by Peter Heller
“We could get naked and take a picture,” I suggested.
Kim shrugged. A lone gringo in a big straw hat with a woven satchel over his shoulder strolled toward us up the damp sand. We turned to go. “C’mon.” I looked at Kim. Her jaw was hanging, eyes wide. What? She was following the progress of the man who had passed us. I looked at his pink and naked moon of a butt moving away. “Gimme the camera!” she said. “That guy is strolling up the beach completely naked! Like he doesn’t realize it. It’s like one of those nightmares in reverse!”
Once we were back on the road, we detoured through Huatulco, a government-subsidized insta-hotel zone and marina carved out of a once-uninhabited bay. Leon said no one had lived here before, not even fishermen. Now it was miles of smooth and empty four-lane divided blacktop separated by a manicured median of planted royal palms and flower-box-trimmed bougainvillea bushes. With side roads leading to big luxury hotels, each with a beach, each with a hillside to ravish and climb. Condos, a golf course. We could see bits of the resorts as the road twisted and offered vistas of the bay. Tourists must have stayed here but the resorts felt lonely, hollow, disattached from the landscape like moon stations.
We drove on. The coast was more rugged. The little highway pitched and plunged, switched back. Crossed a high steel bridge over a shallow clear river crowded with tall old willows and palms. One rambling two-story concrete restaurant-house leaning above the bank. The river was a vein of vivid green pulsing through a parched country. The thickly leaved treetops bent and swayed in the afternoon wind pouring down the canyon. I felt happy. Two of my favorite people rode in the van with me. Over the days of traveling, we had developed an easygoing multicelled way of moving: if someone wanted to stop and pee, or eat, or get an ice cream, or rest, or drive, or look inside a church, the van nudged over and everyone was game, everyone participated with an easy willingness to shift gears. It was Leon’s spirit, I think, that pervaded the organism of our van. He was not overly demonstrative or easily impressed, but he was truly mellow and tolerant and adventurous.
The highway, squeezed by forest, struggled up a grade. We spotted a tiny sign on the ocean side that read BARRA DE LA CRUZ. We pitched down a new concrete drive that dropped like a roller coaster, twisted, and we could see the village below, a lush valley cradled between two headlands, a dark lake, fields of bright broad-leafed bananas. We caromed down through a pueblito of little concrete houses painted in pastels, wooden huts with thatch roofs, a whitewashed school, and a full-sized shadeless basketball court. The road turned to dirt and ended at the cone of a tall, round palapa roof with an elegant open restaurant beneath it, and a gate. The gate was a swinging bar. A sign informed us that surfers who wished to continue beyond this point must pay twenty pesos. Good idea; at least one poor village in Mexico was taking advantage of a natural resource sought after by an increasing flood of international surfers. A boy limped out from behind a shaded booth, wearing a clean white Quicksilver cap and Rip curl T-shirt. His right leg was twisted, and by the way he carried his right arm, high, fist clenched, I knew he had cerebral palsy. My younger sister has it, too. He came to me at the driver’s-side window and asked how many we were.
“Tres.”
“Sesenta.”
“Sí, bueno.” I gave him an extra ten. His eyes widened, then he nodded and put the coin in the pocket of his jeans. He limped back and swung the gate and we passed through it onto a smooth new sand road that shot through pasture and banana fields and above the river valley on our left. We topped a rise.
“There,” Leon said. “Pretty good.”
I pulled to a stop in full view of the broad blue bay. A spur of ridge on our right, rashed with scrub and tall cacti, flowed down to the water and ended in a pile of protruding rocks. The wave, a right, barreled in off of this point. The wave heaved up against the boulders, unreeled fast in level lines of whitewater. Right now, simultaneously, three clean walls of wave, in three measured tiers, one behind the other, rolled into the beach. The closest in had the longest rope of white. A surfer worked the pocket of each one. A perfect right. Like Scorpion Bay but heavier and faster. Close to the rocks every other wave formed a hollow tube.
“Jesus.” We all stared.
Leon smiled. “Vámonos.”
Midafternoon was too late to have a good session most anyplace else on the Mexican coast, but not here. The wave was too muscular, too shapely, too clean to be knocked down by an onshore wind. It might fray, but it would stand up. The sight of it, from a mile away, did two things to me: it scared me, the kind of scare that made me want to find an outhouse; and it got me amped. I couldn’t wait to run out there and get on it.
“The wave will be there,” Leon said with a smile. He knew me pretty well by now. “Better to be patient.”
Jesus, he sounded like Kim. “Yeah,” said Kim. “Slow down, Ting. Remember what James said?”
“What did James say?”
She shook her head like I was a lost cause and began the geologic process of braiding her hair. We might not get out there till midnight. Well, maybe there would be a moon. Anyway, I couldn’t just run off and leave my wife in the parking lot; not at this world-famous barrel.
Leon was remarkably mellow and methodical. He pulled out a 6–8 shortboard, something nimble but fast, and began to wax it. He stretched his shoulders, arms bent one at a time behind his head. Kim braided. The sun declined in the west. I was hopping up and down, almost running in place with my Bruno 6–7. I couldn’t wait to try it on a big fast wave. In the last week before we’d left I’d been catching more waves on this board than I was missing. I felt that I was edging onto a new plateau in my evolution as a surfer. Now would come a real test. Could I ride such a fast, hollow, powerful wave?
Leon wanted to find the local surf elder named Pablo Narváez. He was partly the reason we were here: he had met Leon at a surf competition in Acapulco and invited him to come down. I could feel the thundering of the wave in my viscera the way I felt the bass of a thumping band tugging my gut strings. But first things first.
Nothing about Barra was like anyplace else we’d been surfing in Mexico. The gate was the first thing. Charging for surfing. Outrageous, but fair in its way. These were poor people, and the wave was a resource. Technically they weren’t collecting for the wave, but for use of the new road, which strung along the river and led right to the beach and a single shaded restaurant. A restaurant not owned by any grubbing vendor, but by the whole town. As was the lake we’d seen from above, which was filled with tilapia. Every Saturday the fishermen netted boatloads of the freshwater fish and distributed them to the villagers at the very low price of twenty pesos a kilo.
Communal living wasn’t a trend here but a way of life. Barra was an “indigenous village.” In the early sixties, the people, descended from the Chontal, had moved down to the rich valley at the mouth of the river Chacalapa from a flinty historical provenance up in the mountains. The Mexican government established a reservation for the Chontal and extended their lands down to the sea, granting the people a certain surprising autonomy. The town of nearly eight hundred had its own police—an annually rotating job—its own bylaws, and held real estate in common. Every third year all adult males had to give a year of service to the town in various jobs, such as being one of the twelve cops, working the fish, or helping to teach in the school. Families were allotted the use of plots for farming. Anyone could own a private business, such as the fine palapa restaurant up by the gate, and these businesses payed no taxes. The town council, which voted on all matters, was composed only of the heads of households and only of men. It was this august body that hired the boy with cerebral palsy to man the gate, and which closed that very gate one day in 2007 to all international surfers and “rented” out the barrel to wave oracle Sean Collins and fifteen of his VIP friends for about $20,000 for three days. (Collins started the popular wave report and forecast Web site surfline.com.) The “Goodwill Tour,” as the exclusive event was called, took place
during one of the best swells of the year and barred many surfers who had traveled a long way to surf it. This was unprecedented in Mexico, and the closing, and selling, of Barra created an uproar among the surfing community.
Leon’s friend Pablo was the king of surf in Barra. He surfed, he guided surfers, he farmed, he was the most knowledgeable ornithologist in this part of Mexico. He owned the palapa restaurant by the gate and at thirty-nine was a respected elder in the town. He understood gringos, their proclivities and dealings, probably better than anybody, as he had been leading birding trips for rich tourists staying at the fancy hotels in Huatulco for two decades. He said, “It is our right to close the gate, to open it for anyone. Let people say what they want. We will make our decisions. We will do what is best for the community. We cannot stop people from surfing the wave, but it is our road.” He also told us that the community had refused multimillion-dollar offers to sell their coast to developers. Having seen what had happened to the local people in places like Pescadero and La Paz—how they had lost control of their most precious resource—I understood that this was a decision of remarkable foresight.
We met Pablo in the shade of the beach restaurant, which was a tent over the sand, ten tables, an open kitchen. He had just come in from a session on the wave. He wore trunks and a red baseball cap. He had light skin and broad cheekbones, a tuft of beard on his chin. He spoke perfect English and was welcoming. He said there had just been a shark in the water. He and Leon set about catching up, but I didn’t even try to follow the conversation.
The midafternoon sun beat on the white sand. Across the blinding expanse, up to our right, were the tumbled slabs and boulders of the point and the wave. The wave. From down here in the orchestra pit the thing was even more impressive. Scorpion Bay had been consistent, ruler-level. This was the same. But this was—this was … big. These didn’t roll in and crumble, icing themselves with a frill of whitewater along their length like some vanilla log cake. Uhn-uhn. This wave took a deep breath as it approached the outer rocks and swelled into something more like a stampeding mammoth. More like a mountain. Then it curled, and when it curled it threw its whole top into the effort, it became vertical, past vertical, concave and hollow, sometimes tubular. When it passed the angle of repose, beyond which it could no longer live as a mountain, it relinquished itself to gravity with a geologic roar, a ferocious surrender. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. There must have been thirty surfers all clustered and bobbing at the point. I watched as one by one they jockeyed for position and took off. Most of them looked like pros. This’ll be interesting, I thought. The set waves may have been just over their heads, but they seemed much bigger because they were so heavy. The lip when it folded was thick, like a ridge of muscle. I couldn’t wait any longer.
“Hey, I’ll see you guys out there!” Pablo nodded, Leon and Kim exchanged what I like to think of as a glance of loving tolerance.
“Ojo, Pedro,” Leon warned. “Take a look.”
I ran out onto the sun-blared beach, which sizzled like a skillet. I yelped and hopped all the way to damp, cooler sand. It felt like I had second-degree burns on the bottom of my feet, but I didn’t care. I walked the wet tide line, over glistening piles of eely kelp and past little crabs skittering into their holes, without taking my eyes off the wave. I noticed how the surfers who were just getting in waited on the sand, then when the foam sucked back for the next wave they trotted out and took shelter in the lee of a lone house-sized rock just off the beach. They waited while the whitewater of the next wave surged around them, and then ran again for the beach of a tiny cove up against the spur of the point. From there they waded out along the projecting shore, in the shadow of the point, protected by the jut of rocks. Again they waited for the right timing, for a sequence of smaller waves, and jumped on their boards and sprinted right across the path of the break, sprinted out away from the rocks, angling to get around the crashing pocket and out fast to the steep shoulder. Okay. Easy. A game of angles. If you took a line too close, too straight up into the wave, you’d get nowhere and the most powerful part of it broke on you. If you paddled too far sideways, too parallel to the beach, the net of whitewater cast by the wave would unfurl and swallow you.
I ran into the shallow water, hugged the face of the first protecting boulder like a SWAT trooper, holding a shortboard instead of a rifle. Even the shallow foam surprised me. It charged in, faster than I was used to, and sucked out against my knees with real force. I had to hold the rock. So much energy here.
“Okay, cover me!” I said to the rock, and ran to the little cove beach. I stood on the sand and caught my breath. Leon had said to look. I looked. I had been looking. I got the idea.
I waded up along the point, bracing against each surge. The interval between each wave was barely long enough: a fast paddler could just get across between the avalanches of whitewater. Okay, now! A big wave had just thundered by. I hit the board with my belly and started paddling like a madman up and away from the rocks. I sprinted as I had never sprinted before, and just barely cleared the next wave. It was like paddling up a cliff. Went over the back of the lip just as the ferocious jaws roaring in from my right got to me; the surfer in the pocket nearly grazed my feet. I dropped into the trough, into blue water. Whew. I slowed my stroke and took stock of where I was. I was still pretty close in to the point. Too close? Was this the impact zone? Nah.
In fact, here came a wave, right at me. It was a lot bigger than the last one. A kid out at the point missed it, wiped out. It was empty, steep. It had my name on it. Right? Definitely. Anyway, I had no choice. I was like an escapee caught by the spotlight in open ground. I pivoted, looked over my shoulder. Holy shit! The thing was huge. It was over me. It was breaking. I popped up at the same time as a sledgehammer knocked me full across my back and flung me away like a doll. I tumbled in bright champagne, hit the sand floor hard with a shoulder. I was bursting to breathe, but when I came up to burning sunlight I got shoved back down again with barely half a breath. I needed to breathe. Not gonna happen. I somersaulted, fought panic. Relax! My mind raced. Relax! Relax and use less oxygen. Okay, okay! When I finally sputtered to the surface I saw that I hadn’t made it away from the rocks at all. I’d managed to turn right into the impact zone and tried to catch a catastrophe. I sucked air and tugged on my leash to retrieve the board. It felt strange. Really light. It reeled in with almost no resistance at all. I pulled in the back half of Bruno’s 6–7. Jagged foam and torn fiberglass where the logo had been. I saw the nose bobbing into the cove, a helpless and poignant wreck. What an idiot. I swam after it. I saw a little local kid jumping up and down, running into the water, fighting with the current to snag it.
The boy was tiny, maybe six. When I got to him he was yelling, excited, holding up the nose, laughing.
“Un regalito?” he said. A gift?
“Nah, I want to see if I can fix it. Gracias.” It was my favorite board. I tousled his head. He grinned at me, handed me my small chunk of foam and fiberglass. I started walking off. I loved this board. It was the only thing short I’d been able to really move. But I had the 6–4 in the van. I remembered Leon telling me how when he was the same age, the only chance of getting a board had been a broken one from a gringo. I stopped and unstrapped the leash. “Hey!”
The boy turned.
“Aquí. Tuyo!” I gave him the two pieces. His eyes widened, huge. He couldn’t contain his joy. He ran straight up to the brush, suddenly surrounded by five friends. “Repáralo! Facil!” they cried.
I went back to the van for the quad, and this time I made myself watch the other surfers for five minutes before I paddled out. Kim was sitting right where she should be, down the shoulder a ways, ready to catch any of the smaller waves the pros had missed. Leon laughed when I finally got out to him. “It’s part of the game,” he said.
Leon went straight to position at the point and fought for waves. He was courteous, but he hunted down every one, and he caught more than almost anyone. He tore
down the line, making sweeping, effortless turns. He crouched and got barreled. He had that heedless beauty on the board. I sat just inside the big group at the peak and caught the few waves that someone missed. The speed, the stiffness of the wall and the lip, were a rush. I’d never surfed anything like this. It was wild out there. Giant bait balls of sardines deckled and thrashed the surface, while hundreds of small terns and a few wide-winged frigate birds swooped over them.
Kim caught two long rides. I watched her when I wasn’t trying to survive at the edge of the pack. She had the timing, the quickness, the strength, and she sledded down along the line on the fastest head-high waves she’d ever ridden. It was a triumph. Five months of surfing, total, and here she was. I almost burst with pride.
We shacked up in a room above Pablo’s parents’ house a block up from his restaurant. The room had been hurriedly added on to the roof to accommodate the new surfer traffic. The rest of the world had watched the same movie about Barra that we’d seen in Huntington, and a lot of them must have been inspired to pack their boards and book flights. Everybody in town was building bedrooms.
Surfing is a true meritocracy; you could be rich, you could be God, but once you’re out on the wave, you still have to earn respect and wait your turn in the lineup. You’d still get yelled at for pulling a dumb kook move like dropping in without looking. At Barra, locals who couldn’t afford wax battled it out with Aussie semipros on trust funds. Off the wave, surf culture dictated that the rich wear the same baggie shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops as the poor. But then they got in their shiny rental SUVs and drove back the forty-five minutes to Huatulco to stay in one of the all-inclusive five-star hotels.