Kook

by Peter Heller

  Nathan at Surfing magazine had told me about it, but I’d forgotten completely until Kim and I saw the movie Absolute Mexico at the surfing film festival in Huntington Beach during the U.S. Open championship when we had the keys to the beach and were camped below the pier. Kim and I had squeezed in with the crowd at the movie theater on the Pacific Coast Highway and dutifully sat with the Michaels and Bruno for what we’d thought would be another surf-porn fest. I can’t stand extreme sport movies, whatever the sport. But the wave in Oaxaca had been the site of one of the most extraordinary surfing competitions in history, a shoot-out between the world’s top competitors and local hotshots on a consistent pipe that almost never ended. Some of these guys were covered up, traveling like lead inside a gun barrel for what seemed all morning. I watched and discovered that I was holding my breath. Kelly Slater was in the film, and Andy Irons. And some strong local surfers like Bobby Martinez who had the wave wired.

  The competition was called the 2006 Rip Curl Pro and Andy Irons beat Slater, beat everybody. But what I remember was the wave, the way it loaded itself against the rocks, swelling and building pressure like a pulled bow and then shooting off the point like an arrow. I remember the color, the stone-blue that turned to glass-green inside the necked bottle of the barrel. The way the surfers changed color inside the wave like some reef fish and then exploded, nearly vanishing in light as they emerged and hit the shattering crystalline lip. The sound it made, the wave devouring itself, groan and thunder. It was such a wave to haunt even a nonsurfer, to haunt dreams.

  After James left, I retired the 6–4 for a while, the one with four fins, and pulled out a standard 6–7 shortboard thruster, which was faster. It had the normal three-fin configuration designed for acceleration, especially when caught up in the whitewater of a section. With my new and improved paddle stroke I found that, for the first time in our two months at the river, I could really move. Which meant I was beginning to catch waves.

  Just beginning. When I did, most of the time I just wiped out. I didn’t pop up fast enough and got caught with a wave breaking on my back, or I popped up and went to the very bottom, skated through the transition and out into the flat ahead of the wall, not where I wanted to be. Like sliding down a playground slide and getting dumped into the dirt. And because I had not set an edge or a fin to help me generate opposing pressure—the thrust needed to swing back up the face—I just got buried.

  One day Cole paddled up to me after seeing me wipe out a few times in a row. “Stay low,” he said. “Keep your knees bent, you remember? What I told you? You are too straight. You’ll get it. In a couple weeks you’ll be having fun like the rest of us.” He smiled. He could read the anguish of frustration on my face.

  He held out a fist and bumped me. Later that morning, I did what he said and it worked—staying low allowed me to set an edge high on the wave and accelerate away from danger. I was so happy. With such slow progress, any small improvement seemed a triumph.

  The board moved now. After two months of surfing every day for two or three hours, I felt like I was developing the instincts to catch the right waves the right way. It was the same with Kim. She had recovered from her cut and was catching waves now without help, making the extra power surge to drop in. Part of it was that all of our training was paying off: we were learning to read waves, and learning where to be and when. But part of it was sheer strength. Months of surfing hard every day had given us the strength we needed to begin to learn how to ride a wave. It reignited our desire to travel. The joy of breakthrough. Or maybe it was simple antsiness. We had been camped by the lagoon for almost eight weeks.

  Whatever it was, I began to think about the wave in Oaxaca, wondering if I could ride it. I called Leon Pérez, my old mentor. He’d just had an operation in his gut, probably a result of three decades of hard partying, and he’d been out of the water for a month. It was the longest he hadn’t surfed since he was fifteen. I’d seen him two weeks before and he was getting stronger, eating carefully, staying away from tequila and Corona, and impatient to get back in the water.

  “Hey, how’s the stomach?”

  “Getting better. Little by little. I am surfing again. Taking it easy.”

  “You want to go to Oaxaca for ten days?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “You were?”

  “Yes. I need a break.”

  I thought about that. Leon surfed every morning of his life and caught many more waves than any of the younger locals, than anyone at all. He was the king of the breaks up and down the coast within an hour of Zihuatanejo. Hell, he’d discovered most of them back in the late seventies. He usually showed up at his shop after two, unless he had special clients to guide. He had arranged his whole life around surfing and answered to no one. I knew what he meant, though. He needed a break away from his convalescence, everything associated with the operation.

  “You wanna go in a few days?”

  “Yes. I want to see the wave at Barra. Also to stop in and see friends in Puerto.” He meant Barra de la Cruz, the wave I’d been dreaming about. Puerto was Puerto Escondido, home of the Mexican Pipeline, the most famous barrel in North America, and an international scene.

  “You’re kidding. I’ve been dreaming about that wave! That’s so weird.”

  “That’s the way things work, Pedro.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “My truck is having some problems.”

  “Nah, we can take our van. We’ll come down and pick you up.”

  It was settled. We’d go south to the perfect point breaks of Oaxaca with the King. It would be the climax to our trip.

  LEON’S TREE

  We spent the night in Ixtapa with Leon. His daughter Auramar was a rambunctious, pretty six-year-old who loved to make me hot tacos that got me screaming and begging for water. They were tacos that she made out of air, and my howls were theater, but they sent her into paroxysms of laughter.

  Leon split custody with Auramar’s mother, an attractive younger woman who had suffered some terrible things as a kid and was half crazy from it all. He adored his daughter even more than he loved the sea, which is saying something. Leon told us how he had planted a little palm tree for her when she was born, out there by the fence along the empty lot. It grew to the height of a man with a trunk a hand-span thick. One day he came back from a week of surf competitions and the tree had been knocked down and pulled out with a bunch of other brush. It lay in the lot desiccated and dead. All the fronds were brown, roots broken. Just a bare trunk. Leon freaked out. He called the mother. Auramar was sick. She had a fever and couldn’t go to school. Leon thought the uprooted palm might have more significance than a memento destroyed; he feared for his daughter’s safety. So he picked up the tree and he planted it back by the fence, this forlorn post, and he watered it and prayed. He watered it every day without fail. In the second week it sprouted one tiny green leaf. And Auramar woke up and her eyes were clear and she went back to school. He showed us the tree, taller now, almost eight feet, and thick with green fronds.

  We drove for fifteen hours, along the endless headlands of southern Guerrero, hundreds of miles of surf. We drove through small villages and palm and papaya plantations, with always the rugged Sierra on our left as if to say, This is another dream. Your dream is the sea. Don’t even think about coming up here. I wouldn’t. Of all the mountain ranges I have ever seen, from the St. Elias to the Pamirs or the Himalayas, the Sierra Madre are the most forbidding—as unapproachable with hide intact as the afterlife. Which is where you’d probably go if you decided to drive up in there and wander around. In those isolated mountain towns, rife with droguistas, xenophobic describes the most mellow residents; everybody else would really rather kill a stranger than give him directions. It’s easier, requires less thought. But the mountains were beautiful, and they changed shades of blue the way the sea does as the sun rises, becoming more and more substantial as the day wore on.

  We took turns driving. There we
re two seats in the van. The third person had two choices: to stretch out on a Therm-a-Rest under the a stack of surfboards tied to the side, or to perch in a folding camp chair between the front seats and yell, “Tope!” every ten minutes. Topes are speed bumps, and they are a highly effective speed-limit enforcement in lieu of state troopers. Unless you’re me. I think the suckers are put in by the local alignment and shock shop. I didn’t pay any attention to them until we were right on top of one going fifty miles per hour, and then Leon, dozing in back, would levitate two feet off his sleeping pad and slam back down, and Kim would scream and her seat belt would keep her from cracking her head on the roof. I got yelled at a lot. It got so Leon would forgo resting and ride shotgun and shout warnings.

  We drove down into the dry-season heat of southern Oaxaca. Rough coastal hills, big spreading ceiba trees at the edges of pastures, small villages of thatch-roofed shacks. We crossed long bridges over wide rivers that ran mud-brown and slow now with the first mountain rains, rains that hadn’t yet gotten down to the low country. The rivers were lined with palms and cornfields and they emptied into the sea below us. Others were dry beds reflecting back the midday sun, and horses wandered the arroyos and banks. I loved being on the road again. We stopped for lunch at a roadside shack that canted in a billow of fragrant smoke and steam curling out of the open kitchen. The woman offered us two platos del día: iguana and armadillo. We had Cokes and drove on.

  When Leon first surfed the barrel of Puerto Escondido the good road ended there. It was a fishing village with a small town center and the only route beyond it, south into Chiapas, was a dirt track. Not anymore. Puerto materialized out of the coastal farm country like some psychotropic Eurotrash dream of a Mexican surf city. The wide Zicatela Beach was flanked along much of its length by a jammed array of Italian restaurants, courtyard hotels with names like Flor de Maria and Santa Fe, organic cafés, smoothie dens, kitsch T-shirt stores, surf shops. Hip-hop and hard rock poured out of every other establishment. Luxury tour buses rumbled and idled at the curbs, and in among the herds of international tourists, like smoothly muscled predators on some herd-trodden savanna, moved surfers of every type. Long European girls in bikinis; sun-darkened locals with tattoos sprayed over shoulders and thighs, carrying their big-wave guns. Big, ripped veterans, eyes unfocused, minds blown out by decades of drugs and killer tubes, so skilled on their boards they moved on instinct, became engines on autopilot. And facing them all, with the distant boom of cannonade that rolled through the loudest of the music, was the wave, the Mexican Pipeline.

  It just looked like suicide to me. We walked to a low whitewashed wall and stood looking across the stretch of white sand. I’d never seen anything like it. The groundswell rolled in and threw up a vertical wall just yards from shore. Then the whole wall dumped with an impact that shuddered the ground where we stood. Jeez. I couldn’t even imagine going out there. Or wanting to. But every fifth wave or so the same wall tongued itself into a long, smooth, critical barrel. And that’s when one of the brave surfers—there were only a handful out today—took off in a flurry from the lip to either make the drop or miss it. Usually three or four took off and two or three were skilled enough to pull back at the very last nanosecond. The one with priority threw himself off the face. Sometimes he surged ahead of the white bullet train of the collapsing wave and went to the lip. If he was really brave and really good, he dropped down again and put the brakes on by weighting his back foot and stalled, and waited for the onslaught of the barrel, and then he was covered up in the maelstrom and sometimes he emerged cleanly out the end and shot over the back of the wave unharmed. Sometimes he got eaten and the castle wall fell on his head and he disappeared and I found myself praying for his life. Just looking at the thing roiled my guts and made me want to find a bathroom.

  Leon said it was pretty big now and the shape wasn’t very good, which was why so many we watched met disaster. He shook his head. He was just recovering, not full strength, so he probably wouldn’t surf the barrel anyway, but especially now when it was very dangerous.

  We turned back to the street.

  One of Leon’s oldest surfing friends ran the most established surf shop on the beach, Central Surf Shop. His name was Angel Salinas and in the middle of talking to a customer he caught sight of Leon and broke into a radiant smile.

  “Discúlpame.” He stepped from behind the glass counter. He was a giant of a man, thick like a ceiba trunk, with a broad round face and a bright smile and eyes that threw off light like sunlight on textured water. His warmth was a weather pattern that engulfed his surroundings. He spoke English in a bluff, hoarse, happy tenor, the way you’d imagine a good-natured grizzly bear talking. He reminded me of the happy bear at Scorpion Bay. He first-bumped Leon and then crushed him in a hug that would have accordioned stouter men. One of his shop guys tactfully slipped over and took care of the customer and Angel and Leo caught up in rapid Spanish. Kim and I looked around. Everywhere there were posters of a big man in a fierce wrestler’s mask surfing the great barrel. And up on the cabinets were mannequin heads with the same elaborate, brightly colored masks. Cat eyes and fringe that hung down around the throat and neck. They were frightening.

  “Who is that?” I pointed to a poster.

  “That’s me,” Angel said.

  “He is the famous masked surfer of Puerto.”

  “Wow. What gave you the idea?”

  A bearded man, fiftyish, came from behind a corner counter where he’d been working on a laptop. He was Ruben Piña, probably the most published surf photographer in Mexico. “We shot thousands of really good photos of Angel and submitted them everywhere. Nobody would publish them. Then he put on the mask, and wham. Everybody wanted pictures. Surf, Surfing, Transworld, everyone.”

  I asked Ruben if it was a racist thing. He shrugged tactfully. “Well, anyway. El Surfo is a sensation now.”

  Leon asked where we could get rooms cheap and Angel suggested right up the alley a block from the shop. That’s where we went. The Beast barely made it up the steep drive. We got two flyspecked rooms with rattling fans and met Angel and Ruben for dinner at a pub on the front street. Leon was so happy to be among his old compadres. Soon the shots of tequila came out in crowded trays. I noticed that Angel drank only club soda. I could imagine the reason: get a huge, emotional surfer like El Surfo blotto and the destructive force could be as natural and unintentional as a tsunami. We sat near the front of the open bar, right on the street, and it was wonderful to watch how many surfers of all ages stopped by Leon’s table for a fist-bump and a chat. Leon knew everyone.

  Alejandro de la Torre came up the night street bare-chested and moving with a rhythm of a long swell. He wasn’t tall but he was ripped like a body builder and his dark eyes were sad and his smile flitted across his face, revealing itself and gone as quickly as a surfer in a big barrel. A deep scar ran across his right cheekbone, knife or rock or thruster fin. His tawny hair hung loose down his back, partly covering the lat-to-lat tattoo of a stingray. The ray was partly filled in and part inked outline. I remembered him from the first surf competition I’d ever seen in Acapulco on that first assignment with Leon. I had met him again a week later at Leon’s shop in Ixtapa and he had a little dog with him. I asked him where he got the pup. Alejandro tipped back his bottle of Corona to drain it and looked around. I ordered him another. He said, “La Pulga and me and a couple of others were in Puerto staying down at the hostel by the beach. We got stoned and we ran out of papers. La Pulga opened the drawer and they had, you know, the Bible in there, so we started ripping out pages and rolling joints. We got real stoned. I don’t remember, maybe I fell asleep. La Pulga shook on me, ‘Alejandro, Alejandro, wake up, it’s the flood, man, wake the fuck up. God is punishing us for smoking the Bible.’ It was true. The water was already under the beds. A big storm swell. Fucking really big. I grabbed my board and I ran out. The point was going off. I paddled out, there’s this big rock, I paddled past the rock and I saw this bitch dog, ma
n, she was putting her puppies on the rock. Trying to save them. I tried to get them all but a set wave came in. I held on to this little dude.” He took a slug of beer and the shy smile shot across his face. He reached down and picked up the dog by the scruff of his neck and put him in his lap and gave him a sip of beer.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Milagro.”

  Now, in Puerto, Alejandro came up the street in the rhythm of his own music and saw Leon and lifted his chin, angled over. He was amped, humming with the high-idle engine of so many surfers. The smile flashed and he met no one’s eye. His scar throbbed on his burnished dark cheek, his hair was more sun-bleached. I wanted to ask about the dog, but figured there was no conclusion to that story that was not painful. He exchanged some words with the boys at the table, then, shirtless, went behind the bar. He seemed to work there, anything to keep surfing.

  NIGHTMARE IN REVERSE

  Two narrow lanes wound through the rugged, forested hills, now parched and thorny. Straightened along fields and pastures. At every crossroads a wobbly thatch roof on crooked posts, a stick fire under steaming pots, a flat stone comal for making tortillas. Heat. We stopped a lot, drank Nescafé, cold Fantas. Every side road turning down through the hills on our right led to a little-known wave that Leon had surfed as a young man. We were on the road again. After two days surfing an easy wave in a cove on the north side of Puerto, we were eager to get to the wave Leon and I had both been dreaming of. We had two weeks altogether for the trip, so no one was in any hurry. At another small side road there was a little sign that said ZIPOLITE.

  “In the seventies there used to be a big nude beach down there,” Leon said. “Hippies from all over the world.”

  Kim perked up. “I’ve never seen a nude beach. Let’s go.” Along the road, some evidence that hippies had stayed: A-frames and tree houses, signs advertising kinetic bodywork and aromatherapy. Espresso. How weird. We wound down to the coast, parked between a one-story stuccoed hotel and a restaurant, walked out onto a wide beach. Empty. Kim was disappointed.