by Paul Theroux
“So far, no one.”
But I’ve never heard that, Sharkey thought: a big wave that has never been ridden.
“And not one,” the man was saying, “but maybe four or five separate waves, breaking right and left.”
“Why don’t you ride it?”
“If I could ride it I wouldn’t be telling you about it. I’d keep it for myself,” the man said. “But this one has killed so many fishermen.”
“Where did you hear about it?”
“I don’t hear,” the man said. “I see it.”
His name was João Roque de Oliveira, he came from the city of Coimbra, sixty miles north of the bay of Nazaré, and the town Sitio on the cliff, above where the wave broke. It was a sad story, João said. Sitio and Nazaré were impoverished fishing villages, made poor because of the wave, which had swamped incoming boats and drowned so many men that the shore was known as a place of death. The stigma had doomed the villages, fishing had declined; the wave dominated its fate, looming over the place, threatening with death anyone who faced it.
“Wicked wave, bad wave,” João said.
Sharkey laughed. “No. The wave is just a liquid, rising and falling, then gone forever. It has no character except its size and shape—and that’s temporary. It has no morality. It’s water, formed by the rocks beneath it and the wind behind it.”
“But dangerous.”
“Only if you’re not prepared for it,” Sharkey said. “If you fall off a mountain, it’s not the mountain’s fault. I’ve been surfing for many years and what I’ve learned is, never blame the wave. Look, I blew out my knee on Cacimba do Padre. Whose fault is that?”
“But I think,” João said, becoming thoughtful, “if someone manage to ride the wave at Nazaré, he can bring luck to the village, and maybe tourists.” He nodded. “Maybe money.”
Surfers traded stories about waves all the time, and yet Sharkey had never heard anything of this one at Nazaré. Even surfers who’d ridden the waves at San Sebastián and the Spanish coast—Sharkey himself at San Lorenzo and Vigo, not far from the place João had described at Nazaré—even those watermen had never mentioned the wave.
Maybe they’d never heard of it. Or maybe it was that other factor in surf culture—the secret place, the special break, never to be shared. When Sharkey was interviewed and asked to name his favorite surf spot, he always said with a smile, “I’ll give you my third favorite.”
“I don’t get it,” the interviewer would say.
“Telling you my favorite will turn it into a gangbang.”
Surfers were evasive when it came to talking about the great places they knew. They might swap the names of breaks, but the rare ones, the undiscovered waves, they kept to themselves.
So the fact that Nazaré wasn’t mentioned did not mean it was unknown; it might be one of those secret waves in the world, known to a few, not to be revealed to the many, who would crowd the lineup.
“João, why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re Joe Sharkey.”
* * *
Back in Hawaii he had a second operation on his knee and spent his days in physical therapy and cross-training. He said nothing of the monster wave, nor did he mention Portugal to any other surfers. He avoided telling Kailani, his girlfriend, suspecting that she might mention it to one of her friends at the health food store in town where she worked. All the women there knew surfers, and the wave would be revealed to the North Shore, and to Honolulu and the world.
What he said was, “I’ve decided to go with Prime Fuel.”
“That cheesy energy drink,” Kailani said. “It’s junk. Just juice and chemicals and sugar.”
“I need a sponsor.”
“For what? You’ve got money, you got this great house in Pupukea now. You’ve got me.”
She was pleading, indignant, and looked wronged. And she was outraged in the way only the young can be outraged, he thought—their innocence violated, with the knowledge of the jangle of money in the world, money as influence, a glimpse of business, seeing it—rightly—as the source of wickedness.
Sharkey said, “I have to do some traveling.”
“If you take that deal, I’m not going with you.” Her hair was black and lustrous; she tossed it as she threatened, and looked beautiful. “In fact, I won’t want to know you.”
“What’s your problem?”
“You’re selling out,” she said. “You’re not one of these stupid surfers who do anything for money. You’re Joe Sharkey. You’re akamai. You know more better than these guys.” She began to cry, snatching helplessly at her eyes and her smeared cheeks.
“Traveling costs money. You’ve never been out of Hale‘iwa. What do you know?”
Enraged by the question, by Sharkey’s kicking her yoga mat as he said it, Kailani lost her tears in her anger and said, “That stuff is so junk. Is like poison. And you promised you never do it, and now you doing it. So you fake, and you make ass, and it have a bad ending—that’s what I know, panty!”
And when she left, taking her tray of sprouts, her sticks of incense, her aromatic candles and her yoga mat, Sharkey was relieved. He had wanted to go alone. All the sponsors needed was his name and a photograph of him holding the bulbous bottle of Prime Fuel and smiling.
* * *
He flew via New York to Lisbon and rented a car. Passing the villages, the markets, the tile-roofed bungalows, the field hands pruning in the vineyards, he thought, I am a stranger in their country. No one knows that I am on a reconnaissance mission. They too are unaware of the monster wave.
João was waiting for him as he’d promised, at the church in Sitio, Nossa Senhora de Nazaré. He greeted Sharkey with a hug and said, “I obey what you said. I tell no one that you come here.”
“I drove via Santarém—deliberately avoided the coast road,” Sharkey said. “I wanted to be surprised.”
“I show you,” João said.
In the car, driving into the town of Sitio, he’d heard nothing, keeping the windows closed. And the church was in the town. But getting out of the car he’d become aware of a rumble—the sound not of water but of something more solid, like the movement of earth, the shifting of big boulders, the seismic tumble of their stone surfaces chafing, with the suggestion of a motor behind them; then silence; then the rumble again, a sequence of landslides, a mountain moving. He felt it under his feet, the vibration traveled up his legs and into his belly, he sensed it at the back of his eyes.
“We walk—we go to the farol,” João said, leading him upward along a road, a fortresslike building in the distance, on the cliff at the end of the road, the cupola of a lighthouse surmounting it.
Approaching the cliff edge, Sharkey saw another cliff on a mountain headland beyond it, but this one was in motion—gray, still swelling, topped with froth, and the cliffside was not smooth. On its face were the toppling boulders in the landslide he’d heard. The mountain moved toward him in silence and then, slowly, it broke in a succession of loud collapses, some explosive, the shattering of rock, others aqueous sighs of sea spray, all these sounds at last subsiding in a rattle and smash, a swallowing of the sea.
João had been talking—the falling water had drowned out his words.
“It is the wave,” he was saying. “And this is not the biggest day.”
Sharkey said nothing for a long time, watching more sets rise and roll in and break.
“It closes out so near to shore,” he finally said.
“Is a problem,” João said.
“The problem,” Sharkey said, and then watched more waves before he spoke again.
The problem was not in riding it, he considered—though that would be a long steep descent and maybe wiping out against the rocks. But more than that was the difficulty of paddling up this mountainside of the swell and setting up on its forbidding summit.
He said so to João.
“Sometimes we ride jet skis around the back of it,” João said. “You know about towing?”
Sh
arkey nodded, still studying the wave, which, while he watched, parted in the middle, one wave breaking right and steeply, another portion breaking left in a barrel, and in the distance a swelling mound of gray ocean becoming bluer as it rose up, lifting and forming into a distant shapely hill and growing to a craggy cliffside before it rolled onward past the other waves and swelled and tipped and broke—and in a matter of seconds this stupendous work of nature was gone, collapsed, tumbled flat in a slosh of froth. Sharkey saw himself fighting his way to the sand, dragging his board behind him.
“I don’t like the idea of being towed into a wave,” he said.
“No other way to do it,” João said.
“You know Mount Haleakalā?” Sharkey asked him. “On Maui?”
“I hear about it.”
Sharkey doubted him, but said, “High mountain. Ten thousand feet. I saw it when I was surfing Jaws, and my buddy says, ‘Let’s go up the mountain some morning and see the sunrise.’ So we got woken up at an ungodly hour in the dark and were picked up by a van. Then a long ride up a mountain road, and by the time we reached the top, dawn had started to break. We stood watching it.”
João’s face registered incomprehension, a wan smile, a slight squint, a twitch of impatience.
The sunrise in Sharkey’s memory, impossible to describe to João, was an ocean of thick clouds whitening with silver light, the blown-open cheeks of the clouds defining themselves like the spindrift of waves, then pierced with shafts of gold—flames of it, blades of it, a gilded sea for minutes, and rosy light pricking it, an exploded ocean of billows filling the sky—big waves at last—and dispelling the darkness and warming his face.
“Awesome,” he said, because he had no words for it. He was silent for a while and then said, “We’d brought bikes in the van. When dawn had fully broken we got on the bikes and rode downhill all the way to Paia—thirty-five miles, without pedaling.”
“Nice,” João said.
“Not nice,” Sharkey said. “Cheating. Too easy. A ride up in the van. A ride down on the bike. Bad karma. I had to undo it.”
“How you undo?” João smiled at the idea.
“A month later,” Sharkey said. “I didn’t want to wait—I didn’t want this karma on me. I got a bike in Paia. I rode it to Makawao and kept going, up the hill, zigzagging, hairpin turns. I was gasping and that was good—I was suffering. And going slow, I saw things I hadn’t seen before—orchids, geraniums, and the amazing silversword plant that only grows there—soft spikes, so beautiful growing in the lava gravel of this volcano. I saw this stuff because I was going slow, all uphill.”
“Is the way,” João said.
“I got to the top. And it was funny. The cars that had passed me on the road were parked on the summit, and seeing me, the people began to clap, and I started to cry. I had undone the lazy ride in the van. I rode back to Paia, happy.”
“Nice story,” João said. “But you never paddle into this wave. You never—”
He was still talking, but a much bigger wave was breaking and drowned out his words.
* * *
Back in Hawaii, Sharkey mentioned towing—just the word, casually, no detail—and Moe Kahiko said, “Laird wen’ doing it. Garrett wen’ doing. Braddah Skippy. Da guys.”
“With a jet ski?”
“Ya. Da kine. Dey wen’ try tow-in.”
And when he asked further, it seemed that some surfers were being towed at Jaws, and on the biggest days at Waimea—a novelty, embraced by a few, spurned by others. Sharkey thought, I would spurn it too, but I’ve seen the wave at Nazaré, and there’s no other way to get onto it.
In the same offhand manner, on one of those Waimea days, he mentioned to Garrett that he wanted to try being towed into a big wave.
“I can show you,” Garrett said. “You’ll feel great on the wave. You won’t be tired from paddling in. You’ll just sit there and wait for a beauty.”
“Is it pono?”
“It’s practical,” Garrett said. “For some waves there’s no other way.”
“Give me a lesson.”
“You don’t need a lesson, brah. Just hang on to the jet ski. I tow you out and drop you on the wave.” He bumped fists with Sharkey. “You do the rest.”
It was that simple. The only question was when to let go, and Garrett gave him the signal, releasing him early, as the wave was sloping. And Sharkey found himself in a series of big sets that would have exhausted him had he needed to paddle into them. The others in the lineup that day, those who’d paddled out, eyed him and frowned, but they recognized him and said nothing. Only one of the younger surfers, a haole, hardly twenty, whom Sharkey did not know and who did not know Sharkey, called out, “Dude, you hitched a ride!”
To make a point, Sharkey took the next wave, paddling in front of the young surfer, crowding him, forcing him aside while he swore and spat seawater. Sharkey dropped in, surfing the right face of the wave that curled over him, and rode inside the barrel to finish, bursting through the overhanging foam at the far side of the bay.
“Two more rides,” Garrett said, picking him up again, “and you’ll have it down pat. Just a little softer on your release.”
On the beach, toward sundown, Sharkey thanked Garrett for towing him. In his gratitude, he wanted as a gift to tell Garrett, almost twenty years younger, that he was learning tow-in surfing in order to ride the wave at Nazaré.
But he resisted sharing the name, and in the end they talked only of the day and the great surf and the vibe.
“Thanks for the rides,” Sharkey said. “Who knows what monster waves you can conquer with a tow-in.”
Garrett nodded. “Yeah, who knows,” he said. “But we’re not out to conquer, man.”
Sharkey’s smile was a query, a cue for more information.
“It’s not about conquest, Joe,” Garrett said. “We’re just complimenting the wave.”
* * *
But Sharkey saw it as much more than a compliment; he regarded it as a decisive statement, the assertion “I’m here, I’m on this monster wave, I’m still in the game”—and also as the last public flourish of a long career. No more trophies, no more contests, no more jostling; only the solitary ride down the greatest wave in the world, acknowledging the acclaim and then returning to his old haunts at Rocky Point and Leftovers and Pipeline. He hoped to leave his image on the memory of all the younger surfers: the old man bursting off the top of the wave at Nazaré and riding to the shore into obscurity, never to compete again.
The message he’d left for João was, “Call when it’s predicted to be monstrous.” And he advised his sponsor, Prime Fuel, that he was planning to attempt the biggest wave in the world; that the marketing team and photographers would need to be ready to converge at Nazaré in Portugal this coming winter.
When the call came, João saying, “Next week—gonna be huge,” Sharkey alerted the team, told them of his plan, and had João set up a jet ski for the tow, and without telling anyone else flew to New York and changed at JFK for a flight to Lisbon.
I can do this, I have been preparing for it my whole life, he thought: this week, this day, this wave.
“Vacation?” the man in the seat next to him said as they landed in Lisbon.
“Sort of.”
“Not good weather,” the man said. “Come in summer. These months the sea is rough. Too cold. They close the beaches.”
“That suits me,” Sharkey said.
He drove the most direct route to Nazaré, calling ahead to João to warn him that the photographers and the Prime Fuel team would be coming.
“They here now,” João said. “Lotta guys.”
“No,” Sharkey said. “They’re just leaving New York with the crew. Some are coming from Australia.”
“They here. They on the cliff. They setting up cameras and tents.”
“Yeah, right,” Sharkey said, and hung up, because the call was a distraction, the road was narrow, rain spattered the windshield, and he had no idea what Joã
o was talking about.
As before, João met him in front of the church, the Portuguese man conspicuous in his yellow slicker and his deeply tanned face framed by his hood. Instead of walking, they drove to the lighthouse on the cliff and saw the tents and the windbreaks.
“Those aren’t my people,” Sharkey said.
“I know now, “João said. “They tell me. Is the news.”
“What news?”
“Good news is the wave is coming big tomorrow. Bad news”—he punched Sharkey playfully—“your friend is here.”
“What friend?”
“Mr. Garrett.”
“McNamara’s here?”
“With his team. He going out tomorrow.”
There was something in João’s poor pronunciation that Sharkey found especially annoying, his slurring delivery of this unwelcome news.
“What about my team?”
“Maybe they come soon.”
“But I want to ride the wave tomorrow.” Sharkey heard a plaintive tone in his voice, almost a note of helpless pleading.
“You ride the wave,” João said. “Is come big all week.”
Sharkey did not have the heart to say, “I want to be first.”
“Where’s Garrett staying?”
“Here. Nazaré. Same hotel.” Joao took it all as a joke, an irony, a coincidence.
Lingering in the lobby after he checked in, Sharkey heard the familiar friendly voice: “Aloha, Joe—how’s it? Hey, this is great. You here for the wave? Of course you are, why not?”
“You didn’t say you’d be here.”
“You didn’t ask.”
Garrett was kneeling over a unblemished surfboard bag, longer and fatter than any bag Sharkey had ever seen. He’d unbuckled the tension straps and was unzipping the sides.
“You hungry? There’s good grinds at a little place near here.” Still he worked the zippers open, poking beneath them with his fingers. “I’m meeting Nicole there pretty soon.”
“That your board?”
“Yeah,” Garrett said, and lifted the upper flap of the bag, revealing a gleaming silver thing, a Mercedes medallion, stamped near its top end, and a pointed tip that made it seem more like a dagger than a surfboard.
