by Peter Heller
I was such a kook.
I was ecstatic.
I was not the only one. Andy surfed his first wave and looked like he had just been hit on the head with a cow. The rest of the class was standing within half an hour.
Turns out that Pless is perhaps the best surf instructor in the country. He is so good, so warm and fun, that investment bankers fly in from Chicago for two mornings of lessons with him. Celebrities come down from L.A. Congresswomen and supermodels and star athletes have all been his students. Children with autism and cerebral palsy. An eighty-six-year-old lady. Canadians. Whole families from Manitoba who come back for a week year after year. A lot of people, too many, have actually quit their corporate jobs to take up surfing after taking lessons with the Saint. Nobody in the world is better at getting people surfing and having fun in so little time.
Midmorning we took a break. Pless told me that he had grown up in Orange County and had been an avid surfer his whole life. When he was in his twenties he fell in with a rough crowd. He rode with the Hells Angels as a young pledge. I watched him as he talked and I could see it. Beneath his jolly rotundity was a bull of a man. He seemed easygoing, but out in the surf he hustled students into the safe spots, shoved boards and bodies back up and into breaking surf if he didn’t like the look of a wave, hauled people out of whitewater as easily as if they were drenched puppies. He kept everything in control and didn’t miss a lick. He would have been hell in a bar fight.
One night when he was a biker he was late for a meet at the house of a drug dealer. The four Hells Angels who did show up were shot to death. Pless missed dying by minutes. He quit the gang.
Then one afternoon he was working at his job as a telephone lineman and he fell off a high pole. When he hit the ground he fractured every bone in his right lower leg. When the bones healed, they all fused together, so he had, essentially, a peg leg. He sustained other injuries, too, and the doctor said he’d be lucky to walk again unaided. Pless, being Pless, not only walked, albeit with a hitch, he learned to jog with a shuffle and completed a painful marathon. He refused to accept that he would no longer ride waves. But it is very hard to balance on a small pitching platform, even with feet and ankles that flex and roll. With a peg leg and scar-stiffened body, the job is much more daunting. Painfully, he retaught himself to surf. He figured that if he could teach himself to surf again, he could teach anybody, so he started taking students. He also found God and discovered that he was happiest being of service to others—as opposed to scaring the daylights out of them.
It seemed to me that his greatest gift as a teacher was his warmth and sense of fun. Gusts of laughter often came from the pod of boards floating around him. “The best surfer is the one having the most fun!” he’d yell. I didn’t really believe that—I’d look over toward the pier where there were some shortboarders tearing it up, and I knew they were much better than me—but I was finally having a good time.
“Look at that!” Pless called as I paddled proudly back out. “Nice job! That’s how it’s done. Okay, c’mere, here comes your wave. C’mon, c’mon. Chest down, now paddle!”
I did it again. I caught a wave and hopped up and rode it until I couldn’t ride it anymore, straight into the sand.
The world no longer looked the same. Part of it must have been chemical, adrenaline and endorphins. While we were surfing, a seal swam past the lineup and pelicans flew overhead. Gulls wheeled. The low swell rolled in from a bright sea, and Catalina Island lay dark and blue on the horizon like a sleeping animal. And Pless’s encouragement and good cheer filled me with a rare magnanimity toward my fellow man.
Andy and I drove back to Main Street Huntington Beach and headed for the Sugar Shack. We walked up the sidewalk crowded with spring break tourists and young surfers carrying boards and I felt like a king. I belonged. All the surf kitsch—the surfboards in the windows of beachwear stores, the boards hanging over the fronts of restaurants, the surf-scene prints on the shirts of the passing visitors—I saw it all and thought, Yeah, that’s the culture everybody wants to be a part of. My culture. Cuz I’m a surfer now.
You know what I did that afternoon? I bought a green rayon Hawaiian shirt with surfboards all over it. Like Andy’s.
And then I wore it. In public.
Timmy Turner was our waiter at the Sugar Shack and I was all excited and I tried to tell him about catching my first wave while he took our order, and he flicked his eyes over me once and said, “Cool. Fruit salad or french fries?”
That night I called Kim. I said that I had discovered a new love, not a woman, and that it was the funnest thing I’d ever done aside from being in her company.
“That’s right,” she said. And added, “Get your butt home.”
Andy and I took five more days of lessons with Pless. On the third day he let me use the egg and I caught my own waves without being pushed. I felt like a natural. I had had to work really hard at everything I had ever done in my life, from kayaking to writing, just to get the rudimentary skills. But this seemed easy. I was taking to it like an otter. I loved catching waves and I loved getting tumbled. I loved the violence of the break, and the stillness outside just sitting, waiting, watching the rolling swell all the way to the horizon; and the absolute quiet that descended when I caught one and zipped into the beach.
Back on land, all I could think about was when we would get back in the water. I was lit up. It was like a drug. I kept reliving the feeling of catching a wave. Andy and I walked into Huntington Surf and Sport to buy our own wetsuits; when you’re on the water and you have to pee, you just let loose in a hot, groin-warming stream, then hold the neoprene away from your throat and slosh water into the suit and wash it through. I really liked the idea of having my own suit. I got so excited talking to the sales manager about surfing that at one breathless pause he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Son, if you were a little younger, I’d say, There goes college.”
I had heard about a place in Baja where gray whales line up to surf a wave—wait in a queue, catch the wave in, ride the rip current back out like a chairlift, and do it again. Now I could see why.
When I got back to Denver all I wanted to do was return to the coast. In May I brought Kim to Seal Beach for a week of lessons with the Saint. I went back to Skip at Java Jungle and bought my first board, an eight-foot-six-inch “funboard,” meaning it had a rounded nose and a longboard shape, but was shorter. Sleeker and faster than the egg, and stable, too. Also it turned, which was an advantage. Michael began to teach me that real surfing is not simply about riding the wave straight in to the beach, but involves taking off at an angle and riding along the face of the wave, right to left or left to right.
That November, I got an assignment from Outside magazine to go down to Mexico and follow the Mexican National Masters Surfing champion around for three weeks, while he competed and taught me what he could. His name was Leon Pérez Yañez and he was my age. I got hammered everywhere I went with him and had a grand time. I felt like the Karate Kid. I’d paddle up to Leon and say, “Leon, what’s my lesson for the day?” and he’d think a second and say, “Today, watch the peaks,” and he’d paddle off. The next day he’d say, “When you go for a wave, go like your life depends on it.”
I returned to Denver and didn’t surf much over the next year. When I went back out to Seal Beach to surf again with Andy, I found that I’d lost all my strength and timing and it was almost like starting over. It was frustrating. I realized that getting beyond the most basic level took a lot of power and stamina and that would take time.
And then I took an assignment on an eco-pirate ship in Antarctica that was trying to stop the Japanese whaling fleet from killing whales in a sanctuary, and the trip was so epic it became another book. I learned a lot more about the oceans on that voyage, and in the subsequent research. What I learned drove me wild. How could an area twice the size of the United States be bottom-trawled every year? The weighted nets dragged the ocean floor and turned the benthic commun
ity—the reefs and grass beds—into parking lots. Dr. Sylvia Earle, the great oceanographer, likens it to bulldozing the forest to get at some wild turkeys. And then, depending on the target species, 20 to 80 percent of the catch is thrown back overboard dead or dying. Twenty million tons a year of “bycatch.” This seemed to me more than negligence: it was a sin. If overfishing didn’t kill the oceans by shredding the web of interdependent species, then warming and rising acidity would. Half the coral reefs were dead or dying. They harbored over a million species. The sequestration of atmospheric carbon has made the oceans more acidic now than they’ve been in 650,000 years, and by the end of the century scientists predict that they could be more acidic than they have been in millions of years, leading to the death of creatures that secrete skeletal structures, like coral, shellfish, and calciferous phytoplankton.
I found myself thinking about the sea all the time. Not just the waves, or the whales, or the fish, but the whole heaving expanse. As if she were a being, alive and entire. I longed to be rocked by the swell. To surf, to be buoyed and surrounded and engulfed.
I was now forty-eight. I got this idea that maybe, with total devotion, I could go from kook to riding a big, hollow wave in six months. I sensed intuitively that learning to surf could make me a better person. I thought that if I could take a solid chunk of time on the coast, head down the length of Mexico where there would be fewer crowds than in California, I’d have a real chance of learning, of making surfing a true path. Was it too late? To learn something this hard? It felt like the only thing to do. Just in case, I answered an ad in the Denver Post and bought an ’85 VW Vanagon camper I quickly named the Beast.
And then I invited Kim. It was time to really give this woman a shot.
LOVE MEDICINE
Meet Kim.
Tall, long of limb, Chinese American, eyes of jet and rosebud lips. Thirty-something years old and pretty. Strong, too. Broad-shouldered. Trained as a ninja. Pretty good with twin short swords. Born in Denver to parents who spoke only Cantonese. Learned English from television, hence says “purchase” instead of “buy.”
One of my friends calls her the Goddess of Stillness. Because she is slow and patient, very hard to ruffle. Wholesome in that she is cheerful, expects the best of people, and does not waste a lot of time in the past or the future. Stolidly present, she fears little on earth except mosquitoes.
Her hair cascades down her back like a waterfall of ebony. Her eyes are the eyes of a big cat who has eaten magic almonds.
I really didn’t want to mess this one up. I figured that the surf trip would bring us closer, help us to get to know each other or— I couldn’t think about what else might happen.
On a Saturday morning in late July we took a last look at the little ranch house in Denver; at the flower bed in front of the deep porch that was blooming in a riot of blues and reds; at the sweep of lake and mountains across the park; at our house sitter from Alabama, Terry Ann, who called, “Y’all be safe and call me!” and held her cat in one arm and waved her cigarette with the other. We scruffed the necks of our own cats, who knew we were leaving them for a big trip and were already huffy and pissed, and we climbed into the VW and roared the water-cooled 1.9-liter twenty-two-year-old engine and pulled away from the curb.
Kim is a model and actor who now works at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science as a performer; she puts on a NASA space suit and conducts experiments on the Mars-surface diorama. She also wears a white lab coat and dissects sheep hearts and brains under an overhead projector. She had gotten several months’ leave. We were embarking on an epic road trip, leaving everything behind: jobs, bills, stuff.
I have been a traveler my whole life, and yet at moments like this I feel completely untethered. There is such a wave of loss it borders on grief. There is so much unknown just down the road I feel a disorientation bordering on vertigo. Part of me always wants to crawl back inside my house and curl up under the quilt with a gush of relief. Part of me never wants to go anywhere strange again. Wants to go to a movie for excitement and come home. Make tea like we always do at night before sleep. At least this time Kim was with me, which is not the usual way I leave home on a big adventure, so that lessened the poignancy a little. It’s a wonder, given these powerful emotions, that I still don’t live at home with my parents.
But there is the other part that cannot stay still for too long and needs to be out and away. That thrives on new topography and smells and rhythms, and wakes up and comes alive only when I travel.
We made it to Arizona before the brakes of the VW began to cry like a colicky infant. By Flagstaff they were screeching. By Kingman they sounded like a mile of ungreased freight train. I downshifted all I could, but there always came that moment in the gas station or at the stop sign when I just had to tap the brake pedal. Then all heads within a quarter mile would swing up. I saw people laugh, I saw them shake their heads and shove their fingers in their ears. After a day of this, just when I had tuned in NPR in Albuquerque and the digital clock showed four minutes to top-of-the-hour headlines, my favorite radio moment, the radio went dead.
“Dang. I hope that’s not a sign.”
“I was listening to that story. Cage fighting is rough.”
We both stared at the radio. That night we pulled into a truck stop, backed into the end of a long line of eighteen-wheelers that would idle all night, popped the top, and dug out our toilet kits. The desert night pressed down on the rumbling diesels and the whine of the traffic passing on the interstate. We went into the brightly fluorescent convenience store to use the bathrooms. The place was crowded with Chinese tourists who had just piled out of a big bus and were crowding the shelves of Arizona cactus shot glasses and postcard racks.
“Excuse me,” a middle-aged man in a clean white button-down said. “What is Route 6–6?” He held up a tin highway medallion. Three of his friends, each holding their own Route 66 souvenirs—a sign, an ashtray, a license plate—pressed around us.
“It’s a road,” I said, gesturing to the plate-glass windows and the highway.
“Ah, ah, I see.” All four of them nodded and smiled. If I thought I’d gotten off that easy I was a fool.
“What signify?” the man asked.
“Well. It’s a very important road to America.” They nodded, waited. “It goes from Chicago to L.A.!” They smiled politely and digested this. It occurred to me that that’s what roads do, generally speaking, go from one city to another. They looked at me with great expectation.
“It was made famous in a song.”
I can’t sing. I don’t mean it the way other modest people mean it, I mean it with deadly seriousness. But I felt in that truck stop outside of Kingman that some scrap of national honor was at stake. These Chinese really wanted to understand Route 66. I got the sense that suddenly it was the most important element of their trip, their American Experience. They held their Route 66 mementos in their fists, as yet empty of meaning, and looked at me and waited for these souvenirs to be touched with significance, to shine with imparted spirit. I cleared my throat. I held up my toothbrush like a conductor’s wand, snapped my fingers with the other hand. I snapped the intro and nodded to each of them, until they, hesitantly, began to snap along with me. They had perfect rhythm. Then I began to sing.
Wont you get hip to this timely tip
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66 …
I will never forget the expressions of those four Chinese tourists. Stunned. The snapping sputtered, died. It was like a star-spangled American Glory had just risen and blinded the sun, and the thing was God or devil, who knew? They blinked at me, their smiles frozen.
“See,” I said, “Route 66 represents freedom. American freedom. To try, to fail, to seek, to live. You know, climb into a Cadillac convertible, hit the road to California, and remake yourself.”
“Freedom,” murmured the man. He said it like the name of a social disease. “Cadillac. I see.” They all bowed. “T
hank you.”
They took their souvenirs to the counter, but it looked to me now dutiful, drained of excitement. I stepped into the men’s room somehow deeply moved.
Back at the Vanagon, nestling under the flannel sleeping bags in our second-story pop-top, marinating in diesel exhaust, I said, “Those were your people in there. Chinese.”
“Not my people. They were from Beijing. They spoke Mandarin.”
“You can’t understand Mandarin?”
“Completely different. Boy, they sure bought a lot of Route 66 stuff,” she said, kissing my ear. “Good night.”
We arrived on the afternoon of July 24, the week of the U.S. Open, the biggest surf event in the mainland USA and the biggest week all year in Huntington Beach for crowds and energy. Big shaded bleachers for spectators had been set up against the south side of the pier, with colored banners at the corners rippling and flowing, and behind them, acres of tents—surf industry stuff of every stripe, a circuslike half-pipe venue just for skateboarding, throngs of youths, shirtless, muscled, tattooed, girls with tiny short-shorts unbuttoned and partly unzipped along the fly in the new provocative style, sexy bikini models passing out free chilled cans of Red Bull, techno and hip-hop blasting from every quarter. You can just forget about parking or camping. But that first night in Huntington Beach we were given the key to the city. The head of Beach Safety at Huntington loaned it to us after hearing about our intensive learn-to-surf project. This was a literal key. It fit a small padlock that hooked through an eye that was welded to a bar gate that closed across the entrance to the beach parking lot just south of the Huntington Beach Pier. We had tried to get an RV spot at Bolsa Chica, one of the only public camping spots along this whole part of the coast, but they were booked up for a year in advance.
Anyone who has not been to Huntington cannot know what this means—to be able to open that gate. It means at ten p.m., when the lot is totally emptied of vehicles for the night, we are able to drive up to the gate, open it, and pull in to a spot by the sand and go to sleep. To the sound of surf. And drunk partiers. And the crackle of campfires. And megaphones from the lifeguard trucks and the sweep of their spotlights as they try to clear the beach. It was like Stalag 17.
