Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Ferré is bookish. Within the first minutes of our conversation in his office at Fonatur’s local headquarters, he had saluted Marx but disparaged Marxism and paraphrased Santayana as to what directs the path of economics—“We produce things but things also produce us. We live to myths, but myths also create us.” He then rose from the conference table where we were sitting and selected two volumes from the bookshelves, handing me one. The book was Vince Lombardi on Football.

  “This was also one of my teachers,” Ferré declared.

  “Vince Lombardi?”

  “Well, not the person but his ideas. I’ve been searching for a long time for the material basis of values, ethics. Look, this is another of my bibles, very important to me. Bible in the sense of God, exactly.”

  The I Ching. Vince Lombardi and the I Ching.

  Ferré has an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in philosophy, did postgraduate work in Eastern Europe, and has taught at the University of Chicago and the national university in Mexico City. He speaks nine languages, he said. He found a copy of his most recent published article to show me. It was an assault on the scholarship of Octavio Paz.

  He then told me of an experience he said he had had on that very day, out on his morning constitutional through the countryside. In the dawn’s misty light, he crested a hill and saw, there in the road, horses, “savage horses.” They stampeded and, electrified by the sound of their hooves, Ferré had the fantastic feeling he was in prehistoric times, clutching a stone in his hands. I suggested to him that such an event could be placed on the endangered list: five years hence, his revelatory moment couldn’t possibly exist in Huatulco. Unless he fabricated it himself, hired a man to import horses from the interior.

  “Exactly,” he said, and laughed. “But this is a laboratory of what happened many years ago in different parts of the world, a laboratory for what happens when society shifts from a Neolithic peasant pattern into a society that is an urban society. I’m creating it to a certain degree, but the behavior of people is moving us the way people moved into urban settlements many thousands of years ago. It’s the new city coming into reality. What I want to prove are the limits of Utopia. If possible.”

  I inquired about his plans to manufacture cultural ambience in Huatulco. He told me that in two more months Fonatur would be sponsoring movies, music, dances. “Besides that,” said Ferré, “I will give some masturbation for the so-called upper middle class so they can see European films, very esoteric films—Bergman, Truffaut.”

  And traditional culture? I wondered if he’d ship it in from the mountains for the tourists.

  “Yes. That’s engineering, social engineering. I will take many ideas from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” He smiled at his own joke.

  Ferré turned to one of his pet projects: to take some of the fishermen on the beach at Santa Cruz and remake them into “businessmen with big, big boats.”

  Was he committed to making everybody in Huatulco middle-class?

  “Well,” said Ferré, “not everybody. Some of them. But society is not built according to geometry.”

  He had an anecdote: “About two weeks ago, one of the very important persons from Mexico City came to see the new buildings we are doing at the beach, a vice director of Fonatur. So this man is a very technocratic person. A typical engineer—very smart, very good, but he has no sense of humor. I refer to him as Don Quixote. He has the shape—very tall, with an eagle nose. So we were strolling to the beach in Santa Cruz. We were chatting with the people, since we are going to build a new restaurant. And there’s a man—I’m a small size but this man is smaller than myself and thinner. His name is Don Tesoro. Don Tesoro. So we approach this man’s shack. ‘Good morning, Don Tesoro, how are you, how do you feel?’ ‘Ohhh, I’m all right.’ And we say, ‘Don Tesoro, what about you now agree to move from this area so we can build the new restaurant?’ ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’m an old indio. Please leave me alone. I was born here. I want to be free. I don’t want a restaurant. I don’t want anything from you. Please leave me alone.’ I was so surprised and happy. The vice director was astonished, stunned. ‘How is it possible this man is against the progress?’ he said. But me—I really love that man.”

  I wanted to know what Ferré planned to do with him.

  “Well, we have to talk with him.”

  “You’re going to change his life, true?”

  “No. Don Tesoro’s going to move to another area. There are plenty of beaches—he will go there. Well, it is what we have to do.”

  “You have to get him out of the way.”

  “No,” Ferré said now, reversing himself. “We are not going to move him. WE are going to build around him.”

  “He can stay?”

  “Yes, if he wants.”

  “Who else on the beach in Santa Cruz can stay? Anybody who wants?”

  “Well, Don Tesoro is the only case. He’s the only pure man. He’s really pure. The others are crooks.” Ferré, it turned out, had thrown a beach dweller in jail the week before as a means of getting this message across.

  While we talked, a line of petitioners had formed outside the Fontanur offices, waiting for an audience with the boss. Now Ferré had to return to work. But he wished to throw the I Ching for me before I left. I asked instead that he throw it for himself and for Huatalco, and he agreed, though he wanted me to toss the coins myself.

  While I did this, my thoughts meandered back to another aspect of Ferré’s discourse on the philosophical underpinnings of tourism. As he saw it, tourism was a “result of the new loneliness” in industrial societies. “Tourists,” he had said, “try to meet people like peasants around here to acquire some of their innocence, their ingenuity.”

  I threw the coins six times and six times Ferré translated their numerical correlates. With a pencil, he drew the corresponding trigrams until he had sketched a six-bar hexagram, each of its halves, north and south, representing the sun. Double Sun. He flipped through the text of the I Ching to the appropriate chapter for an interpretation: The wanderer has nothing that might receive him.

  “This is Huatulco?” I asked.

  Dr. Ferré chuckled. “Yes.”

  Success is through what is small. Ferré giggled. It furthers one to have somewhere to go.

  There was more, pages of elaboration. Ferré’s secretary photocopied the chapter for me, and I was on my way to contemplate its mysteries. What I made out of it was this: The gods want us all to be tourists.

  (1989)

  The Life I Didn’t Get

  Kiribati, Christmas Island, erstwhile thermonuclear playground in the South Pacific, two years ago and counting. Neither the beginning nor the end of a journey toward the lightness of being but, for me, more of the same, surfwise, selfwise, further evidence of the truth inherent in the mocking axiom, You should have been here yesterday. Yesterday, in fact, is the stale cake of many an aging surfer like myself. Yesterday is what I walked away from, determined to someday again lick the frosting from the sea-blue bowl.

  Out there on the Kiribati atoll, we were a small, neoprene-booted family of elite silverbacks—Micky Muñoz, Yvon Chouinard, Chip Post—and brazen cubs—Yvon’s son and daughter and her boyfriend; Chip’s son. Micky (sixty-one) was the first maniac to surf Waiamea Bay. Yvon (sixty), the founder of Patagonia, legendary rock and ice climber, had surfed just about every break in the world, starting with Malibu in 1954. Chip (sixty), a lawyer in L.A., had seniority in almost every lineup from Baja to San Francisco. The second generation Xers were already dismantling breaks all over the planet. In years (middle), condition (not splendid), experience (moderate), and ability (rusted), I was the odd water monkey in the clan, neither out nor in, and the only one dragging an existential crisis to the beach. The only one who had opted out of The Life, the juice. Maybe I wanted back in, but maybe not. I felt like an amputee cont
emplating the return of his legs but long accustomed to the stumps.

  In the coral rubble of the point at the channel mouth, we stood brooding, muttering, arms crossed on our collective chests, trying to conjure what was not there. The trade winds had developed spinning disease. The glorious, mythical break had been crosswired by La Niña, chilling the equatorial water and deforming the shoulder-high waves, which advanced across the reef erratically, convulsed with spasms, peaking and sputtering inconclusively, closing prematurely, like grand ideas that never quite take shape or cohere to meaning. In years past at this same spot, Yvon and his company of “dirtbaggers” had been graced with an endless supply of standard Christmas Island beauties—precise double-overhead rights, shining high-pocketed barrel tubes that spit you out into the postcoital calm of the main harbor. This time, however, we had traveled far for Oceania’s interpretation of Euclidean geometry and we got this, bad poetry, illiterate verse.

  Yeah, well . . . this was a hungry crew, and you never know what’s inedible until you put it in your mouth. The Xers flung themselves into the channel; the rip ferried them down the pass and out to the reef. Chip goes. Then Yvon, but less enthusiastically. “I’m not going,” said Micky, squatting on his heels. I sat too, thunderstruck with relief. Forget that it had been more than seven or eight years since I surfed, or almost fifteen since I surfed steady, daily, with the seriousness and joy of a suntanned dervish. With or without its perfect waves aligned off the point, one thing about this break on Kiribati horrified me. As a swell approached the reef and gathered its peak, the trough began to boil in two sections vital to the fall line of the wave. When the wall steepened to its full height, thinning to emerald translucence, the two boils morphed into thick fenceposts of coral embedded in the wave.

  We watched Yvon muscle onto an unreliable peak, gnarled and hurried by the onshore wind. The drop was clean, exhilarating, but without potential. He trimmed and surged past the first spike of coral, the fins of his board visible only a few scant inches above the crown. Then the wave sectioned and crumbled over the second spike. Without a bigger swell and an offshore wind, it was going to be like that. Yvon exited and paddled in.

  “Those coral heads really spook me,” I confessed.

  Yeah, well. Some risks you fancy, some you don’t. When more water piled up, they weren’t much of a problem, Yvon assured me. The stay-alive technique was, fall flat on your belly when you left your board. Glide shallow, protect your head, avoid disembowelment or the tearing off of your balls. Solid advice.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said.

  For a half hour, we watched the rodeo out on the reef, Chip and the Xers rocketing out of the chute, tossed and bucked into the slop. Their rides resembled a five-second saber dance with a turquoise bull, something like that. Micky kept looking up the coast, across the scoop of bay to where the shoreline straightened out in front of a reef I had named, ingloriously, Caca’s, because the locals in the nearby village mined the beach with their morning turds. The tide had begun to ebb.

  “Caca’s going off!” Micky cheered. Yvon and I squinted at the froth zippering in the distance.

  “Yeah?” we said, unconvinced, but off we trudged to check it out.

  So.

  There is a pathology to my romance with surfing that contains a malarial rhythm; its recurrence can catch me unaware, knock the wind out of my metaphysical sails, bring fevers. For a day or two I’ll wonder what’s wrong with me, and then, of course, I’ll know.

  I would like to tell you that I remain a surfer but that would mostly be a lie, even though I grew up surfing, changed my life for surfing, lived and breathed and exhaled surfing for many years. Now I can barely address the subject without feeling that I’ve swallowed bitter medicine, I avoid surf shops with the same furtiveness that I steer clear of underage girls, and I wouldn’t dare open up a surf magazine and flip through its exquisite pornography of waves, unless I had it in mind to make myself miserable with desire. In any pure sport, in any art or extreme passion, such disengagement happens sooner or later to all but a blessed few to which the alternatives never quite make sense.

  My life only started when I became infected with surfing, moon sick with surfing, a fourteen-year-old East Coast gremmie with his first board, a Greg Noll slab of lumber, begging my older brothers for a ride to Ocean City, two hours away if you drove at ninety miles an hour, which they did. Before that, I was just some kid form of animated protoplasm, my amphibian brain stem unconnected from any encompassing reality, skateboarding around suburbia like an orphan, ready to be adopted and subverted by the Beach Boys, who can still make me swoon when I hear “Surfer Girl” on the radio.

  I remember in high school the spraying rapture of the first time I got wrapped—seriously, profoundly, amniotically wrapped—by an overhead tube, an extended moment when all the pistons of the universe seemed to fire for the sole purpose of my introduction to the sublime. This was at Frisco Beach, south of the cape on Hatteras. I remember the hard vertical slash of the drop, the gravitational punch of the bottom turn, and that divine sense of inevitability that comes from trimming up to find yourself in the pocket hammered into a long beautiful cliffside of feathering water. It only got better. There pinned on the wall in front of me, entirely unexpected and smack in my face, was a magnificent wahine ass-valentine, tucked into a papery yellow bikini and, since I didn’t know anyone else had made the wave, for a moment I thought I was experiencing a puberty-triggered hallucination, but there she was in the flesh, slick and glistening, whoever she was, wet as my dreams, locked on a line about two feet above me, crouched in what is known in the animal kingdom as the display position. Surgasm—can that be a word? You have to understand, I was sixteen and, up to that point, a pioneer of the wonderful world of geeks. The wave vaulted above us and came down as neat and transparent as glass and we were suspended and bottled in brilliant motion, in the racing sea, and friends, that ride never ended, unto this day.

  Boy, girl, wave—whew. On earth, I could ask no greater reward from heaven nor define any other cosmology as complete as this. Point, click, put it in your shopping cart. When you’re given something good and true you want to stick with it, but it’s exactly here, at the impact zone of commitment, that a problem arises. Let the master speak to this.

  “I think the biggest lesson I got out of surfing,” Yvon told me one night on Kiribati, “is that if you want to take it seriously, you’ve got to completely restructure your life so that at any moment you can drop anything and go surfing. At Patagonia [headquarters in Ventura], we have a Let My People Go surfing policy written into my employees’ contract. You can’t underestimate what that means—I don’t mean as a business, but as a life. A lot of people end up on the fringes because they’re not accommodated by their employers. And it gives you something to look forward to—maybe the surf will be up tomorrow. Tennis is a game, but surfing is a real passion. It’s not something you just do when you’re young, it’s something you do your whole life. I think surfing was the first counterculture, absolutely the first one.”

  It’s a passion, sure, yet like all of the best pursuits and fine indulgences a privilege, requiring generosity from above. Luck. The liberating paradox of obsession. At the very least, a parking place on the overcrowded, overregulated, dog-hating coast.

  Most upstanding civilians I know have trouble believing this, but surfing was the energy that formed my identity when I had no other; it was my coming-of-age narrative. Surfing sculpted my ambition, surfing gave me an appetite for the wild world, taught me a value system and the virtues of nature, taught me (through the innovative prose of Surfer magazine) to be word-drunk, intoxicated with new language, and prepared me, ultimately, to be free, by making me practice persistence and, as much as I could muster, courage. To set aside fear and paddle out on a day when the beach is lined with fire engines and littered with boards snapped in half by Godzilla waves. To paddle out blind with myopia and alone a
nd lonely into unknown waters. To paddle back out after you’ve just been seized by an undertow, the strength of which you never imagined.

  The first time I declared my irreversible independence and defied my father, it was to go surfing—I was an underage minor boarding an international flight to the West Indies. I joined the Peace Corps to go surfing in the Windward Islands. I moved my household from Iowa, where I was teaching at the university, to the Outer Banks to go surfing. I vividly remember spectacular waves on Long Island, New Jersey, Virginia Beach, North Carolina, Florida, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the islands of the Caribbean, waves that when I kicked out, through the sizzle of the white water I could hear hoots of astonishment on the beach, which felt like your ecstasy was shouting back at you, and beyond you, to a future where one day you might recollect that once, for a time, you had been a great lover in your affair with the world. You weren’t just sniffing around.

  But there are many ways to love the world. My sea became literature, my waves rolled into books, my rhythm became the pulse and flow of sentences, not swells. No regrets there, yet I found myself hunkered down on ocean-lonely prairies, striking a Faustian bargain with the gods of success. In my life as a surfer, it wasn’t time to move on, it was time to stay, but I couldn’t, being deranged by adulthood and its sober illusions. Years later, when the opportunity came up to fly to Kiribati with Muñoz and Chouinard, two of my boyhood idols, though I often daydreamed of riding waves, I just didn’t know if I wanted to surf again, to become reinfected with surfing, because I knew there was a chance I would stop living one life and start living another, that I would uproot everything and remake it according to a different sort of yearning, a different set of needs, and I didn’t particularly think that was possible. Yes, Bill Finnegan had done it, but no one else, as far as I knew. And as Chip once told me, and not incorrectly, “The greater human enterprise requires more than doing your own thing.”