West of Jesus, page 2
It had been a long time since I had been anywhere with a view.
Before he had reached the street corner I picked up the receiver and made a phone call to a travel agent I had never heard of before, whom I found on a Web site I had never visited before. The Web site specialized in surf travel. On the site are pictures of those perfect waves one finds on Web sites that specialize in surf travel.
These are waves the vast majority of surfers will say they have never seen, but maybe it was time to try. When all else fails, I thought, go on a damn quest.
This was not, particularly, a rational decision. I had not traveled far in four years because I could not predict which days I would bound out of bed energetic or which days I would never leave at all. Waves with long arms raised some very mixed feelings. I told the agent that I wanted to leave the country, surf every day, read and perhaps, occasionally, have a conversation. She told me I was going to Costa Azul.
5
It was a crisp seventy degrees when I left California and a gummy ninety when I landed in Puerto Vallarta. Navigating the crowded airport with my surf bag was about as much fun as drowning.
Forty yards from baggage claim a man reached out and grabbed my wrist. He could have been thirty years old; he could have been sixty years old. He wore a baby blue suit and baby blue shoes and a white shirt with rhinestones studding the collar. Urgently, he demanded I put down my bag. Owing to the fact that my brain had not yet decided it was time to speak Spanish again, it took a little while to understand why it was as such.
"He's coming" is what he said over and over again.
I had prearranged a ride from the airport to Costa Azul and considered that he might be talking about my driver. I tried to tell him my driver was meeting me on the other side of customs, which I had yet to clear.
"El hombre espera otra lado del costumbrey" is what I tried. Unfortunately,
a number of words in that sentence, my Spanish-English dictionary told me later, meant something else. The literal translation of what I was saying was "my driver is waiting across my habit." Which might have been the case as well, but the man kept shaking his head against it.
"He's coming," he said again.
"Who?" I repeated. "Who's coming?"
"From there," he said finally, exasperated, pointing to a spot in the airport's roof which looked liked a coffee stain on a white couch. "He's coming from there."
On the other side of customs my driver was waiting. He welcomed me to Mexico and led me out into the sunshine. We crossed the parking lot, on the way to an old pickup truck the color of rotting avocados. Mud splatters coated the tires, fanning out across the sides. Plastered to the rear was a bumper sticker. It read: JESUS IS COMING: LOOK BUSY. This was a level of religious irony not often found in Catholic countries. This was a level of coincidence about which I have not been properly trained to comment.
One of the largest and most expensive shopping malls in America is found in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University.
Years before, several friends and I had printed up several thousand small stickers reading: WE ARE EVERYWHERE. We had driven to this mall during a holiday weekend and attached stickers to every bumper we saw. A few days later a small segment of the local television news was devoted to the mysterious plague of bumper stickers mysteriously plaguing Palo Alto. In closing, the newscaster, with a level of irony not often found on local news, said, "The question remains—who are we?"
It is almost fifteen years later, and I still think it's a fair question.
6
Costa Azul is an "adventure resort" which, being found in Mexico, has probably seen more than its fair share of adventure. It's located in the state of Nayarit, near the village of San Bias, about which the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The Bells of San Bias."
The poem contains the lines "Oh, bring us back once more, the vanished days of yore, when the world with faith was filled." Coincidentally, San Bias is where Father Junipero Serro began his northward journey, spreading Catholic gospel up the long spit of land that would eventually become California.
The resort is a few miles down the road from San Bias, in the village of San Francisco. Since Saint Francis is known in parts of Mexico as Pancho, the town of San Francisco is known locally as San Pancho. In 1970, the former president Luis Echeverria Alvarez took a proprietary interest in San Pancho, installing a series of high-minded amenities. For the first time ever the town had running water, public schools and a hospital. Supposedly, Echeverria Alvarez had hoped to receive a prestigious United Nations posting by creating in San Pancho a self-sufficient town that would be a model for Third World development. The only information I can track down on his fate says that things did not work out as planned.
The road that winds into San Pancho is a thin twist of dirt and gravel, banked by lush, undulating terrain. In the distance are remote hilltops where old-growth trees still stand tall. Closer to the road, the forest had been pillaged for tropical hardwoods, but enough time has passed between then and now that a new canopy has regrown, thick and labyrinthine. Cows and horses graze in this tangle and occasionally wander across the roads. Just back from the gravel shoulder are dozens of wooden, white markers where—one suspects—cows have wandered and cars have swerved and things have gone badly for all concerned. Mexicans believe that the soul lingers in the spot where death occurred until proper tribute has been paid. Funerals held in villages far away are not enough, so this road is lousy with crosses.
San Pancho is a small, coastal, fishing village hacked from the edges of the jungle. The residents are farmers or fishermen or both. It is not unusual to find senior citizens wearing cowboy hats and riding donkeys through the streets. There are a few shops, a half-dozen restaurants and a main church with a tall white steeple.
The church sits in a small cobblestone plaza. Once a year, the locals throw a weekend festival here. The music is live, and people come from miles. At the height of the festival, at around midnight on Saturday, when everyone's drunk seventeen or eighteen of whatever it is they are drinking, a bull is let loose in this plaza. Before the animal is released, its torso is wrapped in fireworks and the fuse lit. The result is a low-rent running-with-the-bulls spectacle with an apparently acceptable level of carnage. Occasionally, someone is gored. Occasionally, a small white cross is added to the main square.
This is what passes for fun in San Pancho.
The coastline that runs from Puerto Vallarta north to Santa Cruz is a giant, curving bay, dotted with some of the better surf spots in mainland Mexico. In San Pancho proper the one decent wave is a rivermouth break. In some such breaks, like Malibu and Rincon, the outflowing river forms alluvial sandbars that flawlessly shape incoming waves with such consistency that the rides there have become the stuff of dreams. San Pancho is not that kind of rivermouth. It's shallow and mean and runs over a persnickety rock bottom that requires a rare and sizable north swell to work. All rivermouths are heavy with pollutants and agricultural runoff and the flotsam of upstream, inland living, but Mexican rivermouth breaks are dirtier than most and often thick with sharks. For these reasons San Pancho has yet to develop the heavy surf tourism of neighboring towns. Costa Azul is the only hotel around and stays busy primarily because the owner is a San Diego native with a decent advertising budget and because the staff uses boats and cargo vans to ferry guests to the best waves around.
The resort sits a few miles outside of town. It's a multitiered complex that starts high on a hilltop and works its way a few hundred yards down to the beach. High up on that hill are the more expensive condo-style rooms. Down low are smaller rooms and a small concrete office and beyond that a sprawling bar and restaurant, built under a giant thatched roof. It is a kind of Tiki hut writ large. There are no walls. On one side of the bar is a swimming pool shaped like a pear; on the other side is the beach shaped like a beach.
By the time I checked into my room, it was about three in the afternoon and the sticky ninety-degree heat had climbed to over a hundred. I threw on a pair of board shorts and joined about ten other guys in the swimming pool. Very few women actually come to Costa Azul. The ones who do come with boyfriends or husbands or boyfriends who will soon be husbands. That day, like most, the pool was empty of estrogen.
I wanted to know how the surf was—which is what surfers on vacation always want to know, though most surfers on vacation want to know that the surf is booming. In general, in October, in Mexico, they want to know that the nearby hurricanes are stirring up trouble and that trouble is manifesting itself as mountains of water in the double-overhead range. Double-overhead is a shifty
term. Technically, it means exactly what it sounds like, that the waves are double the height of an average man or somewhere around ten to twelve feet. Metaphorically, it's the dividing line between business and pleasure.
I ordered a beer from a woman who may very well have been the best-looking bartender in all of Mexico. Things were looking up. I asked one of the other guys in the pool how the surf was.
"Big."
"How big?"
"I mean big."
Things stopped looking up nearly as fast as they started. I was both addicted to surfing and terrified of surfing. The last surf trip I had taken was to Indonesia, and that was seven years back. In Indonesia, I learned one rather simple lesson: how easy it is to drown.
7
In 1996, about four years into my career as a writer, the country of Malaysia decided to put its northernmost province, the island of Penang, online. The plan was to run fiber to every corner and every curb, to hot-wire hospitals, hotels and hovels—the whole damn place really—and somehow I persuaded a magazine to send me to cover it. Because I had never been to that part of the world before, I wanted to extend my stay and look around. Because I was dirt-poor at the time, I called everyone I knew and mentioned I would be over in that part of the world and asked if they happened to need anything. You know, the usual: drink umbrellas, dengue fever, an article, whatever. Another editor from another magazine suggested I check out Komodo Island, and not knowing any better, I agreed. At the time of this suggestion, I had no idea that Komodo was in Indonesia, but after I figured that out I realized I could make some quick cash with a surf story in Bali and then catch a boat to dragon land. There were a few problems with that plan. Uppermost among them was the fact that I hadn't surfed in three years and back when I was surfing I was never much good. But I didn't mention these things to anyone, and one sunny December day in the midnineties I found myself in Bali.
If you've spent some time roaming the edges of the world, you've discovered that there are a lot of other people out there roaming with you. A good portion of these people would rather be anyplace besides where they are or where they came from. Many would rather be in Mecca, whether or not they realize Mecca is a city caught in a sandstorm surrounded by desert surrounded by war. Nearly half of Jamaica wants to be in Ethiopia, never mind that it's not really a country in Africa they desire, but a mystical place somewhere between Marcus Garvey and the gates of heaven. But Bali is a place where people run to and stay forever. It's a dream state, and some of its dreamers never awaken.
At the time I was there, the daily wage hovered just over two dollars, roughly fifty cents of which the locals spent each morning on small religious offerings. The offerings were made of areca nut, betel leaf and lime, red, green and white being the colors of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva respectively, often augmented with currency and cigarettes—though why any god would want to smoke Indonesian cigarettes remains something of a mystery. The offerings are known as banten, which means "gift," or enten, which means "consciousness." Either way, one quarter of the typical Balinese below-poverty-line income was spent every day on a tribute to their beliefs.
Some believe in a horny goddess known as Ratu Nyai Loro Kidul, queen of the Southern Seas. Every year she plucks several young men from the nearby ocean to be her lovers. Among her favorite hunting grounds are the water of Nusa Dua. If you ask the locals, they'll tell you that Nusa Dua is the Sunset Beach of Indonesia.
If you ask what this means, well maybe they know or maybe they don't. Maybe it's something they heard or read, or maybe they just like the way the words play in their mouths. It might mean that Nusa Dua is a bowling alley on the moon. Or a great spot for a tryst. Or a pristine expanse of white sands and luxury hotels where you can get a good tan and buy expensive mangoes. But to surfers it means only big, serious waves breaking over the sharp teeth of a coral reef on the southern tip of the island of Bali.
I'd been there for three weeks. I'd surfed the beginner waves at Kuta and Legian and paddled out at Canggu, where the waters rise over black lava and the surfers all speak Japanese. I'd hitched a ride on a logging truck west up the coast to Medewi—a slow, fat wave perfect for longboards and an afternoon snooze. I knew enough not to try and paddle out at Padang-Padang. I knew that Padang-Padang was a place to confront mortality. I knew the nearest hospital was a plane ride away in Singapore or Jakarta. I knew that to screw up there was to be very, finally, fucked. But I knew nothing about Nusa Dua—not until I met the Australians.
I met the Australians because I had woken in the middle of the night to find the door to my bungalow jimmied open and a man with a flashlight pawing through my backpack. Despite being completely naked, I leaped up and gave chase. I think it was my passport I was worried about as we dashed across the darkened lawn, past a long line of bungalows and directly into a hedge. On the other side of the hedge there was a six-foot brick wall that separated the hotel from the rest of the city. My burglar vaulted the wall, and I vaulted after him, catching my foot on the way over, ending up sprawled naked in the middle of a very crowded street.
Kuta is where half of Australia goes on spring break, and it was spring break and bar time and people were everywhere. None seemed to happy to find me suddenly in their midst, least of all the military police less than twenty feet away.
Before I was even back on my feet, they had started my way and I had started to contemplate exactly what happened when a naked American went to an Indonesian jail. Moments before they arrived, a group of drunken Australians decided, in what I can only assume was a moment of divine inspiration, to block the police's
path. They used the traditional techniques—stumbling and swearing the main components. They bought me ten seconds, but it was enough. I jumped back over the wall and dashed to my bungalow and slammed and locked the door and wedged a chair beneath the handle for good measure. As it turns out, my passport was still beneath my pillow, where I'd hidden it hours before, for safekeeping.
The next day, this time fully clothed, I bumped into the same Australians again. I told them the story and bought them some beers to say thanks, and they bought me some beers because they were Australian. Then we made up a few more excuses and kept on drinking. In the end we all had a few too many, and in the process they managed to convince me to go surf Nusa Dua with them the next day.
Hungover and standing on the shore at Nusa Dua, I thought the waves looked like medium-sized curlers, a little fast maybe, yet utterly manageable. But in the boat, drawing near, I got a better look. Nusa Dua is an outer reefbreak. Reefbreak is a fancy way of saying lots of rock underwater, and Nusa Dua is an outer reefbreak because the rock sits far offshore, completely exposed to the full brunt of the ocean's power. The wave that results is something of a wondrous monster. On a big day there's no margin for error.
Not that the Australians were making any errors. They did all the things good surfers do, catching waves like most people catch buses. I was watching them cut it up and down the line as if they were doing something I didn't understand, something I hadn't put a few years of my life into, something alien and mysterious, like golf.
I caught a wave. It took a while and it wasn't nearly the size of the leviathans my friends were catching, but it came in well overhead and I saw it starting to form in the distance, and before I had time to think things through I spun my board and dug in deep. I heard shouts of "Paddle, motherfucker, paddle" from the Aussies, then I heard nothing but the roar of water. The water that was roaring toward me was quite literally a memory. It started out in some other part of the world, forming when a change in temperature produced a change in pressure. Air's natural tendency is to move from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. We call this movement wind. When wind flickers across the ocean's surface, it produces small ripples which provide a greater surface area that can then catch more of that blowing wind. Eventually these ripples become larger and larger until they cohere into wavelets and eventually waves, attaining their greatest size when they come closest to matching the wind's speed. What makes this whole chain of events slightly stranger is that it is not the water itself traveling across the ocean as a wave, but merely the memory of the original wind's energy being constantly transferred as vibration from one neighboring water molecule to the next. When I heard the roar of that wave behind me at Nusa Dua, what I was actually hearing was the sound of the past arriving in the present with me directly in its path.
On the wave I chose, its peak—both its highest point and the first section to break—was fifteen feet to my left. Ideally, you want to paddle into a wave by lining up dead center with that peak, timing things so it arrives right behind you just as the lip's about to pitch. I was fifteen feet away because that pitching lip represents the greatest transfer of energy in this wave's life and getting to one's feet beneath that lip requires the agility to go from horizontal to vertical in the exploding milliseconds it takes for this transfer to happen. Technically, this involves laying hands flat on the front of the board, roughly in line with the shoulders, then pushing down evenly and steadily. You are both pushing yourself up to a standing position and pushing the surfboard down into the ever-steepening wave. Timed just right, feet hit board as board drops into wave. Good surfers do this with the incredible economy of motion required to keep things steady at a point when nothing is steady. Bad surfers fall down a lot.
