“Let’s do it,” Mark said.
The three of us were now sitting in his van—a brawny, battered, trek-outfitted 1975 Dodge—parked on a dirt road just south of the pier. No one had said anything except “Oh my God!” and “Look at that!” for ten minutes. I had absolutely no desire to go surfing. Fortunately, my board was inadequate for these conditions; even Edwin’s 8'4" gun didn’t look big enough. Mark had two big-wave boards, both over nine feet, with him. He said that one of us could use one of them.
“This is why I don’t own a board over nine feet,” Edwin said. He gave a nervous laugh.
In fact, this was why most surfers didn’t own a board over eight feet; it might raise the question someday of actually going out in conditions that required that much surfboard. Once, in Wise’s shop, I had heard a surfer mutter as he and his friends studied a 10'0" gun on display, “This one comes with a free pine box.” The market for boards that serious was minuscule.
Mark jumped out of the van, went around to the side door, and began changing into his wetsuit. For the first time since I’d moved to San Francisco, I was ready to refuse to go out, and Mark seemed to realize it. “Come on, Edwin,” he said. “We’ve surfed bigger waves.”
They probably had, too. Mark and Edwin had a pact, informal but fierce, concerning big waves. They had been surfing together since they met, in 1978. Mark took an interest in Edwin’s welfare: counseling him about how to get along in the United States, encouraging him to go to college. Edwin, who lived with his mother—his parents were divorced—treasured Mark’s foster-paternal guidance, which came to include a running pep talk on the subject of big-wave surfing. Edwin had the physical equipment for big waves: he was powerfully built, a strong swimmer, a solid surfer. He also had steady nerves and a major endowment of youthful blitheness. Finally, there was the fact that he trusted—even worshipped—Mark. That made him an ideal apprentice in a program that, over several winters, had got him out into bigger and bigger—eventually into some very big—waves. Mark and Edwin’s pact consisted mainly of an unspoken understanding that Mark would not take Edwin out on days when he would probably drown.
Edwin was shaking his head lugubriously, unzipping his down-filled jacket. In most company he would make an unlikely Sancho Panza—he is over six feet tall, with square-jawed, leading-man looks—but it struck me, watching the two of them clamber into their wetsuits, that Mark could make any companion seem like a sidekick.
While Edwin fiddled with a leash that he was transferring from his board to the board Mark was lending him—a hefty, pale yellow 9'6" single-fin gun—Mark showed me how to use his camera. Then he took the board that he would ride—a magnificent, narrow 9'8" three-fin—out on the dunes, methodically rubbed wax on the deck, and did a series of deep yoga stretches, all without taking his eyes off the surf.
“Why do we do this?” Edwin asked me. His nervous laugh rose and fell.
Finally, Edwin was ready, and the two of them set off, trotting lightly past the guard’s trailer, disappearing behind stacks of mammoth sewer pipe, then reappearing a minute later out on the pier, still jogging—two lithe silhouettes, their big boards dramatic against a whitish sky. Beyond the pier I could see waves breaking off Sloat where I had never seen them break before. Farther north still, the ranges of gray-beige swells and white walls were a scene out of my surfing nightmares. The waves scared me even as I sat, warm and dry, in the van.
At the end of the pier, Mark and Edwin climbed down a ladder, flopped on their boards, and started paddling back toward shore. Their approach gave scale to the waves, which turned out to be less monstrous than I’d imagined. When Edwin quickly took off on a meaty left, it stood up about three times his height. The wave was mud brown and hungry-looking; I started snapping pictures. Edwin pulled into it well, but the wave suddenly lined up all the way to the pier, fifty yards north, closing out, and he was forced to straighten off. The whitewater exploded and engulfed him. A moment later, his board came cartwheeling out of the whitewater; his leash had snapped. The waves were breaking close to shore—there was no outside bar on the south side of the pier—and Edwin washed in quickly. He came chugging up the dunes, and he grinned when I told him that I’d got several shots of his ride. “It’s not too hairy out there, I don’t think,” he said. “Kind of closed out, maybe.” He wanted to borrow the leash from my board. I gladly gave it to him. The waves looked more than kind of closed out, and it was not getting any warmer—the air temperature was in the forties.
While Edwin started back out the pier, I noticed a tremendous set breaking on an outside bar perhaps two hundred yards to the north. With people in the water, it was now possible to say that Sloat was indeed twenty-foot-plus. But the set I could see breaking on the outside bar was more than gigantic—it was also phenomenally violent. The waves seemed to be turning themselves inside out as they broke, and when they paused they spat out clouds of mist—air that had been trapped inside the bus-sized tubes. I had never seen anything like it before, even on the North Shore: twenty-foot spitting tubes. Edwin was gesturing to Mark, trying to show him where a set on the horizon on the south side seemed to be planning to break. The thunder of the waves under the pier drowned out the roar of the larger waves farther away, and Edwin never glanced north, where the view would have stopped him cold.
Mark caught a couple of peaky ten-foot rights, both of which he made. I didn’t have a good angle on the rights for shooting pictures, though. And, photographically speaking, the situation south of the pier began to deteriorate after Edwin got back out. It started raining in earnest, and Mark and Edwin, whom I could barely see through the mist, caught no waves for half an hour. I stowed Mark’s camera, locked his van, and went home.
Shortly after I left, Edwin told me later, he caught another left. He made this one, but the following wave, a fifteen-foot peak that came crashing through the pier, caught him inside. My leash snapped, but this time he did not wash in to the beach. Instead, he was seized and carried by a powerful current straight into the pier. Terrified, he fought his way through the pilings, and came out unhurt on the north side. But there the current turned seaward and began to carry him toward the outside bar—the same bar where I had seen twenty-foot tubes turning themselves inside out and spitting. He swam toward shore, but the current was stronger than he was. He was already hundreds of yards offshore, weak with panic—but still south of the killer sandbar—when a freak deepwater set broke outside him. These were much softer waves than the ones breaking where he was bound, so Edwin stayed on the surface and let them hit him. The set washed him to the inside edge of the rip. There he managed to swim into the path of the whitewater rumbling in from the killer bar, which washed him farther inside. When he reached the beach, somewhere near Sloat, he was too weak to walk.
Mark found him there. Edwin was too shaken up to drive, so Mark drove him home. I don’t know whether he mentioned to Edwin what he had been doing while Edwin was fighting for his life in the water and lying gasping on the sand, but Mark later told me that he had grown bored with the long lulls south of the pier and had paddled through to the north side. He had stayed outside the killer bar, but had caught a couple of gigantic waves at Sloat, he said, before heading back south to look for Edwin. He had been worried after he found the board he’d lent Edwin lying on the beach, and very relieved when he finally found Edwin himself. Their pact had survived a severe test. Edwin, after Mark took him back to the apartment he shared with his mother, stayed on land for several days. He surfed little the rest of that winter, and I did not see him out in very big waves again.
• • •
ANOTHER COLD DAY AT SLOAT. Half a dozen people are out in eight-foot, high-tide glass. I’m on shore, warm and dry, hors de combat since tearing up my ankle two weeks before in a free fall at Dead Man’s, a cliffside left on the south side of the Golden Gate. I’m back in Mark’s van, again with the camera. I almost never take surf photos—I can’t sit still
if the waves look good—but Mark has seen and seized another chance to put his camera in my hands. Nearly all surfers love shots of themselves in the act of surfing. To say that waves and the rides they provide are inherently fleeting events, and that surfers naturally therefore want mementos, doesn’t begin to explain the collective passion for self-portraits. I’m supposed to be shooting two or three guys, Mark and friends, but they aren’t getting many waves. The peak shifts south, taking the crowd along with it, and my subjects dissolve in a glittering field of light.
I should move south with them. I drag myself into the driver’s seat, start the engine, and feel suddenly like a kid wearing his dad’s overcoat: the sleeves fall to my knees, the hem brushes the floor. Mark is actually not much bigger than I am—an inch or two taller—but the seat feels strangely vast, even the steering wheel seems oversized, and the van itself feels less like a car than like some high-bridged, sure-ruddered freighter as I steer it through the puddles and potholes of the Sloat parking lot. From the driver’s seat, the van, its bed stacked high with surfboards, seems suffused with a big-cat-stretching sense of power, of rangy well-being and good health. From this surf-rinsed, king-of-beasts view of the world, I think, I too might be inclined to evangelize.
Mark understood the surf-photo compulsion. He not only put on slide shows, and had pictures of himself tacked up all over his apartment; he also delighted in presenting friends with pictures of themseves surfing. I’d seen these photographs hanging in the homes of their subjects, framed like religious icons. He gave me one of myself half crouched inside a slate-gray barrel at Noriega. Caroline had it framed for my birthday. It was a great shot, but it frustrated me to look at, because the photographer, a friend of Mark’s, fired an instant too soon. Just after the moment recorded, I disappeared into that wave. That was the shot I coveted: the wave alone, with the knowledge that I was in there, drawing a high line behind the thick, pouring, silver-beaded curtain. That invisible passage, not this moment of anticipation, was the heart of the ride. But pictures are not about what a ride felt like; they are about what a ride looked like to others. This Noriega shot—I am looking at it now—shows a dark sea; my memory of that wave, meanwhile, is drenched with silver light. That’s because I was looking south while I navigated its depths, and when I slipped through its almond eye back into the world.
For me, and not only for me, surfing harbors this paradox: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform.
The social side can be competitive or a pure yearning for companionship or, most often, both. It was unusually strong, I found, in San Francisco. The community of surfers was small, and the loneliness of surfing Ocean Beach when the waves were aroused was huge. Tim Bodkin’s wife, Kim, let me know where I stood, community-wise, one fine spring morning. I was waxing my board in front of her place on the Great Highway. Several other surfers were heading through the Taraval tunnel. Kim had her infant son on her hip. She was bouncing him in the sunshine. (Mark had already predicted that Tim would stop surfing big Sloat next winter.) “So is the whole Doc Squad going out?” she asked.
“The what?”
“The Doc Squad,” she said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it. You’re a charter member.”
• • •
THE NEW ISSUE of Surfer lay on the counter at Wise’s. Normally I would snatch it up and start leafing. But the cover featured a familiar-looking blue left peeling in the background as a surfer leaped with his board off a boat in the foregound. “FANTASTIC FIJI!!” read the headline. The upper-right corner band screamed, “DISCOVERY!” It was, of course, Tavarua.
I wanted to throw up. And I didn’t know the half of it.
The Surfer article, it turned out, was not about the discovery of a great new wave but about the opening of a resort. It seemed that two California surfers had bought or leased the island, built a hotel, and were now open for business. They were offering exclusive access to perhaps the best wave in the world to a maximum of six paying guests. This was a novel concept: paying to surf uncrowded waves. Articles about the discovery of a great new spot were a surf-mag staple, but the unwritten rules about disguising its location were strict. Maybe the continent would be revealed, generally not the country, sometimes not even the ocean. People might figure it out, but only a few, and they would have to work at it, and then they would want to keep the secret themselves. Here those rules were all smashed. Crowds at Tavarua would be prevented by the resort and its agreement with local authorities. It would be a private wave. Book now. All major credit cards accepted. There was even an ad for the resort in the same issue of the mag.
Bryan, as it happened, was flying into San Francisco that week from Tokyo. He was freelancing for travel magazines; he had been on assignment in Hokkaido. I met his plane. On the drive from the airport to our place, I dropped the new Surfer in his lap. He started cursing quietly. He slowly got louder. Speculating about who had opened their big mouth was pointless. Our shared fantasy had been wrong. Tavarua had not been sitting chastely, transcendent waves roaring unridden down the reef, for six years after all.
Bryan took it harder than I did, or at least less passively—he wrote a cutting letter to Surfer. By feeling aggrieved, he told me, we were being dogs in the manger, yes, growling over straw that we weren’t using. Still, he thought the whole thing stunk, and so did I. Everything untrammeled in this world gets exploited, he said, and sullied and spoiled. His letter to Surfer asked the right questions about financial arrangements between the magazine and the resort, calling the editors pimps or, at best, morons.
It was strange to see Bryan in the flesh. We were still faithful, high-volume correspondents, such that I sometimes felt like I was living a second, more uproarious life in Montana—skiing hard, drinking hard, knocking around with rowdy, talented writers, who always seemed to mass there. Bryan was publishing a lot, articles and reviews, working on another novel. He was living with “a mean skinny woman,” as he called her, a writer named Deirdre McNamer, who wasn’t mean at all, and who would eventually do him the great favor of marrying him. His travel pieces took him all over the place—Tasmania, Singapore, Bangkok. Deirdre went along to Bangkok, where he showed her the Station Hotel, our old digs. Even he was shocked by its squalor. “How different a city is with money,” he wrote—this was on page fifteen of a letter to me from Southeast Asia. “It becomes air-conditioned, manageable, flowing.” Bryan’s letters were Whitmanic, volcanic, funny—even the ones racked with self-castigation, which were distressingly frequent. He once wrote that he had just realized that the hospitality we received back in 1978 from Sina Savaiinaea and her family in Samoa had cost them a lot of money, relative to their wealth, and that we had repaid them with trinkets rather than the cash that they desperately needed and were expecting but were too polite to mention. He was so horrified he couldn’t sleep. And I wasn’t at all sure he was wrong.
Bryan hadn’t surfed in a while. There was a small October swell. Mark loaned him a board and wetsuit. The wetsuit was too small, and Bryan struggled to pull it on, writhing in the gloom of Mark’s garage, with Mark and friends watching with entirely too much amusement. I helped Bryan get the thing zipped. In the water, he struggled again. The Ocean Beach whitewater was, as usual, relentless, and he was out of shape. I duck-dived next to him, making little unwelcome suggestions. We surfed twice during his stay, and he claimed to be elated to be back in the ocean. I waited for a slighting remark from some junior member of the Doc Squad, itching to slap them down. But nobody said anything. Bryan took Mark’s measure, and no doubt vice versa. Bryan’s least favorite people were the overweening.
Bryan and Caroline, meanwhile, spoke each other’s language. I noticed him jotting down throwaway remarks of hers—when she called me a “hyena” for skulking through the kitchen or she indignantly asked why a local fitness buff thought anyone would be interested in his “nasty body.” Bryan had brought us English-language tou
rist decals from Japan—WE MADE A FINE TOUR and WE TOOK A PHOTOGRAPH IN ALL—which we stuck on the fridge.
About a year after that visit, Bryan wrote a short piece about his softball team—the team was called Montana Review of Books—and sent me the manuscript. Did I think the New Yorker would want it? It was good, I replied, but not right for Talk of the Town. Too novelistic, too confessional. I was an expert, of course, having sold the magazine one thing. Bryan didn’t wait for my advice letter to arrive, though. He submitted the piece. William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, read it and called him, full of praise. He flew Bryan to New York, put him up at the Algonquin Hotel, and asked him what else he might like to write. Shawn published the softball piece immediately and gave Bryan an assignment for a two-part piece on—Bryan’s idea—the history of dynamite. When I heard from Deirdre that Bryan was in New York and why, I meekly asked that he not open the letter from me waiting for him in Missoula.
• • •
A VERY BIG late-winter day at VFW’s. Tim Bodkin and Peewee are the only people out. From the beach, the sea is just a blinding, colorless sheet of afternoon glare, intermittently broken by the black walls of waves. Mark was out earlier. When he came in, he called it ten to twelve feet and the northbound current “a killer.” A light northwest wind has come up since, marring the surface and rendering the waves a notch more dangerous and difficult to ride. Bodkin and Peewee are catching few waves. Most of the time, they’re invisible in the glare. The waves they do manage to catch are all massive lefts, breaking on an outside bar I have rarely seen break and have never before seen ridable. I don’t normally think of VFW’s as a big-wave spot. On small, clean days, it’s usually the most crowded stretch of the Beach. But this is the kind of day when Bob Wise says he gets a lot of phone calls from guys asking hopefully, “Is it small?” And when he tells them, “No, it’s huge,” they suddenly remember all the business they have in far-flung parts of the Greater Bay Area.
Barbarian Days Page 33
