by Jaimal Yogis
There was also money. I’d just come off a summer of magazine writing; a first glimpse at a journalist’s salary and city bills. Another practical reality was hitting me. This master’s degree in religion was going to leave me with debt that could take decades to get out of. In exchange, I’d have yet another degree in religious studies. I was quite sure not even Thurman had a spell to get me out of that situation.
So, hoping I could absorb Thurman’s wisdom through his writings and talks and retreats—he would later reveal to me how frustrated he was with academia—I dropped out before tuition time hit and bid New York farewell. Back in San Francisco, I was lucky to find a writing job at San Francisco Magazine. The job offered no health benefits. When my reporting hours were broken down, it didn’t pay much over minimum wage. But living off burritos in a single-room in-law, I got by.
In that hovel with one window, I shared a kitchen with my landlord, an insurance agent who became strangely enraged if I used a plastic spatula, rather than a steel one, to flip my eggs. But this was worth it. The house was two blocks from Ocean Beach. I could, in addition to working sixty-hour weeks, surf. Also, my editor at San Francisco encouraged me to write about what I was passionate about: Warriors basketball, politics, prison reform, my friend’s garage band.
I had to occasionally write one of those “Ten Best Secret Beaches!” articles, cringing as I helped make them not secret. I wasn’t doing anything terribly mystical. But I also wasn’t getting into more debt. I could generally write about quirky characters, social justice issues, and the environment, the last of which I thought maybe could help save our seas from acidifying into a toxic sludge that will turn biological life on earth into a single bottom-feeding species a million years from now. Or maybe not. But I was doing what I had aspired to do on this journalism journey.
Absence had made our hearts grow fonder, and Siri and I got back together too. She was living in Berkeley, teaching art at an elementary school, and she and I had a pretty good thing going this time around. We had a fun crew of eclectic friends: writers and surf bums and architects and techies. We went on camping trips to Big Sur, snowboarded in Bear Valley. We watched movies and drank the best wine under sixteen bucks.
Look at us, I often thought. Grown-ups! Working. Buying stuff. Laughing. Crying. Surviving. Even though life was busy, I also felt that I could hold onto a wisp of that grace I’d felt with Thurman and the friars. Each morning while I did my little zazen session, even with my landlord obsessively vacuuming above—why did he need to vacuum every single morning?—the Western Wall and the Jordan River and the brothers and Sonam and even the mighty Himalayas were there with me. They were part of my DNA now.
Except, of course, when they weren’t. Though I did feel that work and the big momo of reality were becoming more integrated with the mundane, there were still times—lots of them—when I was stuck in my brain spinning about deadlines and whether I’d trapped myself in a career that would never allow me to buy a house in any of the places I loved and whether I would ever feel quite settled in any relationship at all.
But when that sort of frozen thinking happened too many days in a row, Sonam would pop into my head saying, “Dis many many difficult no problem, Ja-ma. Dis make strong.” When he had to say that in my ear every day for a month, I knew it was time to go on retreat.
For months, I’d been pretty good about going on little weekend Ch’an retreats with Steven—preempting whatever angst-filled imbalance might set in. But then, the second half of the year, I got a bit overconfident, a bit overly ambitious, and skipped retreats altogether. This led, like an overused dryer filter, to excessive buildup of mental junk, which became apparent one night after I sent in a monotonous piece on the best new gyms in the city. I was feeling frustrated by the pointlessness of such articles, which triggered a feeling that maybe this modern capitalist hamster-wheel life was dumb. I felt that I couldn’t keep it up forever and ever. The same uncertainties about my relationship with Siri were also creeping in again. I felt trapped in a cycle of my own mind. And “just as a dewdrop on the tip of a blade of grass quickly vanishes with the rising of the sun,” the Buddha said, “the life of human beings is like a dewdrop.” And what if my dewdrop evaporated into a blur of deadlines and tasks and imbalanced love so my mind continued into who-knows-what busy, busy next life and so it would go forever? Heedless.
How could the cycle ever end without a radical shift? Without true enlightenment?
I felt freaked out enough that I ended up impulsively spending all my savings on a ticket to a place directly on the other side of the globe that night. And in a few weeks I was on a plane to Bali.
The early Indonesians worshipped the spirits of trees, rivers, and the sea. They were mariners who caulked their boats with tree resin and used that same resin for incense. South Asian merchants began arriving on the archipelago not long after Christ. Local beliefs were absorbed into Buddhism, then Buddhism into Hinduism. “The one substance is called two,” a twelfth-century Javanese Buddhist monk wrote, “that is, the Buddha and Shiva. They say they are different but how can they be divided?”
Hindu kingdoms began converting to Islam—largely for trade benefits—around 1500, just about the time the Dutch, Portuguese, and British were competing to control the spice trade in Indonesia. Under all these pressures—colonial, religious—artists and priests from Java and Sumatra escaped to a small island, a lush green dot of lava surrounded by colorful reefs and the warm Indian Ocean, a dot that soon became a refuge of spiritual and artistic freedom.
OK. In truth, Bali has never been just the perfect paradise of peace and creativity and yoga it does a wonderful job selling itself as. Amid artistic resplendency and prayers in the stepped rice fields, there have always been scandals, corrupt governments, wars. As recently as 1965, an ethnic cleansing in Indonesia claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Many of those murders were perpetrated by the “peaceful” Balinese elite. The island rebounded under a new government, but in doing so, Bali decided to rebrand as an international party destination. Today, areas like Kuta Beach are so thick with massage parlors and pirated DVDs and penis-shaped bottle openers, the Vegas strip starts to seem high class.
But despite government corruption and chintzy wares, it seems to me, after spending nearly a year in Bali over the last decade, that the vast majority of Balinese are a resilient, kind, and creative people. Even when the cops pull you over for a fake traffic violation and demand twenty bucks to avoid a ticket—this is the way they earn back the thousands they have to slip a government official to get the police job in the first place—it’s done with a smile. On my first trip, a couple years before the trip I’m now writing about, I forgot my backpack, which contained my passport and laptop, at a bustling market. I came back hours later and found an old lady holding the bag. “I thought you come back,” she said smiling. Then she handed me the bag and walked away.
That lady represented the old Bali—apart from elite family feuds, foreign development, and corruption. Made’s (pronounced Mahday’s) was part of that Bali too.
Made’s had no telephone, no website, no address, and no computer. You couldn’t even drive to the entrance, which was at the end of a long dirt road that didn’t have any signs. But if someone tipped you off or you happened to stumble down it on the way to surf, you were well rewarded.
Made’s was a collection of thatch bungalows built illegally on bamboo stilts at the base of a seaside cliff. The huts balanced above coralline coves bordered by volcanic stones so large they looked like a Jurassic species sunning on the shores. At the edge of the sand, a vast reef created pools for wading or swimming, and on the far end of these pools, viridian-hued waves peeled against the shoal.
The price to stay at Made’s, if you shared a room, was $2.50 per night. It was five dollars for your own room. But it was best to share because the walls were grass. You were sharing anyway.
A meal of nasi goreng—noodles, egg, and vegetables—cost two bucks. A twenty
-two-ounce Bintang was one dollar. Coffee was fifty cents. Between surfing sessions, you could lie in a hammock, read books that travelers had left behind, sip fresh papaya juice, and chat with Made and Made, the husband and wife owners of the inn who had the same name because there are only four names in Balinese culture, for both men and women: Wayan, Made, Nyoman, and Ketut. They mean first, second, third, and fourth.
Word about Made’s low prices and relaxed vibe had spread to interesting pockets of the globe. When I showed up in July on this spontaneous trip—with little more than my surfboard and a few pairs of trunks—there was a crew of Welsh teenagers who were surfing around the globe before college, a Russian couple who had been doing yoga in India for eight years, two Kiwi surfers living indefinitely off welfare, a Portuguese traveler on holiday from video game production in Shanghai, and Jimmy.
I’d met Jimmy in the water during my first surf trip to Bali. He’d tipped me off to Made’s, and we’d struck up a fast friendship. We had a lot of common passions: writing, meditation, surfing, travel. But what I’d come to admire about Jimmy was his ability to thrive at the fringes of the system. Jimmy was pushing fifty but still had no qualms about spending six months of the year sleeping in his van in Ojai, surfing Rincon, and painting houses. He saved up about twenty grand painting each winter. Then, as the Pacific swells faded, Jimmy came to Bali and lived through peak season at Made’s.
If all went well, Jimmy could surf through the summer here and still have enough cash to visit friends in Africa, Japan, or Hawaii for a month or two. Then he’d fly home to Ojai and do it all again.
It was an easy lifestyle to spoof. Jimmy himself liked to joke about the Chris Farley Saturday Night Live sketch, “You’re going to be living in a van down by the river.” But Jimmy was happier than any middle-aged person I could think of—a real-life bodhi from Point Break. But legal. And not ridiculous. As I thought back to my sixty-hour weeks for thirty-five grand a year with twelve-hundred-dollar rent and five hundred dollars per month in student loans, Jimmy’s life looked increasingly alluring.
I actually didn’t see Jimmy for the first week of the trip. Just his boards. Made told me he was traveling on one of the outer islands, merely keeping a room and equipment at Made’s until he returned.
“You know Jimmy,” the female Made winked at me. “He like a cloud. Come one day, gone next. I don’t know.”
But one morning when I was just starting to recover from jet lag, I woke to the usual sounds of parrots, macaques, geckos, and Jimmy telling stories down on the lanai.
I peered over the bamboo railing. The Welsh boys, all five towheads, were gathered around Jimmy, leaning in.
Jimmy had better true stories than anyone I’d ever met. He had been imprisoned for weeks for trying to help refugees over the Sino-Tibetan border. He’d been shot in the ass in South Africa. He’d been impaled by a surfing fin in Tahiti. At twenty-five, he was surfing an outer Indonesian atoll and contracted cerebral malaria. Months later, he woke from a coma in a Malaysian hospital, following which he had to learn to talk and walk all over again, a process that took years.
Jimmy looked to be in the midst of another big adventure now. I had to listen.
“There’s this stream I go to,” Jimmy was saying, holding his bronzed arms to one side to represent the flow of the stream, quivering his fingers like the jitter of rapids.
“It’s almost a river, stretching for miles over these curved stones. Some of the stones are perfectly round, and these are the ones you look for. The stones, sort of, I don’t know, they call to you—you know. When you’re quiet and not really looking. There’s that feeling, you know, that feeling?”
The Welsh boys nodded.
“Then you look and there one is,” Jimmy said, “one of these stones, and it’s like, did that stone find me or did I find it?”
Jimmy got into Sisyphean stance, acting out how he rolled these round stones along a riverbed. The end goal was to get the stones to his girlfriend’s dad’s garden in the Santa Barbara valley, but the journey was clearly the destination.
The stones were huge, he said. So it took hours to roll them back to the house. But then the stone found a groove and rhythm with the current.
“You just roll the stone,” he said. “That’s all. You don’t think of anything else.”
“Yeah, mate,” one of the Welsh boys said, taking a drag on his Marlboro.
I was wondering how Jimmy had these nineteen-year-olds so gripped by a story about rocks. Not his usual epic. But at the next transition, I understood. This was a way of entering yet another conversation about the subject you couldn’t escape for more than a few minutes in this part of Bali: getting tubed.
“Sometimes in the process you come upon a special kind of waterfall,” Jimmy said, “where the stream begins to suck up and spill over itself—an aqueous cavern right in the middle of the flow. So you stop. You stop at these little vortices”—he hunkered down on the bamboo floor to demonstrate—“and let that thin sheath of green spill overhead, peering out into the dry world. In there, there’s nothing but the echo of water on rock. Time’s different. Then you’re out again and you just start rolling the stone.”
“Siiick,” one of the Welsh boys said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy said. “There’s something special about tubes. In the river, in the sea, even here”—Jimmy pointed to a far-off lava tube on the peninsula—“in stone.”
I wanted to see where Jimmy would take this next. But a fat green gecko began chirping on the roof above me. Jimmy looked up. He smiled his big Owen Wilson smile.
“Jaimal!” he said. “I knew you’d come back.”
Because Jimmy rarely emailed or used modern technology like the telephone, he didn’t know I’d be showing up. But Jimmy’s entire life was a series of surprise encounters. He pointed casually to the surf, which was so feathering and teal and inviting I’d have thought I was dreaming if I hadn’t been watching it all week.
“The tide’s getting low,” he said. “Are we going?”
What I really wanted was breakfast and coffee. But surfing with Jimmy was not to be missed. You learned things just watching him. As social as Jimmy was, I knew that it wouldn’t be long before he disappeared again. Sometimes he went and stayed with the locals he called his second family—folks who had nursed him back to health after the coma.
I lumbered down the stairs, guzzled some water and an instant coffee. Ten minutes later, Jimmy and I were tiptoeing across the reef to a break called Impossibles.
When the tide drained on the Bukit, Bali’s pinkie-toe peninsula that was absurdly rich with world-class waves, about one hundred meters of reef became exposed to the air. This meant you could no longer paddle to the breaks. You had to walk. At Impossibles, you had to walk over a football field of coral and purple urchins—perhaps the most impossible thing about it.
One wrong step and you risked getting poisonous spines lodged in your foot or slicing a toe to the bone. This could mean a nasty staph infection. Wise surfers wore reef shoes. But I couldn’t waste money on those. So I was nearly falling over myself while I tried to keep up.
Jimmy had been walking on reefs so long he strolled on the coral as if on a sandy beach, continuing the conversation we’d floated into about the Indian Himalayas, the place Jimmy was considering returning to this year for meditation.
“Up there,” Jimmy said, “it’s just sky and stone and white. That’s why you need to fill it with infinite flowers, infinite Buddhas, infinite compassion—the wild Vajrayana, you know, and its dakinis, its mandalas, its universes inside grains of sand. The mind needs a carrot to chase, a symbol of enlightenment to eventually shatter. It’s not like Japan, little islands, precious, precious space, life and green everywhere. Over there, you need zen: white wall, tatami mat. Refine, refine, refine, like sanding a boulder into a pearl. Geography changes a lot.”
“Yeah,” I nodded, trying not to reveal that my feet felt as if they were being stabbed by tiny spears. Then
I looked up.
“Oh fuck,” I said.
A thick set began to approach—blue buffalo rearing hooked spines. We were almost to the end of the exposed section of reef and had to decide whether to run to the end and attempt to dive under the breakers, or brace for impact and hope we didn’t get grated over the coral.
I looked to Jimmy.
“Well,” he smiled. “Off we go!”
He trotted lightly over the coral, making it into the water with enough time to swim under the waves. I tried to follow—“ah, ee, ooo, ouch!”—getting microcuts between nearly every toe. At the last second, I managed to flop into a three-foot-deep area and cling to the coral with my fingertips. The thunderous whitewater skated just overhead. I surfaced, gratefully unscathed, and as I clambered onto my board and paddled toward the horizon, Jimmy was already ten meters ahead in the takeoff zone, turning to catch a long, gorgeous wave.
I watched Jimmy spray peacock tails of water off the back of a blue freight train of Indian Ocean. He was the only surfer I’d ever met who made this break look easy. The waves here peeled fast. If you could tap the power in just the right places to maintain speed, you could ride for a half mile.
Most surfers couldn’t carry the momentum. They’d eventually be caught by the foam and sometimes dragged over the reef—the true reason for the name Impossibles. But Jimmy knew exactly the right board to take out—a flat twin-fin fish that skimmed over the surface like a hovercraft—and the right waves to choose. Often, he got several tubes in one wave.
I bobbed quietly, waiting for the right set. Ten minutes later, Jimmy paddled back from his ride with a smile, picking up the conversation as if there hadn’t been a break.
“Yeah, India,” he said. “I’ve been feeling it. You ever get that feeling you don’t want to go back to the States?”