Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  In Madeira, we knew after a few days that we had found something extraordinary. It took us a few forays, though, to grasp its full dimensions.

  • • •

  THE FIRST TIME WE SURFED Jardim do Mar, or the first time we surfed it good, was probably the next year. Even at six feet, it was a serious wave. Heavy, long-interval lines marched out of the west, bending around the headland into a breathtaking curve. They feathered and bowled and broke at the outermost point of the horseshoe, and then reeled down a rocky shore. We paddled out from a primitive boat ramp—a mossy concrete slide off a seawall—far down the point. As we got closer to the lineup, the power and beauty of the waves got more drenching. A set rolled through, shining and roaring in the low winter afternoon sun, and my throat clogged with emotion—some nameless mess of joy, fear, love, lust, gratitude.

  A crowd of villagers had gathered on a terrace below the church bell tower. We weren’t the first surfers they had seen. Still, they seemed frantically curious about our progress as we tried to figure out the lineup. They cheered when one of us caught a wave. The takeoffs were intense, and must have looked dramatic, with a great ramp of silver face and then a broad, backlit, green-gold wall standing up quickly. We both surfed conservatively, picking our waves carefully, then driving hard, using the big faces to carve around sections, showing respect, not pulling in. The speed and depth and scale of the waves were a revelation, a glory. And the villagers clearly knew a good ride when they saw one. They also knew this patch of ocean well, and from their height they could see more than we could. They started whistling us into position. A piercing whistle meant a big wave was coming and we needed to paddle farther out. A more piercing whistle meant we needed to paddle faster. A gentler whistle meant we were in the right spot. We surfed till dark.

  Jardim do Mar, 1998

  That evening we ate espada preta—a sweet-fleshed, monstrous-looking deepwater fish—in a café in the village. We wanted to thank the whistlers, buy them a drink, but people were shy, not used to strangers. Peter pronounced the wave “supreme.” I started looking for a place to stay.

  • • •

  MADEIRA BECAME MY WINTER RETREAT. Vacations, these were not. They were submersions, some lasting many weeks. The spots we surfed were all dicey, super-complex reefbreaks, demanding the most diligent study and harshly penalizing even small mistakes. For me, with my physical powers dwindling and my work as a journalist in high gear, it was a strange time to take on such a high-stakes, off-the-grid, unforgiving project.

  But I found the island a resonant lair. Most of the Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii had come, it seemed, from Madeira. The malasadas (Portuguese doughnuts) we ate as kids had come from here, as had the Portuguese sausage that I once wolfed down uncooked. Even the ukulele had come originally from Madeira, where it was known as the braguinha. I could see, or thought I could, in the faces of Madeirans strong traces of the Pereiras and Carvalhos I had known on Oahu and Maui. Madeirans had gone to Hawaii in their thousands to work in the canefields—sugar had been Madeira’s first export crop. The island was famous for its wine, but its main export was not wine; it was people. Madeira had been unable to support its own population since the mid-nineteenth century. People, especially young people, were still emigrating in large numbers. South Africa, the United States, England, Venezuela, Brazil—every Madeiran I met seemed to have relatives living overseas.

  The African connection was the most intense. When António Salazar, the midcentury Portuguese dictator, tried to export his surplus-peasant problem to his colonies in Angola and Mozambique, a great many Madeirans joined the exodus. Most became farmers (cotton, cashews). Inevitably, many served as soldiers. Even little Jardim do Mar had among its few hundred residents several Portuguese Army veterans of the anticolonial wars. I knew Mozambique, having written about the civil war that broke out there after independence. But I never saw a reason to mention, among the ex-colonists on Madeira, my time in Mozambique. Nearly all the Portuguese had fled after independence.

  Now they were fleeing newly democratic South Africa. Shipping containers would show up in the square, the praça, in Jardim. The whole village would turn out to unload the loot—ironwood furniture, modern home electronics, even cars, all straight from Pretoria. I became friendly with a Jardim native named José Nunes. He had lived in South Africa. Now he lived with his family above a small bar and grocery that he had inherited from his father. “People come back because they don’t feel safe now in South Africa,” José said. “Here they’re safe. But there’s nothing for them to do.”

  People still fished, actually, and farmed, but the farming was all by hand—grueling work—on little rock-walled terraces. Old men in tweed caps and cardigans, red-faced and bandy-legged, solid-bodied, worked the terraces. Wine grapes, bananas, sugarcane, papayas—small plots and fields were cut into all but the steepest slopes. In Jardim, every porch and wall seemed to overflow with flowers. There was a constant light, gulping music of spring water rushing off the mountain—it ran down through the village, through an intricate system of gutters, watering the lush household vegetable gardens. At the corners of the tiled roofs of the houses were ceramic doves, cats, little boxerlike dogs, busts of young scholars in old-fashioned hats.

  I sometimes stayed in a new hotel in the village, and later in rented rooms. I brought work for when there were no waves or the winds were bad. But the surf ruled my days. When it was big, mist and thunder filled the air. At night, during a swell, there was a general roar in Jardim—a deep bass throb that was not the sea but the rocks underneath the point, groaning. Madeira has no continental shelf. It is like Hawaii that way. Giant storm swells from the north and west cross very deep water unimpeded and strike the island full force. But even Hawaii has, in many places, offshore reefs to absorb the impact, and sandy beaches. Madeira supposedly has a beach, somewhere on the east side, but in a decade of chasing waves there I never saw it. The shore was rocks and cliffs, which often multiplied the danger quotient, which was already high, by a large factor. We were mining a rich lode of bliss. But disaster never felt far away.

  • • •

  OUR FIRST BAD MISADVENTURE came during that second winter. It happened to Peter, at Ponta Pequena. We had paddled out at Jardim, early in the morning. It was glassy and big—twice the size of that first great afternoon session. We were both on our guns. The scale of everything had expanded. There were excellent waves pouring through where we had surfed before, but that zone was now unsafe. The big sets showed far out at sea—darkening bands on a pale blue surface, wide and heavy, steaming silently toward us from the southwest. As they approached, I found it hard to stay in position. I kept sprinting southeast, digging for deeper water, unnerved by the size of the swell. This was as big as anything I had surfed at Ocean Beach, and that had been in another, more physically fit life. A few people seemed to be out on the church terrace watching, but they were not whistling—or perhaps their whistles were being drowned out by the constant boom of shorebreak. Peter was showing more guts, paddling less frantically for the horizon when a set appeared. He angled toward the outer wall, not away from it.

  The takeoff was a huge, clean open face, not breaking exceptionally hard, and the wall seemed to hold up reasonably, with no catastrophic sections, all the way down the point. Eventually, Peter caught a wave. With a shout, he jumped to his feet, rode over the ledge, and disappeared for what felt like a very long time. I thought I saw his track once down the line, but I wasn’t sure. Then he came flying over the shoulder far, far inside with arms raised. He came back raving. It was doable, he said. It was insane. I moved over, into the lineup, heart thudding, and caught a couple. The takeoffs were giddy, almost nauseating, but not overly steep. The faces were maybe twenty feet. (We would call the waves ten or twelve.) I surfed carefully, arms outstretched for balance. The rides were long and swooping, the blue walls like great stretched canvases. Each of my rides ended with a safe, gliding p
ullout somewhere down near the boat ramp. I was very glad I was on my gun. My confidence began trickling back. Then Peter surprised me. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “It’s too much pressure.”

  I was happy to leave. My hair was still dry. We paddled up the coast, across half a mile of calm water, to Ponta Pequena. It was also big, double-overhead-plus, but unintimidating. The outside takeoff at Pequena was soft—not inconsequential at this size, but easy. Pequena was a strange wave. When it was over six feet, it did not taper down as you rode, as most waves do, but actually got, on the inside, near the shallow cove where we had first surfed it, suddenly more powerful, faster, much more intense. You had to be prepared for the acceleration. It was like surfing from Malibu to the North Shore on a single wave. But there was a pause before the transformation, a pause that gave one just enough time to plan for the shift into hypervelocity, time to decide what line to take, and how to escape. I was starting to love Pequena, mainly for that mutant shapeshift, and on this sunny morning, having survived big Jardim unscathed, I was surfing it hard, happily, unafraid. That may be why it took me too long to notice that Peter had disappeared. We had been riding in a rotation. Then I was surfing alone. I kept watching the channel, kept checking the impact zone. I wasn’t worried. Peter was strong and smart. My sense of acute threat from earlier had lifted. Finally, I spotted him. He was on shore, down past the boulders that marked the lower end of Pequena, sitting next to his board, his head between his knees. I headed down there and scrambled ashore.

  Peter gave me a nod. He looked out to sea. It wasn’t quite the thousand-yard stare, but not far off. It seemed that he had stayed too long on a wave, gotten caught by the next one, sucked into the shorebreak, and then had his ankle leash wrap tight around a rock. At this tide (high), and this size, the Pequena shorebreak was absolutely off-limits. It broke on a steep scree of jagged lava rocks, then smashed against a sheer cliff. Unable to free his leash or even reach his ankle to tear it off, Peter had been trapped—dragged out, flung back. Most of the time, he was underwater. He didn’t know how many waves had pounded him. In the end, but not before he had decided he was about to drown, his leash had snapped. “It was a miracle,” he murmured. “I have no idea why it snapped.”

  His board looked to be more banged up than he was. He later made a series of drawings of his predicament in the Pequena shorebreak. With titles like Undesirable Situation No. 002, they were semi-comic. But the boulders and cliffs and empty, terraced coast beetled darkly over the tethered, big-nosed surfer.

  • • •

  WE WERE NO LONGER the only surfers around. Shortly after our first visit, a group of Hawaiian pros had come to Madeira. They had scored great surf, and in the lavish magazine spread about their trip they compared Jardim favorably to Honolua Bay. So the secret was well and truly out. Even Mark Renneker, I heard, had paid a visit, wearing a crash helmet to surf Jardim. Jardim was being touted in the global surf underground as not only an A-grade wave but an extreme rarity: a big-wave pointbreak, possibly the best in the world. Nobody knew how big a swell it could handle; nobody had seen it close out yet. The Hawaiians had been wowed by another spot as well, a grinding barrel that broke close to shore in Paul do Mar, the next village to the west. You could see the wave from Jardim—it was beyond Ponta Pequena—but the drive over the mountain to Paul was tortuous.

  A big, perspective-challenged mural of the wave at Jardim, painted by a California surfer, had materialized in our absence on a wall in the praça. A harlequin crew of Brits, Aussies, Americans, and Portuguese mainland surfers had started passing through the village, lodging here and there. We hit it off with a young couple who had come for the winter, Moona and Monica. He was Scottish, she Romanian. They had met in Bosnia, where they both did relief work during the war. Now they had a new baby, Nikita. Monica was translating The English Patient into Romanian. Moona, who had been a pro skateboarder, was fearlessly trying to translate his skater chops into surfing competence, with mixed results, in supremely unforgiving waves. They were a luminous pair, living in a seaside room on next to nothing. I had written about Bosnia, and Moona and Monica said I had to visit Tuzla, the old salt-mining city where they had met. It was an antinationalist island in a sea of raging nationalisms, they said. They were so persuasive that, later that winter, back at work, I took their advice and made my way to Tuzla. They were right. It was a ravaged, poignant place from which to look at the war that had just ended in pan-ethnic bitterness.

  One morning, half a dozen of us trooped over to Paul do Mar. It was eight feet and rifling. In less than an hour, Peter had snapped his board, gashing his foot, and an American named James had been lip-axed and broken his ankle. They left together for the hospital in Funchal, the capital, three hours away. Two days later, again at Paul, my foot got stuck between two rocks in the shorebreak. I ended up at the same hospital for X-rays (negative), and for the next week surfed with foot and ankle heavily duct-taped for stability. Peter announced that Paul do Mar was not a surf spot, that it was just a picturesque, kamikaze close-out. I disagreed. I found it a mesmerizing wave.

  But absurdly dangerous. Besides the raw power, there was the shoreline. The rocks were round, mostly, but the shorebreak borderland you had to cross to enter the water was simply too wide, particularly when the surf was big. Even after timing it carefully, waiting for a lull, letting a shorebreak wave expend itself, then running recklessly with your board over wet boulders, you sometimes didn’t make it to water deep enough to paddle on before the next wave slammed you, banging you backward across the rocks—board, body, dignity all battered, sometimes severely. This was not a normal ocean problem. It felt like bad arithmetic—the time and distance did not, for some Madeira-only reason, compute. I had never seen a surf spot with an entrance so daunting. And the exit, getting back onto dry land, could be even worse. The wave we were there to ride was at most only thirty yards offshore, but I sometimes resorted to a very long paddle, around a seawall at the far east end of the village, rather than face that shorebreak.

  The glory of the wave was its down-the-line speed. The water was often dead clear at Paul, which made for an unnerving effect on the takeoff. Sometimes, as you caught the wave, jumped to your feet, and, assuming things went according to plan, made a quick edge turn to your right, the bottom did not move at all. The big white boulders underneath the water were stationary, or even inching slightly backward. There was, that is, so much water rushing up the face that no matter how fast your board was moving across the surface, you were, in land terms, standing still. This, again, was not normal ocean behavior. Then, after a few moments of this stomach-turning suspended animation, you would suddenly start rocketing down the coast, with the boulders turning into a long white blur under blue water. You went so fast that on a wave strongly angled from the west, you could ride for a hundred yards without seeming to get any closer to shore. Peter was right, the wave had a strong kamikaze element. It was hollow, shallow, and many waves did close out. But the right wave at Paul do Mar was by itself, to my mind, worth the round-trip airfare from New York.

  • • •

  I GOT THREE OF THEM in quick succession one gray morning. Peter had gone to the north coast at dawn, guessing wrong about what the wind and swell would do. During the previous winter, we had found on the north coast a spot we called, for reasons now obscure, Madonna. We had never seen anyone else in the water there. It was a silky, wind-protected left at the base of a waterfall-striped cliff—a quicksilver wave, sweet and swift. I felt its call, wondered what it was doing, every day. Peter headed that morning, on a hunch, to Madonna. But it was a long trip, and there was a solid swell hitting at Paul do Mar, and the first rule of chasing waves is never to drive away from surf, so I didn’t go. He took another guy with him.

  The shorebreak at Paul looked too fearsome for me. I made the roundabout slog from the east. The village of Paul do Mar was long, narrow, dusty, and semi-industrial—nothing like the dense tile-roo
fed hamlet of Jardim up on its sparkling headland. Paul stank, for a start. At the east end of town, by the wharf, it had a strong fish smell. To the west, where the surf was, the stench was lavatorial—people used the shoreline rocks as an open-air toilet. There was primitive worker housing strung along the sea-facing road. Dirty, half-naked children jeered at strange cars. On certain afternoons, roughly half the adults in Paul do Mar seemed to be falling-down drunk. People in Paul, I eventually learned, considered the people in Jardim snobs. Jardimeiros considered Paulinhos riffraff. The two villages faced each other across a mile of sea, with a mountain between them and no other settlements in sight. Their rivalry went back centuries. I got to like them both.

  On that gray morning, I paddled far outside and then parallel to shore, trying to see what the wave ahead was doing. It looked big, smooth, peaky, ferocious. There were a couple of guys out, young Portuguese mainland hotshots on tiny boards. I stopped and surfed with them a while. They were excellent surfers but playing it safe, riding the shoulders of waves that were already breaking long before we caught sight of them. Effectively, they were contenting themselves with scraps. Lovely scraps, to be sure. Still, I was on my gun. I was nervous but not weak with fear, even when the heavy sections on the set waves threw out and boomed upcoast. I started moving deeper, paddling west. The usual lineup markers were a pair of brick smokestacks, but those, I could see, wouldn’t work today. The main peak today was much farther west.