confident and clear. “You wanna learn to surf? Or do you wanna always be a kook like that guy out there? I’m going to get my board. You watch. We’ll have a quiz.”
For fun that day James borrowed my Bruno quad-fin fish, the one that looked like a brick. He took off the two inside fins to give it more speed floating the white sections and to make it more challenging. By the time we paddled out, there must have been twenty longboarders clustered toward the inside, in front of the beach, and a few better shortboarders way outside, up against the point, waiting for the big set waves. James paddled past them. He paddled so far out you couldn’t tell if he was a pelican or a man. Twenty minutes passed. I caught a couple of waves, but they were short lefts and I missed almost everything; I could never seem to generate any speed on the board. Kim went over into the pack of longboarders and was having the same trouble. And then a big set came in and I saw the pale figure way out on the point move onto it and into the break. The surfer accelerated across the face, being chased by the hissing, traveling line of white like a burning fuse. He flew to the top, veered right into the snowy maelstrom, and jetted out of it as if on fire. He crouched and generated magnificent speed straight across the face, went airborne off the lip, and landed back in the pocket. He jammed right toward the big crowd of surfers who waited for a shoulder to ride. James flew into them. They all just stopped. They stopped whatever the hell they were doing and just gawked, and James slewed through them like a slalom skier. When one clueless kook dropped into the wave without looking, right in front of him, James flew effortlessly to the lip and swooped around him. Anybody else I’d ever seen surf would have had a wreck. He kept going. He left a wake of astonishment behind him, an impression of raptor speed and beauty.
I kept trying. I caught a couple of little waves. After one short ride I saw James on the sand, taking a break, watching me with his arms on his head. I rode the whitewater in on my belly, got out.
“I figured out what your problem is.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, I was watching you. I thought, Pete is spending a ton of energy paddling, but he’s not really going anywhere. I watched. You’re paddling all wrong. You’re cupping your hand—”
“That’s what someone told me in California.”
“What did someone tell you?”
“They told me to cup my hands, extend my arm, and pull straight back like I’m starting a lawn mower.”
James exploded. The most derisive laughter yet. “That’s not what you do. You put your whole arm in the water. Relax your hands, let your fingers fall open. Paddle with your whole arm.”
“Wow.”
“Try it.”
I went back out. Seemed to work. But before I could catch a wave, as I was sitting on my board, I saw James waving with both arms on the beach. Huh? And I saw Kim sitting on the wet sand. I rode back in as fast as I could, trotted up. Blood poured down on Kim’s white rash guard.
A skinny Spanish tourist in a Speedo pressed a bag of ice to her mouth. James was holding her head and shoulders. She had tried for a wave and been tumbled. As she came up to the surface her board slingshotted back on the leash and smashed her face right between her nose and upper lip. Half inch higher, it would have broken her nose, lower and it would have knocked out all her front teeth. She was crying. I held her and murmured, “It’s all right, you’re gonna be all right, we’ll go to the doctor in town. The bleeding’s stopped, you’re all right.” I didn’t know if it was true but it was the best thing to say and believe. Surfing was pushing our limits. I had pulled her into this.
We made a fire in camp. The night wind shirred the palms. Kim sipped Ensure. The doctor said the cut on her gum and inside her lip was pretty deep but unstitchable where it was. She’d have to endure antiseptic-soaked gauze placed under her upper lip and refrain from solid food for ten days. She looked like she’d had an overenthusiastic botox job, like Joan Rivers. She was a good sport.
“Cuj a vu wrrrr,” she said.
“What?” we said.
“Cuj a vu mu wrrrr,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, much worse,” we agreed. I’d thought of it and thanked the wave god all evening. She was an actor and model and it could have really screwed up her face.
James lay in the hammock and chewed on a piece of grilled chicken. The moon was three-quarters full and made shifting shadows of the fronds. A night bird cried out. “You know, this is the first time in years I’ve traveled and just gone surfing for fun. No photographers, no sponsors. It’s awesome.”
He was as happy as Sergio had been, swinging gently in the same place. Except that the hammock and even the tree trunks looked less stressed out.
On James’s last evening a sultry, premonsoon heaviness set in over the lagoon. It seemed to press down from the Sierra. The first leaden clouds moved past the peaks and a thick haze lay over the sea to the west. As the sun lowered toward the band of fog, it warmed slowly like reviving embers. The wind died. The palm leaves stilled and a languid heat overtook the mangroves and stilled the cries of the birds. James wanted to go surfing.
The bay was empty. No fisherman with nets waist-deep in the whitewater, no surfers. Kim had a no-surfing order from the doctor till her mouth healed and she’d driven to town to check e-mail. James and I paddled out. The sun lowered farther into a layer of blood-infused smoke. The water grayed. There was an easy, shoulder-high swell. We each caught a couple of waves. I could paddle a lot faster, now that I was using my whole arm, and my constantly inflamed right shoulder no longer hurt. I caught a short ride and paddled back out. It wasn’t just the light—the short chop inshore crested and foamed and was the color of soot. So was the breaking wave beyond it. And the water was slick, windless, rippling like oil. It smelled like death. I sat on my board and looked around. My shorts slid on the greasy board. The sea palled, ashy under the smoking sun, swollen and malignant. It was portentous. It was the way I would have painted the end of the world. I looked inland. A column of greasy black smoke roiled out of the palms just upriver. What was going on? I slid back down onto my board and began to paddle against the current. On my second stroke my right hand came down on something large and fleshy. It slid away from my palm like something dead. Couldn’t see because the water was so dirty.
“Hey,” James called. “Something’s wrong.”
Yeah, I thought. This is the apocalypse. That’s what it looked like. I saw no living bird etched against the sky, not a soul moving on the whole long beach. The smell wrinkled my nose. But worse was the way the water moved—not like the living ocean I was used to, but slack and unctuous. It slid off the crest like melted fat.
“Let’s get out.”
We both bellied in on the foam, which gave off a flat, fetid odor.
Walking back along the beach, we stepped over a dead sea turtle and a dead cormorant splayed on the wet gravel. We entered the palm g
rove where a few tents were pitched. Not a soul there. The few parked cars were gone.
“Did we miss the memo?” James said.
“Creepy. I always fantasized about an earth without people, but I’m not sure I like it much.”
A woman stepped from behind a wall tent and waved, a simple action that snapped the world back in place.
We walked to our tents and laid our boards on their bags. “Damn.” I looked around. “What do you think was going on?”
“Like a red tide,” James said. “But gray. Sometimes if a lot of plankton die it can be like a death current. The water was really warm, did you notice?”
I had noticed. I thought how recent studies had found hypoxic, or low-oxygen, dead zones thousands of square miles in areas out in the middle of the ocean, caused by warming. (Warmer water holds less oxygen. Imagine opening a cold pop, the light rising of bubbles. Now let it get really warm and it releases its gas in a thick fizz.) A study led by Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany discovered that deep water hypoxic bands are rapidly expanding and washing up onto continental shelves. Giant squids are one of the only species that seem to be able to live in the oxygen-poor waters. The study says that the trend eerily echoes a scenario that unfolded about 250 million years ago, when massive carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes warmed the planet and stripped the oceans of oxygen. When that happened the earth shrugged off 95 percent of its biota.
As the oceans go, so do we.
THE WAVE THAT LIVED IN MY MIND
I had been thinking about a wave. It was a perfect right that swelled on the shelf of a shallow reef and hit a rocky point and jacked up in a green and overhanging wall that shot one dead-level barrel after another across the inside of the bay. It was in southern Oaxaca, almost to the Guatemalan border, at a place where the Pacific coast of Mexico inverted and caught the southern storm swell on its back and generated rights instead of lefts.