by Tim Cahill
Something else. The ocean became more than just a substitute for a good white-water river. It had become a new and overwhelming passion. Once you learned how to break the wave barrier, you could paddle out beyond the breakers and hit out for a few easy miles along the coastal headlands. The cliffs sometimes rose several hundred feet above the sea, but there were always sandy coves carved into the rocky walls. Sometimes you had to ride heavy surf into shore, and that could be especially gnarly when rocky islands, called sea stacks, guarded the beach. Once you were on the sand, however, the beach was all yours. The cliffs on one side and the raging surf on the other ensured your privacy.
There was risk involved, sure, and it was like climbing a mountain in that way. Except when you got to the top of a mountain, it was all ice and snow and nothing lived there. In those coves where the ocean met the land, there were seals and otters; there was shore life in abundance. Soares felt like Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise: He was going where no man had gone before. And he could get there in less than an hour.
There were plenty of people sea kayaking in 1980, but they tended to paddle in the calmer bays or behind protected reefs. Others were braving the surf on kayaks called surf skis. These were actually sit-down surfboards—great for waves, but of limited use in exploratory forays. Unlike conventional kayaks, surf skis had no hatch, no storage capacity at all.
No, what you needed for coastal exploring was a boat that could carry a week’s worth of camping gear and that could take some pretty serious rock-bashing. You wanted a bullet-proof kayak with room for your lunch.
Soares was stripping off his Robo Kayaker gear. He had broken the wave barrier at Rodeo Beach and had paddled out to the rock gardens near Point Bonita, at the northern entrance to San Francisco Bay. He had spent some time getting up close to the rocks as the breakers hit them so hard that spray burst thirty feet and more over his head. He liked “getting close to a bomb” like that, but the clapotis had been pretty good out there today too. To hit the clapotis just right, you wanted to get into the deep water, into an area where swells rather than breakers were running into some rocky island. When a good-size swell hits an immovable rock wall, water has no place to go. It drops off the rock and forms a swell that moves back out to sea. But other swells are moving in. At some point, two swells collide, and there is a powerful popping explosion called the clapotis effect. A good Wave Warrior, in proper position, can ride the clapotis ten feet in the air.
Soares likes to reverse the clapotis experience by moving into the “suck zone” next to the rock. It is a matter of some delicate timing. The swell hits the rock, and retreats. Get in there, right there, right next to the rock, in just that moment of retreat, and the bottom drops out of the sea. You fall five, six, ten feet and more.
Mistime the suck zone, however, and you may suffer the sort of rock-bashing in which a pair of ugly shoulder pads and a good helmet mean the difference between life and death. All in all, a better maneuver in a mistimed suck zone involves leaning out to sea as the next swell lifts the X-1 into the rock. Let the hull of the kayak absorb the blow. What the hell; it’s bullet-proof.
It seemed inevitable that Eric Soares should meet Jim Kakuk and Glen Gilchrist. Both were coastal explorers, pushing the limits of traditional kayaking. Kakuk was a boatbuilder. Gilchrist designed boats. The three of them formed a company called Tsunami Products to manufacture—and perhaps market—the kind of boat they needed to ride the surf and the surge in coastal rock gardens. The X-1 “Rocket Boat,” a bullet-proof rock basher capable of carrying four hundred pounds, is the result of several years of research and experimentation.
Soares tells his students that too many companies use market research to postpone decisions. He believes American businessmen often suffer paralysis by analysis. “We need to use tools like marketing research in a judicious manner to help us make committed decisions,” he says in his lectures.
Soares has done a little of the controlled experimentation market research he finds cost-effective on the X-1. A randomly selected group of experienced sea kayakers preferred the “Rocket Boat” in rough water, and they liked it in calm conditions. However, of the seventy-two boating and wild-sports retail outlets in the Bay Area—all were visited personally—only two would sell such a craft.
“So what we need to do is create a market,” Soares told me.
“This boat business relates to what I do in the water,” he says. “You understand the environment, see the opportunity, and seize it.”
Lisa Campbell, Soares’s friend and companion, was sitting on the bow of an X-1 staring out at the breakers thundering into Rodeo Beach. She was studying the sea, looking for a “window,” a set of smaller waves she might be able to handle. There were four Tsunami Rangers at the beach and only two X-l’s. Lisa had been sitting there in full gear for half an hour, waiting, studying. Finally, she shook her head and gave up the boat. Not today. She had a bad feeling about the sea.
There were no disparaging comments.
“It’s why I love to go out with the Rangers,” Lisa told me. “They believe the first order of business is to understand the sea. And if you don’t feel comfortable, don’t go out.”
There are a dozen active Rangers and about fifteen affiliate members. To become a Ranger, one must pass swimming and kayaking proficiency tests. Members are assigned naval ranks that are based entirely on skill. Soares is a commander, and Kakuk is a captain. While the men are perhaps equal in skill, Kakuk was assigned the higher rank on the basis of his judgment. Captain Kakuk, for instance, can be depended upon to call off a proposed sea-cave penetration if the enterprise seems too ridiculously deadly.
“The Rangers have a rule,” Lisa Campbell told me. “The only excuse for not doing something is ‘I’m scared.’ No one is allowed to argue with ‘I’m scared.’ ”
Soares agreed, but pointed out that having skilled friends watching you—and available for rescues—tended to mitigate the fear level somewhat. You needed those good Wave Warriors out there with you because the sport, as practiced by the Rangers, is so new. Who could have guessed, for instance, that when a swell hits a sea stack, there is often a watery cushion that rides up the rock and protects the kayak and kayaker. Soares first noticed the phenomenon when he mistimed a suck zone and got creamed by an incoming swell. “But,” he told me, “I wouldn’t have been in that close unless Jim Kakuk was there. I knew he could get me out.”
So the Rangers exist for the purposes of camaraderie, exploration, and experimentation. Happily, they are not stingy with their personal discoveries: The Tsunami Rangers often attend kayaking clinics, where they give seminars on the proper way to enter and exit surf zones. This is done free of charge, in the interest of expanding the sport of sea kayaking without a concomitant loss of life.
The university finds the idea of marketing professors involved in marketing appealing. And far from being an embarrassment, Soares’s exuberant reports in kayaking journals are seen as a way of stimulating a new market. The surf clinics are seen as a valuable community service. It all fits.
But have a glass of wine with Eric Soares. Sit there on the beach with the sun going down while the world vibrates with shifting pastels, and listen to him talk about rock gardens and punch bowls, about sea caves and churns. The guy’s not fooling anyone. He’d be out in the danger zone no matter what. In the fading light, with the rumble of the sea for background music, it’s not even that difficult to comprehend the nature of his compulsion.
He was talking about a kayaking trip he’d taken in the Big Sur coastal region, south of San Francisco. “Big Sur,” Eric Soares said, “has some of the most incredible crystal gardens I’ve ever seen. There are very few rivers in that area, so you don’t see much silting. The water is exceptionally clear, almost turquoise. You get next to a bomb there—bang—water hits the rocks, and it explodes into the sun: great aquamarine-colored sheets of water spiring up into peaks. And there it is—a crystal garden. Looking through the water into
the sun, each drop becomes a prism. There are ethereal colors and falling rainbows, shifting crystal shards falling onto blue-green water.
“The cliffs there are five hundred, maybe a thousand feet high. The sound is a constant echoing rumble: a thunder and a murmur and a hiss. It’s wave on rock, but every once in a while there’s the random clapotis: a loud popping sound that’s almost electrical. Like something you might hear out of a big audio speaker when a wire is misconnected. Pop! And then there’s spray falling back into the ocean, and that hisses and crackles.
“All of it blends into the rolling sound of the sea, of the wind, and it’s like a symphony. Every instrument is pure, it all goes together, but you never know what you will hear next.
“All the time—while all this is going on—you have to scope the sea and know where you should be for your own safety. If you want to hold in place, you might use little slapping strokes, ninja strokes, to maintain your position. And you can feel the awesome power of the ocean. You try to understand it, to use that power. Because bad timing, a lack of understanding—those can kill you. But to survive in a place where you can very easily die—there’s an exhilaration that verges on giddiness.
“It’s something very primitive, I guess. You have a heightened sense of life and death, and that’s something you can actually smell out in those crystal gardens. The spray is like an aerator on a perfume bottle. You can smell and taste the essence of the sea in the spray. Seals, fish, the soup of organic compounds—everything. Life. There’s something … well, sexual isn’t the right word, but it’s close.”
Soares took a last sip of wine and stared out into the dark ocean. Far to the west, the last of the sunlight was bleeding into the sea. He might have been thinking about tomorrow’s lectures or wondering which suit he’d wear to his classes. Or maybe he still saw himself out there in some glittering crystal garden: Professor Soares, Tsunami Ranger, getting close to the shimmering bombs, riding shards of light, dodging the Coast Guard in ugly shoulder pads.
Therapeutic Perambulation
Irritation, it seemed, had become the central fact of my life.
We were four days into a five-week walk across the northern region of the Republic of the Congo, moving roughly from the Sangha River to the Mataba. It wasn’t the swamps or the sucking mud bogs or the tangled forest or the heat or the torrential rains that bothered me. It was the bees. Great swarms of them were ever present. There were honey bees and bumblebees and long thin waspy bees and blue-black bees and great clouds of stingless little fruit-fly-looking bees that filled the nose and mouth with every breath.
“These bees,” I informed my companions, “are driving me mad.”
The American biologist in charge of the expedition explained that there was precious little salt in the forests of equatorial Africa, that salt was essential to life, and that, as I tended to sweat like a pig, the bees were focused on me. In addition, I presented the largest salt surface in our party. The biologist was a wiry individual—I outweighed him by forty pounds—and our guides and scouts were, for the most part, Bambenjele pygmies, men who topped the scales at about a hundred pounds apiece, which was less than half my weight.
Our mission was to make a rough count of the animals in the uninhabited Ndoki forest—there were gorillas and chimps and elephants and leopards—and then report back to the Congolese government. Up to this point, I hadn’t been able to see the chimps for the bees.
“I’m getting stung about half a dozen times a day,” I complained.
The biologist advised me that the bees only reacted to dorsal pressure. “Don’t touch them on the back,” he said, “and they won’t sting.”
I tried, but the bees covered me in layers. They got under my T-shirt and stung me in the armpits; they stung me on the butt when I sat down, or on the back when I leaned up against a tree. I had to live through another thirty days of this, and I felt like screaming. The biologist said I was suffering from “insect stress.”
Gradually, in the midst of this existential agony, it occurred to me that bees seldom torment a moving target. And so, for the next month, I walked. I walked an average of ten hours a day, from dawn to dusk. When the others took breaks or stopped for lunch or made camp early, I shucked off my pack and strolled down our back trail. I never stopped. I walked constantly.
Walking, I discovered, cures insect stress.
I write about travel in remote areas for a living. My doctor, who is a personal friend, likes to see me immediately upon my return. I provide an opportunity for him to treat, for instance, malaria, in Montana. After my long walk through Africa, he seemed disappointed in my physical condition.
“You look great,” he said sadly. “How much weight did you lose?”
“Almost twenty-five pounds.”
“Blood pressure’s way down,” he noted reluctantly. “Heartbeat’s strong and slow.”
“And I haven’t had any anxiety attacks for a couple of months now.”
“That’s good,” my doctor said, and speaking as my friend, he meant it. A year or so before, I’d made a serious mistake in love. When it all fell apart, I began having the attacks: periods of intense and unfocused fear, accompanied by a jack-hammer heartbeat, flushed skin, and hopeless depression. I didn’t go out much. Tears came easily in those days.
“So you’re over her?”
“I think so.”
The truth was, I’d never felt better in my life.
I thought about this sudden reversal of emotional and physical fortune. The weight loss was easily calibrated. An individual weighing 200 pounds burns up about 7.8 calories per minute walking at a 4-mile-an-hour pace. We weren’t walking that fast in the Ndoke, but I figured the exertion involved in crawling under thorny vegetation and wading through knee-deep mud put us somewhere on that level. So: 7.8 calories, times 60 minutes, is a total of 468 calories burned per hour. Multiply by 10 hours for a total of 4,680 calories lost per day of walking. Divide calories lost (4,680) by the number of calories in a pound (3,200) for a total of 1.46 pounds walked off per day. Given the fact that we were on low rations—rice, nuts, vegetables, and a doughy concoction of powdered root called fu-fu—a weight loss of twenty-five pounds in a little over thirty days seemed right on the money.
Dropping some excess weight tends to lower blood pressure, of course, but I felt there was more to it than that. The walking, I thought, was a kind of natural tranquilizer. Every day, about an hour into the trek, I’d drop off into a state I thought of as automatic pilot. My senses, it seemed, were preternaturally sharp. I could hear the distant pant-hoot of chimpanzees, the vaguely electronic chortle of the mangabey monkey, the scream of the crested eagle, the grunts of bush pigs, the trumpeting of forest elephants splashing in a nearby stream. Without conscious thought, I stepped over columns of fierce driver ants, and noted the acrid ammonia scent of a nearby silverback gorilla. In the visually limited world of the dense forest, I knew, without thinking about it, where everyone was; I knew my place.
Occasionally, we encountered elephant trails running in our general direction: great wide footpaths straight as any road in North Dakota. The elephants, nature’s bulldozers, had cleared away the foliage that otherwise twisted around our ankles or bloodied our arms with thorns. We called these NAT paths: No Arm Touch. Walking along the elephant interstates was an atavistic pleasure. The pygmies chatted quietly among themselves in Sangha, a language I didn’t know. It was, to my ear, a kind of sibilant spoken music. And above, sounding in counterpoint to our various conversations in French and Sangha and English, the monkeys, who were bedded down in the midday sun, chattered softly in the canopy. The sounds of man and monkey were not dissimilar. I felt we belonged here, and wondered vaguely about my love affair with the internal combustion engine.
In the evenings, I tried to stay awake in my tent listening for the strange humming sound of leopards beyond the fire. Every few hours, I’d hear the pygmies laughing. They never slept, or so it seemed, and they were as happy as any
group of men I’d ever met.
Which hadn’t been the case in the village where we’d hired them. Pygmies are the aboriginal people of the forest. They were hunters and gatherers, but about five hundred years ago, Bantu agriculturists moved in along the rivers. In the past centuries, the pygmies have gravitated to the Bantu villages, where they lead lives as second-class citizens. They are in fact near slaves, trading their lives for fu-fu and alcohol. Especially alcohol.
I thought about the pygmies. In the village, they had been dissatisfied and drunk. They wanted things that seemed to them beyond their grasp: They wanted radios and colorful T-shirts. They wanted to ride in cars and buses. They wanted jobs running forklifts for the lumber companies that were cutting down their forests. Instead, a local policeman had recently come around and burned down their small huts, made of bent-over saplings and leaves. The pygmies were told to build regular houses, like normal people. And so they got drunk and sullen, and they fought viciously among themselves.
But here, walking in rhythm with the forest, they were happy, immune to the stinging calculus of want. I listened for the leopards and realized that I, too, for the first time in some years, was delighted with my life. And why not? Compared to the Bambenjele people, my own collision with civilization and its discontents seemed minor, almost insignificant. My suffering, such as it was, amounted to little more than a matter of cultural insect stress.
And walking, of course, cures that stress.
The Monks of Apnea
“Two,” the announcer said in Spanish, “four, six, eight, ten …”
In front of him, under bright lights, men were pulling fish out of a numbered plasticized burlap sack and transferring them, two at a time, to several mesh plastic boxes, of the type used to transport milk cartons. The boxes were later loaded onto what looked like a refrigerated truck. Above, there were five thousand people sitting on the hard stone steps of an outdoor amphitheater. Five thousand people, breathlessly watching men count fish, two by two, in Spanish.