ithaka's FISHDADDY CHRONICLES c.2006

rough draft for ithaka's
surfing-related short story book,
FISHDADDY CHRONICLES
__________________________________________________





Ithaka’s
FISHDADDY
CHRONICLES

c.2006







FISHDADDY CHRONICLES
by Ithaka Darin Pappas

1. STILTS
2.OXYGEN FALLS
3.CARCAVELOS BROWNS
5. ZE DOS CAES
6. PALM TREE REEF
7. MOROCCO IS:
8. ADVENTURES IN ADVERTISING
9. THE FORGOTTEN FOUR
10. MOMENTS OF INSANITY




STILTS

As a grom,
born and bred
in the pristine coastal suburbs,
Brick never imagined
that he was destined
to become an inlander.
Go Back To Pomona !
He’d yell down
to peroxide-haired body boarders
foraging for waves on the north side
of the Manhattan pier.

Both his parents being prominent engineers
in the aerospace trade,
Brick never took into consideration
that not everyone in the world
was dealt a winning hand of cards.

But the L.A. aerospace industry
shriveled up
and both his mom and dad
moved out of state (separately).
Brick was not about to relocate to either
Oklahoma or Arizona.
Eighteen and on his own.

College now out of the question,
employment geographics
forced Brick deep into the depths
of urban Los Angeles….
..that was several years ago.

As he exited his dense,
degregaded East L.A. neighborhood
onto the Santa Monica Freeway,
Go Back To Pomona !,
kept echoing
around the interior of his skull,
Go Back To Pomona !

As usual,
the local news stations had been
over-exaggerating
the storm swells all season.
A High Surf Advisory
Didn’t actually mean BIG waves
It just ensured the following days
would be ridiculously packed.
But for once the predictions
and hype were reputable.

As the 10 Freeway
poured him out onto
Pacific Coast Highway,
he saw the normally flat beach-breaks
a hollow but sloppy five-foot.
He was tempted to park it and surf Chattaugua
(it’d months since he’d
pulled into anything
even resembling a barrel).
But the urge kept him going.
Out past congested, six-foot Topanga
(even the Charthouse had twenty-five people out).
Thru Malibu, also good size but bumpy.
Past Zuma, big and closed out.
And past Leo Carrillo to County Line,
for a coffee at Neptune’s Net.

County Line had size.
but who wants to surf powerless waves
with a hundred human buoys in the water?

SUPERTUBES???????
…the right swell,
the right tide
he was SURE it was on…
but it was almost flat.

Today the on-shores
would probably arrive early
(no time for Rincon or Oxnard).
He slowed back southward
checking out every little cove,
beach and rock pile he knew of.
There was definitely a lot of swell,
missing some stretches, hitting others,
but too north for most of it.

The gas gauge on the Stonemobile
was broken, but he was confident
he had at least enough fuel to
make it back to Santa Monica.
But somewhere south of Solstice Canyon
as he flipped a cassette over
(Hammered, by Motorhead)
the engine died.
He didn’t stress,
just coasted it out
and pulled over next to
a makeshift wooden wall
in front of a construction site.
It was the only opening
in a strip of about forty stilted homes.
Their entrances street level
on Pacific Coast highway
with no gaps for beach access,
while the main volume of the structures
extended over the beach and water
(about fifteen feet below)
on a series of wooden and cement pilings.

He sat in the car,
music still blaring,
but in the brief silence between tracks
he heard the powerful SNAP ! of a wave.

What the HELL ?!
He scaled over the wooden wall for a look.
A short climb put him at water level
at the top of a small semi-point.
A sight that left him in momentary disbelief.

Less than a hundred feet
in front of the homes,
powerful rights were detonating
over a shallow flat reef.
Spinning almost in place
for a couple of seconds,
they momentarily backed off
in a deep spot
before racing sideways
for another five or six houses.

Up the building frame,
over the wall
and back to the Chevy.
The truck was stealth.
Both surfers and non-surfers
had no idea it was a surfer’s car.
It looked more like an immigrant
gardener’s vehicle.

No towel, he bare-balled it
on the house side of the car
to get into his wetsuit.
I’m going to call the police !
a woman yelled down
out of a second-story window.
SO AM I ! he laughed
scrambling over the wall.

After a short slalom course
down thru the beams
and around some jagged boulders,
he was soon muscling his way
into the last wave of an overhead set.
Barely making the drop,
He recovered into
a relaxed tube stance
and in wonderment ,
watched the antiseptically blue funnel
pass him by,
SLAM!!
Like a doctor slapping
a newborn’s butt
to get it to start breathing,
the Pacific-pounding
breathed life back
into Brick’s soul.
He screamed through
the saltwater placenta
with prehistoric adrenalin.

When he surfaced,
there were no waves
behind it waiting to punish him.
Just glassy, kelpy silence.
Looking shoreward,
he saw the underbellies
of the homes
(the structures
did not seem secure).
Then up to the large deck-patios
extending out in front of each of them.
They were all vacant except for one,
where a large-breasted,
red-haired woman
sat in front of an easel
painting the horizon.

Soon more waves arrived,
This day seemingly a gift of the gods
designated specifically for him
and him only.


But after an hour of solo euphoria,
four short-boarders separately
paddled north toward the lineup
(thank god they were short-boarders).
He wondered if there’d be vibes.
Whatever the place was called,
with its tiny take-off slot,
It was not intended
for mass consumption.

A set stacked.
Brick snagged the first one,
Backdooring the section on takeoff .
Momentarily covered up,
the lip released him
onto a steep carveable shoulder.
He heard distant hoots
as he raced it all the way to the rocks.

Returning to the peak,
He saw each of the new riders
snatching up the remaining set waves.
Three regulars and a goofy.
All decent surfers,
but not pros.
And judging from the brand names
of boards they rode,
none of them from the Malibu area.
He was glad they were outsiders.
And they were relieved
that Brick (who looked mean)
was amicable.

With stoke level
running feverishly high,
the five strangers
took turns on the bigger set waves.

Considering the
actual abilities involved,
performance levels
were peaking
(with the tube success ratios
at least 50/50).


Does this place have a name?
asked the kid from SB
riding the Matt Moore board.



Brick, pensive for a moment
trying to make up one
(the kid, thinking he
was reluctant to tell him).

Brick looked toward the vertical
under-supports of the homes.
It’s called, STILTS, he said.
….and that section that always
tries to pinch you at the end
…that’s ENVELOPES.

Although none of them
had ever met before,
the five surfers
began to converse
between sets,
mostly about global travels.

Having never left North America,
Brick could only listen.
But it was hard
for the others to deny
that this was one of
the best days
of isolated perfection
any of them
had EVER experienced ANYWHERE.
It was understood that this
was an extremely rare day,
but none of them could believe
that makeable
barrels of this caliber
could possibly exist
within thirty minutes of Santa Monica.
No cameras.
No videos.
No sponsored riders.
The fact remained, however,
that as good as it was,
size-wise it was just a sideshow
to what breaks in
Palos Verdes, Ventura and beyond
were experiencing at that exact moment.
But nobody here was complaining.

Six-hour session,
the tide now bone-dry.
A few yards of sand had appeared
directly in front of the houses.
Exausted, Brick rock-hopped
out of the water and onto the beach.

Go Home,
it wasn’t shouted
but it was definitely audible
…but from where?

He surveyed the homes
and decks from below.
The woman with the big boobs
still worked on her scenic.
And now, on another terrace,
an elderly couple
was being served breakfast
by a stocky Latina maid.
AND
two twenty-five year old trust-funders
still in their tennis clothes
fresh off the court,
sat on a wooden deck
(cluttered to capacity
with several surfboards,
windsurf boards,
a Zodiac and a jet-ski.
They had their backs
turned toward him,
but he could see them smirking
from the side and could hear
the faint whimper
of their cowardly giggles.
This time the bitches coordinated
their effort in unison,
GO HOME ! ! !
They yelled with both
hands mega-phoned
over their mouths
(still lacking the courage
to face the accused).

The euphoria of the day’s
gelatin-smooth barrels
and camaraderie shared
with four low-key riders faded.
Replaced with annoyance,
anger and distrust.
And a remainder
of who and what
he now was,
an inlander.

He looked back to the punks,
but they still wouldn’t make eye-contact.
What kind of worms play tennis
when the secret spot
in front of their own balcony
is disemboweling itself
as NEVER before?

Brick made mental notes
(the house wouldn’t look
exactly the same
from the street side).
Wooden. Gray with white trim.
Five doors over
from the construction site.

Up the beams
through the work-in-progress
and over the wall.
He easily identified the house
on the PCH side.

In front of its
white-washed garage door
was a brand new red
convertible SAAB
with chrome gansta rims,
white leather seats
(two Baboblat tennis rackets
rested on the passenger side cushion)
and a gold license-plate frame
that read,
PEPPERDINE ALUMNI
with two bumper stickers
on either side of the plate:
MY OTHER CAR IS A SURFBOARD
And , BELL AIR BAY CLUB.

Brick found an empty,
one-gallon plastic milk jug
in the garbage and unrolled the short
hose lying next to the garage door.
He opened the Saab’s gas cap hatch,
No lock.
He shoved one end
of the hose into the tank
and started inhaling on the other,
(almost instantly getting a mouthful
of 91 Octane Premium Unleaded).
He snapped his thumb over the hole
to maintain vacuum,
then released it into the jug.
With the optimum pressure
of a full tank,
the jug filled in seconds.
Thumb back on the opening,
he hesitated a minute…
…momentarily entertaining
fantastical thoughts
of dousing the car in fuel
and torching it.

Naaahhh…not his style.
He wasn’t about to
let those weasels
get the best of him.


GO BACK TO POMONA !
Again circled his cerebrum
like a distant ghost.

Karmic repercussions
of his segregational
suburban upbringing.
He couldn’t believe
this is what
he had come from.

Although this last year
had been good to him
and he could probably afford
to move back to the coast.
Brick remembered what had been
holding him back.

His past.
























OXYGEN FALLS

I'd been here fourteen days,
ever since they'd
brought him home
from the hospital.
And for fourteen days in a row
Zeus, Athena and I had walked;
across the cotton field,
through the lemon orchard,
into The Reservation
and along the bank of the canal
until we reached
the base of Oxygen Falls.
The air here was thick with humidity,
the roar of the water threatening.
Haunting and intriguing at the same time.



Three years ago,
he'd been transferred here
from his job at a Los Angeles
aerospace corporation
to their production division
in a rural area outside of Phoenix.
Unfortunately, my trip wasn't
a family social visit,
my Pops was sick.

Terminal they'd called it,
I called it unfair.

KEEP OUT !
SUBMERGED OBSTRUCTIONS!
EXTREME DANGER!

These faded red letters,
on a now rusted-out piece
of white sheet metal,
had been a never ending subject
of controversy and speculation
between Niles, Joe and I
during every holiday
we'd spent together
since Pops and April
had moved here.

The sign was posted
on the first of two parallel,
barbed-wire fences
guarding potential victims
from the hazards
of the falls behind the them.



Oxygen Falls in actuality
was a hundred-foot high
aerator slope
just downstream
from the Red Mountain Dam
on the Saguaro Indian Reservation.

After first corralling
a section of the Salt River
in form of a small lake,
back out through its spillways
and down a descending
eighth-of-a-mile long
boxy, narrowing concrete waterway.
This compressed the river water volume
from an area of about 40-yards wide
into an end width of just twenty-five feet,
quadrupling its velocity.

The water then rocketed
out of its square cement chute
and down the eight-story,
sixty-degree slope
into a churning, chaotic maelstrom
at the bottom.
This process whipped the water
abundantly full of oxygen molecules,
(essential for retarding algae growth
and increasing crop harvests).



Immediately after this frothy,
turbulent area,
the water abruptly tranquilized...
quieting down
into a deeper,
much wider body of water
known as Lower River,
which eventually dissected
itself into several smaller,
slow-flowing canals and ditches,
(providing the
agricultural water supply
of eastern Phoenix).
_________________________________

For fourteen mornings in a row,
I'd stood here with my two friends
and reread the words:

KEEP OUT !
SUBMERGED OBSTRUCTIONS !
EXTREME DANGER ! ,

wondering what exactly it meant.


An old Indian citrus-farmer,

whose land bordered the canal,
had once told my brothers and I
that the submerged obstructions
were in reference to underwater rake-spikes;
sharp, metal, vertical bars
mounted underneath the white water
at the base of the falls
that prevented logs
and other larger debris
that had managed to make its way
through the dam
and down the aerator slope
from continuing any further downstream
(potentially clogging up
the subsequent farming canals
and ditches).

BULLFUCKINGSHIT !!!!!!!!,
that old Red doesn't know shit,
proclaimed my stepbrother Joe,
an ex-marine,
my elder of two years.

No....I think he may be right,
protested Niles,
my other brother,
also two years older
and the brainiest of us three,
...I think I read something
...about something like that ..somewhere.

For the moment
I'd remained undecided on the subject,
but had later asked Pops about it.
He'd said that the underwater rakes
did exist on some dams and aerators,
but on which ones was impossible to tell,
unless the spillways were closed
and the water level low enough
to expose them.
But here at Oxygen Falls,
the water was kept flowing year round,
quenching the thirst
of the area's perpetually arid farmlands.

What do you guys think ?
I asked Zeus and Athena.

WWWWWOOOOOOFFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,
howled Zeus.

AAAARRRRRRRPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,
echoed Athena in feminine equivalent.


Zeus and Athena,
brother and sister Rhodesian Ridgebacks
agreed on everything.
I sometimes wondered
if they shared the same brain.

We walked back to the house
where April had been waiting for us.
She had some errands to do in town
and Pops couldn't be left alone
in his condition.

I'll see you in a couple of hours,ok ?
my stepmother said.

Ok...See you later, I said.

I pulled out an old atlas
from the living room bookshelf
and went up to Pop's room.
He was asleep so I began reading.

Are you to take the drop?
asked an unexpected voice.
It was my dad sleep talking.

What?! I asked.

Are you ready to take the drop?,
he repeated.

I wasn't exactly sure what he meant,
but even though he was unconscious
somehow knew that the question
had been directed at me.

Um...yeah...I guess so...what about you?

Yes, he whispered with a slight smile
as he drifted into a deeper sleep...
...a sleep he was never woke from.

He died in a peaceful way
which I suppose is better
than getting run over by a UPS truck
or catching a stray bullet
in a neighborhood drive-by,
but when it's your Pops,
shit like that is of little consolation.



It was about two a.m.
when the last of the neighbors,
the mortician with dad's body
and the rest of the weepers and mourners
(most of whom I'd never even met)
left.
I walked outside,
got into the family mini-van
and flew out onto the Beeline Highway.
My speed rarely dropping below ninety,
as I talked incessantly
to a silent, invisible father
riding in the passenger seat.

The towns sped by;
Fountain Hills, Apache Junction,
Hobokam, Superstition.
In and out of the Tonto Forest,
through Sunflower
and out past twenty or so
smaller settlements....
until there was nothing
but cactus and stars.

I stopped the van, got out,
laid on my back
across the yellow checkered dividing line
and looked directly up.
The biggest shooting star
I'd ever seen
radiated by overhead,
its trail glowing for a full ten-seconds.

It was one of those infrequent,
self-pitying moments
when I will question the purpose
of all existence;
The Earth, The Stars,
Love, Hate, Life, Death....
....it all seems like such
a cruel, heartless joke sometimes.


Exhausted and fatigued,
I arrived home midmorning.
Niles and Joe
had already arrived in Arizona
and were giving me shit
for staying out all night.
April's been worried
out of her fucking mind !!!,

I apologized,
instantly morphing
the vibe more positively.

Although we all lived
within an hour's drive of each other
in California,
we rarely hang out.
But that night we drank beers,
talked about Pops, the old days
back in the South Bay
and about all the trouble
we'd gotten ourselves into.
I was surprised to learn
for the first time that
(on different occasions)
Niles and Joe had both been arrested.
How I'd never found out
remains a mystery.
And my dad, not being one to rat,
had never mentioned anything about it
or the healthy sums of cash
he'd shelled out for their bail bonds.

However, I wasn't being as open
with my older brothers
as they were being with me.
And hoped Pops had been
as equally discreet
about my own personal fuck ups
and had never told them
of my little run in
with a particular young vixen from Lomita.
An incident far more regrettable
and less heroic than getting your ass thrown
in the slammer for a few hours.
__________________________________________

If it is at all possible for a funeral
to be a good thing, Pops' was.
The youngish priest, Father Paul,
had been a good friend
of my dad and April
and spoke to us with his eulogy, not at us.

His message was very personal,
almost completely avoiding
any corny, generic post-death sermonology.
He even played
a from-the-heart Bob Dylanish song
on the acoustic
which he'd written
when his own father had died.

Part of which was;
He was more than just a father,
a teacher, my best friend.
he showed me things
not known to kings
like how to fish
and make a wish
beside the Magic Sea...
...I miss him the old man

Toward the end of the service,
Father Paul had said something that stuck
into my head like a nail.
He'd spoken directly to Niles, Joe and I.

Your father,
being the man that he was,
would want you to go on
with your lives
...living them to the fullest.
On the ride back to Dad and April's crib,
that last part kept playing
and replaying in my head...
...living them to the fullest.

For me, in contrast to the urban hell
I'd inflicted upon myself four years before
(moving from the beach into Hollywood),
living life to the fullest
still meant getting in the ocean regularly,
something I'd been less
than successfully accomplishing lately.

Of my last several attempts;
On one, I'd borrowed
and broken-in-half
a friend's favorite board.

On another,
I contracted a hideous
bacteria-caused
ear infection.

And on my last try.........
at six a.m. speeding west
down the Santa Monica Freeway
(on my to surf what I later heard
was p e r f e c t five-foot Topanga),
I rear-ended a station-wagon
full of Guatemalan cleaning women
on the way to the Beverly Hills mansions
they were to immaculate.

Coincidence maybe,
regardless, I felt that
the almighty Poseidon
had put some kind
of restraining order
on my surfing rights.
I decided to lay low for a while
and had been surviving
strictly on a surf-mag fix.
_____________________________________

When we got back to the house
after the funeral,
I began frantically searching....
the hall closet,
then the garage,
then the tool shed.
And finally found IT
behind the Jacuzzi pump
next to the pool.
I unfolded the yellow, moldy plastic.
A round, inflatable swimming pool raft
about four-feet in diameter
resembling a giant hole less donut
complete with a circle
of bright pink nylon rope
secured around the top of it
(to use as leverage
in case you encountered
any dangerous oceanic conditions
in your chlorinated utopia).

Joe (stoned as usual) came outside.
And after several minutes
of amusedly watching me
trying to inflate the damn thing
with my own breath, offered...

I think there's a compressor
in the garage, bro.

And soon I was running,
(holding the inflated raft
clumsily on top of my head)......
across the cotton field,
through the lemon orchard,
into The Reservation,
along the bank of the canal.
AND up the the long hill
until I was in front
of the double security fences
at the upper backside
of monstrous cement structure.

I frisbeed the raft over the first fence,
climbed it,
then tossed it gently over the second,
(this time barely clearing
above the sharp barbs).

And seconds later,
I was standing above the rushing,
funneling channel of water
leading to the drop.

I prepared to make my jump,
then hesitated.

I set the raft down,
walked along the ridge of the canal
to the top of the falls
and took a long, last look
down to the the bubbling cauldron
of frothy water at the base....
only imagining what actually lay underneath.

In the far distance,
I saw Niles and Joe charging
up the river bank- yelling as they ran,
both armed with about
a mile of safety rope.

As they got closer,
I realized Niles was shouting something
about the rake-spikes
and the possibility of drowning
in the current.

YOU COULD DIE, ASSHOLE !!!!!!!!!!!,
He shouted, barely audible
above the rumble of water.

THAT'S OK.!!!, I yelled back ,
I DON'T GIVE A FUCK !!!

Frenzied, I ran back to the raft.
And grabbing it,
hurled myself the ten feet
off of the vertical embankment
and into the racing
thirty mile-an-hour current below.

Landing on the raft,
but losing hold of the rope
that circumferenced it,
I was violently swept downstream
spinning like a top.

Dizzy and panicked,
I had only one conscious thought,
going STRAIGHT down
as I went over the top…..
or I'd surely be discovering truth
about the rake-spikes headfirst.

At the last second,
I somehow managed to get it together.
Getting hold of the rope,
I was able to stop the spinning
and was able to lift up the nose
and went straight over.......

SHHHHHHHHITTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I shrieked, flying down
what would be comparable
to dropping in at
100-foot Waimea Bay
(on a giant vinyl apple-fritter).

While my stomach was making
an ambitious attempt of escaping
up through my throat……

FFFFFFUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
my velocity was multiplying all the way down…..
SHHHHHIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!

Below me somewhere through the spray,
I caught a millisecond glimpse
of Niles and Joe near the base
looking like cowboys
preparing to rope cattle.

By the end of the drop,
I had accelerated to the point
that the raft was not
even really connecting
to the water's surface.

With the point of impact
rapidly approaching,
I strained to make a last effort
to get the front of the raft up
as high as possible and.....
SWWOOOOOSSSSHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like a ski jump
I blasted right up and over the top
of the bubbling aquatic chaos,
air born for at least fifteen feet
(safely above the submerged spikes)
and then sent skipping another 50 feet
like a thin stone on a still puddle
into the calms of the canal.

Several long seconds later,
my heat began beating again,
my emotion confusingly somewhere
between laughing and crying.

I ignored the rope
Niles and Joe
eventually tossed my direction
and the drone of falling water
began dissipating behind me.

I spent the next several hours
slowly drifting westward
underneath the cobalt Arizona sky;
alongside of citrus farms,
and waving Indian children .
And by cookie-cutter,
suburban track-home neighborhoods,
thinking about......

…what life would be like without Pops.

___________________________________________

Several months later,
I went to visit April, Zeus and Athena.
When I drove over the tiny canal bridge,
signifying the neighborhood's entrance,
I couldn't see ANY water
flowing down the dirt trenches
into the citrus groves.

I immediately got the dogs
and headed up toward
the cotton field trail
leading to the river.

For the first time
since I'd been coming here
Oxygen Falls was under repair,
the spillways shut, the river bed dry.

There were no rake-spikes.













CARCAVELOS BROWNS

I’m deaf now.
Completely deaf.
Except for the sounds
of my jaws chomping
when I eat and the sound
of my bones creaking
when I walk.
And sometimes I hear
a disturbing jingle-jangle
of something metallic.
I’m not sure what…
the coins in my pocket ?
or the BB’s in my brain?

Earlier today,
I was almost hit by a car.
Same as yesterday.
And the day before.
I’ve changed my mind
about liking silent movies.
I hate them now.

I’d once asked a deaf woman,
what it was like
to live in a silent movie
her whole life.
She said she liked it,
you didn’t have to
listen to people’s bullshit.
I realized now, that I really enjoyed
listening to people’s bullshit.

My Shangri-la has betrayed me.
My Utopia is brown not green.
My first impression of paradise
was an illusion created by a photographer,
a journalist and a world famous surfer.
Green Beach is the Portuguese Pipeline !
the article had shouted at me
with text and photos.

That was just twelve years ago,
a first and lasting image;
big, perfect super-green tubes.
Those solitary impressions
marinating around in my brain all this time,
had recently led me to make one of the most
drastic changes in my entire life.
THE MOVE.
The trans-Atlantic move to a town near
those picture-perfect green barrels.

But when I finally arrived
to my dream beach,
I made a sickening discovery.
Although the waves were
just as big, perfect and hollow
as the article had bragged,
the water was dark brown
(not bright green)
and it smelled like shit.
Because it was shit-
mostly raw sewage,
but also;
mud, oil, detergents, plastics, etc…
all whipped together
by the frequent swells
into a kind of bacteria cocktail.
I vowed never to surf there.
Never.
Never to even look at the place.

Instead, I began surfing
the less dramatic and less polluted breaks
north of Carcavelos along the Estoril coast.
But the waves along this stretch
of reefs and coves were generally
inconsistent and powerless.
In the meantime,
the Carcavelos pounders
pounded on and on……
day after day,
moon after moon.

Although I was often tempted,
I never ventured there again
even for a look.
But I knew deep inside
that the powerful tunnels
would eventually
lure me to test my abilities.

Like most riders throughout history,
in my own mind,
I was the best surfer of ALL eternity.
But how many winters
of strength and speed did I have left ?
How many winters
of real waves did I have left?
Ten or fifteen at the most.

No doubt I’d probably
be surfing until the day I died,
but on fat, slow boards
on small, slow waves.
A grandpa with nothing but memories
and an occasional Sunday afternoon surf
on a board big and thick enough
to support a floating hotdog stand.

…And the young punks
(never imagining that they themselves
will someday will be older
than they are
at that moment in time)
will laugh and point
and tell their girlfriends what a kook I am.
Nobody will be there to defend me.
Nobody will be there
to tell the young punks about the day….

A sturdy sixteen year old kid nick-named Granite
was the only person ballsy enough
to surf Resort Point during very biggest swell
California’s famous winter of ’83
(The El Nino year)….

….Or about another day
later in the same winter,
the same kid continued surfing
his home break
even after he’d spotted
the dorsal of a Great White.
But the waves were good,
he had later told the lifeguard
(who’d also spotted the rare visiting shark)
and had pleaded his return to the beach
for more than an hour through his megaphone.

No…the young punks
wouldn’t know about any of that…

…they also wouldn’t know
about the day years later
when Granite had encountered the legendary,
Kalani Jones
in a Kawaii convenience store.

And had later been invited
to surf a private reef break,
a sacred Hawaiian secret
with one of the Kahunas himself.
Just two soul kings,
a half a mile from shore
(before the crowded days of jets skis).
Nobody to impress
but themselves and the gods.

No, the young punks
wouldn’t know about any of that…
not any of it.

One morning, I woke up
hours earlier than normal
with an itch,
a kind of nervous tingling
in my bones.
The rain had stopped,
the sun was shining,
the clothes pins
on the laundry line
outside of my window
were slapping the panes
(this only occurred during an east wind).
I knew what it all meant,
especially the nervousness
inside my bones.
It meant WAVES.

I don’t know why.
I don’t know how
(With no surf reports
in the area existing
at that time to
aid my delusion..).
But with almost
one hundred-percent accuracy,
as if spiritually linked
with the almighty Neptune,
this strange fearful confusion
I sometimes felt
meant that the day, THIS day,
would be one of the few
in three-hundred and sixty-five
that the ocean would rebel;
sink ships, destroy houses, claim lives.

Although I was about to head
straight to the station
to catch a twenty-five minute express train
out to the coast,
I took a cold shower
to regain consciousness,
brushed my teeth.
and put a new leash on Olga.
She was beautiful,
a thin, plain-white 7’10” thruster pin
shaped by Almir Salazar.
A bigger, sleek board
for bigger, hollow waves.
Although it was nearly six months old
I’d only ridden it a couple of times before
(basically just to try it out),
it still looked and smelled new.
The fiber-glass still crack free and un-dented.

The train raced
alongside of the Rio Tejo,
out toward sea
and before we had
even reached the estuary
I could already see
huge rows of whitewater
foaming up the mouth of the river.
The fort-island
was being bombarded
as was the super-tanker
that was attempting to maneuver itself
into the channel and up river.

East wind.
Sunshine.
Deep cobalt-blue sky.
Under other circumstances
It could’ve been an ideal day
for a picnic.

I got off the train at Carcavelos station,
bought a coffee and a chocolate milk
and walked a quarter of a mile
through a still-sleeping suburban neighborhood
until I reached the beach.

Big walls of dark brown water
marched methodically toward shore.
And one after another
they exploded on the shallow
outside sandbar.
The east wind whistled,
suspending their lips mid-air
forming completely round,
mud-colored tunnels,
often blasting clouds of mist
out their side doors.
Water color aside ,
It was an incredible sight.
Horrifying,
but absolutely perfect.

Took my time
getting into the water;
studied breaking patterns
and currents,
inched my wetsuit on,
combed my wax to perfection,
and finally waded waist-deep
into the churning browness.
I began paddling.


It smelled d i s g u s t i n g.
Pollution so severe that
the water-density itself was different.
Less like water, more like soup.
Cream of Hepatitis soup.

Soon I was making my way through
the foaming rows of muck,
(leftovers of waves that had already
expended themselves on the outside bank).
But the bubbles of foam weren’t
of the everyday pea and cherry-sized variety,
some were size of grapefruits
and didn’t immediately pop
after a wave had passed,
possessing all the unique durabilities
that result from the random mixing
of piss, shit, gasoline,
oil, detergents, river mud
AND diluted blood
from a neighborhood slaughterhouse
that frequently took advantage
of the rainy season
to dispose of by-product waste
directly into the sewer system.

It took me forty-five minutes
just to paddle beyond
the endless walls of foam
and into the impact zone
where waves twelve and even fifteen feet
on the face where mercilessly slamming
into the sandbar, just
five feet below the surface.

I felt nauseated,
not only from the pollution,
but from motion sickness.
The swells were rising and falling,
lifting and dropping me
every several seconds.
But none of the waves
seemed approachable,
out-of -control,
with no obvious take-off spots.

I’d been paddling and bobbing
around out there
about an hour and a half
before IT finally came.
It appeared slower than the others
because it was much larger.
Its rise was a steady one, not as jumpy.

By luck, I was in perfect position.
I simply turned around, paddled twice
and slid in.
But suddenly
like a sledge hammer cracking a skull,
the wave hit the shallowest part of the sandbar,
completely concaving from lip to trough
And there I was,
in position for the biggest, best,
shit-brown tube ride of my entire life.
Crouching into an iron-legged hell-stance,
it PITCHED…swallowing me whole
like an aspirin tablet.
Dark in there,
no natural light
coming through the back of the lip,
just smelly opaqueness.

I aimed at the only route of exit,
the small golden light
at the end of the Hershey Highway.
But as it grew closer,
thousands of big, toxic bubbles
came floating up the wave’s face and into my path,
and for a millisecond
my fins lost traction.
Recovered my balance,
but the slide had cost valuable distance
and I was now too deep
to leave the shit tunnel graciously
No choice but to go down with the ship.

The glimmer of illumination
at the end of the colon
flickered, then faded completely.
And in pitch-blackness,
I was hurdled directly
into the calderon
just to get sucked over with the lip
and then obliterated in the impact zone.
The full weight of the wave
compacting directly onto on me.
Eyes closed, I was tossed around and around and around,
upside down in the Devil’s soup bowl
repetitively getting bounced
off the hard-packed sand bank.

Finally I was released from the force,
But where was I ?
Somewhere suspended in the sludge.
Like an idiot, I opened my eyes.
Burning blackness.
Dizzy and panicked, I swam and swam
and swam into nothingness…
finally switched course forty-five degrees,
and banged my head on the bottom
(I’d been swimming horizontally).

Pushing off with my legs,
I instantly surfaced thru
an eighteen-inch thick layer
of freshly blended
sewage-smoothie bubbles.
Gasping for a solid breath of air
I chocked on one and immediately vomited.

Defeated, and exhausted,
I swam for shore.
Olga was long gone,
already waiting for me
on the beach like a loyal dog
amongst a pile
of river garbage and tree branches.
But, except for the broken leash,
no damage done.

I walked up the beach and across the highway
to one of those quiet suburban houses,
turned on a garden hose
and rinsed off the shit and slime.
Changed back into my street clothes,
walked back to the station
and caught the train back to Lisbon,
got off at the last stop
and walked up the hill
toward Bairro Alto;
past bakeries, flower shops, shoe-shiners,
sailors, winos, dusty old hookers, drug dealers,
past the post office at Praca de Camoes.
Past the Brazilian Consulate,
up Rua da Atalaia and into my front door.

Two days later my ears began to hurt.
Two days after that I was deaf.
Stone deaf.
The star of my own silent movie.
_________________________________________
Ps:
It was three-months
and two surgeries later when
(less than half of)
my hearing was finally restored.
An already advanced
case of Exostosis combined
with severe double ear infections,
left one of my eardrums
rotten beyond repair,
described by my surgeon,
as fragile as a burnt curtain.
I eventually re-operated with one of the best
specialists in the US…and even he couldn’t
do much for me.

This was 1993,
and only two years later,
with newly received funds
from the European Union
the municipality of Caiscais County
did a MAJOR upgrade
on the sewer system
on this part of the coast.
It ain’t perfect,
but it’s a massive improvement.
The days of this kind of pollution
are long gone ..hopefully for good.

But the young punks
won’t know about any of this.
They’ll think Carcavelos
was always just the way it is now.
And on warm winter Sundays…
(never imagining that
they’ll ever grow a day older
than they are at that moment) …
…they’ll laugh
and tell their girlfriends
to check out
the kook with
the big thick board and
the waterproof hearing aid.

















ZÉ DOS CÃES (Jose of the Dogs)


There were five people
sardined into the cab
of Duda’s pick up truck,
the back stuffed to the limit
with all sorts of shit;
sleeping bags, clothes,
a mountain bike, six surfboards
and wetsuits.

I was ecstatic just to be
on my way
out of Lisbon for a while.
Our destination, Sagres,
the southernmost corner
of continental Europe.
In the summer, a playground
for pink northern-Europeans
who flock to the Algarve
to take advantage of the
low prices and sunshine.
But in the winter, desolation,
rural beaches
and big, perfect waves.

Six hours later,
we arrived at
an old stone house
we’d arranged to rent.
Our arrival in town
was soon spread
to the local surfers
(all six of them),
Who dropped by
to give us an account
of the day’s waves.

Ze dos Caes, the leader
of the Algarve underground,
shows up with a Brick of hash
the size of a man’s wallet.
He cuts a piece off
and starts mixing it up
with the tobacco
of a Gudang-Gurang
clove cigarette.
We smoke and talk for a while.
Ze informs us that a swell
just arrived
and that he’d be by
tomorrow at a reasonable hour.

The next morning during predawn,
BAM ! BAM ! BAM!
On the window.
It’s Ze screaming,
Come on Pappas
it’s twelve to fifteen feet
with east wind..COME ON !!!

Nobody else even stirred
from their comas,
but after six hours
of attempting to sleep on
a ridiculously cold stone floor,
I needed something….
a coffee, a beer or some food.

We stopped at
an early morning
fisherman’s snack bar
for a juice and sandwich.
Afterward, I go to take a piss
and as I’m coming
out of the bathroom,
Ze says,
Let’s go…I already paid for you.

But as we’re getting into the car,
The owner of the snack bar
comes running out and says,
You forgot to pay AGAIN, Ze.

Maybe later,
Says Ze,
jamming the car
into first gear and screeching off.

SMACK ! BANG ! CRACK !
A hundred kilometers-an-hour
down a muddy dirt road
with puddles
you could drown in
and rocks the size of basketballs.
SMACK ! BANG ! CRASH !
We nail one of the them head on.
Ze gets out to inspect the damage.
The bumper and grill are Fucked,
mangled beyond repair.
He gives it a shrug.
Gets back in the car.
Throws it into reverse,
Does three full circles going backwards.
The jams it back into first.

And we fly and bounce
another ten or so kilometers
Down a road that ain’t no road..
Sliding to a hundred
and eighty degree stop
about a meter and a half
from a two-hundred meter vertical cliff.

We’d come upon
a panoramic view
of three surfing breaks.
Ze wasn’t bullshitting about the waves,
it was definitely
in the two-meter PLUS category
a not a soul around.

We wasted no time
negotiating our way down
an even worse road
eventually leading
to the beach below.
It was well past dawn,
but the
high cliffs were still casting
about a kilometer into the ocean.

Freezing,
we struggled into our wetsuits
and paddled out.
I was soon to discover
the answer to my previous night’s question.

Can this big, clumsy, gangly,
goofy, hash-toting
Algarvian even surf?

Ze caught the first wave
of the day,
a mean monster
nearly three times his height.
He took off
so dangerously close
to the rocks designating
the beginning of
this ridiculously long left,
that the bottom of the wave
wasn’t even water,
just a pile of boulders.
Then in a section where
most people would try
to outrun the wave
to the safety of the shoulder,
he cuts back
even deeper into the pit
and redirects himself
into a kitchen-sized barrel.
He gets absorbed by the big foam
Ball chasing him down the tunnel
Disappearing from my view entirely,
although I’m looking straight
into the tube from the channel.
The wave spits,
Ze comes flying out of the tube
not from the bottom
of the trough
where I was half expecting him to,
but up at the top of the concave
and is already skating
over the backside
of the huge green tube.
He lands it,
blasting through the turbulence
only slightly off balance.
To this day the most insane floaters
I ever witnessed (including films and video).

At this point
his wave passes me by
and I’ve got a four meter-set
staring at me right in the face….
(and) I can already see the top
of wave behind it
Getting frothy
and beginning to break.
The only way I can avoid
a serious amount of
violent punishment
is by taking the first one
and escape out of the impact zone.
I whip my board around
(a brand new 7’2”
perfect for conditions like these)
and start paddling
like a motherfucker for shore.
The swell lifts me up
into the sky
higher and higher.
I already on my feet
looking straight down
the huge face
squinting into the offshore wind,
I see Ze finishing his ride,
the beach the cliffs.
But at that instant,
the sun (revealed by the wave
lifting me so high)
comes blazing over the edge
of the cliff and directly
into my eyes.
I’m completely blinded
and floating through the air
with my feet still on my board.
Floating down, down.
The second I landed
in the trough,
that mother of a lip
landed on my head,
a no-mercy pounding
that kept me in
the washing machine
for fifteen-seconds or more.
Luckily, I was able to come up
for one gulp of air
before the second wave hit me…
which was powerful enough
to drag me most of the way
to the shoreline,
where I was assaulted by
two-meter high beach-ponders.
Exhausted, I made it to the beach,
my heart about to poke
a hole through my wetsuit.

On the outside,
Ze catches the first wave
of the next set.
Carves a deep bottom-turn ,
drives straight up the face,
bashes the lip vertically,
landing it weightlessly
just in time to get swallowed
by another huge tube.
After a few seconds
he comes out on
a gravy-train speed run
all the way to the beach.

He gets out.
Nice wave Pappas, he says mockingly.

A couple of hours later,
after a second session,
and unwelcome change
in wind direction,
we’re flying through
the pastures again.
Climbing a small blind hill,
we are road blocked
on the opposite by
a herd of two-hundred
grazing cattle.
They don’t move an inch.
But Ze just blares the horn
and speeds up even faster
weaving a maze
through the black,
brown and white monsters
almost killing us.

We clipped the horn
of one of the bulls,
leaving a new dent on
the already damaged right fender.
And continued
through the remainder
of the herd
Past the shepherd dogs,
past two stone farmhouses and
a hundred-and -forty-kilometers–per-hour
down the straight stretch
of slightly better road.
that led to
the Cabo St. Vincente lighthouse.
A small white car
is approaching us at
equally as fast,
but there is room
for passing on either side
and I’m sure Ze
has some kind of death wish.
Surprisingly at
the last possible safe moment
he abruptly slows it down
coming to a complete halt
and gets out to talk to the driver
of the other car.

After a few exchanged words
and a bro-shake
we’re following the white car
back in the direction of Sagres.

Who is that ? I asked Ze.
Joao Antunes, the best surfer in Portugal.

Oh yeah, yesterday,
you told me YOU were the best in Portugal.

I meant he’s the best BESIDES me…
anyway, he told me that Z-Point
is about two meters and glassy right now.

With an evil smile
plastered across his mug,
Ze cranks up the volume
on a Bad-brains cassette
and in about ten minutes
we’re at Z-Point looking
at some of
the most flawless waves
I’d ever seen.
A right semi-point
with Big, hollow but short,
green mothers
not far off shore- shore
four-meters on the face
with tubes seemingly big enough
to drive a Renault Clio through.
Antunes was already
in the water and
the only person out
and nobody was
on the beach yet.

The three of us
surfed alone for hours.
Wave after wave after wave,
tube after tube after tube.
Joao surfing with radical precision.
Ze surfing with reckless abandoned.
And me just surfing for survival.

Five dogs howled from the beach
as Ze took off on
the biggest wave of the day.
The wave was absolutely unmakeable;
an ugly, mutated, close-out.
But Ze , seemingly encouraged
by the cries of the pack of dogs,
hurriedly scratched his way in from the top,
free-falling down
the past-vertical face,
barely managing
to carve a big fat bottom turn
before getting obliterated by the lip.

Half of his board
washed up on the rocks
and was immediately retrieved by
The largest of the dogs,
a dirty-looking German Shepherd..

Ze had collected them over the years.
All strays that nobody cared about.
Ze was the only person who ever fed them.
They just sit on the beach and wait for him to come out of the water, Antunes told me.

By the time we get back up to the cars,
Ze was already engaged in
rolling a big, fat hash joint
and listening to the Doors
with his dog friends. He says to me;
Hey man, You’re from Los Angeles.
Do you know Jim Morrison?
Morrison’s from Los Angeles

He’s from New Mexico..
don’t you go to the movies ?...
…besides, he’s dead. Isn’t he?

The next several days,
were repeats of the first
with smaller waves
and a few other variations.
Ze came by every morning before dawn
( I was the only person
he could find to get up this early
on frigid mornings like these.
Like myself, he was an extremist,
but in a more destructive way.

BAM ! BAM! BAM !
Ze pounded on the window
at six am for our morning surf.
But it wasn’t six, it was eleven.
And it wasn’t Ze, it was Antunes.

How are the waves ? I asked.

HUGE, he says somberly,
Come on…I need to show you something.

We drove to Cabo St. Vincente.
Where there was a police car parked,
and nearby a cop and
several fisherman looking
over the cliff at what was left of
Ze’s dark blue, sixteen-valve
Volkswagen GTI
laying face down on the rocks.

The swell
had risen enormously overnight
and was now nearly six meters.
With the rising tide,
the mountains of water
soon began smashing directly
into the cliff itself,
completely submerging the car
and sending plumes of spray
almost to the top of the cliff.
Absolutely nothing could be done
until low tide when the wreckage
could be safely inspected.

The cop and the fishermen all split
returning back to their daily tasks.

THAT STUPID FUCKER !!!!,
I screamed to Joao,
ALWAYS DRIVING LIKE AN IDIOT
AND SHOWING OFF !!!!

You think this was an accident ?
he asked incrediously.

What do you mean ??

Look at all these tire tracks…
most of the old ones
are from Ze
when he driving stupid,
doing those
hundred-and-eighty degree slides
up to the edge of the cliff
he liked to do.
But look at these freshest tracks,
They go STRAIGHT of the cliff…

..SUICIDE ??? I said,
I don’t know about all that…
I think it was more
of a case that he drove
exactly the way he surfed.
Never thought things through.
Whether or not
he’d make it
from point A to B
or the consequences
if he didn’t.

Six hours later,
half of Vila of Bispo and Sagres
came back with the town cop
to see the wreckage
of the infamous Ze dos Caes,
but no car was to be seen.
The enormous swells
had washed the car
completely of the rocks
and back into
the abysmally deep water.
Here in this rural of an area,
no government official
was about to OKAY funding
for proper underwater equipment
to investigate
the suicide
of a delinquent
drug-addict.

After the funeral
we all stuck around
a few days
holding our own private service
at Z-Point….Ze’s domain.

Everybody who
considered Ze a friend
(and many people
who considered him a menace)
attended.
We smoked hash-joints
until sunset,
And watch Z-Point at its best,
as endless, unridden waves
peeled off the rocks
and seventy-five yards to the beach.
I’d known Ze
only a very short time,
but had felt in some way
he’d been like
a long lost brother of mine.

I wondered where Ze’s dogs
were at a time like this.





PALM TREE REEF
(portugal-winter ’97-’98)

First time in ten years
that I've lived within
walking distance of the beach.
And not just any beach, CARCAVELOS.

In the summer,
a beautiful, but crowded destination
for working-class Portuguese beachgoers.
The sand is clean and the
surface of the water lake-like.
But in the winter,
the wide belt of golden sand
almost entirely disappears
and is replaced by sea and river trash;
(Oil barrels, logs, hypodermic needles,
plastic tampon applicators,
dead fish and birds,
and the occasional dead dog or dead cow)
that get washed up
with an almost endless
succession of storms.
But more importantly
aside from the unwanted
addition of trash,
these storms
also bring with them
powerful well-shaped waves.
Carcavelos is one
of the best beachbreaks
in Europe.

No, it's not paradise,
but it used to be alot worse
when I first arrived here five years ago.
At that time,
it was polluted not only with junk,
but also raw sewage.
The authorities
have since rerouted
the sewage
(to ease strains on the tourism trade)
to a less accessible part of the coast
so now it's mostly the trash,
junk and dead animals
you've got to deal with.
Like I said, it's not Eden by the Sea,
but it sure as fuck beats
not surfing at all.

To maintain
my own personal equilibrium,
I need both
stimulating urban culture
and close access to rideable surf.
And THIS is as good
as a combination
as I'm likely going to find
anywhere in the world.

I'm a twenty-five minute train away
from the center of Lisbon.
I'm a fifteen-minute train ride from
the record company
(Valentim de Carvalho in Paco de Arcos).
And best of all,
a ten-minute walk
from Carcavelos.
I've even got an ocean view.
I can't actually see the waves
breaking from my window,
there is a small pine forest
(eagerly awaiting to become
apartment complexes)
blocking my vision,
but I can see the swell lines
on the bigger days.

Ritualistically,
I get up around dawn,
spark up some coffee and exit
(with blue ceramic mug in hand).
Elevator from the fifth floor
to the ground level,
cross the corner of the parking lot,
through a tiny park,
across a small road,
through the fields
between the Sao Goncalo Estate
and the N.A.T.O. building,
(this time of year the fields
are covered with a zillion
yellow sour flowers)
and across the coast highway
to see if Atlantida is in a good mood or not.
In Portuguese,
the word OCEAN is masculine,
but I know better than that,
She is PURE female,
a temperamental sugar-bitch.
I love her. I hate her.
She loves and hates me too.
She never lets me get too satisfied.
So I've got choice but to return daily.

Usually a thirty-second check
is all I need
to know if I'm going to ride
or not.
If it's on
I'll walk home,
suit up, wax up
and walk back to the beach.
If it’s no good,
I'll stay in and continue
to pretend being an artist
(like I've been pretending
for a long, long while now):
paint, sculpt, scribe...whatever.

Yesterday was too small to surf
and today was windy and rainy,
so I skipped the morning check altogether
and got to work on some new songs.

But at my big window,
(with pen in one hand
and microphone in the other),
a movement on the distant horizon
caught my attention:
A five-meter peak rolling off
some forgotten sandbank about
a couple of kilometers
out to sea above the tree tops. SHIT!

I get down there to take a look.
It's HUGE, out of control.
Windy and beginning to rain again.
Out of the question.

I stand there a good thirty minutes,
just feeling the ocean's anger,
then walk back on the muddy red trail
through the sour-flower covered fields
back home to the EMBRYO,
my laboratory of illusion.

I have a good day with the pen and mic
and hours disappear,
(a kind of cerebral holiday).
And about five in the afternoon,
I finally complete a rough draft
of a new idea.

For the first time since noon,
I take a good long look
out the window.
The rain had stopped.
The wind had stopped.
The sun shone through
a crack in the black storm clouds
and I had the urge, desire, whatever
to say goodbye, good afternoon, good night
to that bitch, that babe,
my lover, my sister, my mother
my friend, my enemy
my life, my death,
my gain, my loss,
my focus, my distraction,
my sport, my art,
The Ocean.

Back through the mud
with headphones on my dome
(lately, I'm more addicted
to sound than ever before.
If I'm not creating it,
I'm listening to it...CONSTANTLY).

I arrive at my usual check-out spot,
just over the small hill
looking across Marginal .
It's still huge,
but the texture of the surface
is now mirror-like glass.
The swell has somehow organized itself
during the last several hours
and perfect double AND
EVEN TRIPLE overhead rights
are dumping (absolutely SLAMMING!)
on what I call "Palm Tree Reef"
then reeling off into
a deep water channel.

Actually, Palm Tree Reef
is not a reef at all,
but a very sturdy sandbar
that never seems to relocate.
And there are no palm trees
on the beach either,
the palm trees are paintings.
The flat cement seawall protecting
the Marginal Highway (from swells like these)
is covered with
giant block-letter graffiti murals,
mostly from the same crew of artists
and all similar in style and color.
From the water looking back to land,
all the murals bleed together into an enormous
strip of intricately patterned wallpaper
stretching from one end
of the 2km long beach to the other.
And is only interrupted by two,
three-meter high brush-painted palm trees
about three quarters of the way
south of the beach’s center.
Easily visible from three-hundred meters
out in the ocean.
And Palm Tree Reef,
is located directly in front of them.

On days with excessive current,
it's useful to use the palms as a line-up marker
to make sure you'll be over the sandbar
and in position for the sets when they arrive.

Running back to the Embryo,
I slip in an oily-slick mud puddle
and land on my ass,
(drowning my two-week old Discman).
But seventeen-minutes later,
wet-suited,
with a freshly waxed 7'2"under my arm,
I'm back at the water's edge.
I'm anxious and ready to go,
but also weak and tired
from forgetting to eat all day
and downing cup after cup of black coffee.
But fuck it,
I'M OUT THERE.

The first wall of whitewater
rolls over me blasting about twenty liters
of icy Atlantic through my wetsuit
and pushing me back almost all the way
to the beach.

I make a little progress,
then another descends upon me.
Then again and again.
For every five meters of progress,
three meters were automatically deducted
with every coming wave..
ONE wave, TWO waves, THREE waves,
FOUR, FIVE waves,
coming in at about fifteen-second intervals.
But instead of coming in sets like most days,
(with lulls in between),
today they were marching in
one after another.
FIFTEEN.SIXTEEN.SEVENTEEN.
I began calculating the time
using the wave intervals.
EIGHTEEN. NINETEEN. TWENTY waves
(about five minutes, I thought).
Some waves were significantly bigger
than others and dragged me even father back.
And even though my arms
were beginning to feel like pudding,
I persisted.

THIRTY-ONE. THIRTY-TWO.
THIRTY-THREE. THIRTY-FOUR.
Number THIRTY-FIVE was lighter
than those preceding it
and I made double time.

THIRTY-SIX, FORTY-ONE, FORTY-SEVEN.

SIXTY-THREE was a nasty mother
that ripped the board out of my hands
and pushed me three meters
below the surface.
SEVENTY-NINE.
NINETY-FOUR.
ONE-HUNDRED!
One-hundred waves,
about twenty-five minutes I calculated.
My arms completely Jello
at this point,
but not about to quit.
ONE-HUNDRED TEN.

NOW GOING THROUGH THE IMPACT ZONE,
seemed like there was
more time between waves,
but when they landed they EXPLODED.
I lost my board several more times.
Exhausted as I was,
I became concerned for my own safety,
(glad I'd used the heavy-duty leash).

ONE-HUNDRED SEVENTEEN.
I ascended and descended the monster
without taking any water on the head.

Free at last
(sitting two-hundred meters off the beach).
The sun had already gone down
and most of the cars on Marginal
had already begun using their headlights.
I can barely make out the palms on the seawall,
but I can see that I'm about fifty meters
off my mark to the south,
so I start paddling up to the reef.

While I'm still in the safety of deeper water,
a bigger than usual group of waves appears,
stands up to attention,
then on after another
(like missles dropping out of a plane)
the payloads DETONATED onto the sandbar,
transforming millions of liters of water
into contorting black dinosaurs.
Then silence........
There was a long enough lull
to allow me to get situated just right.

But minutes later,
the black walls appeared again,
(the first one beginning
to break much farther out
than I'd predicted).
I scratched for the horizon
barely making it over
and saw the second wave,
slightly smaller,
but still
easily five-meters on the face.

She came right to me.
What could I do?
I RODE.
It was TOO easy.
The drop effortless.
And the water so smooth
my board cut the surface
like a surgeon's scalpel.
There was no tube on this one
but the wall was near-vertical
for the next 70 meters
eventually backing off in the channel,
where it reformed
into a long left across the inside.
This inside section alone
would've been a memorable
wave for me on any other given day.
I didn't offer much of a challenge
to my liquid sister,
just cruised,
letting her to do most of the work.
She took me all the way in.
I stepped off my board directly onto the sand
between an old tire and a dead seagull.

I walked up the seawall stairs
and up into the parking lot.
There were several people
in and outside of their cars
mostly upper middle-classers (betinos).

A couple of them nodded to me,
some smiled and others stared.
I nodded, smiled and stared back accordingly.
Had I met them before?
Were they in awe of my stupidity
(to be only the person
dumb enough to be in the water
on a night like tonight)?.
Had they been watching me
get the shit kicked out of me
by a hundred and seventeen waves
before being rewarded the payback?
Had they been watching too much TV
and seen one of my videos?
I'll never know.

But what I do know,
is that this afternoon was a gift
and mine alone,
a reminder to stick it out.
It's sometimes worth it to take
a hundred and seventeen failures on the head
for a few precious seconds of happiness
and accomplishment.

I crossed Marginal at the street light,
then back through the fields,
across the small road,
and tiny park.
and across
The complex's parking lot.
I tracked mud
through the building's entry way
to the elevator.
But the elevator was broken,
so I tracked mud all the way up
five-flights of stairs too.
(leaving at all of my beloved neighbors’
doorsteps a subtle reminder,
that I was among the living,
a survivor).

Scalding hot shower,
(even washed the mop that I call hair).
I Dressed.
Then split back out the door
to the station
and trained to town.

She met me at the station in Lisbon.
We ate at a restaurant in Cais do Sodre
amongst the druggies and whores.
We'd planned on going to a party
up at Soul Factory after dinner,
but by the time we'd eaten dessert
and had coffees
at Espaco Agora Student Center,
It was already two a.m.
Time passed quickly with her.

"Let's go", she said,
assuming I'd be sleeping over at her place
(I usually did on Sundays,
Monday being her only day off work).

"Can't....I gotta go".

I can see from her face
that she immediately
assumes the worst (another girl).

"I'm gonna surf early", I say,
"It's going to be EPIC".

She understands,
she SAYS, with a forced smile on her face
and walks me back to the station
before taking a cab to her crib.

When I get home,
I make the necessary preparations,
(get all of my shit together
for the dawn patrol):
wetsuit ready,
board waxed,
leash attached,
earplugs and dry towel on standby.


At seven a.m.
no need to check it,
(skip coffee too).
I'm out of the house trotting through the mud.
The wind is light offshore,
the sun is glimmering,
the tide (I know from looking at the chart)
is medium-low coming to high around ten a.m.
Gonna be classic.
My heart is pounding.
Fuck, I hope it didn't get any bigger.

But as I reach the hill I don't see any waves.
Great, (I think naively), there are lulls.
At least it'll be easier to paddle out today.
I wait for the green light
to cross Marginal
and into the parking lot.
I stand there for a few minutes
to survey the best peaks,
but none arrive
and No One is in the water.
But this time,
not to avoid danger,
but because it's dead calm.
LAKE FLAT.

"At least it's a beautiful day"
I say out loud
trying to reassure myself.

THE *%$#%$ ing Bitch !! !




















Morocco is:


Morocco is:
The land of endless
right point breaks

Morocco is:
Blue skies, sunshine,
emerald green water,
cactus, palms, rocks, dust,
sand and wild flowers,
golden dawns and
psychedelic sunsets.

Morocco is:
Mint tea with two cubes
of raw sugar
and fresh bread,
bananas, figs and dates.

Morocco is:
Roadside fairs selling
every—thing from fly-covered
lamb carcasses
to Djalabas (the local attire)
and underwear.

Morocco is:
Vast Farmland being tilled
by camel-drawn plows.

Morocco is:
Hearing the ceremonial
Muslim prayers
five times a day
from a loud speaker
of the village mosque.

Morocco is:
Getting sunburned during the day
and getting the chills at night.

Morocco is:
Anxiously awaiting your first plate
of couscous in three years
and having the rest of
your traveling companions
craving burgers
at the new McDonalds’ in Agadir.

Morocco is:
A land without alcohol.

Morocco is:
Bathrooms without toilets.

Morocco is:
Goats that climb trees
and goats that eat garbage
who the get eaten by the people
who feed them the garbage.

Morocco is:
Being religiously careful
to avoid all tap water
and any questionable food;
getting sick anyway,
almost dying and missing
the best waves of the trip.

Morocco is:
Being on the beach of Tagazout
at night while the fishermen
are bringing in a huge haul
of squid
and seeing thousands
of shimmering eyes
still glowing phosphorescently
with life.

Morocco is:
Thinking your clever
for negotiating
the price of a two-pound,
raw turquoise necklace
from eighty dollars down
to fifty dollars
plus three used T-shirts
just to discover your friend
has just bought
an identical necklace
for only two T-shirts and no money.

Morocco is:
Where old shoes,
T-shirts and towels
are worth more than
you could’ve ever imagined.

Morocco is:
Getting hassled by the cops
so frequently you learn
just the right lies
to tell them to avoid problems.

Morocco is:
Getting rocks thrown at you
by angry Safi locals.

Morocco is:
Arriving at a small village,
on the way to the mountains,
and having forty
eager school children
run up to your van –
all with outstretched hands
saying, One Dirim?.
Instead of money,
you hand a couple
of T-shirts into the crowd
almost causing riot,
as they fight over property rights.

Morocco is:
The land of beautiful women
you will never get
a chance to speak to.

Morocco Is:
The native melancholy expression.

Morocco is:
Making friends with the villagers
and getting invited
to a barbeque cave party.

Morocco is: Waiting two hours to use the village’s only phone.

Morocco is:
The land of irregular angles
and glassless windows.

Morocco is:
The inner city labyrinths of Marrakesh.

Morocco is:
Out of the way rock shops
selling giant prehistoric
sea snail fossils
as big around as truck tires.

Morocco is:
Going inland on a small day
and discovering an oasis valley.

Morocco is:
Being on a snow-capped
Atlas peak and looking
down across the desert
all the way to the Atlantic.
Looking down to our feet
in the snow and seeing
thousands of bring red lady bugs
pepper-spotting the area,
freshly brought in
with the dry smelling Sahara winds.

Morocco is:
the land of
endless right point breaks.



ADVENTURES IN ADVERTISING

Part 1: Accidental Purists
Day 1:

It’s bizarre how time
can compress or expand,
depending on circumstances.
A mere micro-second
in the barrel can feel like a minutes.
Waiting for a delayed plane
can feel like weeks.
And for an unlikelycrew
of 29 individuals (ages 15-50),
traveling to mainland Mexico
to shoot the 2003 OP ad campaign,
a week was seemingly transformed
into several months.

For the first couple days,
it was just the seven of us,
a skeleton crew of photographers,
cameramen, art director,
and marketing folk
with the intention
of scouting locations,
and hopefully, surf.
But we’d missed the swell.
Wrong angle...
Wrong tides...
Wrong wind… Wrong coast...

Left as dismal substitutes
were 18-inch
marshmallow crumblers,
staggering drunkenly
across an exacto blade,
lava shelf completely
encrusted with thousands
of baby sea urchins.
And the water was too damn hot,
offering 0% refreshment
from the tropical madness.
Anyone over 95-pounds
was shit out of luck wave-wise,
but the chocolate-skinned
village groms
utilized the impotent dribblers
as a skate park,
each of them with repertoires,
including airs and reverses
(style hopefully will come in time).
One thing was for sure,
this was their break.
Age, ability, and size
were not taken into consideration,
of whom, they rode in front
and behind of.
They snaked all of us
and each other,
over and over again.
No pecking order
of any kind existed,
but up on the beach it
was all bro-shakes and smiles.

We had arrived
just six hours earlier.
An hour and a half, of which,
had been spent trying
to clear100 clothing samples
through customs
(finally achieved with cash bribes,
sweet talking and a couple of pairs
of corduroy walk shorts).

Another two hours
had been burned
digging our rented van
out of bottomless pothole.
And the remaining time
we’d been tap-dancing over urchins.
The trip already seemed doomed.
But at dusk, walking
up the hill to
our luxurious borrowed palace,
the methodical blink
of fireflies
began flickering like
a glimmer of hope
through thick vegetation
on both sides of the path.

I love those little flappers,
someone said,

Yeah,e too. We used to crush‘em
and rub the glow powder all over our faces.......

Yeah...I remember the time..........

Day 2:

More location scouting:
a deep jungle trail boogie,
climaxing with
a wade through a putrid,
mosquito-larvae infested mud pond.
The rewards?
A clean white sand beach
and 2-4 foot glassy but gutless rollers.
Enough scouting -- we surfed.

Once again,
local kids were
on everything in sight.
I wondered if they even realized
that by taking turns
they’d have even more fun.
I was stoked to see,
the campaign’s lead shooter, Colin Finlay,
(who I’d known only by photographic rep
and had no idea was even a surfer),
catch one of the better waves
and milk it to the sand.

New arrivals began trickling in
later that afternoon.
Our final group equivalent
the size of an independent
feature film crew:
7 pro surfers
(an injured Tim Curran among them),
2 swimsuit models
(one of whom, Ana Paula Limez,
wanted to surf just as much
as the contract riders),
2 makeup artists,
2 clothing stylists,
1 designer,
3 photographers,
2 cameramen,
1 art director,
1 V.P. of marketing,
2 marketing coordinators,
2 cooks and our host family,
the Taylors.

In the morning,
our two Californian chefs
drove an hour
out of their way to
the Sam’s Club in Vallarta
to buy 60 pounds of frozen fish.
FROZEN FISH???
Here we were,
located at the goddamn
fisherman’s Bay of Plenty,
and the mofos are driving
to buy fish imported from Chile.

The next few days
could technically
be considered work,
but with cool people
in a beautiful setting,
the atmosphere was not exactly stressful:
shooting film, taking photos,
getting sun burnt,
avoiding giant flying ants,
sweeping scorpions out of our rooms,
scooping beatles
the size of potatoes
out of the pool,
drinking Pacificos
and attempting to find waves.

You tend to talk a lot
on a trip like this,
plenty of down-time,
transport time
and time to hear
people’s own versions
of their own life stories,
(not just what you
have learned through
the grapeweed
or read in surf magazines).
Among us were:
celebrated pros,
big wave hell raisers,
glowing hot upstarts,
underground film makers,
an award winning photojournalist,
and two voluptuous sex symbols.
But considering the talent roster,
egos were at an all time low.
Barriers were broken.
Groms and veterans
had the same rank and file
(and equal opportunity
to ride shotgun
on wave checks).

Lately it seemed,
I ‘d been surrounded day to day
with people who just “talk stuff”,
their whole lives devoted
to the pursuit of material subsidies.
That shit gets old after a while,
downright boring.
But people here
were having real conversions
about real things;
waves, travel, music
and relationships.
(What else is there?).
This was group therapy.
The Breakfast Club,
estilo Juevos Rancheros.

Five days (or was it months)
into this sojourn,
a distant tropical depression
(that we’d barely
been paying attention
to by weather reports)
was now a Category 3 hurricane
a couple of hundred miles
off somewhere.
Enough to send
our pink-bellied cooks
scrambling to the airport
to get the hell out of Dodge.

With empty stomachs,
the rest of us took it all in stride.
But by the next morning,
the system was
now being reported
as a Category 5
and predicted to hit land
in the exact vicinity of
our low-lying adopted village,
Sayulita.

Although not yet
an official evacuation,
it was strongly advised
that we relocate an hour south
to Puerto Vallarta
into the protection
of Bahia de Banderas.
Facing northwest
and protected by high headlands
to the south,
hurricanes had never
entertered the sheltered bay.

Departure was set for eight pm.
With a little light left,
a few of us
snuck down the hill
for a few softies
in front of the village
(the water still too warm, s
till nicking our feet
on the rocks and urchins, a
nd the lineup still infested
with neighborhood kids
demolishing every ripple in sight).
The hurricane warning
had to be a hoax,
the swell had actually decreased.

Sean Taylor’s birthday tonight:
we ate soggy grilled lobsters
and cake and sang
happy birthday
before stockpiling
into four vans.

Most of us had arrived
on separate planes
in phases as strangers,
but we were leaving
as a single tribe
of brothers and sisters.
The southward journey
was a smooth one,
moonlit tropical perfection.
The kind of night made for driving,
we could have kept
going all the way to Guadalajara......
and we should have.

Most of the hotels
were completely booked,
but we eventually ended up
in the Sheraton’s
rock-star marble lobby,
cramming into elevators
en route to our assigned rooms.
Some people crashed early,
but true insomniacs
migrated to the halls.
It was, after all,
Sean’s 18th birthday (
and Holly Beck’s 22nd
was just a couple of days away).
AND we had escaped the storm!
This justified celebration.

Taxis to old town Vallarta,
like a mass of tourists
arriving by cruise boat,
we completely overran
one of the nearly empty
ocean front bars,
(the staff ecstatic at our arrival).

On the ride down,
I’d overheard Sean
ask volumptous model Sarah Stage
what she was giving him
for his birthday.
What do you want?, she asked.

A lap dance, he said.

“Ok”, she responds. “
I’ll buy you one
as soon as we get to town.”

But in the end,
Sarah had her way.
It was Sean
who ended up
giving her the dance
(women rule the universe).

The metallic sounding techno
didn’t vibe well with our crew,
and some people
segregated straight off
to the pool table,
but Jamo Pibram went upstairs
and threatened the DJ,
ensuring bass-heavy,
bumping hip hop joints
for the remainder of the evening.

Two For One drink specials
were rampant,
meaning they just diluted them
twice as much
(but all of us at least grooving
on a psychological buzz).

Pretty OP marketing coordinator,
Nikki Larsen had to fight off
several locals that
were hovering about
trying to stick to her like glue....
(she’d received two separate
marriage proposals
by the end of the evening).

And people
you wouldn’t have expected
to even dance at all,
were throwing down moves
that would’ve made Travolta
sweat with envy.
Filmmakers Mark Jeremias
and Jason Baffa were solid standouts,
but wild man,
Bron Heussenstamm dominated.

Four hours later,
emerging outside into light rain,
I overheard the doorman saying
the hurricane was already
300 kilometers north of us.
We’d survived.


Part 2: The Greatest Show On Earth

We were all up early
considering the near all-nighter
we’d just pulled.
It was still raining,
not a particularly impressive rain,
but now there was wind.
And instead of being lake flat
out in front the hotel,
there was now two-foot shore pound.

It’s starting, prophesized
the shoot’s art director Eric Crane
over orange juice in the lobby bar.
We ignorantly watched
in amusement
as the swell size
and wind velocity
both quadrupled
in about an hour.
On the way back upstairs,
we bumped into North Carolinian
power-styler, Matt Beauchump,

the only person among us
who had ever even been
near a hurricane.......

See those waves, he said,
in about three hours
they’ll be breaking
through the lobby.

Like disbelieving peasants
listening to Noah’s promise
of the great flood,
we disregarded
the information
as pure fantasy.

But minutes later,
the storm was already
kicking the shit
out of the tile rooftops
and palm trees.
And suddenly
the whole thing just snapped!
The waves, wind
and rain seem
to hyper-accelerate
in a single second.
Downpour charged the hotel
in grey opaque blankets
of solid water.
The initial gust of wind
blew out a couple
of 4x6 foot hallway windows.
And like giant liquid teeth
trying to swallow the entire coast,
monster Teahupoo-esque
mud grinders
greedily devoured
the sandy beach away
in a matter of minutes
and were now gnawing
on the cement walkway
leading to the back entrance
of the Lobby.

Surges of muddy white water
rushed up the lawn,
across the pool
and right up
against the building.
This monumental rise
in tide level soon brought
the waves in even closer.
Incredulously we watched
the hotel’s beachfront restaurant
get completely demolished
by a single, three-story wave,
(its fifty foot high palapa
popped like an enormous
palm leaf pimple).

Eight foot walls of whitewash
were now going
right through the hotel’s lobby,
stripping bricks off the walls
and plaster off the ceiling.
And pushing EVERYTHING,
including: sofas, computers,
lawn chairs, refrigerators,
pots and pans, palm trees,
sand, mud, rocks
and garbage
completely through the building
and out the front doors
into the muddy swamp
that used to be the parking lot
and tennis courts.

At this point,
security came through
the corridors instructing
everyone to go up to the 7th floor.
Phone, electricity and water
were long gone.
And we’d also just been informed
there was a gas leak.
The elevators being disabled,
we used the service stairwell.
With horrific sounds
of the flooding taking place
only a couple of floors below,
the walk up the pitch dark stairwell
resembled a scene from
The Poseidon Adventure.

On the 7th level,
we passed an open room
where most of the hotel’s staff
were sitting on the floor
holding hands in a circle
and praying.
This image,
more than anything else,
began to plant seeds
of real fear within our group.

We all packed
into a single room
where trip supervisor,
Michael Marckx, did a head count
and came up a couple people short
(only hours later did we learn
of our friends whereabouts).

Two natural gas containers,
both the size of station wagons,
got ripped off of the roof off
the hotel’s garage (
where they’d been bolted down)
and flew away like balloons.
One punctured on landing,
the pressurized vapor output
spinning it down the street like a giant top.

Because of the hotel’s
diagonal angle to the beach,
it was possible
to watch the storm
from the hallways’, retracted,
windowless balconies.
With the wind rushing sideways
past us at 130 mph,
we still remained in relative safety.
But down below, some of
the outer lower level walls
of the Sheraton’s
pyramid-shaped structure
began crumbling
like graham crackers in wet milk.
No chance of leaving at this point.
And nowhere to leave to.
Debris flying through the air.
The surrounding area totally submerged.
No swimmer on earth
could have survived the water that day.

Although there was no screaming
or hysterical outbursts
among our crew,
we all knew there was
a significant possibility
that the entire hotel could go down.
Built on sand
with low grade cement and bricks,
each gargantuan lip
landing out on the lawn,
set shudders up the building’s spine.

Peoples’ personalities
began to shift under crisis. S
some of the maids and attendants
began freaking out and crying,
others began looting supply cabinets
and guest rooms.
Even the Wonder Grom,
(15 year old, straight-A student,
wave-shredder), Erica Hoessini,
hungry and thinking
it was all over with,
karate kicked (and shattered open)
a glass mini-bar door to retrieve
what she thought was sure
to be her young life’s last Snickers Bar.

Hypnotized by the entire spectacle,
most of us couldn’t
stop staring at the ocean.
This was not the ocean
we had grown to love,
this was an ocean possessed.
When the bigger sets crashed,
warm water spray
from the colossal white explosions
splashed our faces
way up on our seventh floor balcony.

If the high tide
and storm surge continued
to rise and the hotel itself
took the brunt force of even
a single 20 foot set wave,
it would've loosened the building
from the sand it rested
and could have set
the Vallarta Sheraton
teeter-tottering down
into a pile of mud, bricks,
and cheap cement.

But it didn’t !
The extreme tide
began to drop,
slowing
the ceaseless bombardment.
The swell diminished
and the rain and wind lessened.

The once immaculate
poolside flower gardens
began to reappear
as broken trees
and twisted metal,
eventually revealing
the swimming pool
(completely filled to the coping
with sand, stones,
mud and lawn chairs).

The whole entire episode
had lasted no longer
than four hours start to finish,
from 9am orange juice
until the storm
had completely passed us
(heading north
to obliterate the city of San Blas).

Our missing friends
reappeared unscathed.
The sun came out
and clean-up crews
with bulldozers arrived
to begin making
the roads passable again.
And as far as we heard,
there were (unbelievably)
very few human casualties
in the entire area.

Our vans were still half-submerged
in the parking lot,
(all eventually started).
Walking several blocks inland,
we saw familiestrekking
through the mud
with all of their possessions
and animals in tow.
We saw jet skis and boats laying
in the middle of the streets
alongside of logs and rubbish.

We passed a weddingdress shop
that had been flooded
with muddy runoff
and had now completely drained.
The 11 dresses being displayed
on vintage mannequins
were each equally dyed to the hip
with red mud.
We bought snacks
in an air conditioned supermarket
that had survived without a incident
(only 1/2 mile from where we had been).
WE personally had seen
the worst of it all.
Actuall,y as far
as Vallarta was concerned
the destruction was very localized.

Because of the Sheraton’s
severe damage,
we were again forced to relocate
like a band of caravanning gypsies.
But by sunset,
we were all swimming
in a beautiful lapis-tiled pool
and ordering pina-coladas
and smoothies from the sunken bar.

Everything decadently perfect
except for the smell of dead fish.
The storm,
although not visibly damaging
this resort,
had killed most of the fish
in the golf course ponds
and the stench
was beginning to waft its way
over to us,
(the only indication here
that there had been a storm at all).

Had it really even happened?
This morning seemed like a week ago.
Last night seemed like last year.
The longest 24 hours
any of us could remember.


The next day shooting resumed as scheduled.











THE FORGOTTEN FOUR


There are no waves there…
there are no beaches.

Not exactly encouraging,
but in this case considered a lead.
My L.A. neighbor Cristina Casmiro,
telling me this now,
had said exactly the same thing
about her native island Pinheiro
three years ago.
I’d ignored her warning,
gone looking for surf anyway
and ended up SCORING.

This time the inquiry
was not about Pinheiro,
(the main island in the chain of five),
but of the much smaller
“forgotten four”
located a hundred miles to the south.

Two of the islands
were strangely absent
from one of the three world-class atlases
I’d purchased.
And although each
over five miles long,
none of the four
were even individually named,
appearing only as Ilhas Abandonadas.
Cristina was the only person
I’d ever met
who had even seen these islands.

As a teenager,
she’d been there a few times
on her Dad’s fishing boat
and had described them to me as:
Narrow, very mountainous,
with steep, near vertical cliffs
falling directly in the sea…
with NO waves.
But I wasn’t convinced the place
was a complete write-off.

Fourteen hours out of California
and three hours off
the European continent,
I landed on the mother island,
and was now heading
toward the docks
to meet Gustavo,
a forty-something year old fisherman
Cristina had put me in touch
with by internet.
Via-email,
he’d already agreed
to take me to The Forgotten Four
and I’d already agreed to the fee,
but first impressions were not solid.
The guy looked liked a junky…
and his boat even junkier;
an open 15-foot wooden skiff
with a small outboard motor attached.
No cushions. No lifejackets.
Hardly an ocean-worthy vessel.
But hell, the guy had lived this long, right ?

Gustavo wanted to leave at sunset,
but it was still only about 5pm,
Vamos jantar ? (let’s eat ?), he suggested.

We entered a small,
whitewashed restaurant
where he obviously had history
with the toothless girl
behind the counter.
And judging from the way
they goo-goo eyed each other,
that was probably
his basketball in her tummy.

He introduced me
to the girl me as,
Americano
(fucking bastard had already
forgotten my name).

She brought us a huge
ceramic pitcher of red wine
and a cheap three-gallon,
plastic fishing bucket
full of about a hundred rock-barnacle,
snail-type creatures.
Tiny sea-fleas jumped out of the bucket
and on to the table
as my honorable captain
showed me the proper way
to eat live “lapas”
……scrape them out of their shell
using another shell
and throw them down your throat
before they have a chance
to crawl away.
Two strangers playing a kind
of gastronomical version
of Russian Roulette,
competing who could eat the most.

It was pretty sick
to tell you the truth,
the endless supply of wine
making it only slightly more bearable.
But in Pinheiro…do as the Pinheirenses.

As we approached
the bottom of the bucket,
I looked around the small dining room.
Most of the other clients
were eating Lapas too,
except theirs were cooked
and served on blue and white plates
and covered in melted butter,
lime juice and salt.

Gustavo started giggling like a sissy,
with the girl right by his side,
about to have an asthma attack.
Some of the other eaters
were cracking up too.
It wasn’t the first time
they’d played this joke.

Of the four isles,
three had never
even been inhabited.
The fourth (the southernmost)
had supported a fishing village
of about three hundred
and fifty people until 1989
when an earthquake
and following mudslide
killed thirty residents
and buried most of the town.
Most of the survivors left.

Some went north to Pinheiro.
Most migrated to the Americas.
But a core crew of about twenty stayed,
shoveling mud for months,
Surviving on subsistence farming and fishing.

Clear calm night
with about a zillion stars.
For the first couple of hours
we stayed in the swell shadow
of the main island,
then crossed behind
the Abandonadas
where it was even calmer.
Sheet glass.
In the half-moon light
we could see their silhouettes,
all continuing segments
of the same submerged mountain chain,
each separated by
only a couple of hundred yards
mirroring off of the oceans surface.
One of those rare visuals that are
so beautifully real ,
they appear to be false
like a soundstage at a
Hollywood movie studio.

At dawn we chugged
into a small transparent inlet.
Two tiny boats were dry-docked
on the rocks.
Behind them,
a red dirt trail zigzagged
up the mountain,
disappearing into
almost fluorescent green growth.

After ten hours at sea,
Gustavo didn’t even get
out of the boat to rest
or eventake a leak.
The place is cursed
he’d said repititivley .
We’d agreed to meet here
at the cove seven days from today.


What was left of the village
was located on the opposite side
of the island,
a thirty-minute walk.
But thirty-minutes in Gustavo-time
was really two and a half hours
of steep traversing
just to reach the summit.

From the perch off the island,
it felt like standing on the hump
of a colossal sea monster.
Surveying from north to the south,
it was easy to see
both west and east sides
at the same time.

On the east, lake-like calmness.
But on the west…lines.
Not big, but consistent.
Traveling all the way
from the northernmost Atlantic
to be wasted along the base
of a thousand-foot cliff.
But about a third of the way
down the island
was a flat low-lying peninsula
extending out from the cliffs
for five-hundred yards,
(the result of thousands years
of seismic dismantling).

The wind was onshore
and the tide a little too high,
but rolling down opposites sides
of the flat were surfable right
and left point waves.

On the peninsula itself were
the carcasses of about fifty
black, lava-rock houses
that had laid abandoned since 1989.
And about ten other homes
painted in white.

The black ones had no roofs a
nd were all at least half- strangled
by the overgrowth.
But the white houses,
those closest to shore,
had red clay shingles
and were surrounded
by immaculate gardens.


Olaaa! cheered a baritone voice
scaring the shit out of me.
The smiling brown man
with ridiculously large ears
introduced himself as
Antonio, a resident farmer.
I identified myself as
Pappas, a traveling….student.
BEM-VINDO, he greeted
as if I’d been an expected guest,
Vamos almocar ! (let’s lunch!)
he proclaimed.

We arrived at Antonio’s
two-room home
where his wife Luisa
was preparing a communal meal
for all fifteen residents of Atalaia Island,
(the place had a name after all).
Potato soup mixed with red wine
and LIVE lapas !!!
Gustavo
and his prego-bellied accomplice’s joke
hadn’t gone to waste,
it had been training.

Luisa was complaining
that ants that had gotten
into the bread dough.
Are there ants on the mainland,
young man ?, she asked me.
Believe it or not, s
he’d never been to the mainland,
or even up to Pinheiro.

With my new friends
looking on in approval,
I casually downed about twenty
of the biggest lapas on the table
(bridging both the language barrier
and generation gap in a single sitting).

Hadn’t slept in days
and was about to drop.
Prepared to camp,
but they weren’t haven’t it,
insisting that I stay in the large stone shed
that had once housed the island’s padre.
______________________________________

In the nocturnal depths of delusion,
the lapas were breeding
in my stomach,
Trying to take over my body
from the inside out…
Whack !!!
The first shot rang.
Whack !!!
I was on my feet.
WhackK !!!
What the….???
WHACK !!!!!!!
Sounded like a Texas-style hail storm.
I inched the door open.
The storm was coming
in from the East.
WHACKK !!!!!
Whizzing by in a vacoom,
fist sized raindrops were
exploding like small water balloons.
In addition, the wind was carrying
small stones off the top of the cliff
and a quarter of a mile down to my roof top.
When it rains here, it rains rocks too.

But by daybreak
both wind and rain had stopped.
And by lunchtime,
the right was doing
a pretty decent impersonation
of overhead Swami’s…..
(with no other surfer or surfboard
around for a hundred miles).

It’s always freaky surfing
somewhere where no one surfs.
No one’s around to tell you
where to get in and out of the water,
which tides will kill you
or warn you of any antagonistic sea life.

I tried paddling out at the micro- cove
just south of the village
and was violently swept farther south
toward the cliffs.
From there the only way
too get out would’ve been
paddling down the entire length
of the island,
around the tip and back up
to the boat cove on the other side.
Six miles with current.
Fuck that.

I took the foam straight back to the rocks,
walked up a quarter of a mile
to the beginning of the left,
paddled through an assault of white water
and found myself being pulled
into good position for the right.
A few ceiling high waves
came through.
I snagged one thinking
it would be an easy down- the line run
and got slammed.
A LOT faster than it looked.
Makeable, but not
from the absolute outside.
Paddled down a-ways,
found my groove and started gettin’ busy.
A year’s worth of quality waves
in a single afternoon.

The next morning,
I rode the middle left
in front of the salt pond.
Softer-shouldered
but connecting all the way to the inside.
Unfortunately, the wind
kept shifting directions.
Offshore. Onshore. Side shore.
Offshore. Onshore. Side shore.
I’d be ready to get out of the water
and then it’d switch offshore again
or go glass.

I’d been ignorantly assuming
That the primary swell direction
this time of year was always from the North,
but this swell filling in definitely
had southern orgins.
And the following,
the right revealed it’s hidden personality.
Meaty and bowling hard.
The waves now launched you
down the point like a catapult.
Felt myself going faster than I had
in a long, long time
with little effort of my own.
For this reason, it was difficult
to stay deep enough
to get really barreled.
A couple of nice slots though,
got slaughtered on a few too.

Saturday: small
(the swell window
is really small here).
Up on Pinheiro,
these 24-hour swells were actually three-dayers and
probably twice the size.

New arrivals today
from the main island;
a family that had left after the
earthquake-now back
for their annual vacation along with their kids
(the daughter, an exotic twenty year old).

Because the shore
was too steep and jagged
for beach-going,
the spot to hang
was a fifty-foot strip
of black sand
on the village side of the salt pond.

One of the most euphoric days
in my life…eating fish
and gulping down wine
and firewater
with nineteen kindred souls
in the Garden of Eden.
I never return to places
I’ve experienced real magic.
And after only a couple of days
on Atalaia,
I already knew I’d never
be going back there.
You never know if it’s the place itself
that’s incredibly special,
or that small envelope in time
you spend there.
You walk around through life
with these amazing Technicolor memories
(it’s all we really have in the end)
and if you go back
and it’s not the same,
it’s destroys everything preceding.

The sun disappeared
and a big fire was lit.
Expecting someone to fetch a guitar,
I was amazed
when four large African jimbaes
appeared out of old Mr. Campos’ hut.
The men drummed.
And Luisa, Mrs. Campos,
the newcomer wife
and her babe daughter
hauntingly sang to all
who had been lost at sea.
Looking like voodoo goddesses
under a silver moon,
these were Ulysses’s sirens reincarnated.

Being in old dialect,
I didn’t understand
many of the words,
but it was enough
to get my spine tingling.




















MOMENTS OF INSANITY: PART 1
(Jan 3, 2006)

Woke up this early morning (Tuesday)
to check the surf as usual.
There were no waves.
It's summer in Rio de Janeiro,
not totally surprising.

But there was also no sun,
the sky dark with cloud cover
and only about seventy degrees outside
(a huge drop from
yesterday's blistering Ninety-Five).
I'd actually been waiting
for a day like this since moving
here from California
about four weeks ago.

I walked up the street
to Sendas supermarket
and bought three big
bottles of water,
went home,
put a package
of sesame-seed crackers
and some of ripe pears
into a couple of zip-lock bags,
tossed them into an old backpack,
got my surfboard
and walked the three blocks back to the beach.
I counted seventeen women along the way
(two were beautiful).

I began to paddle
from Lifeguard Tower 11 in Leblon
all the way out to the first of the Cagarras,
a cluster of uninhabited islands,
located several miles out in front of Rio.

One of the reasons,
this excursion had to happen
midweek was because
on summer weekends
several cruise boats a day
passed through this exact body of water
between the islands
and the beaches
of Ipanema and Leblon.

I doubted very seriously
in my ability to outrun one
or even get out of the way
of one if I had to.
Once in a rare while,
I'd see one pass by during the week too,
but those were odds I could live with.

I'd already predicted it
to be a long-ass haul
and had expected it to be
a lot farther than it looked,
but it ended up being
infinitely farther than even that.
Took two-and-half hours
of straight, open-ocean paddling
just to get out there.

Like I said, there wasn't much
swell activity today,
but the southern flowing current
was significant enough
that I kept having to readjust my aim
to avoid missing the islands altogether
and drifting out to sea
(The next dry land mass
being the Africa Continent,
thirty-eight hundred miles away).


At about the halfway point
I passed an area that was
literally a minefield
of grapefruit size
(and colored) jellyfish.
The water looked almost black,
reflecting off
the darkly overcast sky and
the orange invertebrates
seemed electrically illuminated.
As gingerly as I maneuvered
through them,
I still ended up brushing up
against three or four,
but for whatever reason I wasn't stung.

Sporadically,
yard-long barracudas
(being chased by who knows what?)
would rocket out of the water
and fly five or six feet
before noisily splashing down,
adding further to
the illusionary frontline ambient.
There was also an abundance
of freshwater plants
floating around that had been
flushed out to sea
from recent violent rains
providing even further tactical difficulties.


After making it through the war zone,
the sea current started
pulling much stronger
but was now going northward
in the opposite direction.
I had to change my general overview
several more times just to stay on course.
In the end,
I was really grateful
I had waited for a day
without much undulation
to attempt this voyage
for the first time.

Ten big, sinister-looking, black,
skin-headed vultures
started flying circles
about thirty-feet above me.
Was I really that out of shape
that I was already
looking like dinner to these bastards ?

I started paddling faster
and screaming at them in defiance
when my right hand
slammed into MEAT !!!
Big and heavy
it was either a dead dolphin..
or HUMAN
(too smooth-skinned for be a shark).
I was too freaked out
to stop and investigate,
I got the hell out of there!
And was thankful to discover
that the vultures
were definitely
more interested in it,
whatever it was,
than me.


Every several minutes,
I'd look back shoreward.
Where I'd see commercial airliners
appearing and disappearing behind
Bored Jesus Mountain
on their way to and from
Galeao Airport in Zone North.
And police helicopters
constantly transiting back and forth
from between the city center
and the general area
the Rocinha and Vidigal ghettos.

High-caliber,
leftover New Year's Eve fireworks
were periodically being detonated
from different parts of the city,
billowing plumes of contrasting white smoke silhouetted by charcoal gray
cloud cover,
their audibility
gradually fading away
into the distance along with the
visibility of city details.

Getting closer to my destination,
I began to realize that,
in terms of average height
and circumference,
the size of palm trees
on the opposite sides of the island
did not match up,
although they appeared
to be of the same species.

All these weeks
I had thought that
the closest island in the group
was mostly long and flat
with a single high peak on one side
covered by significant vegetation.

But what I'd actually been observing
was two different islands,
a long and flat one
being visually montaged (by distance)
behind the smaller, but taller more lush one.

The other five islands,
were separated by greater distances
and were obviously independent
of each other.
I realigned my aim
for the hundredth time that day
to guarantee arrival on
my now smaller target.

About two-hundred yards out
I passed through an area
of much clearer, colder water.
FIFTEEN degrees colder!
FULLSUIT COLD.
Summer in Brazil?....weird.

Finally,
with my head pounding out
a little melody
(trace brain damage from
my-first-New-Year's-Eve-
in-Rio-de-Janeiro-hangover
a full two days earlier)
and my arms burning
with new found soreness,
I arrived to my own private paradise.

I later learned
that all seven of these islands
had individual names,
but had actually been told
the exact opposite by one local resident
a few days earlier.
This island, MY ISLAND, was called PALMAS.

The longer and flatter one,
a half mile behind it
(that I'd mistaken as part of this one)
is ILHA COMPRIDA
or in Gringo language, Long Island.

Palmas is about a ¾-of-a-mile-around
seemingly solid granite oval dome
capped with lush tropical jungle,
hosting about a thousand Royal Palms.
How long it took for enough dirt to collect
on top of a smooth protruding surface
for even a single insignificant plant to take root
and kick off the whole soil making process
.who the hell knows?

I once read that
something like a trillion pounds
of dust a year
gets kicked up into the stratosphere
by windstorms in the Sahara
and eventually transmigrate
over the Atlantic and get peppered
down onto Amazonia
courtesy of daily rainfall.
We are at least two-thousand miles
south of those wind patterns
but maybe a couple of dozen ounces
managed to make their way
down here over the course
of say 65,000 years
and began compacting
on the top PALMAS
and its six immediate island neighbors;
COMPRIDA, ROTUNDA,
MATIAS, PRACA ONZE, CAGARRA
and FILHOTE DE CAGARRA.
Guess that's as good as explanation
as I have to dwell on
for the short -term.

The shore was really steep
And in my delirious state,
I had a difficult enough time
just getting myself out of the water.
But making things
even more pleasurable,
I nicked my knee on a pincushion
of submerged sea urchin spines.

After three or four attempts
I finally managed to crawl up over
the thousands of dormant dry barnacles
and stand up straight.
With my arms victoriously raised
high above my head
I let out a hideously loud
master-of-the-universe Tarzan yell
that was probably heard as far away as Copacabana.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Then silence.

I chugged
a liter-and-a-half bottle of water,
chomped down two pears
and swallowed some crackers,
but my famine still hadn't been extinguished.

I'd seen sea urchins
on the menus of several
sushi bars but had never indulged.
Why not now ? I thought,
they're abundant here.
I grabbed a purple,
baseball-sized urchin
from just under the surface
of the crystalline water
and SMASHED it down on the rocks.
There wasn't a whole lot of flesh in there,
but there was some eggy-looking orange stuff
that at least looked kind of edible.
I picked out the pieces
of broken shell and spine
and ate a small quantity
(swallowing it without really chewing).
IIIICCCCKKKKK !!!!!!!

Obviously my culinary skills
weren't up to Shinjuku standards.
Even with my high-tolerance for grossness,
this was the single nastiest substance
I'd ever tasted,
I barely avoided vomiting.
Next time I'll bring
wasabe and soy sauce.

I left the board and backpack
near the water
and began exploring.
It was extremely difficult to get around,
not only because of the incline
but because the rock face
itself was not that smooth.
Up close it was finitely sharp
and jagged
(and like an idiot,
I hadn't even thought about bringing shoes).


I tried to climb straight over
the highest area of the island
(about two-hundred feet at it's tallest),
but once I got past the granite slab
and the wall started leveling off on top
giving way to vegetation,
the jungle itself was guarded
by a twenty-foot deep barrier
of ground-crawling cactus shafts.
Impossible to attempt without
at least pair of army boots and a machete.

There were a couple
of random seagulls
hanging around chasing crabs
back into crevices on the rocks
and some prehistoric looking insects,
but the island's most prevalent,
visible animal life
were the black-headed
vampiresque vultures.
They were everywhere;
flying around,
walking on the rocks,
taking shits
and standing on limbs
of shrubs and trees.
Not even moving
when I'd get close to them
(no fear whatsoever).

A mini Komodo Dragon
came out of the cactus patch
and laid right in front of me
for about fifteen minutes,
not at all annoyed by my presence.
It's very possible that in his young life
he'd never even seen a human personally
and had yet to learn from his parents
that they are all enemies of the natural world.
Me, of course,
being no exception to the rule whatsoever.

Don't know what he was exactly,
some sturdy, exotic-looking,
triangle-headed,
black and yellow iguana
about three-feet long.
If I'd been stranded on Palmas for real,
he'd have been made into
several excellent protein-rich meals.
Being as naïve as he was,
he didn't look too difficult to hunt.
One rock on the head
would've probably been sufficient.




I descended the incline
and began crawl-climbing
the granite face
clockwise around the island
Maintaining my altitude
At only about forty feet
above the water.
I found six-to eight inch
horizontal step-grooves
inbetween sedimentary
layers of granite
randomly glittered with quartz.

On these little ledges, I kept my feet
as flat as possible while constantly
palming the stone wall with a hands
on either side of my body.
But some parts were nearly totally vertical.
I'm no free climber.
And the potentiality of falling thirty feet
And getting my head split open on a rock ledge
only to be gluttonously devoured by a bunch
of greedy, arrogant vultures
was probably not as amusing as it sounded.

I opted to come down to shore,
dive into the water
and swim around the cliffs
until I could climb up again..

On these brief immersions
I saw one sea turtle
and some beautiful,
fluorescent blue and yellow fish.
Wish I'd brought a mask,
a spear gun, a machete
shoes, waterproof camera
and MORE FOOD.
Next time…..(if there is one).

It took about an hour and a half
to negotiate my all the way around the island.
And although I tried to repetitively,
I never found a user-friendly enough spot
to penetrate the jungle zone.
Nature at its wildest.

There were all kinds
of chaotic insect sounds
rhythmically cocktailing
around in there
with melodic symphony accents
supplied by different species
of unseen song birds.
Everyone had their part
and no one missed a beat.
Beautiful. I was hypnotized.
Very tribal.

But occasionally,
a random gangster-vulture
would spoil it all by shrieking jealously,
(as if protesting his own
lack of songwriting ability)
They were always out of tune
and always off rhythm.
I hated them even more now,
and apparently it was mutual.

As I made my way
around the last corner
of the island,
they started reacting
more aggressively toward me.
Flying nearer to me
and squawking harassingly.
I'd overstayed my welcome.

They could have easily killed me
if they'd wanted to gang up on me,
but the vibe was more like,
Visiting hours are over kid,
now get the #%$@ out of here!

Back at camp
I had to throw rocks
at the six vultures
bickering with each other
over what was left
of my Japanese Blue Plate Special
(the urchin)
just to get near my stuff.

Although much smaller
than a condor
or some other
bigger buzzard species,
even this variety
with their five
and six-foot wingspans,
could've flown off
with my surfboard single-handedly
without much effort.

I ate the rest of my rations
and drank another bottle of water,
trying to hydrate as much as possible
pre-visioning the minute possibility
of being lost at sea.

My feet were now raw
and bleeding selectively
from micro-cuts caused by barnacles
and other surface irregularities.
And unfortunately at my exit point,
below the ring of razor-sharp barnacles
that had been located
just above the waters edge
all the way around the island
the descending tide had eventually exposed
a six-foot horizontal band of
black muscles and urchins
that I had to tiptoe over just to get back to
the water.......

I was in pain, not just my feet
But also my shoulders from the paddle,
and now I had to do it all over again.....
Thankfully the cool water
numbed away most of my suffering.
And I was on my way.

The view of Rio
from this far out
was absolutely spectacular.
The city is completely surrounded
by forest-covered mountains.
They say the Tijuca Forest is the largest
urban forest in the world
and believe it or not
it was one of the world's first
major environmental projects.
These mountains were bare in 1850
resulting from four-hundred years
of over-ambitious timber industry.
The claim is that this entire area
was replanted by only eighteen slaves
who together planted
eighty-thousand indigenous trees.

My view was south
from the Grumari reserve
all the way north to Niteroi,
forty miles at least.
There are other groups of islands
in both directions.
(I'd experienced only
one of the state of Rio's
four-hundred-and-something islands).


Predicting the same dual currents
I'd encountered
on the way over,
I steered toward the general
direction of the Corcovado Jesus Statue
(Bored Jesus)
I knew if I aimed there
that I'd first be dragged
about a half mile even farther north
and then 2nd fase of current
would eventually carry me about
a mile and a half in the opposite direction
depositing on the far south side
of the beach in Leblon,
(hopefully not far from my street,
Bartolomeu Mitre).

I took a long LONG time to get back
and making it worse
it started raining heavily
as I was going thru thejellyfish field...
COLOSSAL bolts of lighting
shot across the sky from behind me toward
Jesus on the mountain.

A boat full of fisherman,
rushing to get back to harbor in the storm,
took a short detour to motor past me
to see if I was alright.
I gave them a thumbs up
...that I was "ok"
And they were on their way.
Curiously, two other boats
passed me a half hour later
and hadn't even
bother to investigate...
(that's brotherly love for ya).

Eventually I could start seeing
individual people on the beach,
tourists no
doubt
Cariocas usually don't stay
on the beach
when it's raining.
The weather is
Near-perfect here
4-5 days a week..
(Why would they bother?)
And before long,
I could even hear
the cars and busses on "PCH".


The swell had increased
a little throughout the day,
which toward the end
started helping me
not hindering me,
giving me a gentle
tail-push toward shore.

When I got about
a hundred feet off the beach
a solitary two-foot glassy
left appeared behind me.
I caught it almost effortlessly
butI was so exhausted,
I barely had the energy
to stand up especially
with the extra weight
of a now water-filled backpack
burdening me.
But I managed to force myself
to my feet
and regally rode it to shore.

Like a Hawaiian king
I waved to my loyal subjects
lining the shore of Leblon
anticipating my arrival.
One thing had become
embarrassingly obvious to me
during the course of the day,
I am slowly, but most definitely
loosing my mind..
My fins hit bottom.

When I put my feet
on the warmish sand,
I could feel the new pulsating
pillow-blisters painfully
de-numbing and coming
back to life on of the
bottom of my feet.
I limped the three blocks
back to my apartment
counting eighty-two women
along the way,
thirty-seven of them beautiful
(but only the uglier ones smiled back at me).

It was still only early evening,
but I took a shower
and slept
for the next sixteen hours.

_____________________________

Four days later
A dead body washed up
On the beach at Leblon,
a shooting victim of drug wars
at the Vidigal favela located a mile away
Good chance it was him
that I hit on my paddle to the Palmas.