Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  The peak that I ended up riding was not especially far from shore. It was on the west side of a channel I hadn’t seen before—a choppy stretch where a heavy current, a huge amount of water, was hurrying out to sea. I had to angle in and paddle hard to cross the channel, which didn’t seem to be following a bottom contour. Evidently, this ocean-bound river had been created simply by the dynamics, the angle, and the sheer volume of this morning’s swell. Beyond it, I found a frightening but completely intelligible—unusually intelligible—surf spot: a big, clean, fast-moving, classic horseshoe peak. I knew where to go—out to the place where it stood up tall—and that’s where I went.

  I caught three waves, just a few minutes apart, each from the heart of the peak. They were textbook waves: huge drops, gaping barrels, reliable shoulders, not very long rides. The water was murky, a stirred-up turquoise-gray, so I couldn’t see if the boulders on the bottom were inching backward on the takeoffs or not. Still, I could tell, deep in my chest, that everything was wrong with these waves. The water ran up the face too fast, the lip threw out too hard. To anyone even moderately experienced, the physics of these waves were off. It was obviously too shallow. These waves were far too big for the amount of water they were breaking in. That was why they broke so hard, and why they fired me toward the shoulder like a too-light toy. I corrected for the ominous physics by being extra-aggressive, by overriding my normal takeoff instincts, and by having the right board. Precisely the right board. My third wave had a longer wall than the others. I rode farther down the line, out of the warped chamber of the great takeoff barrel section, onto a relatively flat face, where I got slapped off by a whitewater paw, tumbled a bit, and then came up in a calm area, quite near shore, just inside the big rip current. I saw my chance, sprinted for land, and hit the rocks feet first on the back of a shorebreak wave that chose, after seeming to consider the matter imperiously, to spare me. It drew back not overpoweringly, while I hugged a rock, and a few seconds later I was standing on dry land, in weak sun, waving to a group of kids who had been watching me from a concrete wall, yelling and whistling after each of my rides. The kids were silent now. They waved back noncommittally.

  I walked slowly down the coast road through the village. I was barefoot, dripping. To the Paulinhos, I knew, I was one of these new estrangeiros, these foreign savages, who washed in from the sea with a flimsy craft, finned and pale. Nobody said, “Bom dia.” A high, salt-corroded wall blocked my view of the ocean. Those three waves. I had rarely, if ever, ridden more critical waves. It did not bear thinking about what would have happened if I had misjudged a takeoff, or slipped, or hesitated for an instant. Really, all I had done was surf them correctly, after dialing up my aggression to a level befitting a far better, braver surfer than me. Luck had played a big part, but so had long experience. I recognized those waves as lethal but also as nearly flawless and, with the right equipment and sufficient technique, ridable.

  I kept expecting to start shaking, to get hit by some racking adrenaline drain, now that I was safe on land. Instead, I felt fantastic, quiet, light on my feet. I came to a little café. I had been there before, and the owner gave me coffee and a bun on credit. From the raised café steps, I could see the ocean. Great sets were now reeling down the coast, even bigger than earlier. The rip channel had vanished. So I had caught a brief window of big, highly concentrated, well-organized waves at a spot that was no longer there. My luck had been extravagant. I felt like finding a church, lighting a candle, and humbling myself.

  What was I doing? Why was I here? I was a grown-up, a husband, a citizen, full of conventional public-spiritedness in my real life. My American life. I was forty-four years old, for Christ’s sake. And not a churchgoer. Everything felt unreal, including my sense of disbelief. And yet the cup in my hand did not shake. Indeed, the weak instant coffee tasted sublime.

  • • •

  IN THE EARLY DAYS of our friendship, I sometimes misjudged Peter. I invited him to a gallery opening in SoHo. The work was all by prison inmates. “Yeah, yeah, ‘outsider art,’” he said, peering at the pictures. He cocked his head, moved in close, stepped back, frowned. I tried to help. “Looks like that guy’s been looking at too much Magritte,” I said.

  Now Peter frowned at me. “Don’t go all art history on me.”

  I realized that, in his terms, I was probably just thinking in clichés. That was about as brusque as he got.

  We repaired to his loft on Murray Street, where he made margaritas (“They don’t know how to make ’em in New York”) and we watched surf videos with his dog, a bright-eyed toy poodle named Alex. Downstairs, there was a topless bar called New York Dolls. The place made its money from Wall Street guys. Peter, the quiet, funny, aging skater who lived upstairs and sometimes brought his sketchbook in and worked, got special treatment—cheap beer, no hustles—and his house pass extended to his guests. The barmaids fell by to chat between lap dances. They were all, as per cliché, graduate students with heartstopping breasts. It was an unlikely local, but surprisingly relaxed and gemütlich—Peter actually used that word. His New York was full of surprises. He had started out, after art school, working at a big ad agency—quite hard to picture—before prospering as a freelancer. He had been married, divorced. In his day, he had been a nightlifer, and friends from that era still talked about the time he spotted Cher in a club, asked her to dance, and then tore up the dance floor with her.

  “It was Cher!” he said, when I expressed disbelief. “It was my big chance!” His irony sometimes had more levels than I could read.

  But Peter’s big-city days ended abruptly after he and Alison found a tiny old house on a choice piece of land in Ditch Plains. They both sold their lofts and moved out there with Alex. They built a studio across from the house, divided the space, and, working a few feet apart, kept cranking out illustrations. The ocean was across the street. They got a seagoing kayak and fished for striped bass, porgy, bluefish, fluke. They went clamming in Napeague Bay, crabbing in the local salt ponds. Peter installed a commercial smoker in a shed. After a year or two, they seemed to be practically subsisting off their ocean harvest and vegetable garden. They bought an old fishing boat, which Peter refurbished in the yard. When it got too cold to work outside, he built a Quonset hut over the boat. I was a frequent visitor. On hurricane swells, I stayed with them, and Peter and I surfed the obscure, sometimes superb rock reefs and pointbreaks east of Ditch.

  They got married during a pumping south swell. The ceremony was out on Montauk Point, on a grassy hillside under the lighthouse. It was late afternoon, the golden hour, and a pointbreak called Turtles, just south of where we stood, was firing. The groom’s side was lousy with surfers, many of them from Santa Barbara. The Californians in particular could not believe what they were seeing at Turtles. It looked like a good day at Rincon. Everyone tried to attend to the nuptials, but each time somebody muttered, “Set,” many heads turned. There was some glaring, some discreet kicking with high heels, but before it was over, even Alison laughed.

  Peter Spacek and Alex, Montauk, 1998—with kayak-caught striped bass

  The band played “Up, Up, and Away” at the reception in Peter and Alison’s yard. People (I was one) cringed and thought there must be some mistake. “It’s our song!” Peter squawked as he and his bride danced. Maybe cheesiness was the new edginess. Peter was wearing an extraordinary outfit—skintight leather pants, laced up in front, sharp boots, some kind of ruffled pirate blouse. “I don’t see why she’s the only one who gets to look hot,” he told me. Caroline confirmed that he looked dashing. He had the lifelong surfer’s build: a slim waist under a huge triangle of back muscles. Caroline watched him dance, and for years afterward called him Ol’ Snake Hips. They gave out commemorative coffee mugs that showed a couple, each in waders, each wielding big casting rigs, each leaning back hard, having hooked each other. The image was powerful and slightly disturbing, the drawing style an artful combination of his an
d hers.

  The four of us went fishing on their renovated boat very late that year—after Thanksgiving. It was stunningly cold. We drove out to a deep spot Peter knew, over dark gray water, a few miles northwest of Montauk Point. He told me how much line to pay out. The fish we wanted were on the bottom. The wind kicked up, and each lash of spray coming over the rail turned quickly to ice on the deck. Caroline and Alison huddled in the wheelhouse over a flask of hot spiked tea. Finally, just before dark, Peter and I each hooked up good-sized blackfish. My face was numb. Our hands were useless clubs. We got the fish aboard and then pounded, triumphant, back to Montauk Harbor. That night, at home, I cleaned my fish, which was still twisting and twitching. Too tired to cook, I put it in the fridge. Hours later, we heard the blackfish thumping inside the fridge.

  • • •

  PETER AND I KEPT MAKING our pilgrimages to Madeira. His devotion began to seem suspect to me, though. He kept suggesting that we try someplace new. Why would he even say that? It reminded me of our first Madeira trip, when he and Alison nearly bailed back to mainland Portugal. They now took big-time fishing trips—to Christmas Island, in the central Pacific; to the Bahamas for bonefish—when they had the time and money. Peter said, “It’s good to try new things.” I found myself saying, No, I want to keep doing the same thing: Madeira. When had I become such a mewling creature of habit?

  I actually had good arguments for going back over and over. One was the phenomenal quality of the waves, and their particular spooky allure, quite unlike anywhere else either of us had surfed. And it wasn’t as if the surf was easy—a set of challenges that we had now mastered. Not even close. Moreover, Madeira was becoming famous in surf world. It was geting more crowded each year. It would soon be ruined, overrun, like Bali and dozens of other surf meccas around the globe. There was already talk of a big-wave contest to be held at Jardim, with corporate sponsors and big prize money. I watched these signs, heard these rumors, with rising dread. We had to surf it now, before it went to hell.

  The biggest boosters of Madeira’s surf were the mainland Portuguese. The island had quickly become their Hawaii, their North Shore. Mainland pros flew over on every swell. One young guy, Tiago Pires, was clearly a rare talent, with balls of steel—he would go on to a respectable career on the world pro tour, the first (and still the only) Portuguese surfer to qualify for it. The Portuguese surf mags couldn’t get enough Madeira. They splashed the name across their covers, ran huge articles with zero discretion. It seemed to be a size thing. The first Madeira poster I saw, a foldout in a magazine, showed a mainland pro riding a huge green wall at Jardim, with a caption calling it “the largest wave ever ridden on Portuguese national territory.” The poster was titled Heróis do Mar—Heroes of the Sea.

  Peter understood the urgency of surfing Madeira before it got, as we would say, zooed. But he also understood, as I did not, how few surfers were ever likely to hurl themselves into a solid day at Jardim or Paul do Mar. He had showed that first article in Surfer to a number of guys in Montauk whom he thought would be interested. They weren’t. Too heavy-looking. I was the only one who bit. But I had thought the photos made it look idyllic. Now I thought of them as misleading. Without the rocks and cliffs, without the fear factor, one understood nothing about these spots. But I felt chained to them now, despite the fear. Peter had a more arm’s-length, less obsessive relationship. And less fear.

  Peter was what surfers used to call (some still do) a gnarly dude. There had always been guys, usually big-wave surfers, who quietly, casually did things that beggared belief. I remember hearing, on the Hawaiian rumor mill, that Mike Doyle and Joey Cabell, two surf stars from my youth, had set off swimming down the Na Pali Coast on Kauai. The Na Pali Coast is seventeen miles of inaccessible wilderness, facing northwest into the biggest storm-producing expanse of the Pacific. The swim took three days. They wore nothing but trunks and goggles. All they took was a pocketknife, for prying shellfish off the rocks. They did it for fun, to see what they saw. Those two were gnarly dudes, which was both why they did it and why they survived.

  Peter was cut from that cloth. He would set off in his kayak for Amagansett, fifteen miles west of Ditch Plains, trolling with a rod propped on his shoulder to see what he could catch, or jump on a cod boat in winter to go fish the shipwrecks off Block Island. He once got a large treble fish hook through his hand and drove that way to the hospital in Southampton, twenty-five miles away. He surfed the biggest days anyone had seen in Montauk, usually alone, and the stories he told, if pressed for details, about those sessions were reliably droll, vivid, self-mocking. He turned terrifying episodes into comic drawings. On a big afternoon at Jardim, he got creamed on a late takeoff and nearly suffered a two-wave hold-down. He was down there so long, he told me, after he finally made it back to the lineup, that he found himself saying good-bye to loved ones. In a drawing I saw later, there was the familiar bewildered, big-nosed, long-haired antihero deep under the monstrous wave, quizzically producing thought balloons featuring Alison and an alarmed-looking toy poodle.

  In San Francisco when I lived there, Mark Renneker and Peewee Bergerson had been the gnarliest dudes. That was why other men were obsessed with them. It was boys’ own adventure stuff—silly, from most angles. But riding surf that requires serious courage and skill without tooting one’s own horn is a keen test of character. In pro surfing, there is a growing niche of gnarly dudes with publicists. That isn’t the idea at all.

  • • •

  PETER BROUGHT two old friends along to Madeira. I liked them, but Peter’s casual, let’s-mix-it-up attitude continued to discomfit me. Hoping to make our trips coincide with good swells, I had begun trying to forecast the surf in Madeira, gathering what I could from marine weather reports, keeping obsessive records of North Atlantic storms—their tracks past Iceland and Ireland and into the Bay of Biscay, their daily maximum wind speeds, and the lowest pressure readings at their cores—creating predictions for what I thought the waves should be doing in southwest Madeira and then phoning José Nunes for reports on what the surf was actually doing at Jardim. José was a busy man, with other things to do than hike out to the seafront and study waves, and he didn’t have the specialized vocabulary to tell me much, but he did his best, helping me see that I was consistently getting it wrong. This was before online global surf forecasting came into its own, rendering my primitive efforts irrelevant.

  So Peter and I knew nothing about the giant swell that was bearing down on us one winter afternoon at Jardim do Mar in 1997. I had been surfing since dawn, at Paul and at Pequena, and was shaking with exhaustion. Then I saw a series of lovely sets reel through at Jardim. It was late in the day, but not paddling out never occurred to me. I wasn’t sure where Peter was. There was nobody in the water, making it hard to gauge the size. I took my gun, which turned out to be the right choice. The waves were quick, powerful, deep green, double-overhead, with offshores gusting up the faces. I caught two or three. My weariness vanished in a flood of adrenaline. Hurrying to make a long wall, I noticed another surfer paddling over the shoulder, craning to peer into the shadows of the pit, where I was trying to hold a high line. It was Peter.

  “I knew it had to be you,” he crowed. “From the boat ramp, we could barely see this little silhouette.”

  The glare, looking west into the waves, was indeed blinding. I was extremely happy to see Peter. His company made the surf feel less fearsome. His friends had stayed on shore.

  “It looks like there are some big motherfuckers out here,” he said.

  We both dug hard to the south to avoid a cleanup set. The swell seemed to be building. We edged back into the lineup, and each caught hefty waves. It wasn’t classic Jardim—it was too windy—but it was big, fast, soul-stirring stuff. Maybe Peter was right: this place would never get crowded. It was too hairy.

  Another cleanup set, and another long, hard scratch to the south. Peter went over the biggest wave first, and I remem
ber seeing him bust sideways through the backlit crest fifteen or twenty vertical feet above me, as I dug for the next flank of the shoulder. It was a close thing, but we both made it over. Outside, a small fishing boat was motoring past. The boat was dangerously close to the surf, and half a dozen fishermen were at the rail, studying us.

  “They think we’re nuts.”

  “They’re right.”

  It didn’t occur to me that the fishermen, reading their patch of ocean correctly, might have been offering us a lift to a safe harbor, in some town farther east. We waved to them, caught our breaths, and began paddling back to the takeoff zone, trying to line up the church bell tower with a distant pillar of cliff. That was usually the spot. The boat motored away.

  Bigger sets kept coming, moving us farther out. They started breaking in a new spot, higher up the point, and heaving with a ledginess I hadn’t seen before at Jardim. As we were paddling over the shoulder of an enormous wave, Peter yelled, “What does Brock Little say? Are you supposed to look or not?”

  I didn’t know what he meant. Brock Little was a Hawaiian big-wave surfer. We were now far outside the normal Jardim takeoff zone. We had made it over the set. The sun was going down. “He either says you should look into the pit, and see exactly what it’s doing, so you’ll know,” Peter said. “Or you should not look, keep thinking positive, don’t think about what the wave could do to you, just think about making every fucker you catch.”

  I favored not looking. The last two waves had been truly frightening. When they broke, they sounded like freight trains colliding.

  “We have to move in if we’re going to catch a wave,” I said. “Look where we are.”

  Peter agreed. We were ludicrously far from shore. We started paddling in, down the point, glancing back after every stroke. A midsized set appeared. Peter put his head down and dug hard. He pulled away rapidly. My exhaustion was returning, now mixed with the queasiness of fear. I glanced back. There was a very big wave coming. I was more or less in position. I assumed that Peter had caught the one before it, and I did not want to be out here alone. I paddled hard. As the wave began to lift me, a side-chop caught my rail, throwing off my stroke. I kept digging. I heard Peter shouting. I couldn’t see him, but I thought I heard, “Go! Go!” The wave seemed to be shrugging me off. I couldn’t get it to engage my board. Then I realized that Peter was yelling, “No! No!” I veered right, grabbed my left rail, and went up the big face sideways. I made it over the top, then got whipped by a long downpour of offshore spray as the wave heaved and broke just a few yards inside.