• • •
PETER INVITED ME to a surf slide show in the Flatiron neighborhood in Manhattan. The venue turned out to be a posh office—an ad agency owned by a friend of his. The small crowd was all male, some of them surfers I knew slightly from Montauk. This was after hours, plenty of beer, probably coke for those in the know. There were Montauk surf photos, hooting (no horrible snarls—not a hard-core group), some laughs. Professional-quality shots from a Costa Rica trip. But the main event was a set of Madeira photos supplied by Peter. I hadn’t seen most of them before. As usual, I had taken virtually none during all our trips together. Peter had been slightly more conscientious. He had gotten several stunning lineup shots from the mountainside, showing Jardim, Pequena, and Paul do Mar going off. The room rang with sincere curses of appreciation. Otherwise, Peter was like me—unwilling to stay on land when the waves were good.
But several associates and passersby had taken photos of us in Madeira over the years and sent along the results. They were of mixed quality at best, but seeing them made my heart race. There were a couple of shots of me on an unforgettable day at Pequena. These had been taken by one of Peter’s old friends who came with us in 1997. The desperate exultation of that session—I surfed for six hours—came back in a rush just seeing those distant, blurry glimpses of a couple of my waves. The waves were big, and I was dancing hard. There was a shot of Peter at big Jardim, taken by James, the American who broke his ankle at Paul and then later that week hobbled out to the point, leg in a cast, to shoot pictures from the cliff.
“Were you guys towing?” somebody asked.
We laughed. “Hell, no.”
Tow-in surfing was a then new addition to big-wave surfing, pioneered in Hawaii. Using Jet Skis to whip guys on short, heavy, foot-strapped boards into enormous waves, tow-in surfing had practically overnight doubled or tripled the maximum height of ridable surf. Towing was strictly for specialists—for a small subset, in fact, of the madmen who rode the world’s largest waves. Not, that is to say, us. Not even related to us. But looking at the shot of Peter at Jardim, I thought it actually wasn’t a dumb question. He was coming off the bottom of a big, dark wave—a twenty-foot face—leaving a strangely long, hot-white wake. He was leaning forward, knees bent, getting maximum speed from his board, and projecting his turn far, far down the line. He did look like he had been whipped into the wave by some force beyond the wave. I knew well the section that had hurled him into that captured moment, and knew why he was driving so hard. He was actually coming into the inside wall, feeling the full catapult power of Jardim. There was a reason people called it the world’s best big-wave pointbreak.
Peter also had photos, taken by one of his old buddies, from the night when we were nearly lost. There was one of him on a big, wild-looking wave before the sun went down—probably the last wave ridden that day. Then there were a couple of flash-lit shots of us after we reached land, half-mad, above the boat ramp. They reminded me, oddly, of what Peter’s friends had said over dinner afterward. One, a kneeboarder from Santa Barbara, confessed that after we disappeared, he had started planning what he would say to Peter’s mother. The other guy, an old art school classmate, seemed thunderstruck. He had been doing the same thing, he said. They had each felt horribly guilty for assuming the worst, and they each still seemed quite upset. Peter and I, though probably in clinical shock, were merry as crickets—guzzling wine, toasting life. In the first photo by the boat ramp, we were both looking dazed. Peter was throwing the camera a shaka sign. I had a streak of blood on my face.
“Ouch,” someone in the slide show group said.
We decided, without discussion, not to tell the story. The next shot, the last of the show, would have meant even less to the group. Peter and I, needing to collect ourselves, had turned away from the jubilant crowd at the top of the boat ramp. We retreated to the edge of the seawall and sat for a minute, staring out into the roaring dark. The photo simply showed our backs, our wetsuits shining. It wasn’t much of a shot. The house lights went up, with whoops for more beer. I heard Peter say from across the room, “I was going to put my arm around your shoulder, but, you know.” I did know.
• • •
CAROLINE STARTED COMING ALONG for the first week of my Madeira retreats. We would stay in the new hotel in Jardim—a chilly, mostly empty place built, it was said, with South African money. She was suitably wowed by the natural beauty of Madeira, and loved being beyond the reach of her office. She could spend whole days hiking through the terraces and reading what she called murder books—mysteries—while I surfed. I remember a foggy morning: I was surfing Jardim alone. She was reading on a hotel balcony directly above the break. The waves were head-high, barely clearing the rocks on the sets. After every ride, I would look up. Caroline’s nose would still be in her book. I would yell. She would wave. She saw none of my rides. When I finally came in and complained, she tried to explain, not for the first time, how exquisitely boring it was to watch surfing. The lulls between sets seemed to go on for hours. There had been, it was true, some fairly long lulls.
My complaints were trivial, actually, not deeply felt. Caroline indulged my surf fever, even its most juvenile moments, beyond anything I had a right to expect, and I consciously tried never to lose sight of that fact. As indifferent as she was to the ocean and all things surf, our life together was braided with waves. They were a backdrop, a gravitational force, and rarely far away. At our wedding, we said our vows under an apple tree out of sight of the ocean. That morning, however, Bryan and I had gone searching for waves. There were none to be had, but I paddled out anyway at some funky beach on the south coast of Martha’s Vineyard, where I took off on a knee-high shorebreak surge just so that Bryan could get a snapshot of me “surfing” on my wedding day—soul-arching in the moment before I hit the sand. Later, at the wedding dinner, he gave an elaborate, finely wrought toast. One of the main themes was a warning to Caroline that she should expect any outing, certainly any holiday, to be ruthlessly, even cruelly, turned into a surf trip. He had been proved right many times over—in France, Ireland, Tortola, later Spain and Portugal. Caroline, who was nobody’s idea of a pushover, was a spectacularly good sport about it.
She made the most of the perks: the obscure, often raggedly beautiful spots I dragged her to; the freedom to read; the seafood. For an inlander, she had a remarkable affinity for shellfish. In Madeira, she favored the espada at the Tar Mar and the young wine known as vinho verde.
How did she put up with my absences, not just when I chased waves without her but, even more frequent and protracted, when I went off reporting? The answer changed as we changed. Caroline sometimes left for weeks herself, to visit friends and family in Zimbabwe, and the separations did us good, I thought, at least in our early years. We needed the breaks. Later, it got more difficult to be apart. Caroline retained a firm vein of self-reliance, though. She was unusually good at being alone. I sometimes thought she got it from her mother, June, who was both deeply attached to her husband and a tough, well-guarded character who listened all night to the BBC’s Africa Service and rarely slept. Caroline’s father, Mark, who did not particularly like to travel, nonetheless spent a great deal of time on overseas business trips as a minerals trader. Caroline worked extremely hard—she was, as a lawyer, the same perfectionist she had been as a printmaker. My Madeira jaunts were partly redeemed in her mind because they were not just surf trips but writing retreats. I felt the same way, certainly. I got lonely. There was still no Internet or cell phone service in Jardim, so I called home at night from a phone booth in the praça. Next to the booth was a communal birdcage, home to parakeets of many colors. In the daytime, the birds sang and pecked at a huge cabbage someone threw in their cage. At night, they fluffed up into little gray silent balls to stay warm. I would huddle in the booth on wet, windy nights, straining to hear the comforting notes of Caroline’s voice, her cheerful reports on the luxe life of our daily grind.
> • • •
I MAKE IT SOUND like the surf was always huge. In fact, many sweet shortboard days came my way in Madeira—sessions like that morning with Caroline on the balcony in the fog. Big scary days on the 8'0" were not the rule. Still, everything about surfing had become more serious. After long years of riding pretty much whatever board came my way, I was taking real care with what I surfed on now. I had found a shaper in Hawaii, a North Shore eccentric named Owl Chapman, whose boards I loved. They were sharp-nosed swallowtail thrusters, fast and thick, with very little rocker and unfashionably downturned rails—’70s boards, basically, but with subtler lines, lighter materials, and three fins. I snapped a few Owls in hard-breaking waves (airline baggage handlers also snapped one or two), and not all the replacements worked great—Owl had his own ideas about what I should be riding. Still, most of my Owls were magic boards—responsive, fast-paddling, steady in the barrel. I first rode one in the mid-’90s, on a reporting trip to the North Shore, and I rarely rode anything else for the next ten years.
Why had I become so keen on the finer points of board performance? In a word, Madeira. It had thrown me into big, powerful waves in a new way. The ambivalence that shadowed me at Ocean Beach was gone. Unfortunately, my surfing was in decline. I was getting old. It really hit me on crowded days at Pequena. Crowded in Madeira was still a relative term—there might be twelve people out. Most of them would be red-hot Portuguese guys, probably some of the country’s top pros. They paddled and surfed rings around me. Telling myself that they were half my age, or less, and that they probably surfed ten times as much as I did nowadays, should have helped. It didn’t. I appalled myself. I missed waves I should have caught, lumbered to my feet when I should have sprung. Getting old as a surfer, I’d heard it said, was just a long, slow, humiliating process of becoming a kook again. I clung to my delusions that I could still surf decently. The Owl boards helped.
My nightmare of an overrun, despoiled Madeira seemed to be slowly coming true. The first Jardim contest had been held. I was careful to be in New York when it went down. The winner was a dreadlocked South African. A second contest was scheduled, with an alarming list of corporate sponsors and well-known big-wave pros. More ominously, the feral denizens of the world surf-paradise trail were increasingly in evidence. Tim, from North Carolina, now shuffled through Jardim’s cobbled alleyways in purple drawstring pants, raving from inside a hooded sweatshirt about the “endless barrels” he scored in “Indo” last year. “Bawa, man, unreal. Better than G-Land. Better than Ulu. Better than this.” I knew I had no right to despise them, but I cringed as the likes of Hatteras Tim began to haunt Jardim, and to make their drawled, snarling claims in the water.
The villagers seemed wary, for good reason, of the more uncouth visitors, and not happy that a couple of local boys were taking up this dangerous sport. Still, the contests were welcome—they brought money into the village—and certainly no local shared my worry about crowds in the water. Surfing was connecting Jardim to the world, and I had to remind myself how deeply the yearning for such connection ran. I understood, or thought I did, about feudalism and isolation. The ancient, despotic order of church and nobles thrived where contact with the outside world was meager. In Jardim the arrival of electricity, of TV, of the paved road from Prazeres—these were each, despite their drawbacks, blasts of spiritual oxygen. On a surfless Sunday morning, I heard a sermon in the village church by a visiting Brazilian priest extolling liberation theology. You would not have heard that when the only way into Jardim was by goat trail or open boat.
One night, the Portuguese national surfing team turned up in Jardim. I wasn’t familiar with the concept of a national surfing team. But I was impressed by how impressed the villagers were. This was, by God, the national team. They surfed for Portugal. They wore official windbreakers, like Olympic athletes—or the beloved national futebol squad. To me, of course, they were just another bunch of scruffy young rippers. But I was fascinated by the coach. I never spoke to him. I just watched him climb slowly out of his rental car one morning in the praça. He had his wife with him and a toddler in a stroller. He wore his official windbreaker and matching warm-up pants and he looked like a sports administrator, or a phys ed teacher, a soccer coach. What fascinated me was his ordinariness, his ease. I still thought of surfing as a wild thing. You did it with your friends, or you did it alone, but it happened out in the ocean. It couldn’t be socialized. Of course, I had seen how pervasive and presentable and clubbed-up surfing was in Australia. It could be socialized, and here, in cozy, remote Jardim, I was catching a glimpse of my old anchoritic obsession being integrated into Euro-yuppie team-sport norms. Something similar was happening, haltingly, I gathered, in Southern California and Florida.
Still, there were some engaging people fetching up in Jardim. Besides Moona and Monica, who pushed on to relief work in wartime Liberia, there was a loose group of Brits, not all of them surfers, whose previous vacation destination had been some rural spot in Ireland where they stood a fair chance, on a fair afternoon, of seeing Seamus Heaney on a stroll. He was their idea of a megacelebrity, and they were proud to have never interrupted his thoughts. Two of the women in this bookish group had taken an interest in an American surfer staying in Jardim—an affable blond pro from Long Island. He had brought with him an extensive quiver of his sponsor’s boards and he seemed, to his British fangirls, to have nothing but blue sky between his ears. When he was not present, they would pester me, over wine, for details about the hard-core, postverbal American surf samurai mind. I tried to oblige, mostly because I was also interested—sincerely, not ironically—in the guy. He was what is called a Pipeline specialist. He spent his winters in Hawaii surfing one of the world’s most dangerous, most beautiful waves. When he pulled a board from his stack and tried to explain how the rocker on this one helped him hold an edge on the foamball—that’s the whitewater inside a hollowly breaking wave, not visible from the beach—and stay longer in the barrel, I asked questions and listened hard. This kid had been in places on waves where I would never go.
At the center of the British contingent was a couple named Tony and Rose. He was a surfer and landscape painter from Wales. She ran a restaurant there in the summers. They had bought a dilapidated house in Jardim, where they were known as Mr. and Mrs. Estaca. That was because when they first arrived they were given an even more dilapidated house rent-free by the village council in exchange for work, and one of their first tasks was to make hundreds of the sticks that were used to prop up banana trees. The sticks were called estacas. Even their dog was called Estaca. The villagers actually cared about Tony and Rose. When the weather turned stormy, with a southeast wind, and Tony and I headed for the north coast, the old women clucked angrily. Didn’t we know better than to leave the village in bad weather? There were rock slides. The roads washed out in the mountains. We went anyway. I had to check my silken left, Madonna. Even if we didn’t find waves, Caroline and I had found a café in the north that served a grilled parrot fish that justified any expedition.
• • •
I HIKED TO PEQUENA on a sunny afternoon. A swell was filling in. The waves looked funky from a distance, with a west wind chopping up the takeoff, which was why there was nobody out, but by now I knew a few things about Pequena—how this wind, for instance, could bounce off the cliffs and blow offshore across the shelf, turning the inside wall into something spectacular. And so it was. I surfed alone for an hour, catching big mushburgers outside, skiing over the ledge, and then red-lining it through the barrel section on my sturdy Owl. Eventually I was joined by three Portuguese pros, including their top dog, Tiago Pires. They had obviously kept their binoculars ready to hand in Jardim. There were still plenty of waves to go around, but Pires ripped so hard that I found him unpredictable, and he and I got tangled up and went over the falls together on the biggest wave that had come through. We were both lucky not to get hurt. It was a long hold-down, and then we got pounded by a
heavy set. He seemed none the worse for wear, but I was shaken.
I thought about going in. Caroline was leaving for New York the next morning. I decided to catch one more good one. But it was getting bigger now, and I was surfing sloppily. The takeoffs were intimidating but not difficult, if you knew the wave, which I did. Still, I managed to blow two, and take another set on the head. Now I was exhausted. The sets were stepladdering—each one bigger than the last. It was at least ten feet now. The other guys were somewhere out the back—not in sight. I decided to catch the very next wave I could and go in. I found a nice medium-sized wave, possibly the first of a set. I caught it, shaky with relief. Then I managed to fall off. I popped up, annoyed, and found myself looking at a wall of water that seemed to have marched out of my worst nightmares.
It was already pulling water from the shelf, pulling me toward it, and there was no chance at all that I would escape it. It was the biggest wave I had ever seen at Pequena and it was already starting to break. I swam toward it hard and dove early, but it plucked me out of the depths and beat me till I screamed in hopeless protest. When I finally surfaced, there was another one behind it, just as big, just as malignant. There seemed to be a bit more water on the shelf. I swam to the bottom and tried to get a grip on a rough slab of rock, but was instantly ripped away. Another long, thorough beating. I tried to cover my head with my arms in case it dashed me against the bottom. It didn’t. I eventually resurfaced.
There was another one. It was bigger than the others. But the important thing about it was that it sucked all the water off the shelf. Boulders started surfacing in front of me, and then I was standing in a field of rocks in rushing, waist-deep water. I did not understand where I was—a field of rocks had risen out of the ocean, quite far from shore, at a break I thought I knew. In a lifetime of surfing, I had never seen anything like this. The wave mutated into a hideous, boiling, two-story wall of whitewater almost without breaking—it had run out of water to draw from. I had a moment in which to decide what to do before it hit me. I picked a fissure in the wall and threw myself up and into it. The vague hope was that if I wriggled in deep enough, the whitewater might swallow me rather than simply smash me to pieces on the rocks. Something like that occurred, apparently. My feet were sliced up from the leap, but I did not hit the bottom as I rag-dolled shoreward in the bowels of the wave. And when I next surfaced I was in deep water, in the channel east of Pequena, safe.
Barbarian Days Page 41
