• • •
GUAM WAS MILSPEAK, I was told—short for Give Up and Masturbate. The etymology was bogus, but the place was impressively bleak. Heroin addiction seemed to be the leading form of entertainment, followed by shopping, fighting, robbery (a traditional way to fund a heroin habit), television, arson, and strip joints. On an island surrounded by warm turquoise seas, no one seemed to use the beaches. There were almost no trees—a disastrous oversight at 13 degrees north. The island’s trees had been blown down by typhoons, people said, or destroyed in World War II, after which the U.S. military, hoping to prevent erosion, scattered tangan tangan seeds over much of the land from airplanes. Tangan tangan is a tall, dense, colorless brush. Not native to the Pacific, it nonetheless thrived on Guam. To travel the island’s roads was to pass between long gray-brown walls of tangan tangan. The local architecture was squat and concrete—built to survive typhoons. The economy was sustained by low-end Japanese tourism and the vast U.S. military presence. When I told Bryan that my World Almanac listed copra (dried coconut) as Guam’s major export, he laughed. “Most Guamanians think copra is a TV show—‘What time’s Copra, 8:30 or 9?’”
Bryan seemed to be having a ball. He had a delightful, serious girlfriend, Diane—a schoolteacher and single mom. He had a jolly crew of guys he surfed with, and after surfing drank beer with. Most of his friends seemed to be teachers from the U.S. mainland. His students were nearly all island kids—indigenous Chamorros, Filipinos, other Micronesians—who had to figure out what to make of a professor who wore baggy shorts and vintage aloha shirts and exhorted them all year to see the magic in language and literature, and then, on their final exam, gave them a multiple-choice question about which famous personage their teacher most closely resembled, with every choice the same: “Clint Eastwood.”
The surf during my Guam stay was AWOL—“flat as piss on a board,” in Bryan’s words. All the great spots I had heard about and seen pictures of—Boat Basin, Meritzo—didn’t show a ripple for weeks on end. Worse, Bryan seemed less than elated to see me. Had he turned ambivalent about our plan? I hung around, waiting for him to wrap up his Guam life. I stewed and spent a lot of time alone in his bare-bones, cement-walled apartment while he hung out with Diane and her son. I decided that Diane and I were locked in a silent battle for Bryan’s soul. She and her son were moving back to Oregon. What were Bryan’s intentions? He didn’t confide in me, but he was obviously struggling. He was also under fierce pressure from his mother, who, from Los Angeles, was making her disapproval of his job-quitting plans known. Was this why he had gone to Yale, to become some kind of bum? I didn’t really know her, but Bryan’s mother had always seemed formidable, dour, and very tightly wound in a North West England sort of way. Her golden American son’s highly developed sense of fun seemed never to have infected her. I decided that she and I were locked in a silent battle for Bryan’s soul.
I also decided that the disapproval gene had been, subtly but successfully, transmitted intact, and that I was now feeling its lash. The smallest things about me seemed to irk Bryan. I had stopped shaving when I left California; he made it clear that he disapproved of my scraggly beard. Then he told me that I needed to start using deodorant. I took that friendly advice hard. Encouraged by girlfriends, and by the Age of Aquarius in which we had grown up, I had always thought of myself as naturally sweet-smelling. On the phone to Sharon, I mentioned this very personal insult, expecting gentle reassurance, and instead got a long pause. Well, she said finally, he might be right about that. So, I thought, now I was facing a conspiracy. My surf partner and my girlfriend had both decided, possibly in concert, that it was time to rein me in, to tame the wild child, to crush the fresh-smelling free spirit they had once loved. Next they would have me wearing a coat and tie to work in an office park.
I was clearly going Guamshit—a malady much discussed among Bryan’s teacher friends—although I had the sense to keep my more lurid paranoias to myself. The truth was that Sharon was being wonderfully open-minded about my taking off on this open-ended trip. The fact that I was immature and headstrong (and Sharon, being older, had all too much perspective on my self-absorption) didn’t mean, however, that I was physically still a boy. They were undoubtedly right: I’m sure I reeked like a hostler.
I had a novel in progress to keep me busy during the Guam dog days. The main characters all worked on the railroad in California, a milieu I knew well, but the plot wandered off the rails, as it were, and got lost somewhere on the coast of Morocco. (Sharon and I had traveled in Morocco, after a long winter in England.) Bryan read what I had, and pronounced it a mishmash. He was right, and a couple of long talks about where I had gone wrong convinced me to chuck it all. The railroad was still the world I wanted to write about, but I needed new protagonists. And I still trusted Bryan above all readers of my stuff. As for my doubts about his commitment to this Endless Winter plan, they were at least half projections, I realized, of my own fears and misgivings.
In the end, we went. Or tried to go. We had bought cheap tickets to Western Samoa on Air Nauru, an airline that turned out to operate at the whim of the king of a miniature Micronesian country called Nauru. The king commandeered our plane just as we were waiting to board, and the ticket agent told us to come back in a week. I complained, to Bryan’s embarrassment, and the Air Nauru rep quickly started handing out hotel and meal vouchers to those knocked-back passengers who hadn’t already left the airport. We ended up staying at the Guam Hilton for a week. The other Air Nauru refugees staying free at the hotel kept trying to buy me drinks, and Bryan thought the incident illustrated a fundamental difference between us, although the moral of the story seemed to change each time he told it. Sometimes it was about his passivity, other times my obnoxiousness. We took, for the folks back home, poorly lit photos of one another styling like Frankie Avalon, balancing carefully on our boards, in our hotel room. Check it out, everybody: the first stop on our world surf tour. Bryan and Diane got to spend another week together. Then we really left.
• • •
WITHIN WEEKS, it felt like we had been knocking around the South Pacific for half our lives. We traveled by local bus and truck and ferry, by canoe and freighter and open boat, by small plane and yacht and taxi, on horseback. We walked. We hitchhiked. We paddled. We swam. We walked some more. We bent our heads over maps and charts and strained to see distant reefs, channels, headlands, river mouths. We clambered up overgrown trails and beetling crags and coconut trees to likely vantage points, and were frequently defeated by jungles, bad maps, worse roads, mangrove swamps, ocean currents, and kava. Fishermen helped us. Villagers took us in. People gawked, scythes frozen midswing, as we trudged past their taro patches in the depths of the woods, strange planks under our arms. Children seemed to follow us everywhere, screaming, “Palagi, palagi!” (White people!) Privacy became a faded memory, one of those American luxuries left behind. We were curiosities, envoys, entertainment. Nobody understood what the hell we were after.
We wished we had brought a surf magazine. The rain-soaked paperbacks rolling around in our bags were useless as visual aids. (Tolstoy don’t surf.)
In Western Samoa we found and rode a powerful, shifty right off the south shore of Upolu, the main island. The wave had great potential, I thought, but was vulnerable to the southeast trade winds, which blew almost every day. Bryan named the spot Mach Two, after the speed of the drop. It had scary, unpredictable, wide-swinging sets and a shallow reef, and it broke half a mile from shore, all of which left me glad I had brought a fast-paddling board. We decided not to camp on that wave, and pushed on to Savai’i, the next island west, where we found, on a coast with lighter winds, a left in front of a village called Sala’ilua.
The challenge, during the southern winter, was simple enough. Big winter swells came from the south, from storms in the Roaring Forties, or from even higher latitudes, down below New Zealand, and the prevailing trades blew from the same general direction.
For surfing, that was bad. Onshore winds make a mess of waves—tearing them apart, causing them to crumble, filling the lineup with chop. So we were looking for places where the south swells bent, or wrapped, around a reef or shore, turning east or west—more likely east, since the trades blew from the southeast—until they were breaking into the prevailing wind. Offshore winds, as I hope I’ve made clear, wreathe waves in glory. They groom them, hold them up and prevent them from breaking for a crucial extra beat, make them hollower when they do break, and create little or no chop. But swells lose their power and size when they turn corners. Steep coasts with quirky winds could alter the general pattern, but basically we were looking for reefs perfectly angled to bend south swells into the trades without killing them. If such reefs existed outside dreams and theory, they also needed, for our purposes, to come equipped with deepwater channels, also angled just right, so that the waves breaking on the reefs would have ridable shoulders and we would have a place to paddle back out after riding them. It was a tall order.
The left on Savai’i was consistent but undistinguished. We called it Uo’s—uo is Samoan for “friend.” The trade winds mostly left it alone, even in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the brunt of the south swells also steamed past the little bay where we surfed, dropping waves on us daily but none with much juice. The bigger days were head-high. Uo’s had a promising setup, with a reliable takeoff peak and a long wall. Nearly every wave was marred, though, by a quick, crossed-up section that broke out ahead of the hook (the steepest part of the wave) and ended most rides in frustration. At low tide it was extra-quick, and getting in and out of the water got nasty. A lava shelf covered with slick, round, ham-sized rocks was exposed, providing for hilarious-from-shore scenes of slipping, cursing, and ankle-barking, gymnastic attempts to fall down without dinging our boards. Our boards made big, hollow noises when they hit the rocks. Worse, there was an outhouse on rickety stilts perched over the lagoon just west of the break, and its stench got more notable at low tide. Bryan thought the outhouse would make a great logo for a typhoid prevention campaign. In the gashes and scrapes accumulating on our soft white feet, infections bloomed.
Were we the first people to surf this spot? Possibly. To surf this large (roughly forty miles by thirty miles) island? Probably not. But we had no way of knowing. The difficulty, the improbability, of finding good waves on unsurfed coasts was undoubtedly why Glenn Kaulukukui had given me such a searching look when I told him about our plan. Now Bryan and I were completely absorbed, though, in trying to solve the riddles and quirks of Uo’s. Surfing a known spot, a mapped spot, with local guys who demonstrate, if only by example, where to take off and what to expect, is an entirely different enterprise. We were making it up ourselves, first trying to identify and then by trial and error figure out new breaks. It was exhilarating, when you looked up from the reef’s many oddities and thought about it, to be surfing in such splendid isolation.
And there were, praise the Lord, a couple of sessions, at high tide, when the rogue end-section relaxed and Uo’s realized its potential. One of those came at the end of a rainy day after the wind, by some local meterological act of grace, backed around off the mountains and began to blow offshore. The clouds were low and dark, the water a dull gray. Bryan said that except for the palm trees thrashing in the gloom, and the temperature, it felt like northwest Ireland. He was on his frontside—a goofyfoot going left—and he put together a string of long, fast rides, taking a high line through the shut-down section and threading it cleanly. The surf was shoulder-high and pulsing. The wind added drama to the approaching sets and a faint blue light high in the faces just at the moment of breaking. We surfed till after dark, then walked back into Sala’ilua through a warm, thick, gentle rain.
The village had no hotel. (The whole island of Savai’i, as far as we knew, had no hotel.) We were staying with a family, the Savaiinaeas, who had several adjoining fales—open-walled, thatch-roofed traditional houses. Staying with a family was a delicate business. We had showed up in Sala’ilua one afternoon, after a long ride in the back of a dump truck. The truck, with a bed of old rubber sandal forms recycled as padding, doubled as an open-air bus. Our boards were jammed between baskets of taro and fish. The truck dropped us next to a cricket pitch covered with green cocoa beans laid out to dry in the sun. The village was neat, all thatched roofs and well-spaced breadfruit trees, and very quiet. It felt shy. We couldn’t quite see the waves. We had a letter of introduction to the Savaiinaeas from a cousin of theirs whom we’d met in Apia, the Samoan capital. We could hear children yelling, then see them gathering at a safe distance. Finally, a young man wearing a black lavalava approached. We murmured our business, and he led us to Sina Savaiinaea. She turned out to be a handsome woman in her thirties. She read our letter, ignoring a breathless crowd that had gathered around us. Sina glanced at the long, filthy canvas bags under our arms—they contained our surfboards—but did not miss a beat. “You are welcome,” she said, taking the wraps off a thousand-watt smile.
Sina and her husband, Tupuga, and their three daughters deluged us with an embarrassment of hospitality. Meal after lavish meal, cup after cup of tea. Our sweat-stained T-shirts would vanish and reappear in the morning washed and pressed. Bryan, who smoked, said ashtrays seemed to be emptied ten times a day. We tried to observe the basic local manners we’d learned—never sitting with a foot pointed at someone, never declining anything offered, greeting every guest with a handshake and a “Talofa.” But there was no escaping our pampered, privileged role as clueless guests. We even slept inside mosquito nets we’d brought, like little sheikhs with backpacks. Conversations were surprisingly cosmopolitan. Every grown man in Sala’ilua seemed to have traveled and worked all over—New Zealand, Europe, the United States. (Samoa has a large diaspora relative to its size; there are said to be more Samoans living overseas than at home.) There was a matai, or chief, who had been to the United Nations. There was even a guy in a denim jacket with a big American flag on the back who had made a pilgrimage to Lourdes.
And yet Savai’i felt like a world unto itself, a universe complete, out of time. There was no television. I never saw a telephone. (Cell phones and the Internet were many years away.) There were imported goods, mostly from China, in the tiny makeshift shops—shovels and flashlights, Golden Deer cigarettes, Long March transistor radios. But daily life was very largely a do-it-yourself affair. People farmed, fished, and hunted for their meals. They built their own houses and boats, made their own fishnets, mats, baskets, fans. They improvised endlessly. I was enchanted. I had set off from the United States with an ignorant ambition to see more of the world before it all turned into Los Angeles. There was no danger of that happening, of course, but fetching up in rural Polynesia caused my vague discontent with industrial civilization to snap into sharper focus.
Seen from a certain angle, everything in Samoa—the ocean, the forest, the people—had a kind of noble glow. This glow had nothing to do with picture-perfect beaches or grass shacks, those worn-out ideas of paradise, nor with my old storybook dreams—my Umi-and-his-brothers days were long behind me. I didn’t even have bare-breasted-maiden fantasies, or none worth writing about. I also doubted, after surveying the Samoan teenagers we met, that there was a preneurotic adolescence to be had here—apologies to Margaret Mead. (Gauguin, for that matter, was disappointed in Tahiti—he reckoned he got there a century too late.) No, Samoa was thoroughly Christianized and literate. Global pop culture flourished with its usual virulence. Every little kid’s hero seemed to be Bruce Lee. The inescapable tune that year was Boney M’s cover of “Rivers of Babylon.” What enchanted me was simply that people were still living so close to the land and sea, and so communally. To my Western eyes, they were paragons of graceful competence and imagined wholeness.
Sina’s brother, Viti, was a short, well-built guy in his late thirties. He had spiky hair, long sideburns, a shy smile, and a modesty that almost hid his quick mind and cool ingenuity. He h
ad lived in New Zealand, where he worked, he told us, in the Hellaby Corned Beef Factory, the Bycroft Biscuit Factory, and the New Zealand Milk and Butter Factory. He had sent money home, but he was happier here, he said. “There, you must wear a cardigan, and you can see your breath in front of your face while you wait for the works bus.” Each morning while we were around, Viti sailed off over the horizon in a homemade one-man outrigger canoe that, according to Sina, he had carved by hand in less than a week—this after single-handedly felling the fetau tree he built it from. In the afternoon Viti brought boatloads of bonito back to the village. At night he took a lantern out on the reef at low tide and speared fish with a knife. When he needed cash, he climbed the mountain behind Sala’ilua to his family’s copra plantation and brought down a truckload to market. (Samoa, unlike Guam, really did export copra.) When a wild pig got into his taro, he went hunting.
I once asked Viti about pig hunting. He and Bryan and I were sitting in a tiny, open-walled fale in the jungle near Sala’ilua drinking homemade beer from an old gin bottle.
Barbarian Days Page 17
