Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Manja was tall, soft-voiced, warm-eyed, slim. She laughed, or at least smiled indulgently, at all the right places. She was earnestly political, but wore it lightly, in the diffident Aussie way. At night, she and I would slip away and find a quiet place to lay our sleeping bags. She told me about her childhood. She had grown up on a farm on the Murray River. Hunters there used to shoot kangaroos and wallabies, she said, and if they found a little joey still alive in the pouch, they would give the baby to a farmkid as a pet. They were great pets—gentle, loyal, intelligent. She used to dress up her young wallaby in a hat and coat and the two of them would walk and hop, holding hands, to town.

  • • •

  OUR IDYLL WENT TO HELL in Darwin. Tess and Manja had a house to stay in, a feminist commune of some kind, no men allowed. Tess was happy to see the back of me. It seemed I had interrupted a preexisting idyll—something Manja had neglected to mention. Bryan and I stayed in a campground outside town. There wasn’t much to Darwin. It had been blown flat by a cyclone a few years before. Rebuilding was proceeding slowly. The town was allegedly on the coast, but all we could find was mud and scrub and poisonous-looking shallows. It was hot, flat, plug-ugly. There was an airport, though, with cheap weekly flights to Denpasar. We sold the car for two hundred dollars to a bunch of Yugoslavian bauxite miners. By some miracle, it started when they came to inspect it. We changed campgrounds, not certain that the miners fully grasped the meaning of “as is.”

  I longed for Manja. We managed to rendezvous at an old hotel that had survived the cyclone. Suddenly, I didn’t want to leave Australia. It would be better, she said, if I went.

  She was right. I turned up that night, uninvited, at the commune. Nobody answered the door. I let myself in. I could hear festive noise in the backyard. I got as far as the back door. On a concrete deck, under a bright porch light, Manja was getting a haircut. Most of her long blond locks were already on the ground. Tess was merrily clipping off the rest. Manja’s new crew cut was light brown, her head very round and vulnerable-looking, like a baby’s. Four or five women were applauding her transformation. She was grinning goofily, drinking a beer—a stubby of Toohey’s, I noticed, while a wave of despair rose in my throat. I must have made a noise. Manja screamed. Others bellowed. Scuffling and shoving and shouting occurred. I half thought Manja might leave with me. Instead, I left with the police.

  Weeks later, in Bali, I got a letter from Manja. She apologized for calling the cops. They were fascists, and she hoped they had not abused me. They hadn’t. In fact, being good ockers, they had turned me loose with off-color oaths of gender solidarity. Her misadventure with me, Manja wrote, had only strengthened her resolve to have nothing more to do with men. I hadn’t respected her boundaries, which was so typical. I couldn’t argue with that. I still liked her, though. If she had written that she was coming to Indonesia, I would have met her plane.

  Bryan, me, and José from Ecuador, Grajagan, Java, 1979

  SEVEN

  CHOOSING ETHIOPIA

  Asia, Africa, 1979–81

  BRYAN LOATHED BALI. HE WROTE AN ARTICLE FOR TRACKS—IT carried, by tradition, both our names, though I only gave it a light edit—mocking the notion, then widespread among Australian surfers, that Bali was still an unspoiled paradise of uncrowded waves and mellow Hindu natives. In fact, he wrote, it was overrun with surfers and other tourists. It was a place where one could “see topless and bottomless Europeans of both sexes,” “listen to the lies of surfers from all over the world,” “hire a board carrier and experience the dizzying thrill of colonialism,” and “tell people you’re from Cronulla when you’re really from Parramatta,” the latter being a less cool Sydney suburb than the former.

  I agreed that Bali was overrun, and the collision of mass tourism and Indonesian poverty was grotesque, but the place suited me nonetheless. We stayed in a cheap, clean losmen (guesthouse) in Kuta Beach, ate well for practically nothing, and surfed daily. I found a good writing spot in a college library in Denpasar, the provincial capital, catching a bus there each morning. It was a cool, quiet refuge on a hot, noisy island. My novel was rocking along. A street vendor with a little turquoise cart would show up outside the library at midday, my signal to knock off. He served rice, soup, sweets, and satay through the opened windows of campus offices. I liked his nasi goreng—fried rice. In the afternoons, if there was swell, Bryan and I headed out the Bukit Peninsula, where a brace of great lefts broke off limestone cliffs. There were good waves around Kuta too, even on small swells, and, when the wind blew southwest, in a resort area on the east coast, Sanur.

  The spot that sank its hooks in me the deepest was a sweeping, already famous left called Uluwatu. It was out on the southwestern tip of the Bukit. There was an eleventh-century Hindu temple, built of hard gray coral, perched on the edge of a high cliff just to the east of the wave. You entered the water, at high tide, through a sloshing sea cave. Uluwatu got big, and on bigger days, when the wind was light offshore, the long blue walls did something I had never seen elsewhere. In discrete, well-separated places along the swell line, they gently feathered far, far ahead of where you were surfing—hundreds of yards ahead, and hundreds of yards from shore. There were apparently a series of narrow rock ridges running out to sea from the inside reef, formations shallow enough to make a big wave feather but not, at least on the swells we surfed, to make it break. It was unsettling at first, but then, after a few screaming rides on massive waves that did not close out, the sight of those distant feathering sections just heightened the joy of rocketing around in the breaking part of the wave, since those strange wafts of spray out in the bay would soon become, you came to trust, solid sections on the inside shelf.

  Inside Uluwatu was known, unoriginally, as the Racetrack. It was shallow and very fast, with sharp coral that left its claw marks on my feet, arms, and back. One afternoon, it scared me badly. The crowd, which could be thick at Uluwatu, even in 1979, had thinned out, which I found mysterious, since the surf was excellent. There were maybe five of us still out. The tide was low. The waves were big and quick. I could see twenty or thirty guys on the cliff, all squinting into the dropping sun, which should have caused me to ask, Why are they watching and not surfing? I got a couple of sweet rides, and then a wave that answered the question I had neglected to ask. It was well overhead, dark-faced, thick, and I, sky-high on testosterone, made the mistake of driving hard and low into the Racetrack. All the water drained off the reef. The tide was too low to surf down here at this size. That was why everyone had left. I could not pull out. It was too late for that. I could not dive off. There was no water. I got the deepest backhand barrel of my life. It was very dark, very noisy. I did not enjoy it. In fact, even as it became clear that I might actually make it, I wished, with a weird bitter awareness of the irony of it, that I could be anywhere else on earth. It should have been a moment of satori, a thunderbolt of enlightenment after long, patient practice. Instead, I was miserable because fear, entirely justified, filled my heart and brain. I made the wave, but I escaped horrible injury, if not worse, by pure dumb luck. Pulling in had been a low-odds survival move. Stupidity had put me inside that tube. If I had a chance to do it over again, I wouldn’t.

  There were so many surfers in Kuta, it was like attending a world conference of the wave-obsessed. They might all have been lying, but there were people talking surf on beaches and street corners, in bars and cafés and losmen courtyards, 24/7. Max, who had once mocked me and Bryan, would have had a field day with this mob. But I found it oddly moving, the intensity with which a group of guys could talk about the lines of a board standing up against a wall—its release points, its rocker—or the way that surfers often dropped to the ground to draw in the dirt the layout of their home breaks for guys from other places, other countries. Their stories, they felt, would make no sense if their listeners didn’t understand exactly how a reef back in Perth caught a west swell. They lost themselves in diagrams more detailed
than anyone wanted. Some of this strange ardor could be put down to homesickness, or simply to the countless hours spent surfing and studying that particular reef, but a good part of it was also, it must be said, dope-fueled. Surfers in Bali, together with the legions of nonsurfing Western backpackers, smoked daunting quantities of hash and pot. Bryan and I were the rare abstainers. Cannabis had started making me anxious in college; I hadn’t smoked any in probably five years. Bryan liked to call everything except alcohol “false drugs.”

  I had begun trying to interest magazines in travel pieces. My first assignment came from the Hong Kong edition of a U.S. military publication called Off Duty. I had never seen the magazine (I have still never seen it), but the $150 they offered sounded grand. They wanted a story about getting a massage in Bali. Massage ladies were everywhere in Kuta, with their pink plastic baskets of aromatic oils. I was too shy to approach one on the beach, where pale bodies were being kneaded by the dozen all day long. But as soon as I mentioned my interest, the family that ran our losmen produced a sinewy-armed old woman. The children of the establishment laughed as she eyed me with sadistic pleasure and ordered me down on my belly on a cot in the courtyard. I was actually frightened as she dove into my back muscles with her powerful hands. I had torn an upper back muscle on the railroad, while yanking on a rusted cut lever in Redwood City, and it had never properly healed. I imagined this macho masseuse tearing into the sore spot and doing more damage. I wondered uneasily if such an episode might at least make good article copy. The injury had a bittersweet history already. When it happened, my fellow trainmen advised me to take no money, and sign no papers, from the company. This could be my million-dollar ladder, they said—the piece of defective equipment that allowed me to sue the railroad, get rich, and retire young. I considered such thinking contemptible, and so a few days later, when my back felt better, I cashed a check, signed a release, and returned to work. Of course, my back started hurting again the next day, and had ached ever since. But the masseuse didn’t hurt me. Her fingers found the messed-up muscle, explored it, and worked it long and gently. It stopped aching that day, and the old throb didn’t resume for weeks.

  At some point I got sick. Fever, headache, dizziness, chills, a dry cough. I was too weak to surf, felt too awful to work. After a day or two, I dragged myself to Sanur, lying in the back of a minibus, and found a German doctor in one of the big hotels. He said I had paratyphoid, which wasn’t as bad as typhoid. I probably got it from street food, he said. He gave me antibiotics. He said I would not die. I had almost never been sick before, which meant I had no experience of debility to draw on. I sank into a fretful derangement, sweating, listless, self-despising. I began to think, more desperately now, that I had wasted my life. I wished I had listened to my parents. (Patrick White: “parents, those arch-amateurs of life.”) My mother had wanted me to become a Nader’s Raider—one of the idealistic young lawyers working for Ralph Nader, exposing corporate misdeeds. Why hadn’t I done that? My father would have liked me to become a journalist. His hero had been Edward R. Murrow. As a young man, he had worked as a gofer for Murrow and his buddies in New York. Why hadn’t I listened to him? Bryan came and went from the room, looking dubiously at me, I thought, as I sloshed in self-pity. No, he said, the waves weren’t much good. Bali still sucked. Where was he sleeping? He had met a woman. An Italian, I gathered.

  We were getting mail—poste restante, Kuta Beach. But I had not heard from Sharon in weeks. I began to feel forgotten, angry. One morning, when I was slightly stronger, I walked slowly to the post office. There were cards and letters from family and friends but nothing from Sharon. I thought about sending a telegram but noticed a group of tourists gathered by a set of old wall phones under a sign, INTERNASIONAL. The telephone—what a concept. I called her. It was only the second or third time we had spoken in a year. Her voice was like music from another life. I was entranced. She and I wrote a great many letters, but the vast, delicately balanced distance between us collapsed when she murmured in my ear in real time. She was alarmed when I said I was sick. I should get well. She said she would meet me in Singapore at the end of June. This was major news. It was mid-May.

  I got well.

  • • •

  INDONESIA IS A BIG PLACE, with more than a thousand miles of coast exposed to Indian Ocean swells. Only Bali had been much explored by surfers. Bryan and I were ready to look for waves elsewhere. On the southeastern tip of Java, there was a fabled wilderness left known as Grajagan. An American, Mike Boyum, had built a camp there in the mid-’70s, but nothing had been heard from him recently. It seemed like a logical place to start. We sold our extra Aussie boards. From among the hordes in Bali, we found two accomplices—an Indonesian-American photographer from California named Mike, and a blond Ecuadorean goofyfoot named José.

  It was a difficult expedition. We bought supplies in an East Java town, Banyuwangi, a long way from the coast. Vehement haggling seemed to be the local norm for every transaction, at least with orang putih—white men. Mike’s command of Bahasa Indonesia, which we had thought at first was good, disintegrated under pressure. I became chief haggler. (Bahasa Indonesia is an easy language to learn if you don’t mind speaking it badly. It has no verb tenses, and in much of the country it is—or at least was then—nobody’s first language, which helped level the field for a foreigner.) At the coast, in the village of Grajagan, we needed a boat to take us ten miles across a bay to the wave. More wild, sweaty haggling, many hours. The villagers had seen surfers before, they said, but none in the past year or so. I drew up a contract in my journal, which a fishermen named Kosua and I signed. They would take us across for twenty thousand rupiah (thirty-two dollars), and come back for us in a week. They would supply eight jerry cans of freshwater. We would leave the next morning at 5 a.m.

  The boat we sailed in was nothing like the delicate, colorful little jukung outriggers that fished off Uluwatu. It was a broad-beamed, heavy-bottomed beast, powered not by a patch of sail but by a large, noisy, ancient outboard with a strangely long propeller shaft. It carried a crew of ten. Five minutes into our voyage, it capsized in the surf in front of the village. Nobody got hurt but everybody got upset, and a lot of stuff got wet. Kosua wanted to renegotiate our contract. He tried to argue that this trip was more dangerous than we had let on. That was rich, I thought, after crashing on a sandbar that he had to negotiate every time he took out his boat. So we haggled for another day or so, until the surf got smaller. Then we went.

  Grajagan the surf spot, known locally as Plengkung, was way out on a roadless point where the thick jungle was said to be one of the last redoubts of the Javan tiger. Kosua dropped us in a cove about a half mile down the beach from some ramshackle structures that had been Boyum’s camp. It was low tide, and there were great-looking waves breaking off a wide, exposed reef beyond the camp. We started humping our gear in the heat, as Kosua motored away. The jerry cans were hideously heavy. It was all I could do to drag one along the sand. Mike couldn’t even manage that. Bryan carried two at a time. I knew he was strong, but this was ridiculous. Even more impressive: after we got to the camp and all fell prostrate in the shade, gasping for water, Bryan opened a jerry can, tasted the water, spat it out, and said calmly, “Benzine.” What was impressive was his calmness. He went down the line of plastic cans. Six of eight were undrinkable. They had been used to carry fuel, and had not been properly cleaned. Bryan dragged the two cans of potable water to the base of a tree. “Looks like strict rationing,” he said. “Want me to be in charge?”

  Mike and José appeared to be in shock. They were silent. I said, “Sure.”

  The whole Grajagan misadventure went like that. Screwups, mishaps, constant thirst, and Mike and José half-catatonic. Bryan and I seemed, by comparison, seasoned and resourceful. The pattern had started in Banyuwangi. As they got daunted, we divided tasks and took care of business. Bryan and I had been traveling together for more than a year now, and it felt good—redeemi
ng, even—to know how completely we could rely on each other. The division of water, for that matter, would be fair, I knew, down to the drop.

  Boyum had built several bamboo tree houses, all but one of which had collapsed. We slept, gingerly, in the uncollapsed one. We saw no tigers, but we heard large beasts at night, including wild bulls known as banteng and angry-sounding boars rooting around the trunk of our tree. Sleeping on the ground was out of the question.

  Our bad luck continued during our first surf session, when Bryan came up from a wipeout holding the side of his head, his face white with pain. We suspected a burst eardrum. He was out of the water for the rest of the week.

  I tried to assure him that the waves were not as good as they looked, and they really weren’t. They looked incredible—long, long, long, fast, empty lefts, six feet on the smaller days, eight-feet-plus when the swell pulsed. I now think that José and I were surfing the wrong place. For me, it was natural to move up the line, toward the top—to the first place where a wave was catchable. At Grajagan it was big and sectiony and mushy up top, but that’s where I went, and José followed my lead. I figured I could connect some of the racier parts of the wave farther down. Except I rarely could. There were always flat spots, then unmakable sections. I was misreading the reef completely. It apparently never even occured to me to move down inside, to try to find a corner in there where a makable takeoff led to a cleaner, better-peeling wave. On the biggest day, José wanted no part of it, and Mike, who had rarely left his mosquito net, convinced me to paddle all the way up to where it was genuinely huge. He even talked me into wearing a little white wetsuit vest he carried. It would make a nice contrast with the turquoise water and my brown arms, he said. I caught one monster wave, against my better judgment, barely making the drop on my trusty New Zealand pintail. Mike said he got the shot, though I never saw it.