The Surf Guru

by Doug Dorst

  “In that case, I would like a hat,” Flaco says. “Something with a plume. I would have respected our general more if he had worn a hat with a plume.”

  “We will find you a hat,” Alvaro promises. “With a plume. I will hunt the bird myself, once our mission is complete.”

  Flaco stands straighter as the power takes hold. “A brightly colored bird,” he orders. “Preferably orange.”

  “The most beautiful, orangest bird on the island. I swear to you.”

  “And also, as I am the general, I demand a peek at your novia.”

  Alvaro smiles. “This time it is a gift from me,” he says, unbuttoning his shirt pocket with one swift flick of the wrist. “But a good general knows he cannot just take. Like the other men, he must pay, or he must bet.”

  The new general nods quickly, comes to him, takes hold of the photograph with greedy fingers and greedy eyes. He angles it back and forth in the sunlight that drains through the trees, as if he is trying to catch a glimpse of the girl from behind, as if he does not understand the laws of two dimensions.

  Looking over the new general’s shoulder, Alvaro notices a flaw on the surface of the photograph—a spot in the upper-left-hand corner where the image has no gloss. A daub of what might be the kid’s dried spunk, marring the horizon behind the wave-slapped girl whose name he no longer remembers.

  The kid! It is a shame he can only be killed once!

  He snatches the photograph from the new general’s hands. “Enough,” he says. “We have a mission.”

  “We have a mission,” the new general echoes.

  Alvaro runs his thumb along his knife to test the blade, opening a perfect, thin, shallow cut from which no blood leaks. And then they run.

  The kid steps out from his hiding place and crosses the beach slowly, with neither stealth nor authority. He removes his shirt and boots, drops his gun in the sand. He is unashamed of his tenting trousers. When the girls spot him, their ball falls uncaught and drifts along the gentle shore break. They watch him closely as he wades out to them.

  The water is warmer than he expects. He can feel tiny fish at his feet, tasting the salt from his toes. He holds his hands above his head, palms open and empty. It is, he hopes, a gesture of peace. “Ladies,” he says, and it is a difficult word, one that makes his tongue feel parched and clumsy. “Ladies,” he says again. “Please don’t be afraid.”

  They are silent. They goggle. The tallest and fairest-skinned girl folds her sun-pinked arms across her chest, as if she must shield from his gaze not just her small, pointed breasts but the ruffled pink fabric that covers them. And yet didn’t another girl, the shortest, just now push herself higher in the next wave so that he could see more of her? Didn’t she?

  They do not speak. He wonders if they are not local, then realizes he is the one who is far from home. Do they understand his accent? Or has his tongue failed him? Or did he forget even to speak those words aloud? As he pushes himself deeper into the water, he hears shouts—male voices, from a boat he now sees moored off the tip of the cove. The men gesture, hustle about the deck, raise anchor, gun the engine.

  “Are—?” he asks the girls, but gets no further. “But—” he says, trying again. Then: “I—”

  The boat speeds toward them, trailing a violent wake. He tries to read the girls’ smooth faces, but he cannot; their expressions offer him nothing he can understand. Will he be driven back into the jungle? Will he die, bullet-riddled, here in the shallows? Or taken in, fed and nursed, led to a bed? He closes his eyes and waits, listening to the motor’s roar and the shouts and the breaking waves and the girls’ pink silence. Arms high in the air, he delivers himself unto them, hoping.

  Splitters

  H. A. Quilcock’s Profiles in Botany:

  A Lost Manuscript Restored

  Edited by Jonathan Parker Kingslee, Ph.D.1

  Editor’s Introduction

  Nineteen sixty-eight marks the centennial of the birth of Hartford Anderton Quilcock,2 one of the true pioneer botanists of the American West, although it is unlikely that this event will be widely celebrated, or even noticed. Marginalized by the academic Establishment, Quilcock was generally ignored in the botanical literature of his times, with mentions of his name usually relegated to footnotes and nearly always paired with a pejorative. (Examples include: “irascible,” “foul-tempered,” “ceaselessly aggrieved,” “deranged,” “choleric,” “vulgar,” “disordered,” and “unstintingly opprobrious.”) Most contemporary texts ignore his work completely. To the extent that he is known today, it is not for his taxonomic efforts—which were extensive and serious, if not always accurate—but for his sensationally inappropriate “Profiles,” a series of vituperative attacks on his colleagues. Quilcock’s Profiles are now the stuff of chatter at departmental cocktail parties, of lore passed around collecting-trip campfires—sometimes exaggerated, often misconstrued, and utterly unrecognized as the revealing historical and scientific documents they are. In part this is because few people have ever actually read them.

  Quilcock intended to publish these profiles in an omnibus volume titled Botanists in the Age of Quilcock: A Field Guide to Frauds, Fools, Thieves, and Demagogues, but he failed to do so before his death in 1931. One suspects he delayed publication because he never viewed the series as complete, as there would always come some new affront to his botanical sensibilities, which would drive him back to his cluttered desk, poison pen in hand.

  Most readers will be surprised to find my name listed as editor of the project, since my late father, Philip St. John Kingslee, was the target of Quilcock’s most impassioned attacks and most virulent animosity.3 Further, my mother, the late and much-beloved Anna Sophia Parker—a talented but under-appreciated botanist in her own right—was briefly and unhappily married to Quilcock in her youth. So: how did this man’s papers—and thus his legacy—become my responsibility?

  Unbeknownst to me or my father, my mother had remained a trusted figure in Quilcock’s increasingly sad, difficult, and isolated life. It was only after her own passing three years ago that I discovered she had been the executrix of his estate and writings, as well as the curator of the remains of his personal collection of herbarium samples.4 All of this she stored in the remote mountain cabin to which she retreated after she divorced my father and quit the academic life. In her will, she expressed her hope that I would publish the papers once everyone about whom Quilcock had written—including herself—was dead.

  Understand, reader, that this is an obligation I never sought to take on. Obviously my father would disapprove; one imagines him straightening in his chair and puffing on his pipe, silently but disdainfully, refusing even to dignify the topic at hand with speech.5 My mother made her wishes clear, though, and I have spent the past three years im-mersing myself in Quilcock’s work, reading through the entire corpus of his writings; his field notes; correspondence by, to, and about him; and contemporaneous news reports of his time; as well as giving close examination to his herbarium sheets, both those that have been kept properly in the Kingslee Herbarium at Mulholland and those from his private collection, which came to my mother in a grievous state of deterioration and which she had tried, with limited success, to restore.6 I have compiled and annotated Quilcock’s profiles with the goal of showing that their author was no mere crank, but rather a scrupulous and dedicated man of science, albeit a remarkably disagreeable one.

  Before I turn to Quilcock’s infamous Profiles, let me present a brief sketch of the man himself. He was born on September 22, 1868, in Dawson County, Nebraska, according to church records. Little else is known about his childhood, as he went to great lengths to conceal the details of his humble origins. One might speculate, perhaps, that he toiled on a family farm, driven hard by a foul-tempered taskmaster of a father, and that he fled this life as quickly as he could, eager to re-invent himself.

  Our first record of him as a young adult comes from the payroll logs of the Murchison & Reno Railroad, which shows that he
signed on in Omaha and shuttled to the west coast and back for several months—all the while marveling at the expanses of frontier land, with their vast and unstudied inventories of flora. He appears to have been dismissed for insubordination and put off the train in Carbondale, Colorado. For the next few years he worked menial jobs in the area, each just long enough to finance his next excursion into the wilds of the western states.

  His entry into the world of formal botanical scholarship came as he was working as a handyman at the Strater Hotel in Durango in early May 1892. The legendary Aeneas Scottwell-Scott and his field team spent a night at the hotel en route to collecting in Arizona’s Verde Valley, and Quilcock seized the opportunity. “New boy attached himself to us quite forcefully in Durango,” Scottwell-Scott wrote. “Possibly a halfwit, but eager to please & thus useful. One hopes he doesn’t eat or talk much.”7 By the end of their journey, though, Quilcock had demonstrated both competence and motivation; he was attentive, careful in his treatment of collected materials, and strikingly knowledgeable for a self-taught botanist. Scottwell-Scott himself was an up-by-the-bootstraps sort of fellow, and he may well have seen Quilcock as a younger version of himself—his initial comment about the lad’s sense (or lack thereof) notwithstanding.

  Quilcock apprenticed himself to Scottwell-Scott for the next decade, traveling and collecting extensively with him, preparing his samples, and assisting him in publishing his findings, which would be among the most important of the man’s illustrious career.8 Quilcock was utterly devoted to his mentor, and he would come to adopt many of the older man’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and habits of dress, 9 his pugilistic tendencies and indifference to hygiene, and—most important—his species concept and his approach to taxonomical change. Quilcock took extreme umbrage whenever any element of Scottwell-Scott’s taxonomical work was questioned—let alone corrected, as it was in more than a few cases. Indeed, he reacted more violently to such affronts than he did to challenges to his own work (which, admittedly, tended to arise more commonly). Whether or not Scottwell-Scott returned an equivalent devotion to his as-sistant is unclear—but, one suspects, unlikely, as mentors are usually reluctant to allow their protégés to emerge from their long shadows.1011

  The following pages contain selections from the 462 profiles Quilcock wrote for Botanists in the Age of Quilcock. 12 They are presented chronologically in the order that Quilcock wrote them. I hope, reader, that you will find this work informative, that you will be as taken with their author’s rebellious spirit as I have been, and that my annotations will offer illuminating context.13

  —JONATHAN PARKER KINGSLEE, PH.D.

  August 4 , 1968

  Ventura, Calif.

  Profile #114

  Aeneas Scottwell-Scott

  I shall begin my series of profiles with a sketch of the botanist to whom all the backbiters, bullies, dullards, and thieves who rule our field ought to compare themselves, so they can see how glaring their deficits are.

  Aeneas Scottwell-Scott did not care what others thought of his academic credentials or lack thereof. He did not care what others thought of his scientific conclusions, so confident was he in his species concept, his accurate observations and measurements, his encyclopaedic knowledge of botany and the history of its study. He did not care what others thought of his wardrobe or his failure to marry or his quickness to raise his fists. He did not care what others thought of his disinterest in politics, sport, or washing. He did not care what others thought of his approach to teaching, which was demanding, acerbic, and stern, and which occasionally made use of ear-boxing as a tool for emphasis.

  Because he was an autodidact and an iconoclast, he was never embraced by the white-haired panjandra of east-coast botany.15 These fops and frauds, in their towers of ivory (and ivy), were too busy listening to each other’s clarion-blasts of flatus to hear the voice of a brilliant man in the wilderness, a man who routinely risked his physical and financial health trying to bring taxonomic order to the flora of the American West.16

  Scottwell-Scott improved those of us who studied with him. He taught us to observe meticulously, to avoid the small but disastrous errors that issue from hasty or careless work, and to be upstanding, honest, and truthful in all matters— botanical, financial, personal, or any other. He was a father to me—to all of his students, I once thought—and if he occasionally withheld approval, validation, warmth, or rewards, he did so with our intellectual and personal maturation in mind. (He was not, for example, one of those people who use each opportunity to name a new species as currency for bestowing thanks, building egos, or begging for funds. He most certainly did not bestow such favors on us, his students, except in one instance (Ptimorus kingsleei). In the interests of history, I asked him on several occasions to explain this aberration. I suspect he did not recall, for his mind had dulled a bit with age and infirmity, and he was never forthcoming with a convincing answer. 17 In any event, he never bothered to petition the Society for renaming the offending Ptimorus, which is unsurprising; he was a man of fieldwork, not “paperwork.”)

  Our field has suffered in recent years because Scottwell-Scott’s lessons have fallen out of vogue—even among some of his former protégés, such as the klepto- and ego-maniacal Kingslee and the spineless Fitzgilbert. I have maintained my mentor’s high standards and, like him, I have suffered as a result. However, these brief biographies are not the proper venue for detailing my mistreatment by my “colleagues” and by Mulholland University, and thus I shall not do so herein.

  Profile #19

  Clark Sydney Grimshaw

  Word comes that Grimshaw has gone and died, although it is hard to fathom how anyone noticed. He had published no work of value for decades. We should be grateful, I suppose, for the prolonged moribundity of his career, as it leaves us with less of his willfully obtuse scholarship to undo.18

  Profile #64

  Colton Cates

  How Cates escaped this life without being formally repudiated as the serial plagiarist he was19 is one of the earth’s great mysteries. I suspect a wide-ranging scheme of bribery and/ or intimidation.

  Of course, even his meager output of ostensibly honest botanical work was execrable. Recently I was going over some of his final leaflets, and I read his treatment of Amorifera maldita, which makes one feel like planting a specimen of same on his grave so he can spend eternity studying it more carefully.

  Still, Colton Cates’s greatest crime came not in his work but in his decision to reproduce. The less said about his offspring—in particular the reprehensible Slade Cates—the better .20

  Profile #96

  Maximilian Unterdorf

  Another botanical irritant, this one of the Teutonic variety. Unterdorf splits species left and right and left again, finding dramatic differences where none exist.

  What on earth could account for this thuggish Hun’s rampage across the hallowed grounds of responsible taxonomy? With most splitters, the cause is usually arrogance, leavened with a wholly inappropriate sense of certitude, although in Unterdorf’s case, ineptitude may be an equal factor. Support for this hypothesis can be found in his abhorrent dichotomous key for Lamides, which induces its unsuspecting users to misidentify L. dorothyi as L. bettyi, and vice-versa. (I shall not even waste ink to point out how vulgar it is to name one’s botanical discoveries after whichever comely “volunteer assistant” happens to be in the field with one at the moment.)

  Unterdorf somehow has no shortage of young and curvaceous dabblers to accompany him as he roams the West whilst allegedly botanizing.21 One imagines that in the musky air of his laboratory at the University of California-Lake Elsinore, these foolish girls clutch to his tweeds, sigh about how fascinated they are by his work, only to return from the wilds sullied, red-faced, and full of his gametes. At most recent count, sixteen children on this continent (and devil knows how many in the Old Country) call this man Father. One fears one can scarcely put one’s pencil down before one will have to pick it up again to mark
the score-sheet as another poor lass’s cries of labor pain fly to the winds in Tucson or Provo or Ensenada or Heidelberg or wherever else Unterdorf has set foot in his quest to name everything his lizard-lidded eyes fall upon, regardless of whether it is in need of naming.

  A hopeless, vile, and unrepentant splitter; as many bastards as he has produced, he has notched ten times that number in bastard species of the botanical variety.

  Profile #121

  Guy-Laurent Petitfour

  In the human sense, Petitfour’s accidental death22 in 1919 at the age of forty-three was a tragedy. In the botanical sense, it was a blessing, and it ought to have been celebrated with a great feast, much dancing, and that jubilant ritual the Mexicans refer to as “pinyata.”

  His limitations as a botanist aside, he was also a demented little man. Of his behavior in the field I can say little without risking much emotional distress to myself. To those of you who have heard the whispers that he customarily used his plant press in the service of onanism: I shall not be the one to disabuse you of this notion. Since our first and only expedition together, I have refused to handle any specimen collected by him or his assistants.

  As if that were not enough: one morning when we were camped on the banks of the Rio Hondo, he delayed our departure by claiming extreme impaction of the colon, owing to a quantity of Mexican cheese of dubious provenance which he had ingested the night before. (I had not partaken, having the sense to limit my diet to tinned foods while in that primitive land.) He then volunteered the information that he needed to “dig himself out.” Perhaps I misunderstood his intentions, owing to his tortured English and lazy diction, but the image that his words conjured will haunt me until they plant my bones in the ground.