by Paul Theroux
Paddling back to where the waves were rising from the incoming swell, he remembered another story attributed to him, how he’d kept paddling one day until he’d found himself five miles offshore, among the late whales of April, and drifted with the cows and the calves on the southwesterly rip current, the Waimea Express, all the way to Kaena Point, and come ashore where the albatrosses nested.
“Is it true?” people had once asked.
“Just a story,” he said. They weren’t convinced, yet no one had asked lately.
Anyone who did not surf had no idea how even the most basic maneuver took such strength and balance; how for long periods in a pounding shore break he was still driven by anxiety; how so many of his good friends had died—drowned in a hold-down, got hit by their board and knocked unconscious, got caught by their snagged leash. But it all looked so simple from shore, people invented improbable feats and heroics. They did not understand that simply to ride a big wave was a miracle of poise and strength.
* * *
In his dreams he was always on an empty wave like this. With the waves to himself, he surfed for the next two hours in the sunshine, and on a whim, for a better view of the green cliffs, he paddled out for almost a mile, near where whales filled the ocean’s surface with the misty plumes from their blowholes. He looked back to the island and gloried in the sight of the steep green pali, a vertical drop that was a wall of tangled trees and black rock. There was too much of it to be visible close up—you needed to be offshore to take in the whole panorama of spires. He was the only surfer out today at this break, the sole owner of this view.
After ten good rides he took one more, carving a turn toward the sandy beach down the shore at Three Tables, where the injured surfer had lain, where his friend had helped him away. Sharkey dropped to his board and paddled to the low waves flopping against the sand. He sat and looked at the sea until fatigue overtook him, a great heaviness penetrating his body, and he stretched out, using his board to pillow his head, and he slept with the sun on his face, his back on the hot sand.
Flattened against the beach, in that posture of floating face-up, he slept, buoyed by the sun heating his body, levitated again in slumber. He was cooked in dazzling light. When he woke, sand adhering to the sweat on the side of his face, he yawned, as two young surfers strode past, their boards under their arms.
“How’s it?”
They acknowledged him with grunts but no more than that, and for the second time that day he thought, They don’t know me—had no idea that the lanky figure stretched out on the beach, propped on one elbow, was the big-wave surfer Joe Sharkey. He smiled at the notion of his anonymity, the novelty of it, the restfulness it offered him. It gave his day the order he wanted, without interruption.
He carried his board to the car and strapped it to the rack, then walked up the road to the supermarket, bought a sandwich and coffee at the deli counter, and returned to the beach and sat cross-legged for lunch. A month before he’d seen a monk seal wriggle ashore just here and hump itself up the steepness of the beach, away from the waves. The doggy thing had folded its flippers against itself and slept for three hours. He’d watched it the whole time, in a mood of protection, and it was a reminder of his animal sleep in his animal life.
* * *
With that thought he looked up, hoping for a whale, but the pod he’d seen earlier, spouting plumes of mist, had swum southwest, out of sight in the direction of Kaena Point. Backlit by the afternoon sun, the point was a dark headland, afloat in the gleaming sea.
Satisfied with food, warmed by coffee, bathed in sunshine, he snoozed again, sweating and seal-like, and when he was rested he got his goggles from the car and swam out beyond the rocks, upraised on sea foam like tabletops, that gave the beach its name. He drifted awhile among schools of darting fish until he saw, just below the surface, a green sea turtle nibbling at the moss that clung to the pitted rocks.
The turtle was not alarmed, though its side eye widened on the flat of its head when Sharkey approached. It set its hooked parrot beak against the rocks, nagging at the weedy growth, and it rose and drifted with the incoming swell. Sharkey saw how its flippers were positioned like wings, which it slowly beat in the luminous water, and doing so it seemed to soar without effort, a slimy green manhole cover tipping itself weightlessly out to sea.
That’s how I fly in my dreams, Sharkey realized, seeing the turtle lift itself away from the spiked shelves of black rock and move its flippers slowly, angling itself, not a manhole cover anymore but big and buoyant, rising like a fat beaky bird with four wings.
The swell had increased; the waves were much higher than they’d been in the morning—one pushed Sharkey so near the rocky reef that he had to fight to avoid being tumbled against it. So he dived into the swell and swam out, but as he did his foot struck the sharp face of the reef, and he knew from the sting of saltwater that he’d slashed his toe.
Positioning himself at the widest opening, he body-surfed through the slot between the rocks on a rolling wave and made it to the beach in one ride. There he sat, clutching his toe, until the blood stopped flowing through his fingers. And he laughed, seeing that the cut was near the wound the goose claw had made.
No one was surfing the toppling white crests at Rubber Duckies now, no one was swimming; the waves were twice the size they’d been earlier in the day—the surf forecast he’d heard in the morning was proving accurate. Fifteen-foot faces here meant higher waves at Waimea, just around the point of land in the next bay.
Rather than drive to the parking lot, which was probably full of tourists’ cars anyway, Sharkey unstrapped his board from his roof rack and carried it along the road to the path beside the guardrail that led to Waimea Beach. His toe ached from the cut he gotten on the rock, but he mocked himself—a sore toe!—and was soon distracted by the boom of the breaking surf before he saw the great sliding rollers swallowing the surfers, who looked tiny in the blue slopes of the waves.
Flattened on his board, sledding down the steepness of the wave-washed sand, he entered the water paddling, using the riptide at the right-hand side of the bay to help him into the huge incoming swell and the density of foam. He ducked under three large waves and, still paddling, got himself beyond the break, where five other surfers in the lineup were riding their boards.
Perhaps one of them spoke to him, but if so Sharkey didn’t hear it. The waves collapsing on the inside rocks at Pinballs drowned out all other sounds, and anyway the other surfers were too anxious and watchful to take their eyes away from the blue bulge of the swell and the sets, now rising to what was known in Waimea as epic, or nearly so, dangerous to anyone except the most experienced big-wave surfer. But even experts drowned here, toppled and pinned to the bottom by a succession of crashing waves. If this swell kept rising they’d certainly hold the Eddie contest—when the faces of the sets had to be sustained at thirty feet and above, and even better if they were forty.
Those young surfers he had met at the party last night—were any of them in the lineup now? He scanned the faces of the surfers near him, and as he did two of them pushed off and were engulfed, tumbled, fighting to balance. Another wave in the set rose behind him, and beyond it, as he adjusted, a likelier wave. A surfer ahead of him slipped sideways, out of sight, like a naked man tumbling from a building, and Sharkey propelled himself into the wave lifting his board, and when the nose of his board protruded into its lip, he jumped and squared his feet for balance and crouched and rode it, skidding slantwise on the curling face, into the moving trough.
His wave was wicked froth spilling over him as it barreled, and he angled his board to right across its face, the dark water below him ripping like a muscle of blue. Then he was streaking down a steep hillside that was carrying him forward and fast in a precipitous skid. It took all the strength he had in his legs to stay upright and to keep the board jammed against the moving slope of gleaming water, and just as he thought he was free of it, a shadow fell over him, the peak of the wav
e toppling him into a swallowing barrel and speeding him sideways. He shot through it, enclosed by a glittering narrowing cone. He rode it until it swelled and subsided under him, and he was released as the wave broke utterly and flattened and washed and pooled against a wave draining down the beach, allowing Sharkey to float almost to shore. He dropped off his board and pushed it onward to avoid a wave now breaking behind him and threatening to swamp him.
Out of the surf zone, he fell to his knees. All his strength was gone in the effort and exhilaration of that one great ride. He carried his board up a dry sand mound on the beach and gasped with delight. He was exhausted and knew that a good part of that fatigue was the result of anxiety when, in the middle of his ride, he had felt the ache in his lacerated toe and feared that adjusting his feet for the pain would put him a fraction off-balance and send him off his board. He would be buried. High, dense, and unforgiving, it was the sort of wave that would push him down, and the waves behind it would keep him down. The thought of it, together with his unexpected fatigue, kneeling alone on the beach, his lungs burning, made him briefly tearful.
As a younger man he might have gone out again, but this ride was enough. And he saw that the risk he’d taken was real—the slice in his toe had opened and had begun to bleed again, probably from the effort of holding the board down against the force of the wave. That injured toe and clawed foot might have been his undoing.
He had proven himself and felt reprieved, and now the daylight was fading, the last of the sun snagged in low clouds floating on the horizon, beyond Kaena Point, the early sunset of winter, hardly six, when the sun sank and glowed in a green flash in the sea.
Going home, he passed an improvised sign, FRESH FISH, and pulled onto the grassy shoulder of the road, where a man was sitting on the flap of his pick-truck, kicking his feet, a plastic cooler next to him.
“What have you got?”
“Got plenny ahi,” the man said, lifting the lid of the cooler. “I catch ’em myself today morning.”
“Looks nice.”
“Is primo. Good for sashimi. Look—big, da fish.”
The fish slashed into thick bleeding slabs was as red as beef.
“Give me five bucks’ worth.”
Wrapping two steaks in a square of white paper and folding it into a parcel, the man salivated, as people do when handling fresh meat, and handed it to Sharkey. Accepting the money, he said, “Is so ono,”and touched his lips to indicate its savor.
Then Sharkey was home, on his lanai, drinking a beer as the last of the light slipped from the sky. The cloud was pulled apart and smokelike, appropriate to the fiery glow beneath it, and soon there were more flames, blazing to pure gold, and at last a quenching of pale pink and fading blue, the light cooling over the horizontal seam of sea and sky.
He sat, listening to the occasional grunts of the geese. The chickens had taken to the trees to roost for the night. Before he finished his beer he saw the headlights of Olive’s car reflected on the stands of bamboo, and he rose to greet her, but when he did he felt a stab of pain in his wounded toe, and he favored it, limping slightly as he approached her.
“Darling,” he said.
“You had a good day?”
“My mother used to say that to me.”
“What’s wrong with your foot?”
“Dinged it on a rock. Goose clawed it too. How was your day?”
“Busy.” And she knelt to examine his toe. “Ouch. That’s a deep cut. I’ll bandage it.”
“Later.”
“We had a surfer with a gash on his leg.”
“Might have been a guy I saw at Rubber Duckies. A malihini. Small world.”
“Brazilian. It was slashed to the bone.”
“A lesson,” Sharkey said. “Want a beer?”
“No. I’m shattered. I’ve been tired all day. Was that you this morning, you beastly little man, having your way with me?”
“That’s me—the incubus.”
Olive yawned, saying, “I’m hungry, though.”
“I have eggs—got them this morning. And I bought some ahi along the road from a guy. There’s salad too. I’ll make it.”
“Okay—let’s have a shower.”
They took a shower together, soaping each other, and after they’d dried themselves, Olive sat with her whining hair dryer and brush while Sharkey peppered the ahi and seared it, then sliced it thin and arranged it on the salad. He heated the smaller frying pan, cracked the eggs into a bowl and beat salt and pepper into them, and poured the mixture into the pan, scraped lightly at it and grated cheese on it, then folded it and divided it in half. Olive had put the mats on the table, and he joined her with the two plates.
They ate quietly, and when they finished they sat without speaking, and as though to explain her silence, Olive said, “I’m so fagged.”
“The gate’s open,” Sharkey said. “I’ll get it.”
Walking in the darkness on the loose stones of his driveway, he felt the ache in his toe sharpen with such suddenness he stumbled slightly from the pain and wondered if he’d stubbed it.
He closed the gate and, limping back to the house, saw Olive watching from the lanai.
“I think I stepped on something.”
Olive shone a small flashlight on it. “You’re really unlucky. Two punctures, near your cut. I told you to let me bandage it. That’s a ghastly centipede sting. Poor toe.”
“Poor me.” But it was only his toe, and he was someone who had known broken bones and slashes from crown-of-thorns starfish, and stinging stonefish and razor coral. And he smiled, thinking it was the toe the goose had stepped on and clawed, the one he’d cut on the lava rock, and now the centipede.
“Poor you.” Olive hugged him.
“I’m happy,” he said. “Nothing hurts if you’re happy.”
They went to bed. Olive was asleep almost immediately. Sharkey lay awake, slowly subsiding as he reflected on the day. It had been a good day, waking from a dream of flying and making love. The contented geese, surfing at Rubber Duckies, swimming at Three Tables. He’d seen whales and had an inkling of their long eerie calls from underwater. He’d spotted a green sea turtle. He’d surfed a monster wave at Waimea. He’d bought and seared an ahi steak. He’d drunk a beer by the light of a dazzling sunset. His toe ached slightly still—perhaps more than slightly—but that pain was a reminder that he was fully alive.
A perfect day. He’d spent many days like this. He hoped for more.
3
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Early evening in the dusty exhausted light on the North Shore, the purply-pink sunset puddling at the far end of the ocean, and then the green flash, the gulp of the sun as it winked beneath the water. Sharkey turned from this splendor to watch the twitch of the waitress’s shorts. He stood to see more, then self-consciously looked away, and just beyond the window a white-faced owl was spooked from a monkey pod tree to flap into blackness. As a mass of flies found his sweaty head, he batted at them with his free hand. And Olive was on the line.
“Liv,” he said, the phone clapped to his ear.
The waitress’s tight-fitting shorts were white frilly knickers, her T-shirt was artfully torn, a disk tattooed on the nape of her neck beneath her swinging ponytail, a spidery tattoo wrapped around her ankle.
“That was the second transfusion we did today,” Olive was saying. “I was in triage . . .”
He looked away from the waitress and said, “Sounds like you had a big day,” hoping to take up the slack.
And now he turned to look at the froth accumulating at the edge of the beach; but it wasn’t froth, it was flotsam, junk, plastic bags pulsing just beneath the surface like the odd beanies of blobby jellyfish, and a condom like a sea creature, and he was disgusted and angry, thinking, Everything that is wrong with the earth has a human origin—they are the problem, befouling the planet. The trash was a reproach to him for leering at the waitress.
“So I’m running late. I’m in my car. I
won’t be much longer.”
“You know where I am. Aloha.” And, clicking off his phone, he gave his full attention to the waitress. He loved her lips, he loved her feet, she was small and solid, had dimpled knees and tousled hair that had worked loose from the clip that held her ponytail. She had everything. Most of all she had youth.
“Can I get you a drink?”
“A beer, please.”
She drew her whole face into a puckered grin, like a child’s awkwardness before an adult.
“I know who you are.”
He said, “I’d like to know who you are.”
“I’m nobody.”
“You’re a surfer,” he said, and—hesitating, laughing like a bashful boy—reached, squeezing the hard meat on her well-developed shoulder.
“Yeah, but I’m a surf bunny. It was too big today for me.”
He said, “I was out. Pipeline was cranking.”
She laughed, full-throated, appreciatively. “My boyfriend thinks you’re awesome. His father thinks so too. He says he used to see you in the lineup when he was a kid.”
And that was that—the boyfriend, the admiring old man—she could not have put him in his place more neatly, without any effort. I’m a bystander, he thought. Everyone is spoken for, or too young. I should be glad with what I have, which is a whole life, yet the animal in me is always hungry.
“Want a glass?” she said when she came back with the beer, the bottle on a tray.
“I think beer tastes better in a glass,” he said. “You need to get your olfactories going, dip your nose in it—you know, smell it.”
“Old factories, I guess so,” she said, suddenly flustered, and he was reminded that he should not be so glib. She was sweet, in the island way. He knew the stare of incomprehension, as though he’d lapsed into another language or was mocking her.
