by Peter Heller
The same phenomenon of scrappy local kids hitting the waves any way they could was occurring up and down Mexico’s Pacific coast. Unlike California surfing, born in the early 1900s, the sport in Mexico didn’t have a direct pollination from Hawaii, with its centuries-old surf culture. There was no Duke Kahanamoku bringing showy exhibitions and aloha spirit; there were only wayward gringos. American legends Bud Browne and Greg Noll took some trips to Acapulco and Mazatlán in the late fifties, but, according to Nathan Myers, a historical-minded editor at Surfing magazine, Californians didn’t start poking down the coast of mainland Mexico in significant numbers until the 1960s, after the Gidget movies and the Beach Boys craze had ignited the American surfing boom that suddenly crowded California’s beaches. The majority of the first Mexican surfers were the sons of poor fishermen and hotel workers. I asked Arturo Astudillo, now fifty-two, one of the early Mexican pioneers around Acapulco, how he and his friends got their first boards. “We stole them,” he said. He hung his head. “I am sorry. It was the only way.”
By the late seventies, Leon, then a teenager, was shredding. He bargained with gringos for beat-up boards. He dripped candle wax on the decks for traction and made his own leashes out of surgical tubing. He began working in the booming new tourist center of Ixtapa. One morning, he and a friend named Antonio Ochoa paddled out into a wickedly fast hollow break beside Ixtapa’s recently built breakwater. No one had attempted it before. They dropped in on an overhead, right-breaking barrel that blasted them through a tube like buckshot. The wind at their backs almost flattened them. They came back the next morning, and the next, and named it Las Escolleras, the Jetties. Then they began exploring northward, finding the Río La Laja break on the other side of a crocodile swamp.
They heard about a legendary Mexican surfer from Acapulco named Evencio García Bibiano, who everybody said was like a demon on the waves. In 1978, they went to watch him compete at the first Mexican national competition on the mainland, at a break in Guerrero called Petacalco, a fifteen-foot barrel that broke dependably twice a day. García, despite long nights spent partying, was beautiful, almost frightening, to watch.
Leon never missed a day on the waves. When he was twenty-four, he became a waiter at the club Carlos’n Charlie’s, right on the beach in Ixtapa, a five-minute walk from the Jetties. At Carlos’n Charlie’s, every night is spring break, and Leon quickly became chief party maker. He wore his shirt unbuttoned to his waist, danced on the tables, judged bikini contests, administered a devastating sangria from a spouting pitcher. He knocked back tequila every night and was such a ladies’ man that he is still called El Tigre. He dated models and TV stars, often didn’t sleep, and, when the sun came up, grabbed his board and went surfing. When the onshore winds blew out the waves in the late morning, he’d nap for a couple of hours, then come back to the bar and load up the donkey with buckets of ice and beer.
“The donkey’s name was Lorenzo,” Leon said. “We shared free beers on the beach, for advertising. As soon as he saw me open the first beer, he chased me down. I taught him to drink. By the time we came back, he was drunk.
“Too much party,” Leon admitted. After fifteen years in the fastest lane, he downshifted to a slower one, surfing with single-minded devotion and opening his shop. He, a sister, and two younger brothers started renting boards, giving lessons, and taking customers on day trips to nearby breaks. And once Leon got serious about competing, he won the nationals in his shifting age class—over-forty in 2002 and everybody over-thirty-five in 2004. There are few men alive who know the Pacific coast of Mexico as well as Leon.
I changed into a snug rash guard, locked the car, and picked up the 7–6 board. By now there were a dozen surfers bobbing thirty yards offshore. I didn’t want to compete for waves today, but if I did, these teenagers—unlike the locals in California—wouldn’t mind. They were tolerant, even encouraging. On one of our first days there when I collided with a local kid—my bad—he didn’t emerge from the tumble yelling a bunch of fuck-offs. I said, “Lo siento,” and he shrugged and smiled, as if to say, Don’t worry, we all sucked at the beginning.
The air was chilly. I turned down a smooth path toward the beach. Far out in front, I could see the swell form and break. I could see the small figures of four surfers.
At a tangled pile of drift logs, I unwound the leash from the board and secured the Velcro strap at my ankle. Then I waited for a little shore wave to break, jogged into the water, jumped onto the board, and started to paddle. The strong tug of the rip current pulled northward. I made it over a few steep swells and hit a low ridge of whitewater, paddling hard. It flooded over me, stopped my progress. I bobbed up paddling like a possessed turtle, shoulders burning, and when I shook my eyes clear, the only thing in front of me was a pelican and a head-high wall already breaking. Oh, shit. Duck-dive! Wait until the white pile is almost on top of you. Big breath. Rock the nose down hard with both hands, press the tail down with one foot … Yes! When I buoyed to the top, the wave was past. Dang. “Paddle again even before you can see,” Leon had said. I did and made it over the next wave just as it peaked. And then there was only open, rolling water. Phew. For me, there was always this race to get past the break, always a little desperate.
I caught my breath and looked left in time to see Leon hunting the next set. While the other three surfers were just sitting on their boards, he was already moving, paddling smooth and fast, angling both toward deeper water and down the beach. Abruptly, he spun. He was just in front of a perfect peak, the rounded top of a glassy, inexorably forming mountain. No one else had seen it coming. And then he was an explosion of motion. “Everything moves,” a local told me with a grin, describing Leon catching a wave: his arms windmilled, his feet kicked in a violent flurry. Leon had told me, “Paddle like your life depends on it.” But what you remembered most was his expression: he looked like a gunfighter in the middle of a fast draw against five men. When the wave was steepest, hanging for a split second at its own angle of repose, with just the top beginning to fold, Leon was up, rocketing left down the wall with the speed of a diving tern. He was crouched, perfectly balanced, the wave ripping white down the line, unpeeling behind him and trying to devour him like a jaw. He stood upright and pumped, bouncing the front of his board for more speed, swung up to the stiff lip, and caromed down off it in another crouching swoop. I laughed out loud.
I was thinking, like the six-year-old Leon, I want to do that.
On my fifth day in Mexico, Leon and I drove the five hours down the coast to Acapulco for the Torneo Evencio García Bibiano, a Guerrero State selection qualifier that Leon would have to win in order to go to Ensenada. García, for whom the competition was named, was the legend Leon had first seen compete in ’78. He was from Acapulco, and at a 1985 championship at Playa Bonfil, south of town, he used the home-field advantage and devastated the competition. He was a quintessential fearless big-wave rider and the first native to do aerials and floaters and 360s. On his last heat he already had more than enough points to take first place, but he had a few minutes left before the horn, so he paddled back out for one more ride—just for show. Before a crowd of a thousand spectators he took off on a steep left and it closed out and collapsed. He seemed to kick out over the back side. His board flew into the air, then … nothing. The board washed onto the beach, and no one ever saw him again.
In a superstitious culture, García has become the resident spirit of Mexico’s waves. Surfers will tell you with a straight face he was transformed instantly into a dolphin, who still patrols and protects surfers. He was El Campeón, the Champion, claimed by heaven, and every time a wall of green water rises out of the sea, a surfer may sense García’s ghost gliding like a dolphin down the line. I met a twenty-five-year-old top surfer named Julio Cesar La Palma, whom everyone calls La Pulga—the Flea—and when I asked him if he had a hero, he blinked and put his hand on his chest. “Sometimes,” he said, “I dream that Evencio García is surfing in my body.”
If
García were there on that Sunday in November, he would certainly have heard “Guantanamera” booming out of the giant speakers next to the judges’ platform—not the old song but the hip-hop version by Wyclef Jean, Celia Cruz, and Lauryn Hill. Leon was out in the surf loosening up. I recognized him right away even from a distance—his bullet head, his constant roving back and forth, hunting. In surf, he rarely stops paddling, even between sets, his eyes on the horizon.
“Guantanameeera …”
According to the big posted roster, Leon’s finals heat was coming up. At the top of some crumbling steps off the sand, wedged between a palm tree and a shaded slab of concrete covered with plastic chairs, where surfers were eating sopa de mariscos, seafood soup, was a beat-up white Chevy van with PRENSA painted in block letters across the front. It didn’t look like any press van I’d ever seen. A wooden skeleton in sunglasses was chained to the grille. A faded xerox of a dog was taped to a window, with the words CUIDADO! PELIGROSO! I could see why: chained underneath were two tawny pit bulls.
A short, thin-faced young man with a sparse mustache hustled around from the back of the van. His loose hair hung down his shirtless back. He had skull tattoos and a skull pendant, and his official government press card hung on a necklace of shells and claws of black coral, along with a fancy Nikon. I introduced myself, and he ducked his head agreeably. “Andale,” he said, and pushed aside a bamboo curtain across the van’s open side door. He sat against a bag of dog food, under a poster of Bob Marley.
Oscar Diego Morales, a.k.a. “Fly,” was a roving reporter for Planeta Surf La Revista, a magazine by, for, and about Mexican surfers. It’s slick and fun, splashed with Aztec design motifs, crisp action photos, and ads for Mexican beachwear. The second issue had just hit the stands. Oscar told me that surfing in Mexico was at a tipping point. It was growing more popular by the month. “Every time a good swell is forecast, more and more people come out,” he said. Then suddenly, hearing a particularly irresistible riff from the speakers on the beach, Oscar leapt out of his seat and, bent over, began to do a crazy little dance to the music. He sat back down. I asked him how many dedicated surfers he thought there were now in the country, and he began, remarkably, to tick off each major break.
“Puerto Escondido, sixty … Acapulco, twenty-five … Ensenada, fifty … Mazatlán, fifteen … San Blas, fifteen. Nobody knows,” he concluded. (Matt Warshaw, who wrote the seminal Encyclopedia of Surfing, estimates there are thirty thousand native surfers in the country, though Mexicans say there are far fewer.)
“What’s with the skulls everywhere?” I asked.
“Skulls? Oh. No matter if you have green eyes, blue eyes, white skin—in the end everybody is going to be the skull. It’s the true face at the end of our life.”
As I left the van, a small pickup skidded to a stop at the end of the sand street, and ten shirtless teens with boogie boards and shortboards jumped out. Some had fade haircuts with long, red-streaked tops. Earrings, eyebrow piercings, blond-streaked ponytails.
“Hey,” I called, “where are you guys from?”
Playa Princesa, a break a few miles up the coast.
“Are you students?”
Most of them worked as lifeguards and in restaurants for a few dollars a day. Another generation.
Back down on the beach, I found Leon. His final master’s heat was about to start. He was with some other surfers in the shade of a palapa, stretched out in a plastic chair, drinking from a water bottle. He looked much too relaxed.
“Isn’t your heat coming up?”
“In a few minutes. I am ready.” I was more nervous than he was. I felt like a soccer dad.
We heard the blast of a horn announcing five minutes to go. Leon stood, stretched his arms back like a man waking up, grabbed his tiny board. How long can a warrior keep going to war? He reminded me of the graying soldier in The Seven Samurai, the one who would always survive on seasoned judgment, discipline, and patience. Then it occurred to me that I was Leon’s age and I was just starting. What would I survive on?
Twenty minutes later, Leon won his final heat handily. He was now a Guerrero State champion, heading to the nationals. He also won the open longboard class. He shrugged it off. That night, after four days in Acapulco, we drove back up the coast to Ixtapa in the dark. We arrived too late to find a room for me, so I slept on the floor of his apartment, in a concrete block at the edge of the tourist zone, crowded by jungle. I slept under a shelf of trophies, a rack of six bagged boards, and a photo collage of Leon’s younger brother Alejandro, who died in a motorcycle wreck fourteen years ago. The young man held a surfboard in half the pictures, was as handsome as Leon, and looked very happy. “His nickname was Karma,” Leon said before he turned in. “Everybody loved him. He was a very good surfer. That is why we name the annual tournament in Ixtapa ‘the Karma.’ ” I saw a flicker of emotion cross Leon’s usually inscrutable face. Then he said, “You have been working hard. You can do it, the big wave. Practice more. Tomorrow I will take you north.” Then he flicked off the light. I went to sleep listening to the calls of a loud night bird and thinking how everything is connected: Evencio García and La Pulga; Leon and his brother Alejandro; Antonio Ochoa and Oscar and me. And the waves out of the Pacific, which were now pounding the long, empty coast in the dark.
The next morning, Leon jostled me awake in pitch-blackness.
“Almost ready?”
“Are you crazy?” I could see his white teeth floating like a canted moon.
First we surfed Río La Laja, and then we started driving north. We passed through the industrial town of Lázaro Cárdenas, where the legendary tube of Petacalco used to break, before they built a dam on the Río Balsas. We drove into the desolate, lovely country of Michoacán. Tall saguaro cacti came down to the beaches. The road snaked over high bluffs and around rock coves that cradled blue water. We drove in third gear. The foothills were covered with white-flowering bocote trees, and rioting bougainvillea edged the dooryards of the sparse villages. It was like a more tortured Highway 1, but empty, with the Pacific crashing on the rocky points and fringing the long beaches with peeling waves. Mainland Mexico has twenty-five hundred miles of Pacific coastline—enough surf for a millennium.
Leon and I spent three days at Río Nexpa, where there was no phone or running freshwater, just a point break and a beach break going off all at once and a long, cupped strand with a few dozen thatch-roofed cabins built for surfers, each with a balcony and a hammock. On the second evening, Leon sat on the porch rail, drinking a beer, looking out at the ocean. I swung in the hammock, replaying in my head a long ride I’d had that afternoon. A surprising set had loomed, and I found myself in position, suddenly taking off on a fast overhead left and looking down at the pod of other surfers, who seemed far below. Some cheered. I popped up and crouched, and when I’d gotten ahead of the crashing white, I roller-coastered to the top of the lip and shot back down. The sensation was one of the finest I’d ever had. In my life.
“Look at the moon,” Leon said. It was nearly full, rising out of the palms past the point. The sun was still a few degrees off the water, burnishing the tiers of breaking waves. A faint onshore breeze brought in the sound, a rhythmic thresh almost like breath. I didn’t think he was waxing poetic—I knew what he was thinking: after the sun went down, there would always be the moon. He was already taking off his shirt.
“Aren’t you tired?” I said. I think we’d surfed five hours already.
“A little. Almost ready?”
I stared at him. I burst out laughing. “What’s my lesson for the day? You forgot to give it to me.”
The left side of his mouth lifted just a little. “Surf whenever you can.”
Opened my eyes. Kim was still at the wheel. Michoacán was still out the window. I sat up, turned off the horrid AC, opened my window to the turgid heat, inhaled the smell of the sea. Right away I felt better. Even dead I would feel better in the baffles of a stiff wind coming off the ocean. Consign me, then, to
the sea.
“I can drive now, Ting. I know where we’re going now. I remember this road from before.”
“Feel better?”
“Oh, man. Finally. Look where we are.”
“Not a tamale in sight.”
“Thank God.”
She reached out, searched out my head with a blind hand, stuck a finger in my ear.
THE RIVER
It bent out of the mangroves, the palm groves, the tall bocote trees flecked with white egrets. It widened into a generous lagoon before it coursed and riffled over the bar and crossed the beach. Emptied into the wild bay. Behind the river and the jungle of trees loomed the Sierra Madre. Felt old here, wild and ancient. A brontosaurus could lumber out of the palms, wade into the estuary, and he’d be at home. Except that a couple of fishermen who were casting hand nets in the brackish water would have heart attacks.
Squatting above the slow current, I counted three species of heron hunched on the mudflat of the far bank. There were skittering sandpipers, slender pink-legged stilts, a great egret long-necked and leaning on one leg over his own snowy reflection. In counterpoint, four soot-black cormorants at water’s edge spread their drying wings to the early sun. Faces turned away, as if the exercise were distasteful. Their wings were ragged, their pose a parody of crucifixion, they were disreputable in appearance, and I thought as I watched and loved them that it was because they were diving birds who swam as well as flew, caught their fish in a submarine sprint, and I thought how most beings that straddled two worlds looked suspect to those who remained in just one. Why we were scared of bats. Of crabs and vampires and shamans. Why surfers have a badass rep.
Barra Llorona is ruled by birds. Almost every morning royal terns convened by the score on the beach above the lagoon. They all faced the same direction. If it was windy they closed their eyes. They seemed to be listening to a concert. Out along the surf line the squadrons of pelicans rolled in effortless single file. Three beats of the great wings, the line flowed upward, following the same precise arc as if over an invisible rise; then glide, sink to the swell, wings a millimeter off the water, never touching. When there were baitfish, the birds broke apart into a confusion of circling bombers who tucked wings and plunged with explosions of spray. So did the boobies. Smaller, grayer, they fell out of the sky with a fantastic and deadly corkscrew. Folded their wings on the way. Hit the water, one then one then one, like a rain of arrows. High over them all, arched, black, angular, fork-tailed, and crooked winged like a terror of prehistory circled the magnificent frigate birds. That’s not my adjective, that’s their name: Frigata magnificens. Wingspan of something like ten feet. Unlike most other pelagic birds, they can’t settle to the swell and rest. They would sink and drown. The ocean is their mother but they can never sleep on her lap. Should they dive for a baitfish and get clobbered by a breaking whitecap, they are finished. Watching them work, I held my breath. It seemed unnecessarily dangerous.
