by Paul Theroux
“My day is every day—today and tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve been there”—and he pointed at the TV screen, which was showing a man on a big wave in Portugal. “Nazaré. Used to be unridable. It’s a gangbang now. Try Chile—the wave they call El Gringo. That’s a wave. Try El Quemao—more dangerous than most—not just huge but it breaks on a dry rocky reef.”
A traveler’s tales, boasts about destinations like playing cards, snapped down in a game of trumps.
“In Portugal?”
“Lanzarote, Canary Islands. I smashed a helmet in half there,” Sharkey said. “Shippies—Shipstern Bluff, Tasmania. A slabbing wave, a mutant. It creates steps. I air-dropped off the steps.”
You don’t know me, he wanted to shout. I’m not old!
They stared at him as though looking at a stranger, staring at a corpse, implying with their eyes the idle notion “You won’t be here much longer.”
One of them turned aside and said, “He reminds me of that guy a long time ago who ate mushrooms and then surfed Waimea at midnight.”
Briefly he hated them. Then he laughed and murmured, They don’t matter!
* * *
He thought with wonderment, I’m old. When did it happen? It wasn’t sudden—no illness, no failure; it had stolen upon him. It could have been while I was surfing, going for smaller waves, becoming breathless and needing to rest as I paddled out. Or maybe on the days I stayed home, making myself busy, unaware of time passing, and then it was sunset and too dark to go anywhere except to bed. I hadn’t really noticed except for the ache in my knees some days. And growing old is also becoming a stranger, with a different and unrecognizable face, withering to insignificance, ceasing to matter. Nothing more will happen to me. So soon, so soon—and how sad to know that I will only get older.
* * *
Naked, shaving with his electric razor, buzzing it over his cheeks, he padded to the front room and threw the sliders apart, letting the day into the house, the air like silk slipping across his shoulders. He returned to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, spat out the suds, and walked to the kitchen. He swung a kettle of water onto the stove to boil, then found a pineapple and slashed at its sides, revealing its pulpous yellow, and carved slabs of its flesh and chunked them on a chopping board. He put a pinch of Dragon Well tea into a pot and filled it with the kettle of hot water. Last, the pineapple chunks in a bowl. And the tea and the bowl he took to the lanai, to sit and study the day. He was barefoot, he was content.
The ghost of a wind barely fluttered the leaves on the pak lan tree as he listened to the surf report: “. . . head-high sets in the morning, rising to twelve- to fifteen-foot faces in the afternoon, with a high-surf advisory expected for north- and west-facing shores. Light winds today and tomorrow. A storm in the central Pacific heading our way will deliver brisk and breezy conditions over the weekend.”
Hearing the radio voice, the geese squawked again, and when Sharkey had finished his fruit and drunk his tea, he took a bowl of pellets downstairs to the sloping lawn—the five geese following—and scattered it slowly, watching the big birds contend. The biggest gander he fed holding pellets in his cupped hand, and the eager bird coming close stepped on his foot, raking his instep with its fangy claws and leaving a deep scratch and a mudstain. As Sharkey nudged him away, the peacock emerged from the frangipani grove, and the two black Muscovy ducks sidled toward the scattered feed, pecking cautiously. Mourning doves settled and strutted, looking for a chance to seize some grains, and the chatter of all the birds brought a pair of small scrawny chickens—jungle fowl—from behind a clump of dusty blue bamboo.
He watched until all the food was pecked away and the geese had gone through their particular sequence: having finished their pellets, they headed down the lawn and began tearing at the short grass with their beaks, as though moving on to the next course. It seemed the pellets made them hungry for grass, and then they’d all take turns drinking at the basin. They too had a routine.
No soft descriptive words came to him, but the fond feeling did, that he had found a place he loved; that he was so happy living on this island he could die here—such a life taught you how to die. The mood of satisfaction in his mind was a summation: I don’t want more than this. He knew he had everything he wished for; he was too superstitious to say so, for fear it would seem like smug boasting and what he had would vanish.
And that thought was underscored by a shama thrush, its warbling so melodious it held him still until he could see the bird itself flash from a branch to the ground, where it found an insect the geese had raised, jubilantly beating their wings. One peck and the thrush was back on its branch, its long tail twitching, warbling again.
All this time—rested, resolved into a calm, restored body—he was smiling at the warmth of the day, the beauty of the night-dampened trees, the glitter in the blaze of sunrise. He was whole again. Feeding the birds on the lawn put him in mind of the chickens in the coop. He dug a bucket of pellets from the grain barrel on the lanai and walked down the hill to the grove of trees, where a screened-in coop—once a work shed—held a dozen hens. They fluttered and screeched when he entered. He filled the feeder with pellets and found six eggs in a nesting box, small smooth ones, off-white, and delicate, like lumps of carved ivory.
Heading uphill across the lawn to his house he saw a new hibiscus blossom on the bush by the path, the knob of a tree fern swelling to unfurl into a frond, the pencil-shaped culm of a bamboo shoot protruding from the edge of a clump, the new spear of a palm slanted from the top of a trunk, a yellowish curled leaf of a monstera in the midst of elephant ears of the thick vine, gardenias blown open on a bush, and more, to the sigh of the ironwood boughs at the periphery of his lawn.
He had planted everything but the ironwoods, he had watched it all grow bigger by the week. He was no gardener, you didn’t have to be here, a broomstick jammed into Hawaiian soil would become a tree and bear fruit. His plants and shrubs had taken hold and bulked on the hillside, and he marveled at his luck.
It all looked edible, and much of it was—the thick bamboo shoots, the blossoms and leaves of the nasturtiums, the golf-ball-sized lilikoi, yellow-skinned red-fleshed passionfruit that he pinched open and ate or Olive juiced. And the sweet finger bananas that grew by the walkway, the mountain apple tree with its ripe fruit of pale crispness, the Java plum tree, the heavy avocados, each one swinging on a stem.
He lived in a garden, enclosed by fruit trees. He drank his second cup of tea, gloating on the pleasure of it all, the trees growing more fragrant as the sun warmed them, his birds contented and fed, no longer squawking for food but strutting on the grass, and some of the geese resting, their heads tucked under their wings.
The drawn-out boom of the waves at Waimea a mile down the hill, the muffled rumble, then the collapse, like crockery shattering, the sigh and retreat of the heavy water, was a continuous rehearsal of slow bursts. It was as though the ocean were being filled somewhere far-off and the big bulky ripples of its filling were slamming the edges of the shore, rising higher, brimming against the beach, the sea like an enormous swilling pot, the fury somewhere over the horizon pushing its disturbance to its rim.
Light offshore winds would mean almost glassy conditions, wave faces burnished to velvet.
Sharkey sat in silence. The silence was composed of the racket of mynah birds, the cheeping of green sparrows, the chitter of finches, the dry rustle of the palms, the clatter of their fronds, the distant sound of the surf—now a chug-chugging, now a suck-squeeze and a drenching crash, a vast sieving of ocean, a bolster of water butting against sand and rock, growing louder, beckoning with a loosening boom.
He’d woken with the assurance that the whole day belonged to him. Olive was at work: her absence helped. There was never any question of his doing anything he didn’t want to do. He told himself that he’d earned this solitary splendor: he’d worked, he’d sat unwillingly at his laptop and tried to please his sponsors; but now all that was over.
&nb
sp; It was not a question of retirement—apart from a few years lifeguarding, he’d never had a real job, and so there was nothing to retire from. The life he was leading was the life he had always led. To those who said, “You’ve got all the answers,” he smiled, and when they added, “You’re selfish and spoiled,” he replied, “It’s called being happy.”
“Here’s the secret,” he said. “I don’t want more than I have—therefore I have everything. It’s the economy of enough.”
He was content; he’d found the best place to live—a little farm on the North Shore of this island; and the best way to spend his days—surfing. When the surf was up, as on this sunny day in January, he knew he’d spend the whole morning catching waves, and after lunch, and maybe a nap, more waves.
“You’re such a wanker, you never think of anyone but yourself,” Olive said after a week with him. It was not an accusation but statement of fact, marveling one night as he speared the last slice of mango from the bowl that sat between them.
“Yes, I have to, because no one thinks of me,” he said. “It’s a mistake to think that anyone cares, or gives a shit about your welfare. People think only of themselves. You have to do the same.”
Olive had a what-about-me? frown on her face, but exaggerated and self-mocking.
She said, “That party where I first met you, I saw a stonking big geezer get down on his knees when he saw you. That got my attention.”
“So you noticed he was old.”
“Yes, but he truly respected you as a surfer. And so did that popsy he was with.”
He had known English Olive for a month. You meet a new person and become lovers and, talking in bed, you become someone special again, interesting in your vividness, as your life is reviewed, and all your stories are fresh and indisputable. Olive still did not know him, but there was time.
“Big-wave surfing at night, by moonlight. The magic mushroom story. Surfing from Maui to Molokai in a storm. The exotic travel—all the hype,” he said. “Too bad they don’t know the truth.”
“They’d be disappointed?”
He shook his head. “No. The truth is better—what really happened is messier but matters more.”
“They wish they had your confidence.”
“You have confidence. You came here alone—you got a job at the hospital. You did it all yourself. You’re akamai.”
“Pardon?”
“Super-smart,” he said. “We have the word here, but we don’t have much of the real thing.”
Her akamai story had impressed him as proof of her power and conviction. She had come to Hawaii from London with her boyfriend, Rupert, for a visit, just ten days in Waikiki. He’d stayed in town and she’d taken the bus to Hale‘iwa, had lunch—an avocado-topped mahi burger and lemonade, sitting in sunshine—then boarded another bus, intending to travel around the island. But approaching Waimea Bay, looking down from the bus, she was dazzled by her first sight of the waves, wide and glittering, walled by cliffs of lava rocks; the green valley behind it lush, like the gateway to Eden. Getting off the bus, she stepped into air perfumed by blossoms and walked to the beach, where she sat on the slope of sand under a pale blue heat-bleached sky, sadly watching the waves breaking, the waves seeming to speak a language she believed she could learn—almost tearful, because she knew she’d be leaving in a few days.
From the bus window on the way back to Waikiki, she saw a bumper sticker on a beatup car: NO BAD DAYS. She kept the memory from Rupert. The flight to Heathrow via Los Angeles took eighteen hours. They arrived before dawn, the taxi rattling through greasy streets, heavily dressed people jostling at bus stops to keep warm, frowning like bewildered refugees, resigned to rain, the black solidities of London house fronts, the mute unwelcoming English look. Rupert groaned, saying he had a meeting at the bank later that morning. “And the hospital awaits you, petal.”
On their arriving home after a holiday, Rupert always told the same joke: “Wipe that smile off your face, Ollie. We’re back in England.” He said it that morning and looked at her. “Bloody hell, you’re still smiling.”
Later, she told Sharkey she had been thinking, I want to live on the island of no bad days.
She did not tell Rupert she’d come to a decision. She knew he’d oppose her. Within a month she’d resigned from St. Thomas’ Hospital and was back in Hawaii, applying for a job at Kahuku Medical Center and living near Rocky Point, alone.
Sharkey finished his cup of green tea, and the recollection of the talk with Olive made him smile, because it suggested that he’d had fame, and that his fame would grow, and that something would come of it. But he knew that was not so. All this time he dabbed at his foot, where the goose had clawed him. He glanced at his hand, and seeing that he had blood on his fingers, he licked it off. The wound wasn’t serious—just a claw mark.
Olive had left a note for him on the counter, one word in her neat nurse’s hand, all caps—WANKER.
It was a love note, her perverse way of complimenting him, an English thing, teasing the one you love most.
He was content. He was now convinced that the beauty of his life was a certainty that nothing more, nothing greater, would happen to him; that, at peace, he asked for nothing; that he was only on another wave, sliding, climbing, paddling up its back, hovering at its lip, tipping and then racing through the tube—a man surfing, moving in an easy crouch through turbulence, all the time reading its features and its froth, anticipating its alteration, keeping a fraction ahead of his roll, just a man on a board, flying across the swelling slope of heavy water.
2
Epic Surf
His dreams prepared him for the day, nothing in his mind was accidental; the wave that rose in his sleep broke on his waking and swept him into the morning.
He was already in his shorts, and the day was so warm he didn’t bother putting on a T-shirt. His board was strapped to the roof rack from yesterday. He drove down the hill to Three Tables Beach, and parked, and waxed his board. He studied the sets rising outside the break they called Rubber Duckies, the way they lifted and rolled in, staying whole and smooth-faced until they smashed against the wall of lava rock at the shore and cascaded down its fissures.
That rock wall, with its spikes of eroded and pitted boulders, was the reason most surfers avoided this spot. There was no beach, no sand, nowhere to crawl ashore. In places it had the look of a shattered Gothic steeple, carved to sharpness among broken gargoyles and stone ornaments. Surfing on the Côte Basque, Sharkey had seen such gray steeples in Brittany, and there the beaches were rocky too, looking tumbled with old cathedral stone. Linger a fraction too long here at Rubber Duckies, or wipe out at the end of a ride, and you were dashed against the spikes of bulking lava. He had seen surfers lacerated on the stones, their arms and faces torn and bloody from a badly timed run and a face-plant. He always surfed alone, and the danger, the knowledge that mainly kooks surfed here, assured him of solitude.
But he saw two surfers seated on their boards on a swell. He paddled out, duck-diving beneath incoming white waves, tucking the nose of his board down, and joined them in the lineup. He greeted them as he sat, legs dangling in the water, rising on the incoming swell like a man on a horse.
“How’s it?”
They nodded and he took them to be newcomers, mainlanders, or perhaps foreigners.
“Were you out yesterday?” he asked. “It was okay. But it’s coming up.”
One said, “First time,” with an accent, probably Brazilian.
They had no idea who he was, and he smiled, enjoying the novelty of their not knowing him, of his bobbing on the wave with them as a stranger.
And so instead of taking the next good wave he hung back and swayed on the swell, letting it lift him, so that he could watch the other two paddle into the wave and surf it. One of them missed it; the second tipped himself into the face and caught a ride, surfing it almost to the rocks. And when the man lost his balance at the end and a wave behind him slapped his back, he snatched a
t his board and saved himself by swimming hard away from the pitted lava rock, blackened from the seawater streaming across its serrations.
Straddling his board, rising and falling, riding the swell like a horseman in the sea, majestic on his steed, soothed Sharkey almost as much as catching a wave. He sat watching the other two surfers until, as he guessed would happen, the bigger of the two misjudged the distance and dismounted too late and wound up struggling in the foaming rock pools beneath the black cliffs.
The second surfer dithered and called out to his friend, whose board had dinged the rock, snapping off its fin. Then both were foundering, slapping the incoming waves, kicking themselves away from the cliffs, until they managed to edge toward the beach about sixty feet away and the more forgiving sand. One man was injured, the other one helping him out of the water, the boards tumbling after them. They sat on the dazzling sand above the tidemark and conferred, and then climbed higher up the beach, the first man limping.
They’ll be fine, Sharkey thought, glad to see them go. And if they’re scared they’ll never come back.
With the surf to himself, Sharkey sat on his board and waited for a wave, and when he saw one rising behind him he lifted his board into the froth, paddling like mad, and leaped onto the board and stood and braced, his arms out, and rode it, twisting beneath the overhang, then cutting back to ride the whole smooth sculpted hollow of the wave’s face, spanking the glissade with his board. The wave was his, the whole cove too; the others wouldn’t return. Someone should have told them to be careful here—there was no beach for the waves to break upon, only the scabbed edges of the low cliffs and the black fangs and sharp talons of the eroded lava rock.
