All Our Waves Are Water

by Jaimal Yogis

  “Yeah,” I said. “Kinda.”

  This was a strange response because I’d been thinking about it ever since I bought my ticket here. The open road was calling—at least calling part of me. I’d been working the last couple years on repressing this call, for practicality. But now that I’d lived a year of the grown-up life—wasn’t that enough already?—Bali had reawakened that urge to jump ship: leave girlfriend, leave magazine, leave student loans, figure it out one day at a time like Jimmy. No health insurance. No retirement. Foam breaking at your heels. Could the IRS find you if you were far enough out? There were seventeen thousand islands in this country alone.

  I had also run away enough times that I knew this urge would just be a Band-Aid on the human condition. Wherever you ran to, you still brought yourself—all your whimpering, self-critiquing, complaining. The only escape from those was internal. Plus, another part of me loved Siri, wanted stability, a family, to be part of society, to take care of my parents as they got old, to make some sort of impact with this ridiculously expensive education I’d just purchased. But then I looked at Jimmy and wondered if I was just buying into a societal machine that ground people into depressive drones. Because even if you found noble work and a good work-life balance and a happy family, was it so noble to be just another consumer in a minivan driving your kids to soccer while spewing carbon into the atmosphere? I didn’t know. I had a feeling the decision wasn’t black-and-white. But my life felt as though it was at one of those Choose Your Own Adventure crossroads. The choices seemed to lead to different universes, each with its own booby traps.

  “I’m getting the feeling a lot these days,” Jimmy said. “I mean, I love to see my friends back in the States and all. I’m grateful for work. But it’s not like it used to be there. You think you’re going to go back and everything will just pick back up. But then you see people and they’re so tired. They’re just, I don’t know, dead. Just, you know, video games and football and work work work, more more more. Yeah. Dead. They’re so stressed about the economy, the economy. Jesus, the economy! OK, yeah, maybe it’s bad. But bad relative to what? They don’t see what they have. They’re not open to just, you know, taking a walk, looking at the sky. You see it in their eyes sometimes. They’re just not there—not really.”

  “Yeah,” I said, wondering if I’d been dying a little. If that’s why I’d bought the ticket here. But I also wondered if Jimmy had just never grown up—if the coma in his twenties had made him come out like a baby. He still looked like a teenager sometimes with his dancing eyes and goofy grin.

  “It’s just,” Jimmy said, “I don’t know. The States have changed. My dad was home every day after school to play baseball with us, take us on hikes. He worked. But he had time. It’s the time. It’s the time! People don’t have that now. But then that’s everywhere, right? I guess I’m having a rough go—maybe a midlife crisis.”

  “You?” I said, a little surprised Jimmy ever had a crisis that didn’t involve spring onshore winds. But Jimmy began a long ramble about his girlfriend, Serene. They’d been together five years, and she was wonderful. But she wanted children, a career; she deserved those things. She’d even quit running the old folks’ home, a good stable job. She quit to keep coming back here to the Balinese shack, to the Himalayas, to Africa and wherever. She’d done it because she wanted to. Or wanted to at one point years ago.

  “But now,” Jimmy said with a tinge of sadness, “it’s hard to tell. The jig may be up.”

  Jimmy paused and scooped water in his hands, seeming to contemplate the viscous malleability of it all.

  “So I’m thinking the Himalayas,” he said, “then maybe go work in Japan. I can chase typhoon swells down there. I have some old friends there in Tokyo. They have work for me, not like crazy-worker Japanese guys. Surfers, you know, work half-time, surf half-time, drink in the Tokyo alleys at night. Sit zazen with the monks. You’d like it, Jaimal. You should come.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go,” I said, and Japan did sound appealing. Maybe I could finish the book I’d been working on, get the rest of my tiny advance, then continue on the open road with Jimmy, painting houses, picking up odd jobs. Maybe we’d go back to the Himalayas together. I’d introduce him to Sonam.

  But then the student loans and my ageing parents and the career I’d worked so hard to get a toehold in and Siri all started squawking at once on my right shoulder—the one with the halo. Or did I see a pitchfork? How can one know? But I looked at Jimmy’s sadness about Serene and where he would live and how he would work. Did I want to be in this same cycle of uncertain relationships and homes thirty years from now?

  While I made a Venn diagram of “security” and “freedom” in my head, Jimmy spun from a conversational seated position to grab another long ride. Watching him disappear into blue, I said a silent prayer.

  “Give me clarity,” I said. “Please.”

  17

  He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.

  —James 1:6

  And he said all men will be sailors then

  Until the sea shall free them.

  —Leonard Cohen

  I slept hard after the long surf with Jimmy. The next morning we were out again at Impossibles just after dawn. The swell had grown overnight. As the sun rose out of the teal blue, I caught a long racer while waiting for Jimmy to paddle back from one of his. I couldn’t quite make it as far as Jimmy, but almost. And as my wave looked to be sectioning out, I kicked off right where Jimmy happened to be paddling back.

  “Yeah, Jaimal,” Jimmy said calmly. He had an offhanded way of tossing out compliments that made them feel extra sincere. Heaven knows I appreciated the boost. But Jimmy wasn’t looking at me. He was looking west.

  “What?” I said, already cringing.

  “Not bad over yonder,” Jimmy said, nodding toward the peninsula.

  Jimmy was suggesting we paddle a few hundred meters away to Padang Padang, a point break often called the jewel of Balinese surfing.

  “Oof,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Scary. But crowd’s not bad. I’ve been keeping an eye. We could sneak over and grab one or two.”

  I cringed. The waves at Padang were the things of surf magazine dreams—thick and perfectly hollow. But there were endless stories of surfers getting mangled on the wedge of reef beneath: necks broken, skulls pounded, deaths.

  I’d resolved not to surf Padang this trip. I still viewed the tube as a metaphor for enlightenment—the stillness inside the chaos, the union inside duality. But I’d learned my lesson in Mexico. It was counterproductive to push too hard. Before Jimmy had arrived, I’d been getting marginally comfortable at a gentler reef break down the beach called Bingin. That wave, nicknamed “barrel school,” was just the right pace for me. But then, if there was anyone who would be good to paddle out to Padang with, it was Jimmy. I hemmed and hawed, agreeing to paddle over with Jimmy and watch.

  “Yeah, yeah, just a gander,” Jimmy said chuckling.

  We began paddling in the channel where we had a perfect side view into Padang’s trajectory. Each surge collided into the reef abruptly, flipping and throwing itself outward. Often the lip of the wave projected wider than the wave’s height, and with backlight on the wave’s spine, the spiral looked briefly like a teal prism—graceful, gossamer along the fringes. But then the lip connected with the flat sea in a dreadful explosion. The tube formed, and the surfer, if lucky, stayed completely dry in its center before being pushed out by the spit.

  “Wow,” Jimmy said as we watched a massive wave that nobody dared catch explode. “Swell’s building. Almost looks like this wave I used to surf decades ago. Near where I got bitten.”

  I shot Jimmy a surprised glance. I was pretty sure he was talking about the mosquito that had given him cerebral malaria, something I’d only heard him mention one other time.

  “Do you remember anything?” I asked, hoping for a story to help me escape my own nerves. “Yo
u know, from all those months unconscious?”

  It felt a little taboo to pry into someone’s near-death experience. But I’d never encountered a conversation topic Jimmy couldn’t roll with and then some.

  “Two dreams,” he said without hesitation. “In one, I was a Native American and I was tying my wrist together with another man with leather straps, the blood brothers ceremony. In the next, I was in a pyramid-like building, and I was looking down on this horseshoe bay, watching my dad and me walking on the beach when I was a kid. I was in the tip of the pyramid looking through a circular scope, like a long periscope. And then I was lifted up. I saw a conical shape, a being of light, and I was taken into her. I was held by that—whatever it was—and it was bliss. More bliss than I ever believed possible, beyond any idea of what we imagine is possible about happiness or love because, I don’t know, it was beyond all that—beyond ideas. I woke up from the coma in the middle of that second dream. I was gripping the nurse’s hand. The first words out of my mouth were ‘San Sebastián, San Sebastián. I saw an angel. I saw an angel.’”

  “Who’s San Sebastián?” I asked.

  “That’s exactly what I wondered,” Jimmy said. “You know, my family’s religious, but the whole conservative deal in Southern California always weirded me out. I rebelled. But after I recovered from the coma and did all my therapy and that, I went to look him up. Turns out San Sebastián was a soldier in the Roman army. Had to keep his faith secret. When the emperor found out he was a Christian, he had Sebastián shot with dozens of arrows. Everyone thought he was dead—like they thought I was dead—but Irene of Rome, this healer, discovered him and brought him back. Sebastián then went and criticized the emperor in public and he got clubbed to death.”

  “Geez,” I said. “Heavy.”

  “Yeah. And that’s not the weirdest part,” Jimmy said. “San Sebastián is also a famous bay in Basque country. I’d never been there when I dreamt of it. But get this—it looks exactly like the bay where I saw my dad and me walking in the dream. I’ve been there now. Yeah. Really good waves.”

  By now, we were drifting into the takeoff zone at Padang. Six other surfers sat waiting, eyes locked on the horizon like some pelagic cult. We both recognized that carrying on a conversation about saints and angels in a pack of adrenaline junkies would be a bit strange. We let the conversation fall away. But all the talk of miracles had me feeling different. I hadn’t thought about the wailing wall in many months. Work had consumed me and put me back on the track of judgment and calculation rather than looking at life through a balance of heart and head. Maybe that’s why I was feeling so indecisive again—tossed about like an unmoored skiff.

  But Jimmy’s story had me looking at Padang through something of a wailing-wall lens—a lens of faith. The lens was a little dusty from lack of polish. But it was just enough to recall that there was a piece of me that was not the least bit scared of crashing or not crashing, failure or success, death or life.

  This part of me felt just fine surfing or not surfing Padang. But I was here after all—and maybe even for a reason.

  I asked Jimmy, “Any words of wisdom?”

  Jimmy flashed a grin.

  “Believe,” he said.

  It was bright and sunny, but I felt chilly as we bobbed between sets. I repeated Jimmy’s advice silently: Believe, believe, believe. Believe, believe, believe . . .

  The ocean was calm, and we floated there for a good ten minutes, waiting for a pulse. When the next set came, it seemed the sea had been storing power. The swells were mountainous as they rose under the sky. My instinct was to paddle for the horizon so none of these behemoths broke on top of me, which was exactly what the other six surfers did. But Jimmy ticked his head toward the beach, urging me to hold ground. Apparently, we were already in the zone.

  The first swell began to show boils, tracking the indentations of the reef. The other surfers in the pack began to thrash for it, but they were too far out.

  “Go, go!” Jimmy nodded, shouting a whisper.

  My brain didn’t want to go. But my body seemed to move anyway. Paddling as hard as I ever had, the water sucked me up, up, up to the crest. I stood. But it was too late. The wave was already going concave. And like that, I was airborne.

  In that blink of weightlessness, I smashed my back foot down on the board’s tail, an attempt to feel the face of the wave, to keep from nose-diving. I knew this was unlikely to stop me. I almost surrendered to a horrid fall. But unlike in Mexico, it worked. My fins touched vertical blue liquid. I landed with my feet positioned on the wax. And I began zooming down the mountain.

  The wave was fast and smooth. It shimmered, and I enjoyed the raw speed as I dropped and dropped. But as I transitioned to flat sea, the base of the wave seemed to hiccup. It dropped below surface level, slurping against the reef, and I realized that I had never seen a wave look anything like this. It didn’t even look much like a wave. It looked more like a blue-green subway tunnel that had been chopped in half and was falling from space.

  The blue circuit warped and bent into a tunnel so long it seemed that I would have to be going the speed of a subway to have any hope of making it to the end. Looking down, I could see the coral seeming to rise toward me. Water can form optical illusions, but there looked to be only a foot or two of water between me and that hard white sharpness.

  There was no going back. There is no thinking in these situations anyway. I heard a whistle in my ear as the wind rushed past. I leaned onto my heels, trying to veer left, the direction the wave was peeling. But as the water encased me, it didn’t matter which way I wanted to go. The wave was in control now. Just as Jimmy had said, time was different in here. In here, there was just the echo of water on stone. This and this and this. The now—unfiltered. Somehow my board seemed to continue with me continuing to stand on it. Blue, blue, blue. The roar, the roar, the roar. The light at the end of it.

  I kept floating through until a burst of foam hit me from behind and I was—could it be possible?—going to . . .

  Make it . . .

  Out . . .

  Please . . .

  YES!

  No.

  In that final meter before the light, a surge of water smacked my head. In an instant, I was flipping cartwheels. Now it was dark. I tucked into a fetal ball, covering my head, praying. Then it happened so fast it was over. My body collided with a hard surface. Like a rubber ball from a vending machine, I bounced back to the surface.

  How did a body bounce off coral like that? It seemed impossible. But there I was, gasping and floating in the channel, looking up at Jimmy. He was at the crest of the next wave, making the whole process I’d just been through look dance-like and simple.

  Where I had panicked at seeing the wave warp, he leaned forward confidently. He stayed centered, and tucked under the ceiling, dragging his fingers against the blue. His facial expression didn’t change as he stood still at the heart of the wave for those few seconds of infinity. Then he blasted out with the spume, hockey-stopping his board just in front of me with calm wild eyes.

  “Wow, that was a good one, Jaimal,” he said. “Committed.”

  The wind still knocked out of me, I wheezed and pointed to my back.

  “You OK?” he said.

  I managed to turn and lift my rash guard.

  “Ouch,” Jimmy said. “Reef tattoo. But you’re moving well. You’ll be OK.”

  My breath slowly returned. I felt lucky. The wave had smashed me directly down onto the reef, rather than along it, and my neoprene rash guard had protected me from any deep cuts.

  “Think I’m done for the day,” I coughed, trying to smile.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy said. “Let’s go in.”

  After what seemed like an hour-long paddle back to Made’s, I checked the mirror, and my back looked as if it had been carved up by a sushi chef. But like Jimmy had said, the gashes were superficial. Made even laughed when she saw them. (She’d seen much, much worse living in front of Padang.) T
hen she helped me clean the wounds with lime and iodine, a process that turned out to be far more painful than the fall.

  “Ya, scar good Bali souvenir,” Made laughed. “And free!”

  Jimmy sat and drank papaya juice with me while the wounds dried, distracting me from the sting with stories about his own reef scars, about kayaking the rivers of Borneo and befriending tribal people.

  “You know, I could live out there,” he said of a jungle in East Java. “Just plant some mango trees. Eat a little fish, and you’re done. You don’t really need much, know what I mean?”

  “Why don’t you write these stories down,” I asked Jimmy, knowing he loved to journal. “It would be the best travel book.”

  “I try, I try,” Jimmy said. “I mean, I have journals full, but I don’t know, it’s like the stories are everywhere. They never seem to find an order. They’re sort of out there in the ether. And that’s fine. That’s where they want to be, I guess. They’re for me, you know.”

  When Jimmy said that, I watched his intelligent blue eyes, and something I’d long sensed about him—but could never put my finger on—became tangible. It wasn’t just his stories that were out there in the ether. Part of Jimmy was still out there with San Sebastián. This was why he could drift from place to place, unattached, seeming to skim over the earth.

  Jimmy was just who he was. A kind of Ariel sprite, helping lost souls like me. Maybe it was the searing sting of iodine on my back making me not want to follow Jimmy, but I saw that I was not him. I often felt as if I were floating above the world, unmoored. But Padang seemed to be reminding me this wasn’t the time to drift.

  This time around, for whatever reason, I had to keep close to the sharp earth and human chaos. This wasn’t the happy path or the sad path, the perfect path or the imperfect path, the caged path or the free path. It was just my path. I had to look into my heart and trust it because nobody knew it, and nobody could walk it, but me.