I told my family I would be gone a long time. Nobody offered any objections. I had a one-way ticket to Guam, with stops in Hawaii and the Caroline Islands. My mother, seeing me off at the airport, gave me her blessing with unexpected fervor. “Be a rolling stone,” she said, holding my face and looking searchingly into my eyes. What did she see? Not a career railroader—to her relief, I’m sure. The job had been my base, pulling me back to the West Coast seasonally, but I was still a restless romantic. I had become a prolific writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, almost entirely unpublished. I rambled around and lived in places that took my fancy—Montana, Norway, London—for brief stretches. So I really hadn’t been, in my mother’s terms, gathering much moss. I had lived with a couple of women, but, since Caryn, had never felt committed heart and soul.
I sensed later—much later—that I might be overdoing the rolling stone bit, even on my mother’s terms. She and my father, in the third year of my absence, abruptly flew, uninvited, to Cape Town, where the Southern Ocean was pumping out an abundance of winter swells and I had a job teaching high school. They stayed a week. They never suggested that I consider folding my tents and coming back to the United States, but in the fourth year of my travels they did send my brother Kevin out to fetch me. At least that was how I interpreted his visit. He and I traveled north through Africa together. But I’m getting ahead of my story.
• • •
TO SEARCH THE SOUTH SEAS for ridable waves, I needed a partner. Bryan Di Salvatore said he was game. A piece of serendipity had put us back in touch after I left Maui. The Aloha Airlines ticket folder with his parents’ address scrawled on it had surfaced during one of my student-housing moves in Santa Cruz. I wrote to see if he had ever received the payment for his car. He replied from an address in northern Idaho. Yes, the cash had found him. We became correspondents. He was driving trucks—long-distance semis—and working on a novel. On a trip to visit his family in California, he stopped in Santa Cruz. He brought Max with him. It seemed she was living nearby, over the hill in San Jose. Her live-in boyfriend there was a successful pornographer, according to Bryan. That was correct, Max said. She looked, if possible, even more wickedly amused and attractive than she had on Maui.
I took them out to the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, where a rare sandbar had formed after heavy rains the previous winter, creating a marvelous wave that I patronized daily for the months it lasted. But when I tried to describe the setup to Bryan, Max began rudely interrupting. In a startling imitation of a stoked surfer’s drawl, she was completing my sentences, usually with the exact cliché I had been planning to use. “The faces were as high as that garage door!” “You could have fit that pickup inside the barrel!” It seemed Max had put in her time with surfers on Maui—“two-minute men,” she called them disdainfully—and she believed that we should be able to do better conversationally. Bryan and I agreed to talk surf at a later date.
We talked surf, books, writing. I was working on a novel too. We started exchanging manuscripts. Bryan’s novel was about a circle of friends, surfers in high school in Montrose, an inland suburb of L.A. One passage, thirty pages long, contained nothing but words said in the car on the trip from Montrose to a beach north of Ventura. No narration, no stage directions, no attributions. I found it dazzling—the fractured, profane speech was shockingly accurate, sneaky-poetic, and very funny, the story movement invisible but irresistible. This, I thought, was a new American literature. Bryan was from Montrose. His father was a machinist who, as a soldier in World War II, had met his mother in Europe. She was British. Bryan had gone on scholarship to Yale, where he majored in English and wrote for campus magazines. Jack Kerouac had inscribed a book to him, and he had gone to Kerouac’s funeral in 1969. I was in awe of such experience, but Bryan wore it lightly, unimpressed with himself. After graduation, he headed for Maui, where he lived and surfed with old Montrose pals and worked as a cook in a hotel restaurant. Few people in Lahaina, it was safe to say, understood his taste. While they were decorating their surfboards with images of Vishnu and badly drawn dolphins, he stuck a picture of the Marlboro Man on the deck of his board. He liked country-western music, demotic American speech, and the collected works of Melville. As a son of the working class, he scorned welfare. He wouldn’t even collect unemployment between jobs. Women, meanwhile, seemed unanimously eager to get next to him. He had curly dark hair, a thick mustache, and an air of effortless, old-school masculinity. Max reckoned he was the original brown-eyed handsome man. He was also—more catnip—funny and generous and something of a loner.
We first surfed together in Santa Cruz after he decided to move back to the coast. He was a goofyfoot, meaning he surfed with his left foot back. It’s the surfing equivalent of being left-handed. Going right, a goofyfoot is on his backhand—he has his back to the wave. Going left, he is on his forehand, or frontside. For regularfoots like me, rights are frontside, lefts backside. Surfing is notably easier on one’s frontside. I was surprised to hear Bryan say he had never surfed Honolua Bay. It wasn’t that the wave was a right—plenty of goofyfoots surfed Honolua—but that the crowds had put him off. He and his friends had been fixtures at a country spot a few miles north of Lahaina called Rainbows, which few people checked during swells. I had never surfed Rainbows. And now, talking Maui, I felt like a mindless herd-follower, having been focused while living there only on the most obvious possible wave, the famous Honolua, and quite ready, if necessary, to trade elbows with the mob in the main takeoff bowl, oblivious to the self-defeating meanness of grubbing for waves in that glorious setting. Even Les Potts, the old top dog, had seemed to renounce the battle as demeaning. In Santa Cruz, a busy surf town, Bryan and I went up the north coast looking for empty waves, which could still be found then.
We took long car journeys on any excuse. At a student party in Santa Cruz, Bryan suddenly announced that it was time I saw Rathdrum, the little Idaho panhandle town where he had lived, and we left directly from the party, making a ten-day loop of it, visiting college friends of his in Montana and Colorado. Bryan, loyal to scruffy Idaho, sniffed, “Montana has a hard-on for itself.” It was true, but we both later ended up living there—going to graduate school in Missoula, learning to ski, and, in my case, learning to drink. Bryan, after getting a master’s, took a job teaching English at the University of Guam. Best known as an American military outpost in the western Pacific, Guam was said to be blown flat annually by typhoons. As a posting, it suited Bryan, I thought—something about its down-home harshness and sheer unlikeliness. Also, it reportedly had good waves. Those reports were soon confirmed by letters and photos. He was surfing his brains out. During his second year on Guam, while I was finishing my studies in Missoula, I proposed the Endless Winter trip. Bryan was also saving money. And he was up for it, he said. I could check out the Carolines on my way to Guam. Then we could head south.
We should brush up on our Spanish, he said.
I couldn’t see why. There wasn’t a Spanish-speaking country in the South Pacific.
That was good, he said. We were going to need a language that nobody else understood, for classified communications in dicey situations.
I told him he was out of his mind.
But he wasn’t. We ended up using Spanish regularly. It was our secret code. No Tongan could crack it.
• • •
MY GIRLFRIEND’S NAME was Sharon. She was seven years older than me. At that point, she was teaching college in Santa Cruz. We had been together for four years, on and off, and were more deeply attached than we probably looked. She was a medievalist, an enthusiast, adventurous, the daughter of a liquor-store owner in L.A. She had a laugh that went from high to low, drawing you into her confidence, merry eyes, and an eclectic intellectual glamour that wowed people, including me. Underneath all the badinage, though, under her slinky sloe-eyed self-assurance, was a soft and wounded person whose restlessness was, as she would say, molecular. She had a checkered résum�
�, including a brilliant unemployable ex-husband. She and I had survived long separations, and we had never been especially monogamous—she liked to quote Janis Joplin: Honey, get it while you can. We had vague plans to rendezvous after she finished her PhD, which would not be soon. I was ambivalent, I suppose, about my attachment to her, but I didn’t give her even a shadow of a veto over my decision to leave.
I had a board custom-made for the trip. It was a 7'6" single-fin. It was longer, thicker, and much heavier than the boards I normally rode. But this travel board needed to float high and paddle fast—we would be in a world of unfamiliar, reef-edged currents—and it needed to work in big, powerful waves. Above all, it could not snap. Where we were going, it would be impossible to replace a broken board. I put a leash on it, which was, for me, a concession. Board leashes had been around for a few years, and in Santa Cruz they had drawn a bright line between purists, who thought they encouraged dumb, sloppy surfing, and early adopters, who thought that having a lost board unnecessarily smashed on the cliffs at spots like Steamer Lane was itself a good definition of dumb. I was a purist and had never used a leash. But even I knew that I couldn’t afford to lose my South Pacific board at some Fijian cloudbreak and risk never seeing it again. I rode the board for a few months before we left, and I loved the way it handled bigger days at the Lane. During a scary late-winter session at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, my leash snapped, leaving me in big surf with a long, cold swim that lasted till after dark. After that, I bought a thicker leash and a couple of spares.
• • •
HONOLULU WAS MY FIRST STOP. In my overexcited mind, Oahu was all signs and portents. Domenic happened to be there, on a job—he was now shooting TV commercials full-time, with a specialty in tropical ocean action footage. Our friendship had survived, barely, a patch after Caryn and I broke up and he and she became a couple. They hadn’t lasted long, but I found the whole business so excruciating that I wrote a thousand-page novel about it, an apocalyptic prose poem that I finished, bashing out the last draft on a borrowed manual typewriter in London, at the age of twenty. (Bryan may have been the only person who read that entire early masterpiece.) Domenic and I had taken a couple of surf trips together since, including one to central Baja California during which he seemed to be always filming me, encouraging me to talk straight into the camera about whatever came to mind. This was a last gasp of the idea that we might be geniuses—his touching faith that I could hold the screen with pure improvisation. I couldn’t. Domenic shelved the project in favor of paid work.
Now, as we crossed paths on Oahu, a late-season swell hit and we, obeying dog-whistle orders from the collective surf unconscious, dropped everything and headed for the North Shore. I had by then surfed most of the big-name spots along the famous big-wave coast—I first surfed Pipeline on my nineteenth birthday, not long after that addled huge day at Honolua with Becket. I had had some memorable sessions at Sunset Beach especially. Was Sunset, as we had been told as kids, basically Rice Bowl writ large? Not really. It was a vast wave field, bordered on the west by a roaring rip, with a bewildering variety of peaks swinging in at different angles, producing thick, beautiful waves and regular episodes of terror. Sunset was effectively impossible for the occasional visitor to understand.
On that spring day with Domenic, Sunset was big and clean, and I felt as confident surfing it as I ever had. The leash probably helped. The big, thick board definitely helped. Then a ten-foot west set caught me inside and put the leash, and my confidence, to a severe test. I was trapped in the impact zone, taking each wave on the head, ditching my board, diving deep, getting cruelly rumbled, just trying to stay calm. The leash pulled hard on my ankle, threatening to snap. After half a dozen waves, I was painfully glad to see my board still surfacing near me, though I never had the time to reel it in. By the time I washed into the shallows, back on my board, I was light-headed, breathing raggedly. Domenic found me sitting on the sand, still too tired to speak. The ordeal had felt like a baptism. It was the worst beating I had received in fifteen years of surfing. But I had not panicked.
The next portent was the surprise appearance in Honolulu of a kid named Russell. He and Domenic had been roommates in the early ’70s—Hawaii Five-0 days for Domenic and my family. Russell had been a wide-eyed hick from a tiny sugar town on the Big Island then, but he had spent the intervening years in Europe, mostly in Cambridge, where he had picked up a British accent and large quantities of worldliness and erudition. There was nothing supercilious about this transformation—he was still wide-eyed and soft-spoken, just widely read and widely traveled. Russell and I spent a couple of long nights talking nonstop about Britain, poetry, and European politics, by the end of which I realized I had been thoroughly obnoxious to Domenic. I hadn’t let him get a word in. When I nervously suggested as much, he brusquely agreed. “I wanted to catch up with Russell, find out what’s going on with his sexuality,” he said. “Maybe next time.” Russell’s social affect had, it was true, also changed. It was now vividly bisexual. But I had been too intent on exchanging ideas about the decadence of Sartre and situationism even to think of broaching the obvious personal topic. Domenic’s patience with my overwrought erudition had reached its limit, I figured. It was time for me to slip off to Samoa and grow up.
But there was one more sign. On a balmy blue morning, I paddled out at Cliffs. There, looking like he had never left, was Glenn Kaulukukui. It had been ten years, but he headed straight toward me, calling my name with a gleeful curse, reaching for my hand. He looked older—thicker through the shoulders, with shorter, darker hair, and a mustache—but the laughing light in his eyes was unchanged. He and Roddy and John were all now living on Kauai, he said. “We all still full-on surfing.” Although Roddy did not compete—he worked in a hotel restaurant—his surfing had never stopped improving, Glenn said. Roddy was now the best surfer in the family. Glenn himself, as I knew from the mags, was a pro, busy on the contest circuit, putting in his time each winter on the North Shore. “I’m a competitor,” he said simply. We commenced surfing small, glassy, uncrowded Cliffs, and I was pleased to see Glenn pausing on the shoulder of one of my waves, studying me closely, and then announcing, “Hey, you can still surf.” His own surfing, meanwhile, even in soft, chest-high Cliffs, was glorious. The speed, power, and purity of his turns were on a level I had rarely seen except in films. And he didn’t seem to be pushing himself at all. He seemed to be playing—intently, respectfully, joyfully. For me, seeing Glenn surf like that was an epiphany. It was about him, my boyhood idol grown into a man, but it was also about surfing—its depth, or potential depth, as a lifelong practice. I told him I was off to the South Seas. He looked at me hard and wonderingly, and wished me luck. We clasped hands again. It was the last time I ever saw him.
• • •
I FOUND NO WAVES on Pohnpei, a green speck in the Caroline Islands, then under U.S. administration, now part of the independent Federated States of Micronesia. I did spend long, hot days bumping around in the bush trying to find reef passes that looked promising on my charts, but they were all dauntingly far from shore, the wind was always wrong, the swell always funky. I began to wonder if I had deluded myself about the chances of finding ridable waves in random tropical locales. (As it happens, a luminous righthander was later discovered on the northwest corner of Pohnpei. I was there in the wrong season for that wave.) I was reading, between fruitless forays, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, which has a nice first line: “I hate traveling and explorers.” The paterfamilias of structural anthropology goes on, about his profession: “We may endure six months of traveling, hardships and sickening boredom for the purpose of recording (in a few days, or even a few hours) a hitherto unknown myth, a new marriage rule or a complete list of clan names.” This sounded, in my little surf-skunked corner of Micronesia, ominously familiar. Would it take months of hard searching to find even some mediocre wave—the surfing equivalent of a new marriage rule?
�
�� • •
SPEAKING OF ANTHROPOLOGY, I found on Pohnpei a collision of local tradition with modernity—and this would turn out to be an inescapable theme everywhere in the Pacific—over how to get drunk. In the evenings the men either drank, in a slow, ceremonial, communal ritual, using coconut shells as cups, a mild indigenous liquor called sakau—it’s called other names on other islands, most commonly kava—or else they drank imported alcohol. Imported alcohol, whether spirits or beer, cost money and was associated with colonialism, fighting, bars, general dissipation, and domestic violence. I hung with the sakau crowd, on principle, even though I found the stuff, which was viscous and gray-pink and medicinal-smelling, vile. It numbed the mouth, though, and after eight or ten cups it tilted my brain to an angle from which I began to understand, or believe I understood, a complex form of checkers that was the local pastime. The game was played with cigarette butts and little cylindrical coral pebbles, and it went fast, with an abundance of muttered commentary, some bits of it in English. “What’s this, Christmas?” “You crazy dude!” I never gained the confidence to actually play, but I became a passionate kibitzer.
We drank under a dilapidated thatch pavilion in somebody’s backyard, by the light of a naked yellow bulb stuck up on a post. Deep in their sakau cups, my companions would start mumbling to themselves, bowing their heads to drool great careful white streamers into the mud. In this romantic setting, I managed to meet a girl, Rosita. She was a tough, pretty nineteen-year-old from Mokil Atoll. She said she had been thrown out of school for stabbing a girl. But she wasn’t all bravado—she was very concerned, at least, that no one see her stealing into my hotel. One of my secret ambitions for this just-begun journey was to consort with women from exotic lands, and young Rosita seemed like an auspicious start. (What’s this, Christmas?) She had traditional-looking tapa-pattern tattoos on her thighs and, on one shoulder blade, a heart-and-scroll design that looked like it belonged on a U.S. Marine circa World War II. The sex was comically terrible, as I struggled to figure out what might please her. Nothing seemed to, at least not as I understood pleasure. But then she cried, in her green skirt and white blouse, when I left Pohnpei. I knew that my secret ambition regarding women was profoundly unoriginal. It took me a while to figure out that it might also be no fun.
Barbarian Days Page 16
