Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  At Tony’s suggestion, we did not stay in Jardim, but up the mountain, at an inn in a seventeenth-century quinta. The inn had a small pool that looked out on the ocean. Mollie, almost two, called the ocean “big pool.” Driving down into Jardim with a board on my car, I felt people turning away from me in the praça. I imagined they were ashamed. Or maybe they just hated surfers now.

  The devastation along the shoreline was hard to comprehend, even while standing beside it. I had said it would be impossible to build a walkway, but that was because I lacked imagination. Vast quantities of rock and dirt had been trucked in and dumped along the waterfront, right around the headland. The job was not complete, but it was already clear that, with enough landfill, they could build an eight-lane freeway along the coast if they chose. Huge yellow earthmovers were roaring back and forth on the landfill, which was not yet paved. In a plume extending from Jardim, the ocean was milky brown with mud. And between the half-built roadway and the water was the most hideous seawall I had ever seen—a chaotic gray heap of giant rectangular concrete blocks. It was aggressively featureless and yet painful to the eyes. The blocks looked like thousands of angrily discarded coffins. This was the new shoreline. Brown wavelets lapped against the blocks.

  Governor Jardim, of course, was wrong. For the descendant of a seagoing race, his ignorance of the sea was impressive. Waves don’t move offshore when you bury a reef. They simply smack into whatever is where the reef was. Still, I found it hard, staring at the destruction in Jardim, to grasp its finality. Maybe on a very big day, at low tide . . . Even in the rare circumstances under which surfing might still be possible, however, an always dangerous spot would now be orders of magnitude more dangerous. Meanwhile, the ravishing beauty of the shore as seen from the water—the cliffs and terraced fields of bananas, vegetables, papayas, and sugarcane between the point and the cove—had been expunged, replaced by a sinister industrial wall. Accept it: the great wave was gone. Like the tidepools where Jardimeiros had harvested shellfish for generations, and the boulders and shallows where Kiko had speared his octopus, it was now buried under ten thousand tons of crushed rock.

  José Nunes was fatalistic. “You think you’re living in paradise,” he said. “And then . . .” He gave an eloquent shrug—the gestural equivalent of the fado.

  Rosa was less diplomatic. She denounced the whole fiasco and she named names—who had profited, who had lied. Her rooming-house business had dried up, of course. Talking to Rosa, I realized that I had finally got what I wanted: there were no other surfers around.

  From other villagers, I heard rationales for the new seawall and roadway. They would help protect the village from the sea. More villagers would be able to drive cars closer to their houses. This represented progress—other villages, after all, had such improvements. Tourists, someone even told me, would come to admire the sea from the new road. These comments were offered sheepishly, or defensively, or belligerently, or halfheartedly. There was some truth to some of them, none to others. The brute fact was, the authorities had decided to build the project for their own reasons, financial and political, and the villagers had had no say in the matter.

  I mentally composed a report for Peter—he and Alison now had a daughter, Anni, who was a year younger than Mollie. We hiked in the mountains, along a system of irrigation canals, known as levadas, that striates Madeira. The levadas, many of them hand-built by slaves, were falling into disrepair as the economy shifted from agriculture to tourism. At the refurbished quinta where we stayed, the other guests, who were Danish and German and French, groused about how all the new construction was diminishing Madeira’s charm.

  • • •

  SURF SPOTS ARE CREATED and destroyed, both naturally and by human enterprise. Kirra, one of the world’s best waves, vanished not long after Bryan and I lived there. A new dredging regime at the mouth of the Tweed River, a mile or two south, poured sand into the cove where Kirra broke, and in a matter of months the miraculous wave was gone. A new break, known as the Superbank, closer to the river mouth, was created by the same change in sand flow. The magnificent wave that we surfed on Nias, at Lagundri Bay, was violently altered by an earthquake in 2005—not the earthquake near Sumatra that drove the tsunami that killed more than two hundred thousand people late the previous year, but a second one three months later that actually hit Nias harder. The reef at Lagundri was lifted at least two feet—and the wave improved. It got dramatically hollower and heavier—harder to ride, from the looks of it, but undeniably better.

  Beyond the loss or gain, I found these sudden changes to established surf spots profoundly unsettling. I remember a winter storm when I was in high school that flooded the lagoon at Malibu and changed the shape of the famous point. I simply could not accept the fact that Malibu was now a different wave. It was one thing for the Army Corps of Engineers to throw up a jetty at some beachbreak or harbor mouth and erase a surfable wave or create a new one. Malibu, I believed, was eternal. It was a fixed point in my universe. I kept surfing it after the big storm. It was now a short, shapeless right. But I was in full denial. The real Malibu was underneath all this sand. It would reemerge soon.

  As it happened, the old cobblestone point did eventually reappear, more or less the same, in the years after I left L.A. Perhaps, as a child of Southern California, I should have been a hardened catastrophist, understanding that natural history truly goes in only one direction, often violently. Earthquakes, wildfires, megadroughts. But my uneasiness about that 1969 flood remained. The center pole of a stable cosmogony, as far as I was concerned, ran through certain surf spots. (Kirra, after an enormous sand removal effort, has showed signs of resurrection lately.)

  Every couple of years, Peter and I still talk about going back to Madeira. We should do it. This next winter. Nobody goes there now. Plenty of excellent spots still break. Maybe even Jardim at the right tide, if it’s big enough. But I can’t face it, and neither, I think, can he.

  • • •

  ON OUR LAST MORNING in Madeira, the surf was still mediocre. While Caroline and Mollie slept, I dashed to the north coast for a final look. It must have been a true north swell. Not a ripple had arrived in Jardim. The north coast, meanwhile, was gigantic, with lines visible for miles. There were waves breaking out at sea on reefs that I had not known existed. The winds were light offshore. The shorebreak near the road looked at least ten feet.

  I drove west, to Madonna. I parked in the old roadside spot. The high black cliffs, the gauzy waterfalls—nothing had changed. There was no one around. The surf was clean and huge. The outside boil, where I had once heard boulders rolling on the bottom, was breaking on every set. I knew the water was deep out there, but the waves were black-faced and doubling up as if it were shallow, as if they needed even more water to fully express their rage. They looked too mean to surf. But then they shouldered and ran down the reef in a fairly orderly way. Those big left walls were actually surfable, on the right board, by the right person, doing everything right, surfing balls-out.

  I watched it for at least an hour. I walked back along the road, studying the shorebreak, trying to time the sets and lulls. The shorebreak, incredibly violent, seemed to have no lulls. It was more forbidding than the worst days I had seen at Paul do Mar—my benchmark for unreasonably dangerous shorebreak. You would simply have to jump in somewhere else, perhaps down at the harbor in Seixal, a few miles east. And paddle back there afterward too. There was no coming ashore near Madonna.

  Did I seriously consider trying to surf? If there had been someone else there, pulling on a wetsuit, waxing up, I would probably have done the same. I know I felt the gears spinning, turned by ancient compulsion. Parts of me were already anticipating the shock of the water, envisioning the line of approach. It was more reflex than thought. That was my most heedless, least reasonable self down there. It did not weigh risks and probabilities. It didn’t deserve to be called decision making. I wasn’t proud of it. Still, I
felt hot shame and regret as I drove away.

  Author, Tavarua, Fiji, 2002

  TEN

  THE MOUNTAINS FALL INTO THE HEART OF THE SEA

  New York City, 2002-15

  A LONGBOARD BECKONS. IF I LIVED IN A HOUSE NEAR THE BEACH, or in a house at all, or had a van, I would probably own one by now. But I live in jammed Manhattan, and I can stuff my shortboards in closets and corners, under beds, in homemade ceiling racks. I can jump on trains and buses, even the subway, with a shortboard, run through airports with relative ease, and lock boards inside cars, where a longboard wouldn’t fit. So I keep putting off the inevitable. In small, weak waves, I struggle to my feet now, especially if I’m wearing a thick wetsuit. A longboard would be a blessing on those days—easy, graceful gliding rather than blown waves and frustration. Instead, I avoid small, weak waves. In waves even slightly bigger, my shortboards still work fine. The stronger push, the vertical dimension—the board drops away on takeoffs, leaving room for my feet to get under me properly. I’m not riding tiny, up-to-the-minute boards, which are now mostly under six feet. I am, however, still riding boards that, by my standards, are loose and quick and fit nicely in the barrel—in those rare, electric moments when I manage to find my way there.

  I’ve become, strange to say, over the last decade, a New York City day surfer. Coastally, the city sits in the crotch formed by the sprung legs of Long Island and the Jersey Shore. While it took me years to discover Montauk’s waves—partly because I was busy but mostly because of a deep-dyed West Coast snobbery toward all things Atlantic—it took me longer still to see that there was surf of real interest practically on the city’s doorstep. The opaque screen behind which the best waves broke—I should have known it—was winter. Not only are winter days short and punishingly cold, but the window of good conditions—solid swell, offshore winds or no wind—is often brief. East Coast summers are dismal for surf. Fall is hurricane season, which can bring good swells. But it was winter that hooked me on chasing waves on short notice from the city. Storms known as nor’easters charge up the coast, not infrequently producing combinations of swell and wind of shockingly high quality. You just have to know where to go when.

  You also need to have work that can be done at night, a tolerant family, a state-of-the-art hooded wetsuit, and, in my experience, the Internet. Without online buoy data, real-time wind readings, precise wind and swell forecasts, and “surf cams,” it would be impossible for me, at least, to know where to go when. The cams are online video feeds from cameras mounted here and there—on deck railings, burglar bars—and aimed at the ocean in places known to get waves. On days when the window of good surf is only a couple of hours, the cams tend to tell you what you missed. If it looks good, that is, on your screen, it’s probably too late. Conditions will deteriorate before you get there. You dash on an educated guess.

  Chasing waves remains for me a proximate cause of vivid friendships. My education in the vagaries of local jetties, sandbars, wind patterns, shore-town cops, and desperate wetsuit-changing spots around New York has come mainly from a goofyfoot dancer named John Selya. He and I met when Mollie was small. Selya lived just a few blocks from us, on the fuddy-duddy Upper West Side, but he was also renting a house, with a bunch of other surfers, in Long Beach, on Long Island, in the wintertime, when rents were almost nothing. Long Beach gets waves. It has a train station. It’s less than an hour by car from Manhattan. If we surfed there, or anywhere nearby, the house was a place to change, dry wetsuits, leave boards, even sleep in the event of a two-day swell. But the house wasn’t essential. If the winds blow out of the west, as they often do, we go to New Jersey, not Long Island. Selya’s main surf buddies were another dancer named Alex Brady and a goofyfoot geophysicist whom they called the Lobbyist. I didn’t even notice when they let the house go. By then, I was in the rotation, permanently on call, dropping everything when the planets (and the buoys) lined up, going alone half the time, in borrowed cars.

  John Selya, New York, 2015

  Still, Selya makes me look half-committed. “This surfing once a week is no good,” he says. “It’s barely maintaining.” Selya has one of the worst cases of surf fever I’ve encountered. He’s insatiable; he’ll chase any hint of swell. He’s a binge-watcher of surf videos, an exacting connoisseur of great surfers and great waves, a student of advanced technique. He actually expects his own surfing to improve. And it does, perceptibly, each year. I’ve never seen that before in anybody beyond their teens. Selya was in his midthirties when we met, and already an excellent surfer, with a style that manages to be both muscular and delicate, but when I compliment him on a wave well ridden he says things like, “Thanks. It was sweet. But I need more verticality.”

  This must be a dancer thing.

  “And a Jewish thing,” he says. “You gotta suffer.”

  But not, in his case, whine. Selya joyfully surfs junk waves that I wouldn’t consider leaving my desk for. He’s an old-fashioned craftsman—he works hard to make things look easy. One December afternoon, we were out in an ice storm off Laurelton Boulevard, Long Beach. The surf was big: meaty, long-walled lefts, way overhead, pouring out of the east, all gray-black and ragged, with a hideous westbound current. Selya and I seemed to be the only people in the ocean. There was a hard north wind, dead offshore. We had to paddle ceaselessly against the current. When one of us veered to catch a wave, the ice pellets coming off the land were blinding. You had to stare down at the deck of your board, push over the ledge by feel, and then surf with gaze averted. Selya got a long one, riding for a block or more. He battled back outside. I asked him how his wave was. “Like buttah,” he yelled. That became the catchphrase for the session. We were too tired to say much more. The waves were actually splendid, more than worth the toil and trouble. And there was something perfect, in that stormed-out, ugly North Atlantic winter ocean, about pretending it was easy.

  When we finally washed ashore, incipient hypothermia was having its way with my sense of time and space. Trudging, board clamped under arm, head down against wind, past the hulking nursing homes of Long Beach, I wasn’t sure what day it was, or if we were on the same ice-covered street where we had left the car. We were. Selya couldn’t afford a surfed-out daze. He had a show that night. In fact, he was the star of a long-running Broadway hit—Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out. We changed in the car (this was after the rental house) and dashed back to Manhattan. I dropped him at the stage door. He panthered in with minutes to spare.

  • • •

  MY PARENTS HAD MOVED to New York in the mid-’90s. Moved back to New York, I should say. I saw it as a triumphant return, a big “Blacklist this” to the ghost of Joe McCarthy. But when I said so they seemed nonplussed. That was ancient history. They had come because their kids were here. Michael was an investigative reporter at the Daily News. Kevin was a labor lawyer in Manhattan. And Colleen was nearby—she and her family lived in western Massachusetts.

  My parents were both still producing movies and TV, which meant they were often in L.A. or on location. But their apartment on East 90th Street became the new clan gathering spot, especially once the grandkids started arriving—Colleen’s two daughters and then our Mollie. For me, it was a middle-aged second chance, to be enfolded again in the family I had left too young. Moll had a seat on the back of my bicycle, and it was a short ride across the park to my parents’ place, where we always felt intensely welcome. We ate in the kitchen, dogs underfoot, TV news grumbling in the background. I couldn’t possibly fit in the place that part of me yearned to reinhabit. There was, of course, no going back. Still, I was shocked by the comfort I took from hanging out with these lively, doting, terribly familiar people, my parents.

  They had a mysteriously rich social life immediately. Some of their new friends were actually old friends—film and theater people they had worked with. But they also seemed to reinvent themselves with unnerving ease. When Frank McCourt had a hit with Angela’s
Ashes, it turned out they were buddies from the Irish Arts Center—or maybe it was the American Irish Historical Society. I had never known my parents to take the least interest in things Hibernian, but hey, they were new in town, and they had a fine old-sod name. They went to concerts and plays and readings at a furious rate. My mother, especially, had a formidable cultural appetite. My father parked his sailboat on Long Island and started exploring the local waters. I imagined he missed California, but the more we sailed together, the more I saw that I was wrong. He loved poking around new bays and reaches. My mother, meanwhile, soon insisted she barely remembered L.A. (She didn’t call it L.A. All her life she called it “Los Angeles,” on some obscure point of principle or hometown pride.) Nearly seventy years of living there did a quick fade now, into the fog of memory. New York was home. I make her sound like a diva. She wasn’t. She was forward-looking. Although she had been taking French classes for years, now she started taking Italian too.

  • • •

  CAROLINE AND I SANG Mollie to sleep, first in our room, where her crib stayed for a couple of years, and then in her room. We made up a song, which named every aunt and uncle and cousin and grandparent, celebrating how much each one loved her, and ending with our own declarations. It was a soporific, deeply felt lullaby, and it always came first. After that, we each had our own songlist. I would hear Caroline’s high, clear voice from down the hall, slipping sleepily through “The Holly and the Ivy.” My repertoire was mostly folk music from the LPs my family owned when I was a kid—old American tunes, or latter-day imitations, sung by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Also some early Dylan and, of course, the Fool’s Song from the end of Twelfth Night.