Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  In fact, the only time that I knew for sure that he even had film in his camera was a year or two later, when someone sent me a full-page photo, shot by Mike, from an American surf mag. There was empty low-tide Grajagan, with me standing in the foreground, pintail under arm. The waves, as usual, looked magnificent.

  Frustration is a big part of surfing. It’s the part we all tend to forget—stupid sessions, waves missed, waves blown, endless-seeming lulls. But the fact that frustration was the main theme of my surfing during a week of big, clean, empty waves at Grajagan is so improbable to other surfers that I haven’t forgotten it. Bryan never believed it either.

  • • •

  MY PARENTS HAD SENT US a pair of baseball caps from a TV movie they had worked on, Vacation in Hell. People would ask what the phrase meant. My Bahasa Indonesia was not up to a good translation. Bryan took to saying, “You’re looking at it, friend.”

  Mike, when we parted—he and José went straight back to Bali—had solemnly advised us, “Indonesia is a death trap.” That was melodramatic, but it was not easy traveling, on the super-cheap, up through Java and Sumatra, with surfboards. Every bus and van we caught was uncomfortably, insultingly overcrowded, as operators tried to squeeze more profit, literally, out of passengers. Still, I had to admire the heroics of the boy conductors, their incredible feats of balance, agility, and strength, clinging to doorframes at hair-raising speeds, their rapid-fire bargaining over fares, and in some cases their adroit public relations, keeping the customers at least half-satisfied. Barefoot, dressed in rags, these brilliant kids made American trainmen, always carefully dismounting locomotives and freight cars per our detailed instruction manuals, always wearing our steel-toed boots, look like pikers.

  We caught a train across part of Java. Hanging out the window to catch the breeze, I was struck by how, for somebody seeing Indonesia from a train, the main business of the nation seemed to be defecation. Every stream, river, weir, and rice-paddy canal that the tracks crossed seemed to be lined with farmers and villagers placidly squatting. It was a tour of the world’s biggest, most picturesque toilet, and it reminded me that I had vowed to be more careful about what I ate and drank after my Bali paratyphoid follies. I was still eating at street stalls, though, and we were still staying in dives. I had contracted malaria, in any case, at Plengkung. But I didn’t know that yet. Bryan’s eardrum, meanwhile, was indeed burst, said a doctor in Jakarta. He gave him some drops, and said it would heal.

  Rural Southeast Asia, in its intense tropicality, bore a superficial resemblance to rural Polynesia. But the differences between the two regions were far more pronounced. Vast civilizations had risen here on the surplus created by rice-based agriculture. Hundreds of millions of people lived and jostled here, in incomprehensibly complex caste societies. I took to interviewing people, semiformally—it was an odd thing to do, with no particular project in mind, but I was curious and they often seemed pleased to be asked—about their family histories, income, prospects, hopes. A rice farmer near Jogjakarta, who was a retired army captain, gave me a detailed account of his career, his farm’s operating expenses, his oldest son’s progress at university. Across nearly every story I heard, however, a thick veil fell around the period of 1965–66, when more than half a million Indonesians were killed in massacres led by the military and Islamic clerics. The main targets had been communists and alleged communists, but ethnic Chinese and Christians had also died or been dispossessed en masse. The Suharto dictatorship that emerged from the bloodbath was still in power, and the massacres were suppressed history, not taught in schools or publicly discussed. A pedal-taxi driver in Padang, a port city in western Sumatra, told me quietly about spending years in prison as a suspected leftist. He had been a professor before the great purge. He liked Americans, but the American government, he said, had aided and applauded the killing.

  Sumatra was for us a refreshing change from Java. More mountainous, less crowded, more prosperous, less stifling, at least in the areas we traversed. We had a treasure map, given to us in the South Pacific by an intrepid Australian kneeboarder who said she had surfed a great wave on Pulau Nias, an island west of Sumatra. It was no longer a secret spot, apparently, but a key threshold had not yet been crossed—no photos had been published. We caught a small, spartan, diesel-powered ferry from Padang. It was about two hundred miles to Nias, and a storm clobbered us the first night out. We wallowed in total darkness. At times, terrifyingly, we seemed to lose steerage. Waves washed across the deck. The only cabin was a small, grimy plywood hut for the helmsman. Most of the passengers were sick. But people were amazingly tough. Nobody screamed. Everybody prayed. We were lucky no one went overboard. We were lucky the old tub didn’t sink. We putt-putted into Teluk Dalam, a little port on the south end of Nias, on a muggy gray morning. There was nothing about Teluk Dalam, I thought, that would have been out of place in a Joseph Conrad novel. Nias had a population of five hundred thousand and no electricity.

  The wave was about ten miles west, near a village called Lagundri. The kneeboarder was correct. It was an immaculate right. It broke off a point, but it was really a reefbreak, since the wave did not follow the shoreline. It stood up distinctively, a ruler-straight wall, when it hit the reef, but then it peeled across, away from the shore, without sections, for probably eighty yards, barreling beautifully into the wind, before it hit deep water. A small company of tall coconut trees on the point leaned out over the water, as if they wanted to get a better look at the wave. It was a splendid sight, truly. Lagundri Bay was horseshoe-shaped and deep. The village, roughly a mile down from the point and separated from the beach by a palm grove, was a modest collection of fishermen’s shacks except for one imposing, rather ornate three-story wooden house with an elaborately peaked roof. This was the losmen. There were four or five surfers staying there, all Aussies. If the other surfers were dismayed that we showed up, they hid it well. We hung our mosquito nets on a second-floor balcony.

  It was on that balcony that Bryan told me he was bailing. I remember, when he said it, that I was reading a biography of Mark Twain, by Justin Kaplan, that we had traded back and forth. It was a hot afternoon. We were waiting out the worst of the heat before a late-day go-out. The news was not a complete surprise. Bryan had been muttering about meeting Diane in Europe during her summer vacation.

  Still, it hurt. I kept my eyes on the book.

  It wasn’t me, he said, after I asked. He was just tired. And homesick. And sick of traveling. Diane had given him an ultimatum, but he was ready to go. He would look for a cheap flight in Singapore or Bangkok, probably head out in late July. That was six or seven weeks away.

  • • •

  WE SURFED. The swell was remarkably consistent for the first week or so. The brilliance of the wave seemed only to increase. It was ridable at all tides. It never seemed to blow out. There was a little reverse current running out to sea from the bottom of the bay that helped keep the surface groomed in all conditions. Paddling out was absurdly easy. You walked to the point, beyond the wave, slipped through a keyhole in the reef, and arrived in the lineup with hair dry. Except for being a world-class right, it was the categorical opposite of Kirra. There was no demonic current to fight. If every surfer within five hundred miles had been out at the same time, there would still have been no crowd. And where Kirra’s essential quality was breathtaking compression, the wave on Nias felt like pure expansion. It invited you to move farther up, get in earlier, take a higher line, pull in deeper. The takeoff was steep but straightforward. You just had to get over the ledge and be on the wave when it jacked. There was no time to carve big turns on the main wall. It was a run-and-gun wave, with a glorious tube if you took a high line and timed it well on a wave that opened up. It wasn’t a top-to-bottom barrel—it was what is known as an almond-shaped barrel—although it broke hard enough to snap boards. The wave wasn’t extremely long, like Tavarua, but neither was it dangerously shallow. And the wave on Nias h
ad an extraordinary grace note. The last ten yards of the main wall, just before it hit deep water, stood up extra-tall. The face there was, for no obvious reason, often several feet taller than the rest of the wave. This great green slope, particularly the top third of it, begged for a high-speed flourish, a maneuver to remember, a demonstration of both gratitude and mastery.

  I peaked, in some ways, as a surfer on Nias, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was twenty-six, probably stronger than I had ever been, as quick as I would ever be. I was on the right board, on the right wave. I had been surfing consistently for a year-plus. I felt like I could do almost anything on a wave that occurred to me. When the surf got bigger, late that week, I doubled down and surfed with more abandon. The extra-tall end-section let me bank off the top from a height that I had never before attempted, and mostly I came down cleanly on my board. I did know that I had never surfed so loosely in waves that size. I felt immortal.

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS THE DRY SEASON, a two-day rainstorm flooded the village and filled the bay with brown freshwater, which seemed to kill the waves.

  I went to bed feeling weird and woke up with a fever. I assumed it was a paratyphoid relapse. More likely, it was malaria. I started feeling less immortal. Maybe Indonesia was a death trap. Three Australian surfers had discovered the wave at Lagundri in 1975, and one of them, John Giesel, after repeated bouts of malaria, had died, reportedly of pneumonia, nine months later. He was twenty-three. One of the two guys who first surfed Grajagan, an American named Bob Laverty—the other guy was Mike Boyum’s brother—died only a few days after returning to Bali. He drowned at Uluwatu. Mike Boyum survived Indonesia but got into cocaine smuggling, went to jail in Vanuatu, and later died, while living under an alias, at a great wave he found in the Philippines.

  I was also tired, and homesick, and sick of traveling. I wasn’t tempted to quit Asia with Bryan, but I was having trouble remembering exactly why I was here. There was surfing, but it wasn’t going to get any better than Lagundri. I simply couldn’t picture returning to the United States. I copied out a passage from Lord Jim: “We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.” I was not ready for that accounting. For one thing, I couldn’t return to the United States without finishing this novel. I thought about it constantly, filling journals with plotting, rethinking, self-castigation, and exhortations to greater efforts, but I hadn’t written any new material since Bali. Where could I hole up and get back to work? Writing felt like it justified, barely, my existence—this extremity of obscurity I had perversely chosen. But I was also starting to worry about money. We were living on a few dollars a day, but cities like Singapore and Bangkok would be a different story. Bryan had enough to get home. Running out of money in Southeast Asia could be grim. I doubted that Sharon had much saved. We would need to be frugal.

  But it was farcical, gross, I knew, for me to be fretting about money in Lagundri, where the ambient ironies of the Asia Trail were never far away. The Asia Trail was the great snaking overland route from Europe to Bali, slogged down by thousands of Western backpackers since the ’60s. It was being broken into pieces in 1979 by the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was about to remove another poverty-ridden, dope-rich Shangri-la from the itinerary. But the trail, which included a main stop at Lake Toba, in north Sumatra, also had a tiny tributary that ran out to Nias. This had little to do with surfing as yet. It existed, apparently, because of the local culture, which had developed in relative isolation and included stone megaliths, spectacular ironwood architecture known as omo sebua, war dances, and hilltop villages with houses modeled after the Dutch galleons of slave-trading days. And so an odd collection of European hippies and tourists wandered up the coastal road through Lagundri. The villagers looked askance at them all, particularly the bedraggled backpackers. It was not hard to see why. Here was a large, awkward member of the global ruling elite who had probably spent more in an air-travel day than anyone on Nias could make in a year of hard work, all for the pleasure of leaving an unimaginably rich, clean place for this desperately poor, unhealthy place. Here he was struggling blindly down the road under an enormous pack, disoriented and ignorant and sweating like a donkey. He wanted to see Asia from the ground, not from the Hilton height of some air-conditioned resort that any sane person would prefer. The complex ambitions and aversions that brought the poor backpacker seven thousand miles to struggle and suffer from dysentery, heatstroke, or worse in the equatorial jungle—anything to be a “traveler” and not a “tourist”!—were perhaps impossible to untangle, but it was well known that he brought so little money that he was hardly worth hustling.

  Bryan and I were in the same economic bracket, of course. And being a rich orang putih in a poor brown world still sucked irredeemably. We, that is, sucked.

  The family that ran the losmen in Lagundri was Muslim, which made them unusual on Nias, which is predominantly Christian. In the nearby villages, the churches shook with fervent song. On the jungle paths, small unsmiling men with machetes tucked in their waistbands carried enormous jute bags of coconuts. Our hosts were affable, and relatively cosmopolitan—they came from Sumatra—and they warned us against going beyond the village at night. The local Christianity was strictly nominal, they said. During World War II, when the island was cut off from the outside world, congregations had swiftly reverted to precolonial practice and eaten the Dutch and German missionaries among them. I was unable to verify this gory gossip.

  My fever alternated with chills. A headache was constant. I was taking chloroquine, a popular malaria prophylaxis, unaware that it was useless against many local strains of the disease. Indonesian villagers often asked for pills without specifying what kind. Vitamins, aspirin, antibiotics—there seemed to be a general faith in pills. At first I thought the requests might be for sick relatives or friends, or for stockpiling against illness, but then I saw perfectly healthy-looking people pop whatever was handed over, no questions asked. It would have been funny if it weren’t so ominous. Now that I was sick, people left me alone. Babies wailed. I listlessly read a collection of Donald Barthelme stories. Lines stuck in my head. “Call up Bomba the Jungle Boy? Get his input?” Boney M’s execrable, inescapable “Rivers of Babylon” wheezed from a village teenager’s tape deck.

  I listened to Bryan and the Aussies shooting the breeze. Bryan was on a roll. He had them blowing Sumatran coffee through their noses. I heard him say, “Oh yeah, if a surf spot’s too far from town in the States, we just call up the Army Corps of Engineers and they move it. Takes two or three days, a lot of trucks, they have to close the whole highway. Sometimes they bring the whole bay, other times just the reef and the wave. You should see it going down the road—guys still surfing it and everything. They have to go really, really slow. It’s quite an operation.”

  I would miss him unspeakably. He said it wasn’t me, but I knew it partly was. We pulled together nearly effortlessly now, and we hadn’t quarreled in months, but the subterranean dynamics of our partnership had not changed. I was after something, whatever it was. And the chemistry of my brashness and what Bryan called his passivity, which he had been noting since Air Nauru and the Guam Hilton, was not doing him any good. He did not want to feel like he was along for the ride. He had to get away. But what would this long, strange trip be like without him? He and I spoke a language no one else understood. “Oh, wow, a new experience”—that was what we were supposed to say after an earthquake, or if someone stole our car, according to Teka of Tonga. But we said it after smaller fiascoes—hell nights on leaky ferries, days of unslaked thirst brought on by dirty jerry cans. “Radio Ethiopia”—that was an unlistenable Patti Smith song, some secondhand Rimbaud trope. But it stood for all faux-exotic hipster posing—names dropped in New York of
places never visited, let alone lived through. We felt superior to, if also vaguely threatened by, all that. Those were the people getting on with careers in the arts, having what Bryan sometimes called Suckcess. Now he was going back to the United States. I was staying in Ethiopia. I was silently envious.

  I started feeling stronger, started taking little walks. On a jungle path I met an old man who reached out and silently patted my belly. It was his way of saying good morning.

  “Jam berapa?” What time is it? That was the question kids loved to ask, pointing at their watchless wrists.

  “Jam karet.” Rubber time. It was a stock joke answer, meaning that time was a flexible concept in Indonesia.

  People I met would often demand, “Dimana?” Where are you going?

  “Jalan, jalan, saja.” Walking, walking, only.

  Everybody in Indonesia always wanted to know if I was married. It was rude to answer, “Tidak”—no. That was too blunt. It disrespected marriage. Better to say “Belum”—not yet.

  I wondered what Sharon would make of Nias. She had been dauntless in Morocco, game for any casbah detour. I began telling people in Lagundri that I was going to Singapore but would be back in a few months. They put in their orders: a man’s silver Seiko automatic watch; a Mikasa volleyball; a guestbook for the losmen. I started a list of things I wished we’d brought: honey, whiskey, duct tape, dried fruit, nuts, powdered milk, oatmeal. More protein would be welcome. Meat and even, oddly enough, fresh fish were rarities in Lagundri. Our meals were mostly rice and collard greens, with hot chilies to help fight bacteria. Like everyone, we ate with our hands. A fisherman in Java had taught me the best way to eat rice with your fingers. You used the first three fingers as a trough and the back of the thumb as a shovel. It worked. But I needed more food, more vitamins. My boardshorts were falling off my hips.