He began slamming the barrel of the rifle against my leg, just below the bottom of my shorts. I stared down at the rifle, confused. When I looked back up I noticed the crowd.
I wasn’t alone in the building, but I was different from every other person there. I was wearing shorts, while everyone else had their legs covered in long pants or a skirt.
Okay, I got it: pants only, no shorts. I nodded at the guard and walked out, as calmly as I had walked in.
An incident like that informs future behavior, I suppose. And so, despite our trespassing in a gold mine at 2 A.M. and being surrounded by armed soldiers, I was reasonably calm because I had been through circumstances that led me to believe that situations like this do not erupt in violence. That would be crazy. The soldiers would use their guns to make their point, but the triggers would not be pulled. Nevertheless, something still had to be done. They were after something.
Perhaps the bribes we had provided earlier had not greased enough hands? Others who had heard about the bribes might now be angling to get a cut. Certainly, it was no secret that we were passing through the mine. We had spent an entire day hiding in the barracks on our way up and word of our presence surely got around the camp.
Expecting that the bribes were the core issue here, we offered the soldiers money. I don’t recall having very much but we gave them what we had.
The yelling ceased; the soldiers parted. We got back in the jeep and drove on.
I remember shrugging off the incident at the time. It seemed like a dramatic way to squeeze us for whatever money we had left, but it appeared to be nothing more than that—just an ordinary shakedown.
A few days later we realized that far more had been at stake.
You can stand on the highest point on every continent but you can’t surf every coastline. In fact, of the hundreds of thousands of miles of coast on the planet, only a small fraction is surfable. In most places, nature conspires against you.
The first requirement for surfing, of course, is that you need a wave, and you can’t will a wave to roll in. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve been sitting on a surfboard, staring out at the ocean, floating on water as still and flat as a pane of glass, pleading for a wave to roll in. Nothing happens.
The waves that do roll in have a few possible sources. When wind blows over the ocean it creates waves. But wind waves are choppy, staggered, with no rhythmic pattern as they hit the shore. If waves were like music, then these would be the handiwork of a six-month-old with a tambourine: clatter and hash, nothing but noise. The best thing to do is let the child get it out of his system and wait for another day.
The ideal waves are created far out at sea, born of cyclones and hurricanes. Distant, intense, with powerful winds, these storms churn up the water, whipping up deep troughs in the ocean. As those troughs move out across the ocean on a journey taking them hundreds of miles toward land, they smooth out and get more rhythmic, transforming gradually into strong, steep, evenly spaced swells.
As the swells approach the shore, the ocean floor begins to shape the wave.
It is natural to think that only solids can be shaped and sculpted. Marble can be chiseled into a statue of David. Auguste Rodin extracted splendor out of bronze. Steel can be transformed into a Chrysler Building.
But who can sculpt a liquid? Humans can’t. Nature can.
The ocean floor that rises up under the incoming swell acts as an artist’s blade, carving and shaping the incoming water. The shore that the wave pours into confines it, limits it, like hands on the lump of clay spinning on a potter’s wheel.
What finally arrives at the beach is not just water, it is contoured and rhythmic liquid. Born of violence, propelled a thousand miles by the fury of a storm, the wave is finally shaped in its final few hundred feet of travel, only to vanish and retreat in backwash.
The primary limiting factor to what coastline is surfable on this planet is the shore topography, the steepness of the ocean floor underneath the wave that does the sculpting in the final feet of its journey.
The reason a wave breaks is that the wall of water heading toward the beach starts to hit the slope of the shore. As the water swell hits that slope, it slows down. The water behind the swell is now moving slightly faster and it starts to pile up on top of the slower-moving water. The swell starts to curl. Eventually, as too much water starts to build up, the base can no longer sustain it and the wave breaks. The water at the top spills out over the front of the wave.
If a coastline is too steep, the waves break too close to the shore to accommodate any surfing. If the coastline is too shallow, the waves are nothing but gentle ripples, reaching the shore with only a quiet brushing of the sand. The gentle surf delights people with snorkels and tanning lotion, but it offers no pleasure to the surfer. The surfer has to search elsewhere for a wave.
In the best of all worlds, the incoming swell has a base-to-height ratio of two to one, creating a solid foundation to sustain the weight of the crest. The ideal coast will break the wave at a distance that allows a sustained ride to shore.
Those two restrictions massively reduce the amount of coastline available to surf. And once you’ve identified those locations on the planet with the perfect ocean topography, there remain still more complicating factors.
Waves that break over a reef would dice up the surfer, like being tossed onto a batch of kitchen knives. A rocky coastline isn’t much better, though there are plenty of surfers willing to take the risk of getting tumbled around on coral and stones.
The wind can wreak havoc on the quality of the wave. Too much wind behind the wave, blowing toward shore, and the wave can get choppy or break too soon. Too much wind into the wave is no better. The ideal is just the right amount of wind blowing toward the shore, coupled with the right slope under the wave to create that perfect curl.
Even when you’ve identified the perfect topography, and you have a day with the ideal wind blowing at just the right speed and direction, you are still at the mercy of the weather. Nature has to do you the favor of serving up a storm out at sea.
Taking all those factors into account, the odds of randomly selecting a surfable beach is vanishingly small. It is more likely that you could win at Powerball than you could just put your thumb down on the coastline of a world map and ride a wave there on any given day.
Fortunately, surfers have combed the world for the right locations. One of the well-known spots is Bali, Indonesia, just a short hop from Papua, where we had been climbing.
There are dozens of surfing beaches to pick from on the island of Bali. Depending upon the time of year, surfers can find swells that are anywhere from two to twenty feet. With steady waves and reliable weather, the island hosts the occasional surfing competition. A competition means, of course, that there are gradations of skill levels among surfers that can be distinguished one from another.
Surfing breaks down into two generic types of maneuvers: functional and expressive. Functional moves are basic rotations and pivots that keep you riding the wave. Expressive moves, such as aerials that require the rider to rotate the board up over the wave and catch air, are like a gymnast’s vault.
I’ll confess, I’m no surfing star and I don’t compete. Just as with my rock climbing and my mountaineering, I’ve learned to live with the fact that there is always someone else who is far better than me. They’re faster, more nimble, more acrobatic, younger.
In my case, I’m satisfied with the steady, smooth ride of a long board. No aerials. I am compelled by the simplicity and purity of the sport. You don’t have to pace out a field or raise a net. It doesn’t require a club or bat, pads or spikes. No holes are dug, no contour smoothed, no rings hung. All you need is a board and a swimsuit, nothing more. It’s as raw as that.
Better still, no one ever asks the question: why do you surf? That may be because the answer is so obvious; everyone understands, intuitively, without any need for explanation, why the sport is so appealing.
Surfing is so ext
raordinary, in fact, that it probably never occurred to the first people who saw a wave that they could actually ride it.
There are no cave drawings of surfers. And while the Mayans had athletic fields and ancient Greece held Olympic games, the first documentation of a surfer came a millennium later in the pages of the journal of Lieutenant James King, who accompanied Captain Cook on his expedition sailing the Pacific Ocean. King, staring out at the locals on Kealakekua Bay, made this entry in the year 1779:
The Men lay themselves flat upon an oval piece of plank about their Size and breadth, they keep their legs close on top of it, and their Arms are us’d to guide the plank, they wait the time of the greatest Swell that sets on the Shore, and altogether push forward with their Arms to keep on its top, it sends them in with the most astonishing velocity, and the great art is to guide the plank so as always to keep it in proper direction on the top of the swell, and as it alters its direction.
These men may be said to be almost amphibious.
If walking on water was a miracle, then certainly taking a board and riding it on water must be something that all of us can, at the very least, appreciate as extraordinary.
That is why I surf.
And so, aspiring to be amphibious, a few days after driving out of the Freeport-McMoRan mine, with Puncak Jaya far behind us, I dropped a board into the surf of Kuta Beach, Bali. I had surfed before, but never was the moment as memorable as this time, when I stepped out of the water and my world was reshaped.
Most times when I’m on a climbing expedition or on a surfing trip I take a break from world news. This time, for no reason I can remember, while taking a breather from surfing, I picked up an international English-language newspaper and started flipping through it. In scanning the pages I saw a brief item about a group of American schoolteachers who were attacked in a bloody ambush. The details were still sketchy, the news still in flux, but it seemed that three people were killed and at least a few others wounded.
I suppose I might have turned the page with little notice, a tragedy certainly, but one with no particular connection to my life. But before I turned the page, I noticed where the massacre took place.
The Americans were murdered at the Freeport-McMoRan mine.
They had been traveling along the same road we had been on, just five hundred yards from the military base where we had been stopped. Their situation began, as it had for us, with gunmen confronting the vehicle.
The Freeport-McMoRan mine is a vast local enterprise employing nearly ten thousand people. A portion of those employees are foreign nationals, some of whom have school-age children. To accommodate their educational needs, the mine had established a school, bringing in highly qualified teachers.
A top-notch elementary school teacher can find a job in the United States without too much strain, even in the most difficult of economic times. Only a certain type of teacher would forgo those opportunities to take a job in Papua, Indonesia. They would need to be enticed by the distance from the industrialized world, curious about the culture, delight in travel, or perhaps be attracted to the lush biodiversity of the jungle.
Those interests were all shared by the teachers who filled the seats of the Land Cruisers that traveled north, along the mine road, on the morning of August 31, 2002. They had checked out of the military base, alerting the local authorities to their trip, and had been enjoying a day off from teaching by taking a day hike to explore the local ecology.
New Guinea has one of the most abundant ecosystems on the planet. Nearly 10 percent of all known species live on the island, with many of them living nowhere else in the world. The numbers are truly astounding for an island: more than 200,000 species of insects and 20,000 species of plants. In any casual stroll through the jungles or valleys, a hiker would be guaranteed to see something unique in the world. That morning, the teachers had gone to see the tree frogs and orchids.
By late morning a light rain began falling and they went back to their Land Cruisers for the trip back up the mine road. With fog building up on the windows, in order to see out the side and back of the vehicles they had to wipe away the moisture with their palms, hands arcing across the glass, sweeping the jungle into view.
Rick Spier was driving the lead Land Cruiser, four fellow American teachers in the seats surrounding him. Ken Balk was following behind in a second Land Cruiser that carried his wife and daughter, two other American teachers, and the school’s local Bahasa Indonesian teacher. Behind the two vehicles was a fuel tanker, making its way slowly up the mountain.
At 12:40 P.M., near milepost #62, a point just five hundred yards south of the military base, a group of gunmen confronted Spier’s vehicle.
In our case, at or near that very same spot in the road, we came to a stop and our driver began shouting. In Spier’s case, no words were passed. Bullets, dozens of them, started punching into Spier’s vehicle.
When something is coming toward your face, the immediate reaction is to duck down and cover, shut your eyes and seek protection. Rick Spier didn’t have that chance. The bullets came too fast; the attack was too sudden. He had no opportunity to shield himself. Rick Spier died instantly.
Sitting beside Spier was Ted Burgon, who was recently hired by the mine to be principal of the school. With the bullets coming in a spray across the front of the vehicle, there was no hope that anyone in the front seats could survive.
Ted Burgon was fatally shot.
With the driver lifeless, the Land Cruiser now veered to the left and crashed into an embankment. Three passengers were still alive, but there was now no hope of driving away from the scene. The metal doors offered no protection against the hail of bullets, the windshields were shattered; the passengers were encased in useless armor. If they stayed in place, they would certainly die.
Four minutes had passed since the massacre began. Ken Balk, driving the second Land Cruiser, had no idea what was going on up ahead, around the corner and out of view. He was about to steer his vehicle directly into the ambush.
As Balk turned the corner he saw the stalled vehicle in front of him. He hit the brakes on the Land Cruiser and came to a stop as the gunmen emerged from around Spier’s vehicle. Balk’s Cruiser came under immediate attack.
Bullets smacked into the sides of Balk’s vehicle, slicing through the metal doors as if they were made of paper.
By this time, there had already been a staggering amount of shooting; nearly a hundred rounds of ammunition had already been fired against a group of people who were utterly defenseless. But the ambush wasn’t even half over.
As the second Land Cruiser came to a stop, Patsy Spier, sitting in the backseat, caught a glimpse of the vehicle ahead of her. She couldn’t see the driver, her husband.
Looking out the side window she noticed puffs of dirt lifting up off the ground, one after another, approaching the vehicle.
Patsy, not wearing her seat belt, pivoted to her side to get a clearer view and suddenly understood what was happening.
Bullets now shattered the front windshield and one pierced the left side of her back. The hollow point bullet exploded her eleventh rib, then splintered into pieces that stabbed into her kidney and surrounding organs. She threw herself down to the floor of the jeep.
Beside her sat Bambang Riwanto. His fingers were working the seat belt, but not quickly enough. By the time Riwanto unclipped, he was perforated with bullets. His dead body fell on top of Patsy, shielding her from the bullets that continued to stream into the vehicle.
For the passengers who survived the initial strafing, time now stretched out.
In the first Land Cruiser, the rear left passenger, Steve Emma, had taken bullets in his right shoulder, left leg, and hip. His body, he would describe later, felt like it was in flames from the searing shrapnel that tore through it.
With energy draining out of him, Emma kicked at the rear door of the Land Cruiser, bursting it outward. He now had a clear view of what was unfolding behind him.
All the passen
gers were realizing that the vehicles were death traps, offering no protection, keeping them pinned in place, fixed targets for the now roaming gunmen. Emma saw that three of the passengers from the rear Land Cruiser—Ken Balk, his wife, and their six-year-old daughter—had left the vehicle and were huddled behind the limited shielding of the rear tire. All three were bleeding. Balk was gushing blood from bullet wounds to his lumbar artery.
Patsy remained in the vehicle, nearly paralyzed by the shrapnel in her back and pinned down by the weight of Riwanto.
The surviving passengers tried communicating, shouting out to be heard over the sound of the gunfire.
“Gurus! Eskola Amerika! Bebe!” yelled one of the passengers. “Teachers! American school! Child!”
The appeal had no effect; the guns continued to pop, hammering into the bodies of one passenger after another.
Balk’s daughter, now covered in her father’s blood and bits of his tissue, asked why it wouldn’t stop. There was nothing her parents could say or do to stop the bloodshed. It seemed the gunmen would walk up to each vehicle and pursue every passenger until they were all dead.
Patsy Spier accepted her fate. “I’m ready. It’s okay, they can come and get me.”
Bullets started punching through the back of the Land Cruiser and she felt one as it found its target, piercing her foot. In a few moments, only as long as it would take the shooters to sweep their rifles along the rear door, she knew she would be dead.
Patsy knew her husband was dead. She had heard shouting from the other vehicle, but did not hear his voice. If he were alive, he would have called out to her.
“Rick is gone. Just do it,” she said, thinking that a shooter might come up to the window.
And then, there was a pause.
The fuel tanker now drove up into the chaos.
Rifles swung toward the tanker, bullets hammering across the cylinder of fuel and punching through the door of the cab. The cab sat higher off the ground than the Land Cruisers. The gunmen were shooting slightly up; they didn’t have the clear sightline they had with Spier and Burgon.
To the Last Breath Page 13
