West of Jesus, page 3
In the three weeks I had been in Bali I had already fallen down plenty, but falling down at Nusa Dua was not an experience I wanted to have. It was fear that got me to my feet and wax that kept them in one place. Surfers put wax on their boards for traction, and the coat on mine was so thick you could barely see the fiberglass beneath. For added stability, my knees were bent deep and my stance was wide, but this was the biggest wave I had ever been on and nothing could have prepared me for the speed.
Blurry, dizzy, warping speed that sent the world flashing by in snatches too quick for my brain to process. I felt like I had fallen off a building and landed atop a greasy express train, and that express train seemed none too pleased to have the company.
Surfer's use the term bottom turn to mean both any turn made at the bottom of the wave and more frequently the first such turn made on a wave. A good bottom turn sets up the whole ride, taking all of the energy of the initial drop and turning it into all the momentum needed to climb back up to the crest and fire on down the line. To make this happen, you begin in a low crouch and then whip first head then shoulders then arms in the direction of the wave's
face. At the same time, you're straightening legs and rocking slightly backward onto your heels, both powering into the turn and shaping the water beneath the board into the miniature ramp it needs to climb back up. Since I ride goofyfoot, with my right foot forward and my left foot back, I was riding with my back to the wave. This meant the first time I got a real good look at it was also the moment I started my first bottom turn. When I finally saw the size of things, I was not thinking, Oh, look there's a giant memory of wind.
I think the thought was somewhere along the lines of: Holy shit, I better get the hell out of here fast. One of the good things about surfing is that events take place at such high speeds that no sooner did I have this thought than I was already out of the way of that danger and ready for whatever came next. What came next was one of the Aussies paddling back out to the break. He was directly in front of me. I was going to decapitate him if I didn't
find a way to turn or he didn't find a way to duck. I swerved and he ducked, and the last thing I saw as he dropped beneath the surface was one lone finger wagging in my direction—a little reminder perhaps of the camaraderie of surfers.
I passed him and rode on until the wave crossed another shallow section of reef and started to rear up and pitch over. I had lost too much speed in my antidecapitation maneuver and was never going to make that next section. Instead I angled my board up the wave's face and flailed off the backside in a kind of ecstatic belly flop. I don't remember paddling back out to the lineup. I know that once there, I did everything I could to contain myself. Shouting "Did you see that? Did you see that? Did you see that?" is generally frowned upon. That said, it should also be pointed out that there is an unspoken dictum in surfing which states "the best surfer in the water is the one having the most fun." And for those few moments, I was definitely the best surfer in the water.
Then, suddenly, possibly adrenaline-drunk with my newfound prowess, I made an error. It didn't seem like one at the time, but errors never do. I paddled into another wave without careful study.
Instead of positioning myself a little farther down the line, I lined up directly with the peak. Clearly, my one ride had made me an expert. As the wave reached me I felt the back of the board start to rise and then the rest of the board start to rise, and then I was caught by some terrible aquatic elevator. The wave was enormous.
By the time I knew what was happening, the bottom was already dropping out, and when the lip threw, I was not quite at my feet.
That was my second error. I didn't get a third.
In the early sixties, a man named Frederick Brown won a magazine contest by writing one of the world's shortest science fiction stories. The story was as follows: "The last man on Earth hears a knock at the door." That was about what I felt like for those long airborne moments before I landed directly beneath what was quickly becoming one of the dumbest things I'd ever done in my life. Almost, but not quite. They say that Ratu Nyai Loro Kidul has a thing for boys in green shorts. All of her lovers wore—and the past tense is important here—green shorts. I'm still not sure if the only reason I'm alive today is that my shorts were black.
After that fall and the pummeling and the raking over the reef and the gasping for oxygen and the whimpering animal sounds, came the next wave and more pummeling and more raking over the reef and more gasping for oxygen and more whimpering animal sounds. After the six or seven waves that followed had all had their turn, I finally made it back to the boat. I was cut up pretty badly It took me about twenty minutes to stop puking up water.
Around the time I did, one of those Aussies paddled over and said something quaint and reassuring like "Close one, mate." I nodded in agreement and bled a little bit more and said something about the goddess of the Southern Seas feeling forgiving this morning.
He shook his head no. "That wasn't any goddess; that was just the Conductor having his way with you."
"The who?"
"The Conductor."
"What are you talking about?"
So he told me a story about two guys on an epic surf quest who get lost near the ass-end of nowhere and meet some guy who could control the weather and conduct the waves with some kind of baton made from human bone—it was a pretty curious story—but it went on and on and I was waterlogged and bedraggled and forgot all about it and might never have remembered except that seven years later I took a trip to Mexico and there, too, something went horribly wrong.
8
On my fourth day in Mexico, one of the nearby hurricanes quit threatening and finally swept up the coast. Instead of staying out to sea and producing epic swell, it veered too close to shore and produced epic mess. Trees groaned and creaked and were blown sideways, and the ones that didn't uproot entirely bent far and flung their coconuts across the beach in angry protest. The pool at Costa Azul turned dingy and overflowed, and the excess water formed tributaries and estuaries and miniature malarial swamps. The thatched roof of the Tiki hut leaked. It leaked less than the rest of the world seemed to be leaking, so every stray dog in town showed up for a chance to stay dry under its long eaves. For the surfers who had decided to hang around and risk the storm, there was nothing much to do, so we did what one does in Mexico when there's nothing much to do: watch stray dogs, drink beer.
The morning of the fifth day dawned bleary. The rain had stopped, but the sea was still rough. We were an hour away from the spot where we hoped to surf, and there was no way to check the conditions. A cell phone would have worked wonders, but there were none, and the storm had knocked down power lines so there were no regular phones either. We had no other options.
Eight of us piled into a van for the trip to the harbor to see what we could see.
One of the surfers, a lanky New Yorker named Ben, was riding
shotgun. Back home, he worked long hours as a day trader of some kind in Manhattan but tried to surf every morning at the Jersey shore. People who surf the Jersey shore always say that there are waves there equal in girth and threat to Hawaii's legendary Pipeline. The normal response to this statement is that whoever is making it has never surfed Pipeline. But Ben had surfed Pipeline, and even if he hadn't, he got up most days before work to ride waves as cold as ice cubes. In the winter he would have to climb through the snowdrifts to get to the water's edge. He seemed tougher than most, unflappable.
As we drove, the windows on the van kept fogging up, and Ben took it upon himself to keep wiping them clean. About ten miles down the road, while he was rubbing a clean spot on the window in front of him, he suddenly shouted, "What the fuck is that?" It was a fair question. About a hundred yards ahead of us someone was driving in a cement mixer backward, at about fifty miles an hour, directly toward us. We swerved, he swerved, and many of us vowed to give up drinking completely.
After the hangover and the cement mixer came the harbor.
It wasn't much more than a muddy cul-de-sac at the edge of a muddy town. The air smelled of dead shrimp. As it turns out, the harbor was covered in dead shrimp. It looked like the aftermath of an explosion at a shrimp canning factory. They were everywhere.
When we parked and got out, the dead crunched under our feet.
The stink, the stink was awful.
When the harbormaster thought the surf too dangerous for fishing boats to risk, he hung a red flag from a flagpole that stood atop a small shack at the water's edge. It's a good bet that someone made a living in that shack peeling shrimp and flying flags. Today the flag was flying red, which meant that the harbor was closed and the ocean too dangerous. We hoped that the harbormaster was in bed, hungover, and the red flag was still hanging from yesterday.
There was little proof of this, but we had come to surf and suffered much and would not be denied.
In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway said there were two rules for getting on with people who speak Spanish: "give the men your cigarettes and leave the women alone." In dealing with our apprehensive boat captain, we followed both of them and added in about fifty bucks. One out of the three seemed to do the trick.
"Casa de loco" is what he said by way of agreement.
Casa de loco loosely means "the house is crazy." Over the years, I've heard a number of different Spanish-speaking men mutter this phrase, but when I've asked other Spanish-speaking men if it's a common expression they universally shake their heads no. This leads me to believe that somewhere, through those few degrees of separation, all these various phrase-uttering men have a common ancestor of sorts, and that whatever else might be said about this ancestor, one thing is certain: his house was crazy.
Our boat captain didn't care to comment much about the origin of the phrase and instead set about readying the boat. He didn't
look too happy, but truthfully it wasn't much of a trip. Twenty minutes away was where we wanted to go, a reefbreak called Chacala. At every surf destination in the world there are waves that people talk about and waves that people talk about. At Costa Azul people talk about Chacala.
They talk about catching Chacala big, and that day it was going to be big. "Triple overhead," people said. It was a mantra. It echoed in my head. I had surfed seriously overhead waves no more than twenty times in my life and had surfed real triple overhead once, and that had been at Nusa Dua, an experience I hoped to avoid duplicating. Furthermore, Chacala barrels, and I had never successfully surfed a big barreling wave before. While I was sure I could learn to surf such barrels, I wasn't sure I could do so without
falling. Unfortunately, Chacala is not an easy wave to fall from.
The wave breaks over a very shallow reef and that reef is covered in sea urchins and those sea urchins are covered in barbed spines. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that falling at Chacala on a triple-overhead day means nothing good. In our group there were plenty of surfers better than me, and plenty of them had packed first-aid kits in their backpacks that morning.
A few months back a woman had been surfing Chacala on a big day. She duck dove through a wave and once underwater had a brief argument with a bonefish. She ended up with a fish spine stuck into her arm at the bicep and out of her arm through the triceps. This seemed to be exactly the kind of argument that was typical of the spot, but I was in no hurry to find out. My enthusiasm seemed to be shared by the boat captain, who looked at the sky and crossed himself before starting the motor.
Getting to Chacala required punching out of a small bay and following the coastline north. The waves in the bay were roguish and choppy, but once we pushed out into open water the swell seemed to cohere into a pattern that felt a little like riding a mechanical bull: dangerous, but predictable in its violence.
"I think it's going to be big," I said to Ben. He glanced at me and gazed back over the bow at the ragged chop and said, "It's better not to think about it."
Devotees of Tibetan White Lineage Buddhism believe that on the other side of every negative emotion is a positive one. Like hate is the opposite of love and ecstasy the opposite of fear. In this form of Buddhism the idea is to raise the level of one's vibration to change one emotion into the other. While I have no idea what this really means, I do know that during the period of time when I was the sickest, I found that if I went right at the thing I was most afraid of, I usually ended up happier for it. It should be pointed out
that during the period of time when I was the sickest, because Lyme has a peculiarly hallucinogenic effect, it was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all. Either way, I had decided to see where my theory took me. That day it took me to Chacala.
9
The best advice I had ever been given about surfing was given to me a few weeks before I arrived in Mexico. I had gone through a short period of feeling lousy and a longer period of recovery and come out the other end and gone surfing. I was ridiculously rusty and mostly managed some rather spectacular falls. Many of these falls were happening because my timing was off and sections of the waves kept snapping closed before I could dart through them.
The guy I was surfing with told me I needed to look where I wanted to go and not where I was going. In other words, don't
look at the section of the wave that is about to slam closed on top of you, but look past it to the place where the wave's shoulder is, and usually you will end up there. One of the first things I realized that day at Chacala was the importance of this advice.
Taking off on a wave on big days is not exactly the same as taking off on a small wave on a small day only bigger. On a small day taking off means glancing at the oncoming wave, picking the spot where you want to be when you start taking off, paddling like hell for it and, at the moment when the wave starts to lift, standing up and driving down into it. With a little practice, on a small day, this is fairly easy to do. On a big day things are different.
The main thing that's different is that when you glance at the oncoming wave, it looks about the same size as a house. Most people, when they find themselves directly in the path of a moving house, have an instinctual get-me-the-hell-out-of-here response. If you can ignore that response, you turn around and paddle. The problem with this is that when you paddle into a big wave, if you continue looking at the spot where you're going, you'll notice that spot is now some fifteen feet below you, off the edge of a roiling cliff. Moreover, as things progress and you've crashed over that cliff, you'll notice that that moving house is getting ready to land on top of you. But if you look where you want to go, you'll miss noticing these things and instead notice a wide-open shoulder of the wave.
This shoulder is nowhere near as steep as the pit in front of you, and if you can make it there, odds are you can avoid getting killed for a little while longer.
For these reasons, others, most of that morning I avoided being killed. Most of this was luck, but I could have cared less. I was punch-drunk on adrenaline, paddling gleefully into big surf for the first time in my life. I was riding a spitting, swaggering crush of water. Casa de loco, baby. And then I made an error. It didn't seem like an error at the time. I had been surfing Chacala for most of the morning. The waves were coming in sets of five, with the fourth being the biggest of the bunch. Because of this, the fourth wave always broke farther outside and didn't just break left but went right as well. The rights were a dicey proposition. They petered out on a nasty pile of rocks, and since there was at least one other wave behind them, if you didn't find a way off those rocks rather quickly, that other wave was going to land on you and mash you onto those rocks.
But other guys had been riding them, and I wanted to give it a shot.
My error was bravado.
There were a number of things I hadn't counted on about going right. I hadn't counted on the fact that because I was surfing into the rocks, the water was shallower and the wave steeper. And faster. Much faster. And while neither was too much of a problem, the real problem was that the wave I had chosen didn't want to stay open. As soon as I dropped into the wave, I got swallowed by the wave. I got the washing machine. I got mashed onto the rocks. Shit happens. Then more shit happened.
Unlike every other set of the day, this one didn't have five waves; it had—well, I lost count. A better surfer or a smarter surfer would have ripped off his leash and swam in, but by the time I realized this was an option I was out of options. I got mashed onto the rocks. I was running out of breath and bleeding in a couple of places and starting to think that I might drown here when I heard Ben shouting, "Get the hell out of there." It was pretty straightforward advice, but since I had lost my ability to think, having someone else do it for me somehow seemed to make the difference.
Truthfully, I don't know how I got out of the pit. I don't know if there were more waves to paddle through. I don't remember paddling at all. The next thing I knew, I was pretty far outside the break, gasping for air. No bones were broken, though the next morning I found a bruise that started near my hip and ran to my shoulder. But at the time I didn't notice because Ben had paddled over.
"Looks like the Conductor had his way with you" was what he said.
10
It was the same story I had heard in Indonesia. Of course, I didn't recognize it at first. At first, I was just listening to Ben talk about two blokes who chased a surf rumor right off the edge of the world. That was his phrase, how he chose to put it. I often think about following an idea right off the edge of the world.
