Another anecdote from In Search of Captain Zero that didn’t make the final draft of the book.

Words & Pictures
By Allan Weisbecker

Deep dusk now and as the beach fire and revelry in front of my campsite attracts the assorted wave-obsessed misfits, bohemian athletes, stoned idiots and former and current outlaws who have settled at or are passing through lower Baja, my 49th birthday party is starting to have the feel of a tribal gathering.

…a tribal gathering…

Sitting on La Casita Viajera’s driftwood stoop clutching a well-dented bottle of high-octane cactus juice, I observe the peculiar interplay among my guests as the proceedings bloom. To my right by Shiner’s doggy tent, J. Boy Crispin – flamboyantly tattooed artist whose roots go back to the late 1950s Malibu heyday of the surfing life – rents the deepening dusk with that booming, gravelly, tequila-laced laugh I’d first heard at the Hotel California bar in Todos the night before the big New Year’s swell swept in from the northwest and the wave riding around here turned outright serious. “Shady” Lane, an aging surf gypsy, is J. Boy’s cohort tonight. The two lean in for a conspiratorial aside, J. Boy cocking his head and prodding the fire with the ironwood walking stick he sheathed with the skin of a rattlesnake that bit him before he killed it, and which he refers to as Silent Bob.

Big Tony McCormick, former real estate developer, now keeper of the point break from up north at San Miguel, wanders over from the adjacent campsite with his soul mate, Barbara, a Swiss beauty he encountered while on a surf trip in Bali. Barbara has just returned from Zurich, where she performs open-heart surgery in order to help finance their wandering life Down South. Tony and Barb approach me on the stoop, grinning and bearing birthday gifts and a pitcher of margaritas and a bowl of peppery pasta.

…Tony and Barb…

Tony stink eyes whatsisname, who’s just stumbled in, the punked-out moron from the enclave of NorCals and Oregonians at the Punta Lobo end of the beach, and with whom Tony’s had constant problems in the water. Tony looks at me questioningly. I shrug, indicating I didn’t invite the guy. Hey, word spreads when festivities loom.

…Tony…

There’s Dan Duane subtly holding court by the tequila table, a mercifully unpretentious fellow for all his talent. Dan arrived just in time to catch the big New Year’s swell and we surfed double-overheaders together at a point called Pastora, just north of Punta Lobo. There were only a couple other guys out that day and we got to talking story between long, burly rights. Turned out Dan is a writer and had an article in The Surfer’s Journal a few issues back, an excerpted chapter from his recently published book. I vaguely recalled the piece (it was good) – something about his non-surfing young urban professional friends’ incomprehension at the considerable time he spends in the water – but was unfamiliar with the book.

…a point called Pastora…
Photo of the author by Margaret

Although he handled himself well in the borderline hair-raising conditions at Pastora that day (some fair percentage of the Punta Lobo crew found excuses not to go out at all), Dan has the urbane, thirtyish vibe of a member of that unwaterly yup-tribe himself, not an auspicious omen regarding his writing’s surf-perspicacity, at least from my on-the-run-from-Up-There perspective. But the publication of a book, any book, about surfing is a flag-raising phenomenon, so my curiosity, if not my hope, was immediately piqued. I bummed the copy Dan had given to Big Tony.

I wasn’t prepared for Caught Inside, A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast. Duane’s book caught me inside, as it were; maybe ten pages in I suddenly found myself crystal clear-headed and paying very close attention.

By God this guy can string some words.

There are a handful of surfers who, like me, find themselves unable to not write about this endeavor they love. Writers whose flashes of graceful insight have succeeded in revealing those truths we know but maybe don’t know we know about what we do in the water and why we do it; but their soulful wisdoms have been limited to severely specialized venues. Hence the insights remain arcana to the nonsurfer, the practical result rarely transcending a form of preaching to the choir.

…preaching to the choir…

The lack of a significant body of work – a real and accessible literature of surfing – is a bewildering circumstance, given the intrinsic and obvious lyricism of the endeavor. (I ask you: How much more public could our watery art form be?) One mainstream book that comes close is a piece of fiction by an enigma named Kem Nunn, who surfaced back in the ‘80s then disappeared from the realm of waterhead prose.* I’ve secreted a copy, stashed it in La Casita’s bowels, to reread as a reward to myself, or if I ever really need it down the road. Tapping the Source. A title to make you quiver for how it so perfectly evokes what we do out there.

*Many months later at the cantina in Pavones, Costa Rica, I would come across a copy of Nunn’s wonderfully chilling, mythopoetic The Dogs of Winter.

…what we do out there…

Having curled up with this other fine book, Caught Inside, by this guy I’d just surfed with, I read into the wee hours, then found myself slouched at La Casita’s settee table, all disheveled and droopy-eyed and peering around me at the utter squalor of my own in-progress oeuvre: runny, sea-stained notepads and raggedy paper scraps and matchbook covers scrawled with poorly-wrought descriptions, half-baked observations and transcribed bits of inane surf-jive scattered about; printed-out chapters splayed nonsequentially across the bench seat, not a single page unmauled by my own editorial violence (mostly Xs of various sizes, colors and degrees of obvious disgust); my tape recorder, wrapped in its disgorged and stretched and twisted innards, lying on the floor by the door where it somehow fetched up, whatever searing witticisms it once stored gone now (the literary world will survive the loss, I suspect); my sad old dinosaur of a laptop cantilevered precariously over the table edge as if I were hoping it’d fall and break (its flat, permanently depleted battery possibly a minor metaphor of sorts). And all those cheap useless Bics, brimming with blue and black ink that would not flow outward onto paper, scattered around like bad news I-Ching sticks where I one-by-one flung them in frustration. And my daily journal, that ode to drivel; where was the goddamn thing?
What a fucking mess. This is where I live?

… this is where I live?…

Having no real choice, I crawled back into my bunk to finish Duane’s book and found myself taking grim, opprobrious solace in the fact that Duane has never surfed Hawaii – never ridden big Sunset and so forth (Hah! What can he do to me?!) – and then hoping he’d fuck up and his narrative would fall apart at the end. But it didn’t and I was suddenly and truly glad for that, and aghast that I had had such a thought. Having put the book down, I lay on my bunk thinking about envy and self-doubt and the fear they engender, and then dozed fitfully for a while.

Meanwhile the Earth turned and when I awoke a subtle warm glimmering in the eastern sky was emanating faint shafts of color and hope, which tentatively probed the abyss overhead. Shivering for all sorts of reasons, I squirmed into my dank, sandy wetsuit and went out for a surf. There was still a star or two visible low in the brightening indigo over the western horizon as I sat my board and waited for my first wave.

It was a couple weeks ago, this scene I describe, the last day of the New Year’s swell. The waves were chest high at the point in front of my campsite and even as first light turned to dawn and then to morning I had the lineup to myself – the week of boomers at the points and reefs below Punta Lobo had surfed everyone out. Shiner, God bless her, followed me down as far as the high water mark. As usual, her snoozing form was a perfect reference point for gauging side shore drift.

I started tight, flat and clumsy but gradually relaxed and found my rhythm and ultimately had a fine session.

…relaxed and had a fine session…
Photo of the author by TC

I believe I rode this one particular wave about as competently as it could have been ridden on a longboard. As I paddled back out I relived the wave in as much detail as I could. If I don’t immediately do this – re-imprint the sensory experience upon my conscious mind while it’s fresh – all traces of a ride quickly fade from memory and I will not be able to reflect back on it later. Riding waves and dreaming are alike in this way.

Some time later, while vacantly drifting between sets, a sentence I had written weeks before up at El Rancho de Chicho popped into my mind, except that it was better now. I’d added a certain adjective that had been wanting, not so much for descriptive reasons, but for flow. I immediately recited aloud the improved sentence and pictured it on the page. If I had ridden a wave before doing this, I likely would have lost the idea, because of the way surfing clears your mind and forces you to live in the present.

I paddled in as the wind came up hard onshore, creating ugly surface irregularities where before was burnished marble, as if time had been run back on some oceanic sculptor’s finishing work. And the swell was in its final throes, barely waist-high and dropping still, as I watched from the beach. The suddenly poor surfing conditions meant that all the late risers had missed out; the empty lineup remained so. My own two hours in the water now seemed like pure serendipity, an unearned honorarium. Had I not been vexed with envy of another writer’s good, hard work, I would have slept on through the morning glass like the others. The improved sentence struck me now as a subtle and sordid miracle, the perfected offspring of random chance and an appalling personal defect. You’ve seen that sentence, its added adjective; you passed them by in your reading, unmindful of this quirk of their history.

I set to putting right the paperwork and general disorder in La Casita Viajera, which is of course my means of travel, my home and where I write. Then I sat outside in my beach chair and sipped my coffee and thought about Dan Duane’s book and Kem Nunn’s book and some other books I admire. At some point in my musings it occurred to me that although I’m not gifted, I have sufficient talent that if I work very hard I’m capable of creating something worthwhile.

…creating something worthwhile…

Relaxing in the lee of my little house on wheels, I also thought about the wave I’d ridden perfectly – as perfectly as I could’ve ridden it. Putting myself back on that wave, I imagined myself in the place and the state of mind that is sometimes referred to as The Glide.

I dozed off as the encampment below Punta Lobo began its late arousal. For the moment, I was less worried about what lay ahead, both in my life and in this chronicle. I would make do. Things would work out.

…in what lay ahead.

For another Down South anecdote that didn’t make it into In Search of Captain Zero, see “An Occurrence in Northern Baja.“

---

Across the Atlantic Los Balseros - A Day In The Life Of The Guard