by Steve Hely
Well, maybe you can preserve them in videos. Like on YouTube maybe.
“I tried to teach a friend of mine who’s a great swimmer, real strong, but he couldn’t catch anything,” Miah told me. “Then I went out with a friend of my sister’s who’s not a real good athlete at all but she’s fearless,” said Miah as we paddled out. The way he said it made it clear what quality he admired, who had proved more excellent surfing. Surfing, like anything worth doing, is scary and takes effort. I used to work with a guy, the great writer Brent Forrester, who grew up in Malibu and went to Malibu High. Every day before school he went surfing.
“Man,” I once said to him, “you must’ve really loved surfing.”
“No, I hated it,” he said. “It was cold and terrifying and exhausting and there was great risk of bodily injury, getting yourself knocked around.”
“So why’d you do it?”
“Because if you wanted to be anything at Malibu High, you had to be a surfer, and if you were a surfer, then you went surfing every day.”
For me, out on a Sunday afternoon, off an El Salvador beach, there was nothing terrible at all. Miah and the glassy-eyed apprentice coasted by, joyous and effortless, like God’s favored children, while I mostly wore myself out paddling, lying beyond the waves for a while, then from time to time buckling in for a ride that would never get me higher than my knees before my board would shoot out like a rocket and I’d go spiraling around under the warm waves. The beach was nearly empty, here and there a wooden boat pulled up and left to sit, beyond it the deep green vegetation. When I was good and tired and the sun started to set, I rode on in as best I could, fired off belly-down on my board on a good wave, ending up rocked over into froth and soft sand and hauling myself into the open courtyard of La Tortuga Verde, hosing myself down and flopping into a hammock.
That night at the outdoor bar, there was a gang of cheery Canadian teachers on holiday, their clear leader a winning guy with a solid accent who pounded beers happily and unaffected. He told me the five of them were “old friends” while one of the old friends, a woman who was clearly in deep love with him, maybe had been for a decade, stared at him wistfully. I told him I’d flown with the Mounties from Yellowknife up to Iqaluit.
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “That’s pretty far up there now.”
There was an American guy, too, who was on his honeymoon, though his wife was nowhere to be seen and he was too drunk to properly land the punch lines of the many jokes he remembered half of—the Canadian teacher kept having to help him out. Nearby was a gang of twelve or so young and boisterous Europeans, mixed up from all over, it seemed. They went from French to Italian to German, often dropping into English to punch in some phrases from aged hip-hop, like “doing the nasty,” but they were all having a great time. The rumor from the glassy-eyed apprentice was that he and Tom were heading up to a village in the mountains the next day to check out a circus, a literal family circus. The vagabond circuses of El Salvador are an old tradition. I would’ve liked to see that.
Man, a vagabond circus, I thought. That’s just the kind of thing I’d like to see.
(Reader, as you might realize by now, my interests are tough for me to corral.)
No, no, I decided. Gotta stay on point. If I stopped to see every vagabond circus in Central America, I’d never get to the bottom of the Western Hemisphere.
Turns out there was a boat you could take to the next country, Nicaragua. Who doesn’t love an international boat ride?
Me and Kelly Slater on the Gulf of Fonseca
He wasn’t the real Kelly Slater, though, my God, he coulda been. The Europeans just nicknamed him that. Not even because he looked like the real Kelly Slater. He didn’t, not really. He looked like what you might think Kelly Slater looked like if you knew Kelly Slater was a professional surfer, maybe the best ever, but you didn’t know what he looked like.
He looked like he could be named Kelly Slater. I actually forget his real name now. I seem to have never written it down. Presumably, at the time, I assumed I’d remember it forever. That’s what you’d think, too, when he looked you in the eyes.
Big wide shoulders, chiseled cheekbones, the first time I saw him he was shirtless and holding a surfboard with one strong hand and folding his wet hair back with the other. He could’ve been a professional surfer. Maybe. If that one picture was all you needed. I also didn’t see him surf, and he did say he was bad at it, but if all you needed was the look? Goddamn, he had it.
He wasn’t a professional surfer. He was a Swiss German technical representative or something at a telecommunications company. We’d cross the Gulf of Fonseca together.
* * *
The Gulf of Fonseca, that was just the kind of thing I was looking for, some crooked corner on the map that you’d never heard of anybody going that must be interesting. Reader, feel free to consult a map at this point. You’ll see the Gulf of Fonseca is a bay that’s shaped like the head of a giraffe. This giraffe has three ears, but other than that, you must agree it’s very giraffelike. There’s even a thin tongue sticking out in the southeast, the Estero Real, licking into Nicaragua.
We crossed this in a narrow motorized launcha. Going this way, you can see, allowed me to skip Honduras. Kelly Slater had been to Honduras, he’d been robbed at gunpoint there, though he seemed to shake it off as almost fair play, since he’d been riding a scooter on a remote road. I’d have to skip some stuff on this trip, and Honduras, though interesting and supposedly beautiful and full of good ruins, is not easy to travel around. I made the executive decision to go by sea and bypass it. Next time, Honduras, no insult to you, just in a hurry.
First, though, we had to have breakfast.
Pupusas
We had pupusas, Kelly Slater and I, at a table on the road down to the pier in La Unión, El Salvador. Pupusas are like the national food there, and with good cause: They are delicious.
Say what you will about El Salvador: In a contest of number one national food against any other country’s number one, I think pupusas can hold their own.
They are handmade corn tortillas, always handmade, and they’re folded over cheese and whatever other deliciousness is on hand and you want in there, and then they’re fried on a grill, and then you can put more sauce or whatever on top. Two big ones cost a dollar, a bargain. Kelly Slater ate three, and considered a fourth. He was a great man, Kelly Slater.
To the Sunny Isle of Meanguera
Just off the dock, there were a few boats loading. None of them loaded as though they were on any kind of strict schedule.
Ours went when it was full. We helped launch it, Kelly Slater and I, wading out up to our waists because it was loaded so heavy it was stuck in the mud. The mud felt pretty good, sucking my bare feet half off. Shoeless is the right choice sometimes. Once we hopped in, it was easy enough to dry off in the sun. A clear day, a choppy ride from the boat, but the water was unthreatening. Just a beautiful day, on the Gulf of Fonseca, with my new friend Kelly Slater. Tremendous guy. He could speak French and Italian and German, of course. He was working on Spanish, but we spoke in English, which he spoke in succinct and clear sentences full of calm positivity.
Halfway across, we stopped over at an island: Meanguera del Golfo. About this island I can tell you almost nothing. I was surprised we stopped, to be honest. I hadn’t even thought about the islands of the Gulf of Fonseca. This one, I can tell you, belongs to El Salvador. There was a dispute about it, until an international peace commission sorted it out and awarded two islands to El Salvador and one to Honduras.
The island felt to me like its own republic. We went ashore at a little town carved into a steep valley on the mountain that was most of the island. The few streets climbed up, so from the dock they looked like they were each on top of another. Only a few of them, and they spiraled off or ended or disappeared into the mountain. There was a small store, where I’d guess the inventory is not that predi
ctable, but on the other hand I bet the guy behind the counter could get you anything if you gave him time. I had a bottle of Coke and some cookies.
Kelly Slater and I sat on the dock for a while. It didn’t seem like much was happening. Maybe lots of exciting stuff happens there, but I doubt it. It looked like nothing had happened there for a very long time, and nothing was scheduled to happen for a long time into the future.
Teenage guys sat along the water. There were boats tied up, fishing boats and boats that were maybe going back and forth and boats that looked unused. The guys were skinny and shirtless. They all had phones they fiddled with, texting or playing games, I guess. If texting, then texting who? Maybe each other.
“Everywhere in the world, people are checking their phones,” Kelly Slater said to me. With a smile, no judgment. He drank a Coke and ate some cookies, too. I knew he probably wouldn’t care, but there was some small chance he would think less of me if I smoked a cigarette, so I did not.
We watched the small waves caress the boats as they came in. The boys on the dock weren’t interested in me. They weren’t interested in Kelly Slater, either, which was crazy. Didn’t they see how handsome he was?
One thing Kelly Slater was interested in was efficiency. Excellence. Good planning. There was humor to him, for sure, but nonsense was uninteresting to him. He couldn’t even understand it, when people did things in some way that didn’t seem transparent or efficient or guided toward some obvious improvement in condition.
In Central America, this was often, as had become clear to him. He was a worldly man, and the reservoir tank of his patience was deep-draft and full. He didn’t come to El Salvador and Nicaragua to bring judgment on efficiency, he knew that. He was here to surf and improve his Spanish and investigate a few interesting towns, and then he was proceeding on to meet some friends at surf camp in Costa Rica on a certain date. This was vacation and he made the most of it.
But at the border station in Nicaragua, he finally encountered a situation his patience could not tolerate.
After passing close along a dense mangrove-y coast, our boat shot in to a sandy beach. We waded in, hauled it up, took our bags, and helped shove the boat off again. Left on the shore were three Nicaraguans: an old woman, an old man, and a young guy with shades on, built hefty but strong like a college football lineman, and us.
The Nicaraguans carried their bags up a dirt road from the beach and we followed them. There was a concrete building, a box, up the trail, with the Nicaraguan flag.
The front of the box was open like a booth. Inside were two men and a woman in government uniforms, an ancient copy machine, and two computers.
When Kelly Slater and I caught up with the Nicaraguans, they were waiting. Inside the box, no one was moving.
Then, very slowly the woman started to move. She moved across the office, one end to the other. Slowly. As if there were no purpose to her movements but to see how slowly she could move.
When she got to the other side, she took her time. Like a lethargic house cat she eased into a few positions leaning against the wall, slowly feeling which might be best. Then she eased into a good, comfortable sit, and stayed there.
Now, slowly, the two men at their computers began to move.
If you’d seen, at an experimental theater, the slowness with which they moved, you would have been exhilarated by the dancers, the control of how slowly they moved. The choreographer, too, you would’ve admired, who staged such a bold and expressive satire on the tedium of bureaucracy, the suffocating effects of oppression, whether from politics or the tropical heat or society, the human condition. A dance of slowness, you might say, admiring the choice.
Kelly Slater stared at this. If he had one flaw, perhaps it’s that he might not be as appreciative a dance critic as me, but I bet he would be great at even that if that were a task assigned by an appropriate supervisor. This was a border station after all, not the strangely colorful set of a black-box theater.
It probably took them an hour to give us the stamps we needed, and file away some meaningless papers in such a way that they’d obviously never be anywhere where anybody looking for them could find them.
The slowness wasn’t just for us. The Nicaraguans waited first. It took longer for them, actually. There was no extra aid offered out to the old woman or the old man either. When they were done, the hefty guy went through. That took forever, too.
Kelly Slater watched all this with increasing incomprehension. The hefty Nicaraguan in the sunglasses could feel him watching. When they at last stamped him in, he looked over at Kelly and said, in Southern California English,
“Yeah. Welcome to Nicaragua.”
When we were finally through, and out of earshot of the border station, where I assume like puppets in a box the officers were put back to motionless rest, Kelly Slater said, “That cannot be the best way of doing things.”
I had to agree.
“But perhaps they do not send their best people here,” he said then, by way of forgiveness.
Another two hours or so waiting under a tree before a packed, converted yellow American school bus took us all to Chinandega, where Kelly Slater and I just barely had time to buy some fruit before a van took us on to the town of León. We got there at sunset. We agreed to split a room, and we found one at a funked-out hostel where French Canadians were rolling cigarettes by the hammocks in the vine-covered courtyard. We had dinner together, Kelly Slater and I, steaks at a mysterious restaurant with a fountain in the middle of it, where a large group of seemingly unrelated people were drunk and laughing and eating a noisy banquet. That night it was steamy hot in our room. The rickety fan offered little relief from the sweaty evening. I promise you, Reader, if there were one night on this trip when I was going to have a passionate experiment in male-on-male lovemaking, it would’ve been this night. A first for me. I’d thought I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing, but I tell you, if Kelly Slater had suggested it, I can’t promise what I would’ve done. He didn’t, though. He just lay atop his sheet in bed and studied his guidebook for a while, then he smiled and turned out the light. The next morning, blissful and relaxed, we had coffee and fruits and walked the main street of León to see the gory painted statues at the old church, where the sufferings of Jesus were carved to be as vivid as if they happened yesterday. We strolled back down again, joking a little about it. We each had an ice-cream bar. Kelly asked if I wanted to climb the volcano. He wanted to see red lava at night. No, I said sadly, I had to keep going. There we parted ways.
Women, or perhaps gay men, I don’t know what Kelly Slater is into, but I apologize because while a magical night and morning, it feels like I robbed Kelly Slater from somebody who might’ve enjoyed him in even more passionate ways. I know I’ll never forget him.
Like I said, though: I can’t remember his actual name.
Bizarre Mural at the Hotel Gran Francia
Mural is probably not even the right word for it: It was a rectangular stretch of painted shag. The colors used were red, blue, green, brown, and black. The whole thing was maybe ten feet across. A tapestry? A dyed wall rug? I can’t claim to be expert on Nicaraguan shag art. Perhaps this is even a famous example.
Depicted, from left to right, on this artwork, were:
a faceless peasant/soldier carrying a rifle,
a wounded man, also faceless, slumped on the ground,
a man (faceless, they were all faceless, although in fairness, it might be hard to do faces in shag) hanging dead from the branch of a tree,
three men in hats, shooting at each other,
a leader commanding two rifle shooters, and
a man bayoneting another man.
The green ground beneath them was already strewn with bodies.
I was the only customer in the bar. The bartender dried glasses. On the TV was an American baseball game. The bartender and I said a fe
w words about Everth Cabrera, then of the Padres, and Erasmo Ramírez, then of the Mariners, the two best Nicaraguan baseball players. I didn’t know anything about either one of them, but I tried to say “I admire them,” which is true. He didn’t care about the game much, though. I drank cold bottles of Toña beer, and enjoyed them very much. It’d been hot all day and still was, even though the sun was almost down.
This was in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, on the shores of forty-four-mile-wide Lake Nicaragua. By sailing up rivers and then across the lake, you can reach Granada from the Atlantic Ocean, and it had been a city for a hundred years by the time the Mayflower reached Massachusetts. By the first year of the American Revolution, Granada had already been sacked three times by pirates, once by Captain Morgan himself, the guy on the rum, who in real life was not always as jolly.
When she was barely twenty, a woman named Rafaela Herrera led the defense of Granada from yet another pirate attack, in 1762. In the depiction of her on the Nicaraguan five-córdoba note she is very hot, wearing a low-cut dress as she fires a cannon.
Granada is terrific, colorful, and relaxed. Just the right distance from the pretty main square the streets meander down to the shore of the lake. I walked around all day. Tourists drank happily in bars on the Calle La Libertad. I had a couple myself at Reilly’s Tavern, maybe the best Irish pub in Nicaragua.
On benches around Parque Central, there were Nicaraguan men sitting with nothing to do. They talked to me, friendly and without any agenda, until my Spanish ran out and they shrugged. Sitting on a bench by the park is something I never do at home. Whenever I do it abroad, I’m surprised by how great it is. Just sitting there, staring, maybe drinking some water or a coffee. It makes me think I will enjoy being an old man.