I slowly made my way back to Jardim. My brain seemed to have shut down. I had, for a moment, expected to die. Not in some vague future, but right then and there. Now it was hard to see quite how to reenter the world. I reached our hotel. Caroline saw that something was wrong. She ran a bath. I don’t normally take baths. I lay in the water. Night fell. She lit candles. She cleaned the cuts on my feet. I tried to explain what had happened. I didn’t get far. I said that I wanted to go back to New York with her. She washed my hair. I asked why she didn’t get angry about all the stupid risky things I did. She knew I was talking about war reporting as much as I was about surfing. She said she assumed I needed to do them.
But didn’t she worry?
She took a long time to answer. “When things get bad, I think you get very calm,” she said. “I trust your judgment.”
That was not how I saw myself, or ever had. Still, it was interesting to hear. She later admitted that she permitted herself some magical thinking, particularly when I vanished into conflict zones and kidnapping hotspots.
I stayed on, too ashamed to leave, whimpering to myself, after Caroline left. I saw a day so big that nobody tried to paddle out. Conditions were clean. Tow-in teams could have ridden it, possibly, launching from some safe harbor. Nobody was towing Madeira, though, at least not yet. I watched it for hours, not remotely tempted. Tony, the landscape painter from Wales, said that he had seen a day so big that waves broke clear across the bay between Paul do Mar and Pequena. Standing on the wharf at Paul, he said, all you saw were stacked mountains of whitewater with the distant peak of the breaking hook of the outermost wave visible high above all the foam and mist, maybe the top fifteen feet of the wave, moving from right to left—a whole afternoon of mystic behemoths following each other down the coast.
Tony was red-haired, passionate, maybe forty. Madeira, he said, had turned his painting upside down. “It’s the two-thousand-foot cliffs,” he said. “Suddenly, the horizon is right up in your face and the sea is disappearing into the sky. The clouds are below you, the sea’s above you.” He said Madeira had also changed his surfing. “Changed it forever. I don’t surf at home anymore. There’s no point. This is deep ocean power. You know for yourself what it’s like. These things chase you down the point and you just want to get the hell out of there. Head for the greenery, as they say.” Like Peter, Tony wasn’t particularly worried about crowds. “People are scared of this place.”
For good reason, I thought.
But did I surf to scare myself? No. I loved the power, the juice, but only up to a point. Head for the greenery—that was conservative surfing, not slam-bam shredding, and it was probably all I was good for at this age. I paddled out looking for a dopamine rush that was both familiar and rare, that required nerve and experience but had nothing in common with terror. Similarly, when reporting, I went out looking for stories to satisfy my curiosity, to try to make sense of calamities—certainly not to get shot at. In fact, one of my worst days as a reporter had come in El Salvador, on an election day during the civil war. Three journalists were killed that day, one wounded. I had been caught in a firefight in a village in Usulután province. In the next village over, a young Dutch cameraman named Cornel Lagrouw was shot in the chest. The army attacked the car that was trying to get him to a hospital, pinning it down with aerial fire. Lagrouw died on the road. I was there when they pronounced him dead. His girlfriend, Annelies, who was his sound technician, did not take her eyes off him. She kissed his hands, his chest, his eyes, his mouth. She wiped the dust from his teeth with her handkerchief. After I wrote and filed my story, I went surfing. El Salvador has a great wave called La Libertad, which was uncrowded in those days, because of the war. I spent a week hiding out at Libertad. Surfing was an antidote, however mild, for the horror.
These things belonged on opposite sides of the ledger.
The surf went flat and stayed small. I grew a beard. I was working on a story about the global anticorporate movement, which was then in the headlines. I wrote letters, mainly to Bryan. I didn’t think Madeira would interest him much, except perhaps on paper. Our last surf trip together had been a few years earlier: a five-day autumn dash to Nova Scotia while he and Deirdre were doing a stint at Williams College. We had lucked into lovely, empty waves.
Bryan had been following his muse deep into American bedrock. He wrote a two-part New Yorker piece called “Large Cars,” about the life of a long-haul trucker, and then an unforgettable profile of Merle Haggard. He wrote a passionate, scholarly, beautiful book about a nineteenth-century baseball player named John Montgomery Ward. Then he returned to his first love, fiction.
• • •
A PREPOSTEROUS IDEA was being tossed around in Jardim. The government would build a tunnel from Jardim to Paul. It was like the setup for an absurdist joke. A highway tunnel, more than a mile long, through a mountain of rock, to connect two tiny fishing villages that hated each other?
Yes. And this was, it seemed, the least of it. The European Union was shoveling money into its “underdeveloped regions.” Portugal was getting much of it, and Madeira is to the mainland as Portgual is to Europe—farther south and west and, at least traditionally, poorer. As a result, they were now building bridges and tunnels all over Madeira, furiously spending E.U. grants for “transport infrastructure.” These projects would produce, according to the E.U., “time savings.” In the meantime, they were producing jobs for Madeirans and windfall profits for politically connected corporations and local contractors. Graft and corruption were rife—that was what people said. But I saw nothing about it in the papers, where the local strongman and regional governor, Alberto João Jardim (no relation to the village), seemed to preside over a ribbon-cutting on some vast new erection every day. There was a rush to build before the E.U. admitted Eastern European nations that would then start getting these grants.
Were the rumors of corruption true? It was hard to know. I was a tourist, not reporting. There was certainly a madness loose on the island. It was a time to make money—in a place where there had been, through the centuries, precious few such opportunities. Plenty of older people seemed stunned, watching the tranquil, terraced hillsides they had known all their lives bulldozed into flyovers for sleek new highways. In Jardim I heard people fret that once the tunnel was finished, drunken louts from Paul would come streaming through, turning Jardim’s quiet praça into a reeking hangout. Still, men from Jardim would get jobs in the tunnel and their families were thankful for that. It beat emigrating to Venezuela.
• • •
WHEN I ARRIVED the following year, the tunnel was under construction. At night, when there was no surf roar, I could hear the machines, the blasting inside the mountain. Sleepless in my dank room, I imagined Adamastor, a sea monster made of rock in The Lusiads—“Scowling from drunken, hollow eyes / Its complexion earthy and pale, / Its hair grizzled and matted with clay, / Its mouth coal black, teeth yellow with decay.”
We got poor surf that winter. The North Atlantic storms we counted on were tracking lower than usual, battering Madeira itself, and wrecking the waves they did send. When it came time for me to go home, the weather charts showed yet another storm heading our way. This one, I thought, might be different. I decided to stay. The storm hit. It wasn’t different, at least not in Jardim, where the surf was huge but unridable.
I drove to the north coast with a young guy from Oregon, André. He was blond, quiet, built square, like a lumberjack. A new tunnel, nearly two miles long, let us whisk through the central mountains in less than an hour. The north was sunny and windless, a different world, and my old flame Madonna was, as they say, on fire. It looked huge. The wave normally ran close to the rocks, locked in cliff shadow. Now it was breaking out in deep blue water, smooth and heavy in the sunshine. I was glad I had brought my gun. We jumped off the rocks far down in the cove. André seemed excessively keen. I was moving tentatively, having trouble swallowing. He was soon
a hundred yards ahead. I caught glimpses of him paddling over massive waves. It was even bigger than I’d thought. I was not at all sure I should be out here.
Then André appeared, flailing at the top of an enormous wave. He caught it, free-falling through the drop on his backhand, somehow landing on his board, and then surfing aggressively, carving hard, before sailing over the shoulder. It was a bravura ride. But I saw it—I was seeing everything—through a screen of dread. I found the roar of the whitewater hitting the cliffs to my left nauseating. I kept ordering myself not to look that way. The truck-sized waves exploding up ahead were not better for morale. They made me wish I had stayed ashore. The takeoffs looked impossibly fast and steep and the penalty for blown takeoffs unthinkably severe. Actually, these waves were probably no more difficult than the three beasts I rode on that big day at Paul do Mar. But these were lefts and that had been three years before, on a day when my confidence was unnaturally high. Today I was scared and smelled disaster.
Disaster found André first. He had paddled far up the point, into an absurdly dangerous zone. I had stopped and was using the Madonna lineup markers I knew—a road tunnel, a waterfall—except that I stayed thirty or forty yards straight out from the usual takeoff and sprinted for open water every time a set appeared. I had not caught a wave, or even seriously tried. André caught several, positioning himself so deep that even when he pulled out, I was not within shouting distance. He was on a suicide mission, it seemed to me. A big set could peak up where I was, break all the way across to the point, and trap him horribly. Soon enough, this happened. He almost escaped. He tried to punch through the lip of a giant wave, but it sucked him over, snapped his leash, and held him down for a sickeningly long time. His board had already hit the cliff by the time the next wave landed on him. He eventually got ashore, down toward the cove. He retrieved his battered board, waved it to me in a signal that he was done, and hiked back toward the car.
I stayed out for hours. I was too scared to surf properly but could not face paddling in. I caught a few waves, all just big shoulders, relatively easy and safe. I had a couple of close calls dodging sets. Rather than try to punch through the top of the biggest wave of the day—an absolute monster—I abandoned my board and swam under it. The water was clear and deep and rang with an ungodly hollow banging—the sound, I realized, of boulders rolling. I could see them down below, rocks the size of file cabinets being lifted off the bottom by the passing of the swell. I had never seen that before. My leash held and there were no more waves in that set. I was, if possible, now even more spooked.
Several surf cars arrived. I could see Tony among the small crowd watching. Having an audience made it worse—the humiliation of surfing so timidly. But the worst part was the feeling in my chest as I paddled over large, exquisite waves, over and over, unwilling to risk the takeoffs. It was such a waste. Such cowardice. My self-loathing spiked insufferably.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, back in Jardim, I lay in the dark on a lumpy cot thinking about quitting surfing. The southeast wind groaned in the eaves of the old house where I was staying. Various parts of me hurt. My left eye was weeping from too much sun and saltwater. One hand throbbed from a gash received trying to get ashore at Madonna. The other hand throbbed with urchin spines picked up in a collision with the reef at Shadowlands the week before. Both feet ached with infected cuts. My lower back felt like I had spent the month digging a ditch.
I truly was too old for this. I was losing my quickness, my strength, my nerve. Why didn’t I just leave it to guys in their physical prime, like André? Even the guys my age who still tried to ride serious waves—guys in their forties, even fifties—managed to get in the water two hundred, three hundred days a year. Who was I kidding, trying to skate by on a small fraction of that? Why not walk away while I could? Would quitting really leave such a big psychic hole?
• • •
IN THE MORNING, Jardim was still a mess. André and I went back to the north coast. I made the trip on autopilot, with no thought or enthusiasm. During the drive, André told me about his divorce. I was surprised he’d been married—he was so young. He and his wife had split up, he said, over surfing, of course. Chicks had to realize, he said, that when they married a surfer, they married surfing. They had to either adapt or split. “It’s like if you or I hooked up with a fanatical shopper,” he said. “I mean a total fanatic. You’d have to accept that your entire life would be traveling around to malls. Or, really, more like waiting for malls to open.”
I could see how his marriage might have crashed.
On the north coast, the swell had dropped. It was windy and raining at Madonna. The waves were small, the tide too high. We napped in the car—just a couple of shoppers waiting for the mall to open.
Then, improbably, it opened. The wind dropped, the tide dropped, the sun came out, and the surf began to pump. We paddled out. It was half the size of the day before. The takeoffs were still tricky—many of the drops included little free falls—but I found myself anticipating those weightless moments, actually using them to set up a hard turn off the bottom, which then intensified the acceleration down the line. The smaller waves ran a little too close to the cliff, which, since I was on my backhand, was right in my face, but the rocks flashing past only increased the sense of unholy speed. A few tourists stopped on the road to take pictures, but no surfers appeared. It was just me and some young maniac from Oregon trading beautiful waves, surfing our brains out, hour after silken hour.
• • •
THE TUNNEL TO PAUL DO Mar was finished, unbelievably, before the next winter. Derelicts from Paul did not invade the Jardim praça. In fact, the tunnel seemed to be hardly used. It was long, dark, musty. Nobody walked through it. But it was stunningly convenient for surfers. The waves in Paul were now five minutes’ drive away. Everything in Madeira was getting rapidly closer. Funchal, which had been a three-hour drive from Jardim when we started coming, was now less than an hour. Madeirans were happy about the convenience, of course. I churlishly feared that the easier access could only mean more surfers. They had held a second contest at Jardim. It had been won by a Tahitian power surfer known as Poto—an international surf celebrity. Not good.
The enormous ongoing transfer of E.U. funds to Madeira—it was hundreds of millions of euros—included, for me, some irony. I was in favor of the whole racket, in theory. It was in rare accord with my idea of the benign (perhaps the only benign) face of economic globalization: richer countries helping poorer countries, directly. Infrastructure, at least in the abstract, was good. In reality, I was horrified by most of the projects. They were hideous and wasteful, and many seemed entirely useless except as temporary job sources and money grabs.
I began to hear rumors that year—this was early 2001—about a “promenade” that the government wanted to build around the Jardim seafront. This made no sense. At high tide, the ocean crashed against the cliffs. I talked to a building contractor in the village about the rumors. He said he supported the project. He was vague about what it might entail. He said it would be modest, if it were even built—just a little paved walkway. I said it would be impossible to build. And who would ever use it? José Nunes told me not to worry. It was probably just talk.
• • •
IN NOVEMBER 2001, our daughter, Mollie, was born. We had wanted a child for a while. To say we were besotted would be a grave understatement. Our world got suddenly both much smaller and much larger. A rascally smile was a universe. I lost interest in leaving New York. Before Caroline got pregnant, I had been reporting in Bolivia and South Africa. Now Miami felt like a long way to go for a story. When I went to London on assignment, Caroline and Mollie came along. I quit war reporting, even my own mild version of it. I missed two winters in Madeira without a trace of regret.
But I was hearing things. The “promenade” at Jardim had turned into a seaside roadway, and by the time I did make it back to Madeira, with
Caroline and Mollie, in October 2003, the thing was under construction.
The project had not been unopposed. A surfer from California named Will Henry, who had been coming to Madeira, organized protests. Environmentalists, geologists, biologists, and surfers from both Portugal and abroad met and marched in Funchal and in Jardim. The threat to the great wave at Jardim wasn’t the only rallying point—there were other surf spots being buried under other boondoggles, including marinas. The E.U.-driven construction boom, the protesters argued, was damaging Madeira’s coastal ecology as a whole. It was revealed that one of the beneficiaries of the huge new construction contracts was in fact a company owned by the son-in-law of Alberto João Jardim, the regional governor.
Governor Jardim went ballistic. He called the protesters “communists.” He told a local paper that surfers represented the “kind of barefoot tourism we don’t want for Madeira. Go surf elsewhere!” He even mocked their understanding of ocean waves: “Surfers? They’re a bunch of fools who must think the waves break from land to sea. So what if the waves break here or fifteen meters further in the water? The waves will always be the same.”
The reception the protesters got in Jardim do Mar was hostile. Local men associated with the ruling party chased them from the village, hurling food and abuse. Even a village boy who surfed was run out. Will Henry got hit in the face. Who were these foreigners, these barefoot fools, to think they could stop progress in Madeira? Construction went forward.
Barbarian Days Page 42