Bryan Di Salvatore, Viti Savaiinaea, and me, Sala’ilua, Savai’i, Western Samoa, 1978

 

FIVE

THE SEARCH

The South Pacific, 1978

CALL IT ENDLESS WINTER. SUMMER IS PART OF THE POPULAR iconography of surfing. Like much of that iconography, it’s wrong. Most surfers in most places, north or south of the equator, live for winter. That’s when the big storms occur, usually in the higher latitudes. They send forth the best waves. There are exceptions, including, speaking of iconography, Waikiki and Malibu, but summer is most often the doldrums for surfers. An exception that had long interested me was the summer cyclone season in northeastern Australia. Basically, though, when I left Los Angeles in early spring 1978, with a board and a tent and a stack of much-studied nautical charts of Polynesian atolls, I was chasing winter.

It wasn’t easy to leave. I had a job I loved. I had a girlfriend. The job was on the railroad. I had been a brakeman on the Southern Pacific since 1974, working local freight in Watsonville and Salinas and mainline trains between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Everything about braking pleased me inordinately—the country we moved through, the people I worked with, the arcane and ancient language we spoke, the mental and physical tests the work imposed, the big iron itself, the paychecks. It felt like I had lucked into a steel-toed, rock-solid version of adulthood. To get hired, I had failed to mention my degree in English. Because most of the Coast Route traffic we handled was agricultural—produce from the Salinas Valley—the work was seasonal, particularly for low-seniority trainmen like me. I used my furloughed winters to earn another degree, which the S.P. also didn’t need to know about. The company didn’t trust college graduates to become railroaders. It invested time and trouble in bringing young trainmen along, and old heads liked to say that no one with less than ten years’ experience could really pull his weight on a train crew. So the company was looking for forty-year men. Braking could be dirty and dangerous, and college grads might decide to move on to something cleaner and safer. I hated to confirm this view by quitting. I believed I would never find another job as satisfying or well paid.

But I had five thousand dollars in the bank, by far the most I had ever saved. I was twenty-five, and I had never been to the South Seas. It was time for a serious surf trip, an open-ended wave chase. Such a trip felt strangely mandatory. I would go west forever, like Magellan or Francis Drake—that was how I thought of it. In truth, difficult as it was, pulling up stakes was in many ways easier than staying. It gave me an excellent excuse to postpone mundane but frightening decisions about where and how to live. I would disappear from the overdetermined, underwhelming world of disco-dulled, energy-crisis America. I might even become another person—someone more to my liking—in the Antipodes.

I told my family I would be gone a long time. Nobody offered any objections. I had a one-way ticket to Guam, with stops in Hawaii and the Caroline Islands. My mother, seeing me off at the airport, gave me her blessing with unexpected fervor. “Be a rolling stone,” she said, holding my face and looking searchingly into my eyes. What did she see? Not a career railroader—to her relief, I’m sure. The job had been my base, pulling me back to the West Coast seasonally, but I was still a restless romantic. I had become a prolific writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, almost entirely unpublished. I rambled around and lived in places that took my fancy—Montana, Norway, London—for brief stretches. So I really hadn’t been, in my mother’s terms, gathering much moss. I had lived with a couple of women, but, since Caryn, had never felt committed heart and soul.

I sensed later—much later—that I might be overdoing the rolling stone bit, even on my mother’s terms. She and my father, in the third year of my absence, abruptly flew, uninvited, to Cape Town, where the Southern Ocean was pumping out an abundance of winter swells and I had a job teaching high school. They stayed a week. They never suggested that I consider folding my tents and coming back to the United States, but in the fourth year of my travels they did send my brother Kevin out to fetch me. At least that was how I interpreted his visit. He and I traveled north through Africa together. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

 • • • 

TO SEARCH THE SOUTH SEAS for ridable waves, I needed a partner. Bryan Di Salvatore said he was game. A piece of serendipity had put us back in touch after I left Maui. The Aloha Airlines ticket folder with his parents’ address scrawled on it had surfaced during one of my student-housing moves in Santa Cruz. I wrote to see if he had ever received the payment for his car. He replied from an address in northern Idaho. Yes, the cash had found him. We became correspondents. He was driving trucks—long-distance semis—and working on a novel. On a trip to visit his family in California, he stopped in Santa Cruz. He brought Max with him. It seemed she was living nearby, over the hill in San Jose. Her live-in boyfriend there was a successful pornographer, according to Bryan. That was correct, Max said. She looked, if possible, even more wickedly amused and attractive than she had on Maui.

I took them out to the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, where a rare sandbar had formed after heavy rains the previous winter, creating a marvelous wave that I patronized daily for the months it lasted. But when I tried to describe the setup to Bryan, Max began rudely interrupting. In a startling imitation of a stoked surfer’s drawl, she was completing my sentences, usually with the exact cliché I had been planning to use. “The faces were as high as that garage door!” “You could have fit that pickup inside the barrel!” It seemed Max had put in her time with surfers on Maui—“two-minute men,” she called them disdainfully—and she believed that we should be able to do better conversationally. Bryan and I agreed to talk surf at a later date.

We talked surf, books, writing. I was working on a novel too. We started exchanging manuscripts. Bryan’s novel was about a circle of friends, surfers in high school in Montrose, an inland suburb of L.A. One passage, thirty pages long, contained nothing but words said in the car on the trip from Montrose to a beach north of Ventura. No narration, no stage directions, no attributions. I found it dazzling—the fractured, profane speech was shockingly accurate, sneaky-poetic, and very funny, the story movement invisible but irresistible. This, I thought, was a new American literature. Bryan was from Montrose. His father was a machinist who, as a soldier in World War II, had met his mother in Europe. She was British. Bryan had gone on scholarship to Yale, where he majored in English and wrote for campus magazines. Jack Kerouac had inscribed a book to him, and he had gone to Kerouac’s funeral in 1969. I was in awe of such experience, but Bryan wore it lightly, unimpressed with himself. After graduation, he headed for Maui, where he lived and surfed with old Montrose pals and worked as a cook in a hotel restaurant. Few people in Lahaina, it was safe to say, understood his taste. While they were decorating their surfboards with images of Vishnu and badly drawn dolphins, he stuck a picture of the Marlboro Man on the deck of his board. He liked country-western music, demotic American speech, and the collected works of Melville. As a son of the working class, he scorned welfare. He wouldn’t even collect unemployment between jobs. Women, meanwhile, seemed unanimously eager to get next to him. He had curly dark hair, a thick mustache, and an air of effortless, old-school masculinity. Max reckoned he was the original brown-eyed handsome man. He was also—more catnip—funny and generous and something of a loner.

We first surfed together in Santa Cruz after he decided to move back to the coast. He was a goofyfoot, meaning he surfed with his left foot back. It’s the surfing equivalent of being left-handed. Going right, a goofyfoot is on his backhand—he has his back to the wave. Going left, he is on his forehand, or frontside. For regularfoots like me, rights are frontside, lefts backside. Surfing is notably easier on one’s frontside. I was surprised to hear Bryan say he had never surfed Honolua Bay. It wasn’t that the wave was a right—plenty of goofyfoots surfed Honolua—but that the crowds had put him off. He and his friends had been fixtures at a country spot a few miles north of Lahaina called Rainbows, which few people checked during swells. I had never surfed Rainbows. And now, talking Maui, I felt like a mindless herd-follower, having been focused while living there only on the most obvious possible wave, the famous Honolua, and quite ready, if necessary, to trade elbows with the mob in the main takeoff bowl, oblivious to the self-defeating meanness of grubbing for waves in that glorious setting. Even Les Potts, the old top dog, had seemed to renounce the battle as demeaning. In Santa Cruz, a busy surf town, Bryan and I went up the north coast looking for empty waves, which could still be found then.

We took long car journeys on any excuse. At a student party in Santa Cruz, Bryan suddenly announced that it was time I saw Rathdrum, the little Idaho panhandle town where he had lived, and we left directly from the party, making a ten-day loop of it, visiting college friends of his in Montana and Colorado. Bryan, loyal to scruffy Idaho, sniffed, “Montana has a hard-on for itself.” It was true, but we both later ended up living there—going to graduate school in Missoula, learning to ski, and, in my case, learning to drink. Bryan, after getting a master’s, took a job teaching English at the University of Guam. Best known as an American military outpost in the western Pacific, Guam was said to be blown flat annually by typhoons. As a posting, it suited Bryan, I thought—something about its down-home harshness and sheer unlikeliness. Also, it reportedly had good waves. Those reports were soon confirmed by letters and photos. He was surfing his brains out. During his second year on Guam, while I was finishing my studies in Missoula, I proposed the Endless Winter trip. Bryan was also saving money. And he was up for it, he said. I could check out the Carolines on my way to Guam. Then we could head south.

We should brush up on our Spanish, he said.

I couldn’t see why. There wasn’t a Spanish-speaking country in the South Pacific.

That was good, he said. We were going to need a language that nobody else understood, for classified communications in dicey situations.

I told him he was out of his mind.

But he wasn’t. We ended up using Spanish regularly. It was our secret code. No Tongan could crack it.

 • • • 

MY GIRLFRIEND’S NAME was Sharon. She was seven years older than me. At that point, she was teaching college in Santa Cruz. We had been together for four years, on and off, and were more deeply attached than we probably looked. She was a medievalist, an enthusiast, adventurous, the daughter of a liquor-store owner in L.A. She had a laugh that went from high to low, drawing you into her confidence, merry eyes, and an eclectic intellectual glamour that wowed people, including me. Underneath all the badinage, though, under her slinky sloe-eyed self-assurance, was a soft and wounded person whose restlessness was, as she would say, molecular. She had a checkered résumé, including a brilliant unemployable ex-husband. She and I had survived long separations, and we had never been especially monogamous—she liked to quote Janis Joplin: Honey, get it while you can. We had vague plans to rendezvous after she finished her PhD, which would not be soon. I was ambivalent, I suppose, about my attachment to her, but I didn’t give her even a shadow of a veto over my decision to leave.

I had a board custom-made for the trip. It was a 7'6" single-fin. It was longer, thicker, and much heavier than the boards I normally rode. But this travel board needed to float high and paddle fast—we would be in a world of unfamiliar, reef-edged currents—and it needed to work in big, powerful waves. Above all, it could not snap. Where we were going, it would be impossible to replace a broken board. I put a leash on it, which was, for me, a concession. Board leashes had been around for a few years, and in Santa Cruz they had drawn a bright line between purists, who thought they encouraged dumb, sloppy surfing, and early adopters, who thought that having a lost board unnecessarily smashed on the cliffs at spots like Steamer Lane was itself a good definition of dumb. I was a purist and had never used a leash. But even I knew that I couldn’t afford to lose my South Pacific board at some Fijian cloudbreak and risk never seeing it again. I rode the board for a few months before we left, and I loved the way it handled bigger days at the Lane. During a scary late-winter session at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, my leash snapped, leaving me in big surf with a long, cold swim that lasted till after dark. After that, I bought a thicker leash and a couple of spares.

 • • • 

HONOLULU WAS MY FIRST STOP. In my overexcited mind, Oahu was all signs and portents. Domenic happened to be there, on a job—he was now shooting TV commercials full-time, with a specialty in tropical ocean action footage. Our friendship had survived, barely, a patch after Caryn and I broke up and he and she became a couple. They hadn’t lasted long, but I found the whole business so excruciating that I wrote a thousand-page novel about it, an apocalyptic prose poem that I finished, bashing out the last draft on a borrowed manual typewriter in London, at the age of twenty. (Bryan may have been the only person who read that entire early masterpiece.) Domenic and I had taken a couple of surf trips together since, including one to central Baja California during which he seemed to be always filming me, encouraging me to talk straight into the camera about whatever came to mind. This was a last gasp of the idea that we might be geniuses—his touching faith that I could hold the screen with pure improvisation. I couldn’t. Domenic shelved the project in favor of paid work.

Now, as we crossed paths on Oahu, a late-season swell hit and we, obeying dog-whistle orders from the collective surf unconscious, dropped everything and headed for the North Shore. I had by then surfed most of the big-name spots along the famous big-wave coast—I first surfed Pipeline on my nineteenth birthday, not long after that addled huge day at Honolua with Becket. I had had some memorable sessions at Sunset Beach especially. Was Sunset, as we had been told as kids, basically Rice Bowl writ large? Not really. It was a vast wave field, bordered on the west by a roaring rip, with a bewildering variety of peaks swinging in at different angles, producing thick, beautiful waves and regular episodes of terror. Sunset was effectively impossible for the occasional visitor to understand.

On that spring day with Domenic, Sunset was big and clean, and I felt as confident surfing it as I ever had. The leash probably helped. The big, thick board definitely helped. Then a ten-foot west set caught me inside and put the leash, and my confidence, to a severe test. I was trapped in the impact zone, taking each wave on the head, ditching my board, diving deep, getting cruelly rumbled, just trying to stay calm. The leash pulled hard on my ankle, threatening to snap. After half a dozen waves, I was painfully glad to see my board still surfacing near me, though I never had the time to reel it in. By the time I washed into the shallows, back on my board, I was light-headed, breathing raggedly. Domenic found me sitting on the sand, still too tired to speak. The ordeal had felt like a baptism. It was the worst beating I had received in fifteen years of surfing. But I had not panicked.

The next portent was the surprise appearance in Honolulu of a kid named Russell. He and Domenic had been roommates in the early ’70s—Hawaii Five-0 days for Domenic and my family. Russell had been a wide-eyed hick from a tiny sugar town on the Big Island then, but he had spent the intervening years in Europe, mostly in Cambridge, where he had picked up a British accent and large quantities of worldliness and erudition. There was nothing supercilious about this transformation—he was still wide-eyed and soft-spoken, just widely read and widely traveled. Russell and I spent a couple of long nights talking nonstop about Britain, poetry, and European politics, by the end of which I realized I had been thoroughly obnoxious to Domenic. I hadn’t let him get a word in. When I nervously suggested as much, he brusquely agreed. “I wanted to catch up with Russell, find out what’s going on with his sexuality,” he said. “Maybe next time.” Russell’s social affect had, it was true, also changed. It was now vividly bisexual. But I had been too intent on exchanging ideas about the decadence of Sartre and situationism even to think of broaching the obvious personal topic. Domenic’s patience with my overwrought erudition had reached its limit, I figured. It was time for me to slip off to Samoa and grow up.

But there was one more sign. On a balmy blue morning, I paddled out at Cliffs. There, looking like he had never left, was Glenn Kaulukukui. It had been ten years, but he headed straight toward me, calling my name with a gleeful curse, reaching for my hand. He looked older—thicker through the shoulders, with shorter, darker hair, and a mustache—but the laughing light in his eyes was unchanged. He and Roddy and John were all now living on Kauai, he said. “We all still full-on surfing.” Although Roddy did not compete—he worked in a hotel restaurant—his surfing had never stopped improving, Glenn said. Roddy was now the best surfer in the family. Glenn himself, as I knew from the mags, was a pro, busy on the contest circuit, putting in his time each winter on the North Shore. “I’m a competitor,” he said simply. We commenced surfing small, glassy, uncrowded Cliffs, and I was pleased to see Glenn pausing on the shoulder of one of my waves, studying me closely, and then announcing, “Hey, you can still surf.” His own surfing, meanwhile, even in soft, chest-high Cliffs, was glorious. The speed, power, and purity of his turns were on a level I had rarely seen except in films. And he didn’t seem to be pushing himself at all. He seemed to be playing—intently, respectfully, joyfully. For me, seeing Glenn surf like that was an epiphany. It was about him, my boyhood idol grown into a man, but it was also about surfing—its depth, or potential depth, as a lifelong practice. I told him I was off to the South Seas. He looked at me hard and wonderingly, and wished me luck. We clasped hands again. It was the last time I ever saw him.

 • • • 

I FOUND NO WAVES on Pohnpei, a green speck in the Caroline Islands, then under U.S. administration, now part of the independent Federated States of Micronesia. I did spend long, hot days bumping around in the bush trying to find reef passes that looked promising on my charts, but they were all dauntingly far from shore, the wind was always wrong, the swell always funky. I began to wonder if I had deluded myself about the chances of finding ridable waves in random tropical locales. (As it happens, a luminous righthander was later discovered on the northwest corner of Pohnpei. I was there in the wrong season for that wave.) I was reading, between fruitless forays, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, which has a nice first line: “I hate traveling and explorers.” The paterfamilias of structural anthropology goes on, about his profession: “We may endure six months of traveling, hardships and sickening boredom for the purpose of recording (in a few days, or even a few hours) a hitherto unknown myth, a new marriage rule or a complete list of clan names.” This sounded, in my little surf-skunked corner of Micronesia, ominously familiar. Would it take months of hard searching to find even some mediocre wave—the surfing equivalent of a new marriage rule?

 • • • 

SPEAKING OF ANTHROPOLOGY, I found on Pohnpei a collision of local tradition with modernity—and this would turn out to be an inescapable theme everywhere in the Pacific—over how to get drunk. In the evenings the men either drank, in a slow, ceremonial, communal ritual, using coconut shells as cups, a mild indigenous liquor called sakau—it’s called other names on other islands, most commonly kava—or else they drank imported alcohol. Imported alcohol, whether spirits or beer, cost money and was associated with colonialism, fighting, bars, general dissipation, and domestic violence. I hung with the sakau crowd, on principle, even though I found the stuff, which was viscous and gray-pink and medicinal-smelling, vile. It numbed the mouth, though, and after eight or ten cups it tilted my brain to an angle from which I began to understand, or believe I understood, a complex form of checkers that was the local pastime. The game was played with cigarette butts and little cylindrical coral pebbles, and it went fast, with an abundance of muttered commentary, some bits of it in English. “What’s this, Christmas?” “You crazy dude!” I never gained the confidence to actually play, but I became a passionate kibitzer.

We drank under a dilapidated thatch pavilion in somebody’s backyard, by the light of a naked yellow bulb stuck up on a post. Deep in their sakau cups, my companions would start mumbling to themselves, bowing their heads to drool great careful white streamers into the mud. In this romantic setting, I managed to meet a girl, Rosita. She was a tough, pretty nineteen-year-old from Mokil Atoll. She said she had been thrown out of school for stabbing a girl. But she wasn’t all bravado—she was very concerned, at least, that no one see her stealing into my hotel. One of my secret ambitions for this just-begun journey was to consort with women from exotic lands, and young Rosita seemed like an auspicious start. (What’s this, Christmas?) She had traditional-looking tapa-pattern tattoos on her thighs and, on one shoulder blade, a heart-and-scroll design that looked like it belonged on a U.S. Marine circa World War II. The sex was comically terrible, as I struggled to figure out what might please her. Nothing seemed to, at least not as I understood pleasure. But then she cried, in her green skirt and white blouse, when I left Pohnpei. I knew that my secret ambition regarding women was profoundly unoriginal. It took me a while to figure out that it might also be no fun.

 • • • 

GUAM WAS MILSPEAK, I was told—short for Give Up and Masturbate. The etymology was bogus, but the place was impressively bleak. Heroin addiction seemed to be the leading form of entertainment, followed by shopping, fighting, robbery (a traditional way to fund a heroin habit), television, arson, and strip joints. On an island surrounded by warm turquoise seas, no one seemed to use the beaches. There were almost no trees—a disastrous oversight at 13 degrees north. The island’s trees had been blown down by typhoons, people said, or destroyed in World War II, after which the U.S. military, hoping to prevent erosion, scattered tangan tangan seeds over much of the land from airplanes. Tangan tangan is a tall, dense, colorless brush. Not native to the Pacific, it nonetheless thrived on Guam. To travel the island’s roads was to pass between long gray-brown walls of tangan tangan. The local architecture was squat and concrete—built to survive typhoons. The economy was sustained by low-end Japanese tourism and the vast U.S. military presence. When I told Bryan that my World Almanac listed copra (dried coconut) as Guam’s major export, he laughed. “Most Guamanians think copra is a TV show—‘What time’s Copra, 8:30 or 9?’”

Bryan seemed to be having a ball. He had a delightful, serious girlfriend, Diane—a schoolteacher and single mom. He had a jolly crew of guys he surfed with, and after surfing drank beer with. Most of his friends seemed to be teachers from the U.S. mainland. His students were nearly all island kids—indigenous Chamorros, Filipinos, other Micronesians—who had to figure out what to make of a professor who wore baggy shorts and vintage aloha shirts and exhorted them all year to see the magic in language and literature, and then, on their final exam, gave them a multiple-choice question about which famous personage their teacher most closely resembled, with every choice the same: “Clint Eastwood.”

The surf during my Guam stay was AWOL—“flat as piss on a board,” in Bryan’s words. All the great spots I had heard about and seen pictures of—Boat Basin, Meritzo—didn’t show a ripple for weeks on end. Worse, Bryan seemed less than elated to see me. Had he turned ambivalent about our plan? I hung around, waiting for him to wrap up his Guam life. I stewed and spent a lot of time alone in his bare-bones, cement-walled apartment while he hung out with Diane and her son. I decided that Diane and I were locked in a silent battle for Bryan’s soul. She and her son were moving back to Oregon. What were Bryan’s intentions? He didn’t confide in me, but he was obviously struggling. He was also under fierce pressure from his mother, who, from Los Angeles, was making her disapproval of his job-quitting plans known. Was this why he had gone to Yale, to become some kind of bum? I didn’t really know her, but Bryan’s mother had always seemed formidable, dour, and very tightly wound in a North West England sort of way. Her golden American son’s highly developed sense of fun seemed never to have infected her. I decided that she and I were locked in a silent battle for Bryan’s soul.

I also decided that the disapproval gene had been, subtly but successfully, transmitted intact, and that I was now feeling its lash. The smallest things about me seemed to irk Bryan. I had stopped shaving when I left California; he made it clear that he disapproved of my scraggly beard. Then he told me that I needed to start using deodorant. I took that friendly advice hard. Encouraged by girlfriends, and by the Age of Aquarius in which we had grown up, I had always thought of myself as naturally sweet-smelling. On the phone to Sharon, I mentioned this very personal insult, expecting gentle reassurance, and instead got a long pause. Well, she said finally, he might be right about that. So, I thought, now I was facing a conspiracy. My surf partner and my girlfriend had both decided, possibly in concert, that it was time to rein me in, to tame the wild child, to crush the fresh-smelling free spirit they had once loved. Next they would have me wearing a coat and tie to work in an office park.

I was clearly going Guamshit—a malady much discussed among Bryan’s teacher friends—although I had the sense to keep my more lurid paranoias to myself. The truth was that Sharon was being wonderfully open-minded about my taking off on this open-ended trip. The fact that I was immature and headstrong (and Sharon, being older, had all too much perspective on my self-absorption) didn’t mean, however, that I was physically still a boy. They were undoubtedly right: I’m sure I reeked like a hostler.

I had a novel in progress to keep me busy during the Guam dog days. The main characters all worked on the railroad in California, a milieu I knew well, but the plot wandered off the rails, as it were, and got lost somewhere on the coast of Morocco. (Sharon and I had traveled in Morocco, after a long winter in England.) Bryan read what I had, and pronounced it a mishmash. He was right, and a couple of long talks about where I had gone wrong convinced me to chuck it all. The railroad was still the world I wanted to write about, but I needed new protagonists. And I still trusted Bryan above all readers of my stuff. As for my doubts about his commitment to this Endless Winter plan, they were at least half projections, I realized, of my own fears and misgivings.

In the end, we went. Or tried to go. We had bought cheap tickets to Western Samoa on Air Nauru, an airline that turned out to operate at the whim of the king of a miniature Micronesian country called Nauru. The king commandeered our plane just as we were waiting to board, and the ticket agent told us to come back in a week. I complained, to Bryan’s embarrassment, and the Air Nauru rep quickly started handing out hotel and meal vouchers to those knocked-back passengers who hadn’t already left the airport. We ended up staying at the Guam Hilton for a week. The other Air Nauru refugees staying free at the hotel kept trying to buy me drinks, and Bryan thought the incident illustrated a fundamental difference between us, although the moral of the story seemed to change each time he told it. Sometimes it was about his passivity, other times my obnoxiousness. We took, for the folks back home, poorly lit photos of one another styling like Frankie Avalon, balancing carefully on our boards, in our hotel room. Check it out, everybody: the first stop on our world surf tour. Bryan and Diane got to spend another week together. Then we really left.

 • • • 

WITHIN WEEKS, it felt like we had been knocking around the South Pacific for half our lives. We traveled by local bus and truck and ferry, by canoe and freighter and open boat, by small plane and yacht and taxi, on horseback. We walked. We hitchhiked. We paddled. We swam. We walked some more. We bent our heads over maps and charts and strained to see distant reefs, channels, headlands, river mouths. We clambered up overgrown trails and beetling crags and coconut trees to likely vantage points, and were frequently defeated by jungles, bad maps, worse roads, mangrove swamps, ocean currents, and kava. Fishermen helped us. Villagers took us in. People gawked, scythes frozen midswing, as we trudged past their taro patches in the depths of the woods, strange planks under our arms. Children seemed to follow us everywhere, screaming, “Palagi, palagi!” (White people!) Privacy became a faded memory, one of those American luxuries left behind. We were curiosities, envoys, entertainment. Nobody understood what the hell we were after.

We wished we had brought a surf magazine. The rain-soaked paperbacks rolling around in our bags were useless as visual aids. (Tolstoy don’t surf.)

In Western Samoa we found and rode a powerful, shifty right off the south shore of Upolu, the main island. The wave had great potential, I thought, but was vulnerable to the southeast trade winds, which blew almost every day. Bryan named the spot Mach Two, after the speed of the drop. It had scary, unpredictable, wide-swinging sets and a shallow reef, and it broke half a mile from shore, all of which left me glad I had brought a fast-paddling board. We decided not to camp on that wave, and pushed on to Savai’i, the next island west, where we found, on a coast with lighter winds, a left in front of a village called Sala’ilua.

The challenge, during the southern winter, was simple enough. Big winter swells came from the south, from storms in the Roaring Forties, or from even higher latitudes, down below New Zealand, and the prevailing trades blew from the same general direction. For surfing, that was bad. Onshore winds make a mess of waves—tearing them apart, causing them to crumble, filling the lineup with chop. So we were looking for places where the south swells bent, or wrapped, around a reef or shore, turning east or west—more likely east, since the trades blew from the southeast—until they were breaking into the prevailing wind. Offshore winds, as I hope I’ve made clear, wreathe waves in glory. They groom them, hold them up and prevent them from breaking for a crucial extra beat, make them hollower when they do break, and create little or no chop. But swells lose their power and size when they turn corners. Steep coasts with quirky winds could alter the general pattern, but basically we were looking for reefs perfectly angled to bend south swells into the trades without killing them. If such reefs existed outside dreams and theory, they also needed, for our purposes, to come equipped with deepwater channels, also angled just right, so that the waves breaking on the reefs would have ridable shoulders and we would have a place to paddle back out after riding them. It was a tall order.

The left on Savai’i was consistent but undistinguished. We called it Uo’s—uo is Samoan for “friend.” The trade winds mostly left it alone, even in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the brunt of the south swells also steamed past the little bay where we surfed, dropping waves on us daily but none with much juice. The bigger days were head-high. Uo’s had a promising setup, with a reliable takeoff peak and a long wall. Nearly every wave was marred, though, by a quick, crossed-up section that broke out ahead of the hook (the steepest part of the wave) and ended most rides in frustration. At low tide it was extra-quick, and getting in and out of the water got nasty. A lava shelf covered with slick, round, ham-sized rocks was exposed, providing for hilarious-from-shore scenes of slipping, cursing, and ankle-barking, gymnastic attempts to fall down without dinging our boards. Our boards made big, hollow noises when they hit the rocks. Worse, there was an outhouse on rickety stilts perched over the lagoon just west of the break, and its stench got more notable at low tide. Bryan thought the outhouse would make a great logo for a typhoid prevention campaign. In the gashes and scrapes accumulating on our soft white feet, infections bloomed.

Were we the first people to surf this spot? Possibly. To surf this large (roughly forty miles by thirty miles) island? Probably not. But we had no way of knowing. The difficulty, the improbability, of finding good waves on unsurfed coasts was undoubtedly why Glenn Kaulukukui had given me such a searching look when I told him about our plan. Now Bryan and I were completely absorbed, though, in trying to solve the riddles and quirks of Uo’s. Surfing a known spot, a mapped spot, with local guys who demonstrate, if only by example, where to take off and what to expect, is an entirely different enterprise. We were making it up ourselves, first trying to identify and then by trial and error figure out new breaks. It was exhilarating, when you looked up from the reef’s many oddities and thought about it, to be surfing in such splendid isolation.

And there were, praise the Lord, a couple of sessions, at high tide, when the rogue end-section relaxed and Uo’s realized its potential. One of those came at the end of a rainy day after the wind, by some local meterological act of grace, backed around off the mountains and began to blow offshore. The clouds were low and dark, the water a dull gray. Bryan said that except for the palm trees thrashing in the gloom, and the temperature, it felt like northwest Ireland. He was on his frontside—a goofyfoot going left—and he put together a string of long, fast rides, taking a high line through the shut-down section and threading it cleanly. The surf was shoulder-high and pulsing. The wind added drama to the approaching sets and a faint blue light high in the faces just at the moment of breaking. We surfed till after dark, then walked back into Sala’ilua through a warm, thick, gentle rain.

The village had no hotel. (The whole island of Savai’i, as far as we knew, had no hotel.) We were staying with a family, the Savaiinaeas, who had several adjoining fales—open-walled, thatch-roofed traditional houses. Staying with a family was a delicate business. We had showed up in Sala’ilua one afternoon, after a long ride in the back of a dump truck. The truck, with a bed of old rubber sandal forms recycled as padding, doubled as an open-air bus. Our boards were jammed between baskets of taro and fish. The truck dropped us next to a cricket pitch covered with green cocoa beans laid out to dry in the sun. The village was neat, all thatched roofs and well-spaced breadfruit trees, and very quiet. It felt shy. We couldn’t quite see the waves. We had a letter of introduction to the Savaiinaeas from a cousin of theirs whom we’d met in Apia, the Samoan capital. We could hear children yelling, then see them gathering at a safe distance. Finally, a young man wearing a black lavalava approached. We murmured our business, and he led us to Sina Savaiinaea. She turned out to be a handsome woman in her thirties. She read our letter, ignoring a breathless crowd that had gathered around us. Sina glanced at the long, filthy canvas bags under our arms—they contained our surfboards—but did not miss a beat. “You are welcome,” she said, taking the wraps off a thousand-watt smile.

Sina and her husband, Tupuga, and their three daughters deluged us with an embarrassment of hospitality. Meal after lavish meal, cup after cup of tea. Our sweat-stained T-shirts would vanish and reappear in the morning washed and pressed. Bryan, who smoked, said ashtrays seemed to be emptied ten times a day. We tried to observe the basic local manners we’d learned—never sitting with a foot pointed at someone, never declining anything offered, greeting every guest with a handshake and a “Talofa.” But there was no escaping our pampered, privileged role as clueless guests. We even slept inside mosquito nets we’d brought, like little sheikhs with backpacks. Conversations were surprisingly cosmopolitan. Every grown man in Sala’ilua seemed to have traveled and worked all over—New Zealand, Europe, the United States. (Samoa has a large diaspora relative to its size; there are said to be more Samoans living overseas than at home.) There was a matai, or chief, who had been to the United Nations. There was even a guy in a denim jacket with a big American flag on the back who had made a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

And yet Savai’i felt like a world unto itself, a universe complete, out of time. There was no television. I never saw a telephone. (Cell phones and the Internet were many years away.) There were imported goods, mostly from China, in the tiny makeshift shops—shovels and flashlights, Golden Deer cigarettes, Long March transistor radios. But daily life was very largely a do-it-yourself affair. People farmed, fished, and hunted for their meals. They built their own houses and boats, made their own fishnets, mats, baskets, fans. They improvised endlessly. I was enchanted. I had set off from the United States with an ignorant ambition to see more of the world before it all turned into Los Angeles. There was no danger of that happening, of course, but fetching up in rural Polynesia caused my vague discontent with industrial civilization to snap into sharper focus.

Seen from a certain angle, everything in Samoa—the ocean, the forest, the people—had a kind of noble glow. This glow had nothing to do with picture-perfect beaches or grass shacks, those worn-out ideas of paradise, nor with my old storybook dreams—my Umi-and-his-brothers days were long behind me. I didn’t even have bare-breasted-maiden fantasies, or none worth writing about. I also doubted, after surveying the Samoan teenagers we met, that there was a preneurotic adolescence to be had here—apologies to Margaret Mead. (Gauguin, for that matter, was disappointed in Tahiti—he reckoned he got there a century too late.) No, Samoa was thoroughly Christianized and literate. Global pop culture flourished with its usual virulence. Every little kid’s hero seemed to be Bruce Lee. The inescapable tune that year was Boney M’s cover of “Rivers of Babylon.” What enchanted me was simply that people were still living so close to the land and sea, and so communally. To my Western eyes, they were paragons of graceful competence and imagined wholeness.

Sina’s brother, Viti, was a short, well-built guy in his late thirties. He had spiky hair, long sideburns, a shy smile, and a modesty that almost hid his quick mind and cool ingenuity. He had lived in New Zealand, where he worked, he told us, in the Hellaby Corned Beef Factory, the Bycroft Biscuit Factory, and the New Zealand Milk and Butter Factory. He had sent money home, but he was happier here, he said. “There, you must wear a cardigan, and you can see your breath in front of your face while you wait for the works bus.” Each morning while we were around, Viti sailed off over the horizon in a homemade one-man outrigger canoe that, according to Sina, he had carved by hand in less than a week—this after single-handedly felling the fetau tree he built it from. In the afternoon Viti brought boatloads of bonito back to the village. At night he took a lantern out on the reef at low tide and speared fish with a knife. When he needed cash, he climbed the mountain behind Sala’ilua to his family’s copra plantation and brought down a truckload to market. (Samoa, unlike Guam, really did export copra.) When a wild pig got into his taro, he went hunting.

I once asked Viti about pig hunting. He and Bryan and I were sitting in a tiny, open-walled fale in the jungle near Sala’ilua drinking homemade beer from an old gin bottle.

“I take a torch and a rifle and some dogs and find his trail, then wait for him, just downwind,” Viti said.

It was dusk. The beer was sweet, like apple cider, but as strong as scotch.

“Sometimes I must chase him through the bush. He go up and down the mountain.” Viti laughed, miming himself thrashing through the jungle.

“It get dark. Then, after I kill him, I have to wait with him, all night. Only thing I have is my lavalava. I pull it over my head, but mosquitoes are so bad. So bad. It rains. I get cold. Then other pigs come, and all wait around me, because I have killed their brother. The dogs do not stop barking. The pig weigh maybe two hundred pounds. I cut him in two parts. In the morning I find a long stick to carry him, one part each side. But it can be far to a road. So far. You like go pig hunting?”

I thought Bryan would be thrilled to go. We drank another round of Viti’s brew.

Now Viti wanted some music. “Give us a song from your country.”

Bryan obliged with a round of a cappella Hank Williams.

I got a hot rod Ford and a two-dollar bill

And I know a spot just over the hill

The crowd—a gang of kids grinding garden cocoa beside the fale—went nuts. They hooted and clapped and laughed themselves silly. Bryan’s voice twanged merrily through the jungle. Viti grinned wildly. Now it was my turn.

But then a long, mournful double conch-shell blast came to my rescue. “Curfew,” I said. “No surfing, no singing.”

These curfews came twice a day. They lasted less than an hour, and people took them seriously. Nobody walked or worked until a second shell or church bell rang out. We had heard different explanations—that activity ceased out of respect for the chiefs, or for a period of prayer—but the general message about the strength of Fa’a Samoa, the traditional Samoan way, was clear. On Sundays the curfew was in force all day long. On a couple of occasions when the surf looked good, I had found the ban hard to accept. Surely we could slip out for a few quiet rides, far from shore, and offend no one.

Bryan took pleasure, I thought, in chastising me for these impious suggestions. “You think you’re an iconoclast?”

No, I did not. I just wanted more waves.

Another pair of conch-shell notes wafted through the trees. My turn to sing. I closed my eyes and, from deep memory, with no forethought, delivered all five verses of the Fool’s Song from the end of Twelfth Night. It was a strange choice, and I was no doubt off-key, but I got into it, the plaintive philosophical repetitions (“For the rain it raineth every day”), the chastened reflections on marriage (“By swaggering could I n-e-e-ver thrive”), and the applause afterward seemed raucously sincere.

 • • • 

SALA’ILUA HAD A SECOND WAVE. It broke just east of a half-collapsed waterfront pool hall. We spent a lot of time studying it. The wave was a bullet-fast left. It was long and hollow and the prevailing wind on it, remarkably, was almost straight offshore. It seemed that a steep mountain ridge behind the village bent the trades to the west right there, and an offshore canyon somehow combined with a broken slab of reef to bend swells into the wind. The result was a beautiful but lethal-looking wave, almost surely too fast and shallow to ride. It broke below sea level, into a short, deep trough that the wave itself created, then exploded up across an exposed coral shelf. The wave got better as the surf got bigger, though—more possible, at least, to mind-surf without impossible accelerations through ridiculously fast sections. I walked out on the shelf at low tide to study it more closely. The lagoon was full of both urchins and man-made hazards—fish and crab traps with clear line strung between poles. Set after turquoise, wind-brushed set roared past. The biggest waves were breaking maybe five feet from the rocks. No. Uh-uh. We named the spot Almosts.

Uo’s was sloppy and weak by comparison—just a new marriage rule.

On our last night in Sala’ilua, Sina gave us a feast. We had been eating well all week—fresh fish, chicken, coconut crab, clams, papaya soup, yams, and a dozen variations on taro (with spinach, with banana, with coconut cream). Now came pork sausage and banana bread with icing, somehow prepared over an open fire. Also a sharp-tasting black-and-green delicacy from the sea bottom—I missed the name—that toyed embarrassingly with my gag reflex. Bryan and I made heartfelt thank-you speeches and handed out gifts—a glass plate for Sina, balloons for the kids, Schlitz glasses for Viti, cigarettes for Sina’s father, a shell comb for her mother.

A proper bus came through the village at 4 a.m. Sina roused us, gave us coffee and biscuits, and, along with Viti and his wife and one of their children, waited with us by the road. The sky was cloudy with stars. A fruit bat flew low overhead; we could hear the leathery flap of its wings. The Southern Cross glistened. The bus arrived, with tinny music spilling through its open door. A silent boy riding on the roof took our boards.

 • • • 

WE MET OUR SHARE of odd bods in Samoa. A young man named Tia led us to a remote beach that turned out to have no surf. As a consolation prize, I suppose, he told us elaborate stories about each cove and outcropping and reef we came across. There were fratricides, patricides, and a vivid cast of Christianized devils. There was a mass suicide—a whole village self-sacrificed. I was impressed. Every rock on the coast seemed to have a place in a sacred literature. Then Tia said, “You come back in three years, this beach will be really nice place, because I got moneys in the New Zealand bank, so I buy some dynamites and make it nice.”

We fell in with a Presbyterian minister, Lee, and his wife, Margaret. They were from New Zealand but had just spent nine years in Nigeria. Now they were living behind a church in Apia, with three small kids. Lee was eager to show us around. He wore tight red shorts and large gray dentures. He had a deeply dimpled chin, thick glasses, and a startling amount of body hair. He didn’t actually know much about Samoa, and his interest in us soon waned, but Margaret took up the slack and kept inviting us on outings, or over to their place. Lee had a friend, Valo. Young and studly, Valo had LOVE ME TENDER tattooed on one bicep. Lee watched Valo constantly, rapturously, and when Valo wasn’t around he talked about him. At a beach, wistfully: “Valo and I could come here and just find a little corner where no one would ever come across us.” I felt sorry for Margaret, who was dumpy and sweet and, when Lee snapped sarcastically at her, just widened her eyes girlishly behind her glasses and smiled at us. Valo told Bryan that Rothman’s were his favorite cigarettes because there was a secret message buried in the brand name: “Right on, Tom, hold my ass, now shoot!” When the next picnic loomed, Bryan and I spoke Spanish to plot our excuses.

We stayed, on the outskirts of Apia, at a place called the Paradise of Entertainment. It was partly a motel, with a few modest bungalows, but mostly it was an aptly named neighborhood boîte, owned and run by an enormous parliamentarian named Sala Suivai. There was a sunken outdoor stage with a curved bank of bleachers. Some nights they showed movies. Dance bands played on weekends. Once they set up a boxing ring and a giddy crowd watched local scientists go at it. Nobody paid us much attention—the palagis with their bandaged feet, their nautical charts spread across the tables near the bar. And being ignored, the urbanity of it, made a nice change.

 • • • 

FINDING RIDABLE WAVES with nautical charts was a long shot at best. We looked for south-facing island coasts that weren’t “shadowed” by any barrier reef or landmass farther south. We looked for points and bays and reef passes where the shallow water soundings showed, after one or two fathoms, a sharp drop-off to seaward—places where swells would come suddenly out of deep water into the breaking-wave zone, giving them extra power and hollowness. The angle of any promising patch of reef or beach was critical. The rough line along which waves might be expected to break needed to be canted away from, even curved away from, the open ocean to the south, giving waves a chance to bend, peel, and turn into the wind. We looked for offshore canyons that would focus long-interval swell, and the canyon walls that would cause waves to refract into shallower water. Many stretches of coast—most stretches—could be ruled out for one reason or another. But that left a huge number of places with some abstract surf potential, and actually settling on a spot worth traveling to was, in the end, just glorified guesswork. We had no local knowledge; our charts weren’t perfect, and their scale was always too big to account for the individual boulders and chunks of reef that would finally make all the difference. We tried to picture what the swarming numbers meant, as they fell into single digits in the pale blue ribbons of the inshore waters that surrounded the dull yellow splashes of dry land. Looking at the chart of a place you knew, particularly a place that you knew got waves, it was so easy. This is why that spot is good, under the right conditions. A two-dimensional chart suddenly became a multidimensional vision of ridable waves. You could isolate half a dozen factors on the chart alone. But studying charts of places we had never even seen? We were flying blind. This was decades before Google Earth. We had to trust in Willard Bascom, the great oceanographer, who wrote, in Waves and Beaches, “This zone where waves give up their energy and where systematic water motions give way to violent turbulence is the surf. It is the most exciting part of the ocean.”

 • • • 

WE PLANNED TO GO to Tahiti next, or possibly American Samoa. Both places had surfers and known surf spots. Instead, we went to Tonga, about which we knew nothing.

It was a snap decision made during a chance encounter in a waterfront bar with the Australian purser on a freighter bound for Nuku’alofa, the Tongan capital. We boarded the ship, not sober, at midnight. It left Apia at dawn.

The captain only learned we were aboard later that morning. His wrath was reportedly all spent on the purser. With us, he was perfectly pleasant. His name was Brett Hilder, M.B.E. He had a neatly trimmed white Vandyke and wore his uniform well. He gave us a tour of the bridge. That drawing of the king of Tonga on his cabin wall? Captain Hilder had done it himself. The monarch had liked it so much, he signed it. Had we read Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific? Well, the originals of those stories had all come from Captain Hilder. That’s why the book was dedicated to him. (So it was.) But did we know how and why a certain Pacific Island bird had found its way into Herodotus, and into the prophetic books of the Bible? We were about to find out. Incidentally, Captain Cook had dubbed Tonga the Friendly Islands only because he missed by two days the feast at which he and his crew were going to be surprised and made the main course.

Bryan and I found Tonga friendly enough. But the surf was a major tease. On Eua, a solid, tilted lump of an island some twenty miles southeast of Nuku’alofa, I thought we were on the brink of a real discovery. The east coast of Eua was all high cliffs and onshore winds, but the swell sweeping up the southwest coast was highly promising. It looked huge. On the ferry from Tongatapu, the main island in Tonga, just seeing the lines out at sea made my heart pound. Eua is rugged and has few roads. We rented horses and rode up and down rough trails, through thick bush, checking out likely stretches of coast. Every place we managed to see was a mess—rocky, blown out, closed out, unridable. We kept edging north. Part of the northwest coast had a dirt road, which made life easier, but the swell dropped steadily. At the end of the road, we finally found a ridable wave, in a little palm-lined cove called Ufilei.

It was a wild spot. We paddled out through a gap in the reef that was maybe four feet wide. A short, heaving left was exploding spectacularly at the south end of the cove, just off an exposed lava slab. The waves rose so quickly out of deep water that the faces were still an open-ocean navy blue when they broke. We edged into the lineup. The wave was so fast and thick that it looked more like a sudden drop in sea level than a normal swell. I eventually caught four or five waves. Each drop was critical, airborne, obliging me to throw my arms straight up in the effort to stay over my board. I did not fall. After the drop and one screaming bottom turn, the wave petered out in deep water. The rush of the takeoff was ferocious—the bigger waves were well overhead—but the danger-to-reward ratio, surfing so close to an exposed slab, was absurd. Many months later, on a beach in Australia, we met a guy who said he had surfed Ufilei. He was a well-known board builder, sailor, and filmmaker from California named George Greenough—one of the inventors of the shortboard. By his calculations, he said, a five-foot wave at Ufilei was seventy feet thick. It was an eccentric measurement—I have no idea how one determines the exact thickness of a breaking wave—but a good description of the spot’s weird ferocity. After an hour or so, we called it a session.

But we had trouble getting back through the keyhole. There was so much water rushing out of the lagoon through the tiny gap that it was like trying to paddle up river rapids. I gave up, swerved a few yards north, caught a line of whitewater, and bumped and scraped my way across an inch-deep reef. Bryan chose to put his head down and power straight into the current, going nowhere until he was exhausted. My advice, called out from the swimming-pool calm of the lagoon, seemed unwanted. He fumed and struggled. I watched. The sun sank. I don’t remember what route he ultimately took, but I do remember how haggard he looked when he finally made it across the reef. He did not say a word to me. I expected him to crawl up the beach, shipwreck-survivor style, and rest, but instead he rushed from the water and set off, board under arm, at a furious clip. We were staying in a guesthouse five miles away. I found him there, still glowering.

 • • • 

THE GIRLS WHO WORKED at the guesthouse were having their fortunes told. Tupo, a sleepy-eyed, broken-toothed teenager in a striped shirt, dealt the cards. Jacks went across the top. The jacks represented, Tupo explained, the four races of husbands: palagi, Tongan, Japanese, Samoan. Each time Tupo drew a card, she matched it by suit with a jack, tapped it significantly, and declared, “You know!” The other girls, huddled around a kerosene lamp, listened to her with eyes wide and breath bated. They all had a buttery, slightly stale smell.

To me, Tupo explained, “Girls who are fat and lazy will get Tongan husbands, who only allow them to cook and wash. Girls who are thin and beautiful and work hard will get palagis, who will wear watches, and drive them around in cars to moving pictures, and look, look, look at everything. Girls who marry Japanese will go to Japan’s land and live very well, smoking cigarettes and only sometimes mopping, but their husbands will become angry with their laziness and one day come home and carve them up with a knife. Girls who marry Samoans will go to Samoa and live like we Tongans do, except they may see TV.”

One of the girls sighed. “In Pago Pago I see television. Very beautiful!”

Tupo predicted that within a month I would get a letter with money from my family. I would marry a palagi girl, but I would leave someone weeping in Tonga.

Hanging out with the guesthouse girls, joking and passing the kerosene-lit evenings, I couldn’t help but notice that I had abandoned, at least temporarily, my ambition to sleep with women from many lands. Rural Polynesia was not a place for the casual hookup, never mind old sailors’ tales of wanton Tahiti—or, in a movie version seared in memory, the island princess burning up the screen with Brando’s Fletcher Christian. Captain James Cook’s sailors had actually found a wanton Tonga, I learned later (from Tony Horowitz’s Blue Latitudes). One of Cook’s crewmen described the local women as “to the last degree obliging”—willing to sleep with a visitor in exchange for a single iron nail. And a Dutch surgeon on a seventeenth-century voyage reported that in Tonga the women “felt the sailors shamelessly in the trouser-front, and indicated clearly that they wanted to have intercourse.” Such stuff was a long way, alas, from the exceedingly Christian women we met. Most of them wore a stiff woven mat called a ta’ovala around their midsections, tied closely over their other, already cumbersome clothes. These were small, conservative societies that we passed through on our oddball quest. Many of the women we encountered were wonderful flirts, but the boundaries were clear, and they seemed essential to respect. I did not want to leave someone else weeping. Neither did I want to get my ass kicked by her uncles.

 • • • 

“IT LOOKS GOOD,” Bryan said. “You look like a really liberal priest.”

He was talking about my beard, which had become increasingly scruffy. But of course he was talking about more than that, I thought. We were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Moving through unfamiliar worlds, we carried a world together, full of shared understandings, into which we could retreat. But it was crowded in there, with two big egos jostling. We were so dependent on each other, so constantly together, that any little difference chafed and inflamed. I found myself copying into my journal a passage from Anna Karenina about Oblonsky and Levin and their strained friendship. Was Bryan smiling ironically at me? I thought so, and I took little gibes like that priest remark too much to heart.

That was because I knew he was on to something. Bryan was a stick-in-the-mud sophisticate, skeptical of all things nouveau. In college at the height of the student antiwar movement, he had held the fury of his classmates at arm’s length, once carrying a sign at a protest march with the un-gung-ho message, WAR IS SPACE—GO METS. He still found the phrase “world peace” hilariously inane. I was more earnest. In high school I had marched against the Vietnam War, fervently believing it must be stopped. I had been raised on coffeehouse protest music—Joan Baez, Phil Ochs—and it still had a secret place in my heart. Bryan loathed such stuff and all the sentimental, suburban self-congratulation it represented. I never heard him quote Tom Lehrer, whom I knew slightly from Santa Cruz, but I was sure he would dig Lehrer’s sly lines:

We are the folk song army

Every one of us cares

We all hate poverty, war, and injustice

Unlike the rest of you squares

I admired Bryan’s stubborn dissent from liberal orthodoxy. I had also acquired, while braking on the railroad, some of the workingman’s gimlet eye for soft cant.

But bumming around in the South Pacific was bringing out something else in me, something more troubling, from Bryan’s perspective, than facial hair. I was getting interested in self-transformation. I was straining to understand the worldview of the islanders whom we moved and lived among—and I had been doing so since before Guam, when I let myself sink deep into the coral-pebble speed-checkers subworld around the sakau bowl in Pohnpei. I had come here to learn, I figured, and not just a few things about some far-flung places and people. I wanted to learn new ways to be. I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world. This was a hopelessly New Age wish, and I would never have mentioned it to Bryan. But it came out in my quickness to pick up local expressions, local lore, wherever we found ourselves, and in my wholehearted admiration for subsistence farmers and fishermen, and the ease with which I fell into a kind of intimacy with many of the people we met. I had that facility with strangers, but it had a new intensity now, and I wondered if Bryan sometimes felt abandoned by me, or disgusted.

Then there was the self-disgust, which we each wrestled with differently. Being rich white Americans in dirt-poor places where many people, especially the young, yearned openly for the life, the comforts, the very opportunities that we, at least for the seemingly endless moment, had turned our backs on—well, it would simply never be okay. In an inescapable way, we sucked, and we knew it, and humility was called for. But we had different ways of interpreting this obligation. Bryan’s conservative instincts thrilled, I thought, to the heavy patriarchy of the Samoan chief system. My romanticism, meanwhile, filled village social interactions with a prelapsarian warmth and psychic health.

Surfing, under the circumstances, was a godsend. It was our project, why we got up in the morning. After we ran across a group of Western backpackers in Apia, I grumbled, according to Bryan, that they “were nothing but goddam sightseers.” I didn’t remember saying that, but it was in fact how I felt. We did plenty of palagi looking-looking-looking ourselves, and there was something obscene about that, but at least we had a purpose, an objective, however fleeting, pointless, idle, and silly it might seem to anyone else.

 • • • 

WE FOUND A SURFER on Tongatapu, an American named Brad. Actually, he heard we were there, staying at a beach hostel northwest of Nuku’alofa, and one day he appeared, on a horse. He was twenty-three, with very short hair. He seemed to be a missionary of some kind. He said he was living in a village nearby, where he was helping to build a Pentecostal church and was engaged to marry a local girl. He was from Santa Barbara, California, via Kauai, and had been in Tonga eight months. He had an odd, deliberate manner that I found entirely familiar. I guessed he had traveled the same path that a great many surfers took, from California beach town to Hawaiian outer island, ingesting an overload of hallucinogens along the way, and then arriving, somewhat fried, at the feet of their Lord and Savior. People called them Jesus freaks.

But Brad did not preach. He just wanted to talk surf. We were the first surfers he’d seen in Tonga.

We had only one question: Were there waves?

Oh, yes, he said. Oh, yes.

But not this time of year.

He had a north swell spot, Ha’atafu, up at the north end of the Hihifo peninsula. It broke from November to March or April, on long-period swells from the North Pacific. There were several rights, all reef passes, that Brad compared favorably with the best spots on Kauai. That was a high standard indeed. He had been surfing these passes completely alone. This time of year, he said—it was now June—there were a few lefts wrapping around from the south, but they were small and insanely shallow.

I insisted that we go immediately to Ha’atafu. It was a long walk. Brad took us as far as a trailhead, deep in the woods, and gave us directions to the spot. By the time we reached the coast, it was late afternoon. The reef was far from shore, across a broad lagoon, and the sun was blazing behind what looked like chopped-up waves. But the glare was too fierce to tell anything, really. I wanted to paddle out to get a better look. Bryan demurred. The wind was onshore. The sun was going down. There wasn’t enough time to discuss it. I stuck my flip-flops under a bush and struck off paddling.

Bryan turned out to be right. It wasn’t worth it. The waves were awful. And it was indeed insanely shallow. The worst part, though, was the currents. The Hihifo peninsula is five miles long, and I was near the tip of it, being swept seaward and sideways like flotsam. I had to fight my way back into the lagoon, grabbing coral heads to hold position, getting dragged and sliced and, though I had no time to think about it, scared. Once I escaped the surf zone, having caught no waves, I had zero chance of hitting shore anywhere near where I had started. There were short, nasty coral cliffs lining much of the coast. I ultimately reached land at some tiny cove far to the east at dusk. Then I had to hike through the woods barefoot in the dark, a long, uncomfortable slog. Bryan was frantic, understandably. This was a regular chafing point between us. I thought he worried too much. He thought I took stupid risks. Neither of us was wrong.

 • • • 

SOMEBODY HAD PERSUADED the king of Tonga that he was sitting on billions in offshore oil and gas. An American company, Parker Oil and Drilling, had generously agreed to help him find the stuff, and a few of its employees and their dependents were staying at the same half-built beach hostel we were. It was called the Good Samaritan. The owner was a Frenchman named André. He had half a dozen small tourist fales finished, with more in the works, and a funky little outdoor restaurant with a limited but excellent menu (fresh-caught fish, essentially), for which André was the chef. Tables at André’s were limited. I found myself sharing one with Teka, a Parker Oil person. She was slim, sharp-featured, nineteen, from Texas. Her dad was doing something important for the king. Teka had just flunked out of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, she told me, and was on her way back to Singapore, where her family lived, and where she worked as a model.

Teka took a sort of anthropological interest in Bryan and me. We were surfing Ha’atafu every day now, striking off early while the winds were light and usually returning, famished and sun-fried, to the Good Samaritan in the afternoon. The waves had been frustratingly small but well shaped and vicious. My hands and feet were a salade russe of coral cuts, and Bryan had a large raw scrape on his back, the dressing on which I changed twice a day. The water was so shallow at the reef passes we surfed, I even managed to smash the nose of my precious board on the bottom. Teka had watched me elaborately patching the ding on a makeshift rack in the shade of a breadfruit tree.

Bryan and I, Teka announced, were exactly like every other “beach bum” in California, Florida, and Hawaii. We had no goals, no cares for tomorrow. Our type could be found “especially at Waikiki Beach,” she said. “If there was an earthquake, you wouldn’t worry about your house or your car. You’d just say, ‘Oh, wow, a new experience.’ All you care about is finding a perfect wave, or something. I mean, what will you do if you find it? Ride it five or six times and then what?”

It was a good question. We could only hope that at some point we’d be forced to answer it. In the meantime, without disputing that we were highly typical bums, I wanted to know who Teka knew who had worthier goals than we did. Her mother, she said. Her mother, Cherie, intended to “write a book, actually three,” this summer. Cherie was on the premises. She rose late and was drunk by noon. Her main occupations seemed to be sunbathing, putting on makeup, smoking dope with her daughters, and changing her “outfit” many times a day. But then one evening she told me, “I put you in my book today. It says, ‘I love you.’” So there was a book being written. That was more than Bryan or I could claim. Teka had another example: her boyfriend, who was managing a disco, she said, in Huntsville, but who had his sights set firmly on someday “owning and managing a men’s clothing store.”

One of Parker Oil’s field managers was a big, thick-spectacled Texan named Gene. He had a face like turkey wattle, a scary smoker’s voice, and a local girlfriend who was seventeen. Gene was pushing sixty. His girlfriend was a knockout but not happy. I overheard her telling the wife of a Parker executive that she was a half-Fijian orphan, and therefore a social outcast in homogeneous Tonga. She had turned to prostitution, she said. She was now desperate to get away from Gene. “Help me! Help me!” she pleaded.

The executive’s wife looked stricken. I couldn’t hear what she said to the girl, but I was standing there when she approached Gene. She timidly tried to make conversation, mentioning that she had heard that his young friend was half-Fijian.

Gene snarled, “I don’t care what she told you, honey, she’s a nigger.”

Brad came by that night on his horse. I asked him if the police could be trusted to enforce the law against Parker Oil’s employees. He gave me a long, thoughtful look, and then shook his head. “They’re with the king,” he said. Gene’s desperate girlfriend would be the one arrested if charges were laid.

I asked Brad about his life in Tonga. He rarely left this area, he said. Nuku’alofa, which is a small, drab town, had come to seem like the bright lights. He was the only palagi in his village, which was farther out the peninsula and deep in the woods. His neighbors and future in-laws were nonplussed by surfing, he said. “They see me head off into the bush toward the sea with this flimsy craft. Then I come back hours later empty-handed. They think I’m a very poor fisherman. All I do, they think, is float.”

It was remarkable to think that this mild, unprepossessing kid had been surfing Ha’atafu alone, month after month. On northwest cyclone swells, he said, he had ridden it double-overhead—ridden waves, that is, twice his height. This was electrifying news. It was also, at ultra-shallow Ha’atafu, a scary idea. Had he ever hit the bottom hard? I asked. He gave me a little sideways look that meant, Every session, dude. You’ve surfed it. But if he got badly hurt, I thought, the distance between that reef and help would be enormous. There were the waves, the coral, the howling rip, the wide lagoon, the cliffs, at least a mile of jungle to the nearest village, and at least an hour on a very infrequent bus to town, where the medical facilities were probably sketchy. None of this needed saying.

Brad’s immersion in rural Tonga far outstripped, of course, anything I was likely to do in the South Pacific, unless I joined the Peace Corps or married a village girl or both. I had to laugh at myself. Was Brad feeling less existentially alienated as a result of his experience? I didn’t know him well enough to ask.

I was curious about the king, Tupou IV. He was an absolute monarch who weighed, reportedly, 440 pounds. But Brad blanched when I asked about him. He obviously didn’t know me well enough to feel safe discussing the king. I asked if it was true that all the fruit bats in Tonga were the official property of the king, and that only he was allowed to hunt them, which was why the woods were so thick with bats at night. A fisherman on Eua had told me about the king and the fruit bats. Brad declined to confirm or deny the story. He mentioned that he had a Bible study session to go to. He retrieved his horse and rode away down the beach in the moonlight.

 • • • 

I SAW A GRAFFITO in Nuku’alofa, ALL OUTER PROGRESS PRODUCE CRIMINAL. At the post office I tried to send my father a telegram. It was his fiftieth birthday. But I couldn’t tell if the message actually went. The guy behind the counter, who looked like Stokely Carmichael, had little colored postal stickers pasted all over his face. He was friendly, but he fiddled with his ancient typewriter in a slack-handed way that did not inspire confidence. I had not heard from my family, or from anyone else, since Guam—more than a month. There was no way for them to contact us. Did anyone back home even know what country we were in? I wrote lots of letters—to my parents, to Sharon—but they would take weeks to arrive. Phoning never occurred to me. Among other things, it was too expensive.

I wandered down a road of half-built cinderblock houses—their construction presumably on pause until the next batch of remittances arrived from family members in Australia. I passed a graveyard. There were slim brown beer bottles—Steinlager, from New Zealand—stuck neck down in the sand around some of the graves. Steinlager bottles were everywhere in Samoa and Tonga. Local fruit drinks came in them, relabeled. They were used as borders for gardens and school yards. In the cemeteries in Tonga, late in the day, there always seemed to be old women tending the graves of their parents—combing the coral-sand mounds into the proper coffin-top shape, sweeping away leaves, hand-washing faded wreaths of plastic flowers, rearranging the haunting patterns of tropical peppercorns, orange and green on bleached white sand.

A shiver of secondhand sorrow ran through me. And an ache of something else. It wasn’t exactly homesickness. It felt like I had sailed off the edge of the known world. That was actually fine with me. The world was mapped in so many different ways. For worldly Americans, the whole globe was covered by the foreign bureaus of the better newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—and, at that time, the big newsweeklies. Every place on earth was part of somebody’s beat. Bryan understood that map before I did, having gone to Yale. But when I’d found an old copy of Newsweek on Captain Brett Hilder’s bridge, and tried to read a George Will column, I’d burst out laughing. His Beltway airs and provincialism were impenetrable. The truth was, we were wandering now through a world that would never be part of any correspondent’s beat (let alone George Will’s purview). It was full of news, but all of it was oblique, mysterious, important only if you listened and watched and felt its weight.

On the ferry back from Eua, I had ridden on the roof with three boys who said they planned to see every kung fu and cowboy and cop movie playing at the three cinemas in Nuku’alofa until their money ran out. One boy, thin and laughing and fourteen, told me that he had quit school because he was “lazy.” He had a Japanese comic book that got passed around the ferry roof. The book was a bizarre mash-up: cutesy children’s cartoons, hairy-armed war stories, nurse-and-doctor soap opera, graphic pornography. A ferry crewman frowned when he got to the porn, tore each page out, crumpled it, and threw it in the sea. The boys laughed. Finally, with a great bark of disgust, the sailor threw the whole book in the water, and the boys laughed harder. I watched the tattered pages float away in a glassy lagoon. I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what.

The sadness of the obscure graveyard, of unforgotten elders buried under sand, made my chest tight. It seemed to mock this whole vague enterprise. Still, something beckoned. Maybe it was Fiji.

 • • • 

OUR FIRST EXPEDITION in Fiji was a botch on several fronts. First, we went east from Suva, the capital, which is itself on the wet side of the main island, Viti Levu, which meant that we just went deeper into the mud. Our charts showed a major river mouth with a nicely curved bay and a well-angled gap in the barrier reefs that otherwise stopped most swell coming into southeastern Viti Levu. The bay was in fact there, and the swell did sneak through, but the wave was just a long muddy close-out. It took us a couple of days to figure that out, though, partly because we took the wrong grog.

Bryan and I had learned not to show up in remote villages empty-handed. Ballpoint pens and balloons for the kids were optional, but something for the chief or the coastal landowners really wasn’t. The best gift, the traditional offering, was an armload of the root from which kava is made. In Fiji it’s called waka. We had planned, leaving Suva, to buy a batch at a farmers’ market near the bus station, but suddenly our early-morning bus was leaving and, in haste, we dodged into a shop and bought a fifth of Frigate Overproof Rum instead. The rum would be welcome, we figured, and we were right. The problem was that when we reached Nukui, a village near the bay we wanted to check—this was after a long ride in an outboard-powered canoe through a maze of impressively dense mangrove swamps—the headman, Timoci, who greeted us warmly, insisted on opening the rum immediately and passing the flagon around the small circle of men who happened to be on hand. We polished off the bottle in fifteen minutes. It was still early afternoon. We were now kneewalking. We never made it to the beach that day.

Kava is a much more civilized beverage. It needs to be pounded and prepared and is usually consumed only after nightfall. A group, normally men-only, sits cross-legged on mats around a great wooden bowl, known in Fiji as a tanoa. A coconut cup is passed around. In Fiji the group claps three times, hollowly, and the drinker claps once and says, “Bula” (hello, or life), before taking the cup, which is known as a bilo. After draining the cup, the drinker claps once and says, “Maca” (pronounced matha—it means dry, or empty), and everyone claps three times together. The ceremony can go on for six or seven hours and innumerable bilos. Guitars get played, stories told, hymns sung, often with a stunning soprano harmony part.

The closed-out waves at Nukui were at least good for shoving kids into the whitewater on our boards. Some of them were extremely quick learners. One group of boys, getting impatient, dragged two coconut logs into the water and actually caught waves on those. Smaller kids ran up and down the sand with coconut shells on strings under their feet, making a sound exactly like clopping horseshoes. The children in Nukui had a great many homemade toys: round nuts that they used in a never-ending game like marbles; tin-can tops on a string that somehow spun and whistled; a coconut leaf twisted on a stick into an elegant wind-spinner. Amid all this tender ingenuity, I found myself staring one evening, after a great deal of kava, into the ceiling of a hut and suddenly seeing on a crossbeam a pair of child’s rubber boots. The boots were dusty and cut in a vaguely cowboy style, and the sight of them pierced me unexpectedly. They were a talisman both from the manufactured world and from my own Lone Ranger boyhood.

In the canoe weaving back through the mangroves to the landing where the bus stopped, I sat opposite a chubby teenage girl. Her T-shirt had on it a drawing of a cat sprawled drunk in front of a television, under the caption HAPPINESS IS A TIGHT PUSSY. I had to assume that no one, starting with her mother, got the joke. The low gray skies of the river delta—we had not seen the sun once in Nukui—now opened and drenched us with cold rain. We spread ponchos over our packs. We were definitely in the wrong part of Fiji. The place had three hundred islands.

 • • • 

SUVA IS A RAIN-GREEN, bustling city, the biggest in the South Pacific. It straddles a hilly peninsula above a broad blue harbor. We stayed in an affable dive—half brothel, half dormitory—called the Harbourview. The owners were an Indian family. Half the population of Fiji (and most of the business class) is ethnically Indian. Sailors of every known nationality reeled into the Harbourview’s bar at night, got into old-fashioned fistfights, and took the bargirls upstairs. We slept and stored our gear in a stifling room with many bunk beds for a few bucks a night. Downtown Suva was full of tourists, expats, cruise-ship passengers. We each lucked into brief flings with Australian lasses on their way through.

Our plan was to head west, and maybe back south to some promising-looking islands out in the swell window. Suva is a popular stopover for cruising yachts, so we scoured the noticeboard at the Royal Suva Yacht Club for sailboats looking for crew. While we waited for something to come through, I started spending my days in the Suva City Library. It was in a fine, airy colonial building on the waterfront. At one of its wide mahogany reading tables, I made a new start on my railroad novel, in longhand, with new main characters.

There were a couple of surf yachts docked in Suva. One belonged to an American with a Tahitian girlfriend. He was heading west but his boat, Capella, was small. The other was a fifty-five-foot Australian ketch called Alias. It had a rust-streaked hull and a salty, heavy-weather look, with frayed, old-fashioned fittings and bicycles and surfboards lashed to the bow rails. I guessed the boat was eighty years old. It turned out to be two. A surfer commune had built it from scratch near Perth, in Western Australia, with stolen wood and parts and scavenged tools. The women in the group had waitressed to keep the workers fed. The hull was ferrocement. A tall, sun-wrecked, curly-haired character named Mick told us the boat’s story. Alias had barely survived its maiden voyage, he said, after its novice sailors, impatient for wind, took it far south, into the Roaring Forties, and got clobbered by a gale. “Seas were as high as the mast,” Mick said. “Got knocked down once. We were all down below, praying. Thought we were going to die.” When they limped into South Australia, half the group disembarked, swearing off sailing forever. Four people—two couples—had stayed. Now Mick’s girlfriend, Jane, was heavily pregnant, so Alias would be going nowhere until after she delivered.

One morning, while I happened to be visiting, the marine radio on Alias crackled with a fragment of electrifying news. I missed it, but Mick did not. He yelled as if he’d been shot. “Graham!” Graham was the other surfer aboard. He appeared in the companionway, two narrowed bright eyes surrounded by a blond lion’s mane. “‘A perfect three-hundred-yard left,’” Mick said. “That’s what I just heard. I think it was Gary, calling his mate here.” What he meant, he explained to me later, was that a third surf yacht, skippered by an American named Gary, was in Fiji. Gary had been traveling with Capella, but he had gone ahead alone a few weeks before. The radio call was clearly about a discovery somewhere to the west. Mick went to work on the guy who had received the call. He was a plump, wary fellow named Jim, and he was not happy to be getting the third degree from a tall, determined Aussie. He eventually allowed that Gary was sailing in the Yasawa Group, in northwest Fiji, and had apparently found waves up there. That made no sense. The Yasawas were blocked from receiving south swells by an archipelago called the Mamanucas and by a very large, reef-encircled area west of Viti Levu known as the Nadi Waters.

 • • • 

A NOTICE WENT UP: a yacht seeking crew. While I wrote down the particulars, a young Englishman also checking the noticeboard told me that he had just left the yacht in question. “Don’t do it, mate,” he said. The skipper, he said, was a maniac. An American. His entire crew had deserted here in Suva, after one short crossing, and the same thing had happened to the same skipper plenty of times before. “Once you’re at sea, he starts shouting abuse nonstop,” the Englishman said. He gave a persuasive little shudder. “Just another New Yorker battling his way through paradise.”

We ended up leaving Suva on a westbound bus. The south coast of Viti Levu was dense with small towns and fishing villages. As we left the wet zone, rain forest gave way to small sugarcane farms. There were signs for tourist resorts tucked away in sunny bays. Craning to catch glimpses of waves, we saw nothing too encouraging. There was swell, but the reef was mostly quite far out, and the trades were still onshore.

The obvious place to start looking for surf was in the southwest corner of Viti Levu. That region comprised a lacuna, unfortunately, in our chart collection. At the chandlery where I got the charts, in California, the clerk had said that this one chart had, absurdly, remained classified since World War II, when the Allies, concerned about a Japanese attack—Fiji would have made a good staging ground for assaults on New Zealand and Australia—didn’t want maps of the shipping entrance to the Nadi Waters in free circulation. So we were employing even more guesswork than usual. Still, it was clear from any land map that we should check out the mouth of the Sigatoka River, which drained most of west Viti Levu, and then work our way west from there.

The Sigatoka River mouth turned out to be a spooky patch of coast. For a start, there were huge sand dunes. I had never seen anything like them in the tropics, and the villagers we met in the neighborhood were unanimous: the dunes were unnatural. Indeed, they were haunted. The surf breaking off the dunes was also, in my experience, a tropical first. It was a big, cold, foggy beachbreak. It belonged in Oregon or Northern California, not Fiji. The water was cold because the mighty Sigatoka debouched at the east end of the beach. And the big river brought not only chilly, brown, semifresh water from the mountains but a steady supply of dead animals, muddy reed mats, plastic bags, and other garbage. All this stuff came swirling and bobbing through the lineup. The waves, however, were good, particularly in the mornings. They were shifty, powerful A-frames. Pig corpses aside, these were the best waves we had surfed in the South Pacific. There was no village near the surf—see haunted dunes, above—so we hiked west until we found a small grove of trees in a gully behind a high dune. It was a well-protected spot, both from the trade winds and from intruders, who could approach from only one direction. We camped there.

Aboard Alias, Suva Harbor, Fiji, 1978

The tent we carried was too small for both of us to sleep in comfortably. I preferred sleeping outside anyway. But the gully where we camped had an unusual amount of ground-level night life—rats, crabs, snakes, centipedes, and I didn’t want to know what else. I strung up a hammock and slept better there. For supplies, we hiked inland to a village called Yadua. We made tea on a little cooking ring fired by a blue Gaz propane cartridge. For bigger productions, like oatmeal or canned corned beef, we built a fire. One night, heavy rain chased me into the tent. I didn’t like being crammed against Bryan, and I imagined he didn’t care for it either. I crawled out at first light. The garbage in the surf was thicker than ever, with the runoff from the downpour, but the swell was clean and had built overnight.

Down toward the river mouth there was a reliable channel running out to sea. We used that to paddle out. But when the surf got big—over six feet—there were outer sandbars that started breaking, and the wisps of dank fog that drifted out from the dunes over the dun-colored water—perfect clammy products of the weird Sigatoka microclimate—made it feel like there might be something much larger lurking out there, a huge set preparing to mow us under. As it was, I took some memorable beatings after going left, surfing away from the channel. I kept telling myself to take only rights, but then a big, sweet left wall would appear, and I would find I lacked the willpower to say no. Did I mention that the place felt sharky? Fishermen in Yadua, when they heard we were entering the ocean there, told us, with something between disgust and alarm, that we were nuts. That beach was a shark pit. With all the offal in the water, we had already assumed that. But shark attack was a distant third on my own list of Sigatoka worries, after, one, drowning under a rogue set and, two, contracting some hideous illness from the waterborne filth.

Bryan turned thirty while we were camped there. He only told me about it later. I was a bit stunned. It seemed like such a strange secret to keep. Or maybe “secret” was the wrong word. It was just silence, really, a form of privacy, a refusal of some obvious, conventional sentiment, and as such, very Bryan. For all the intensity of our friendship, and despite our now constant companionship, I always felt, in some basic way, shut out. Was it me in particular, or the world in general, that he seemed to keep his guard up against habitually? The old-school masculinity that so many people, including me, found attractive carried with it no small loneliness. Then Bryan double-surprised me by saying that he could not think of a better way to spend his thirtieth birthday: surfing good waves at an unmapped spot in the South Seas, gone from the known world.

Was he really happy? I wasn’t, especially. I was intent on our search, determined to keep pushing, and I could feel deeply satisfied by a good surf session. I was also interested in Fiji, which presented not only an abundance of the preindustrial village life I wanted to lose myself in but also more social complexity, livelier politics, and many more women of interest than Tonga or Western Samoa had. (Australians counted.) Still, I was anxious frequently, and given to lacerating self-doubt. And I obviously didn’t see Bryan the same way he saw himself, which I found disorienting.

To me, he seemed to be going troppo. He said he was delighted to be here, but that wasn’t how it looked. Tiny hassles, and all kinds of innocuous people we met, annoyed him, I thought, unduly. He had taken to pacing, with hunched shoulders, furrowed brow, hands locked behind his back, and to sighing, and pronouncing, with exaggerated precision, on the idiocy of various people and things. That bus driver who told us we could walk from Sigatoka town to the coast? He didn’t know where the ocean was any more than he knew where his side of the road was. That walleyed lady who ran the Harbourview? She was a crook and a menace. I actually thought Bryan was getting scary. He was certainly making me nervous.

We started drinking kava with some guys in Yadua. They had a shack on the edge of the settlement, which was near a paved artery called the Queens Road, making it feel more like a little highway town than a traditional subsistence village. And yet the kava ceremony proceeded much as it did anywhere else. It started in the late afternoon. We would head over there after the surf blew out. We sometimes stumbled back to camp at midnight. The regulars at the kava shack were fishermen who kept their boats in a cove just west of the dunes, but other men from Yadua also came. The only woman around was the wife of a guy named Waqa. She helped prepare and serve the grog. People were curious, of course, about the camping palagis—kaivalagis, in Fiji—but they were also remarkably cool, I thought, with us, letting us explain ourselves at our own pace, or not.

I loved watching people chat, even when I understood nothing, which was often, since they usually spoke Fijian. They seemed to have an enormous repertoire of gentle, intricate social expressions. They used their mouths, hands, eyes—all the usual communication apparatus—but also chins, brows, shoulders, everything. Watching people listen was even better. There was a lovely, widely shared mannerism that I couldn’t recall seeing before: a slight, jerky shifting of the head from side to side; a constant cocking of the neck, notch by notch, the way a bird does. I read it as a gesture of extreme tolerance. The listener was continually resettling his mind at different angles in order to take in different speakers, different impressions, with maximum equanimity. We kaivalagis provoked a visible speedup of this mental-spinal repositioning, I thought, but that might have been paranoia.

Bryan, meanwhile, was assailing my equanimity with his testiness to a degree that no amount of head-bobbing would let me tolerate. One night, lit with kava courage, I announced that I was sick of walking on eggs around him. He announced, astonished, that he was sick of walking on eggs around me. We hiked back to camp under a gibbous moon in a jolly mood. I said I hoped his tent was full of scorpions. He hoped I fell out of my hammock. The expression, anyway, was walking on eggshells, not eggs.

 • • • 

THE MORE WE STARED at the Yasawas on the map—these were the islands where the American yachties had supposedly found waves—the dumber the idea seemed. They were blocked from south swells, period. Still, we went up to Lautoka, a port in northwest Viti Levu. Boats ran from there to the Yasawas. We dithered on the quay, pricing ferries, asking questions. Nothing we heard changed our minds: going out there with surfboards was silly. We gave up on the whole west Fiji idea, defeated, and booked an early-morning bus back to Suva. But we got only as far as the station. Bryan had a bellyache that was getting worse. An all-day bus ride was not on. We returned to our hotel. Bryan went back to bed. I strolled around Lautoka.

That afternoon I saw a strange thing on the street: blond hair. A young white woman, no less. I followed her into a café and introduced myself. She was from New Zealand, named Lynn, and happy to chat. Over coffee, she said that she was on a yacht with a couple of American guys, including her boyfriend, and a Tahitian woman.

Where had they been sailing? I asked.

They had been anchored off a little uninhabited island for weeks, she said, “so the boys could surf.”

Oh.

She knew she was spilling a secret. But she seemed to relish the mischief. Her boyfriend was a schoolteacher in American Samoa, she said, John Ritter.

I knew him, I said. In truth, another surfer-teacher on Guam had told us to look up Ritter in Pago Pago, but we had never made it there. This was fantastic, I said. Take me to him, I said.

She did.

Ritter was startled when I turned up with Lynn, and visibly alarmed when I started rattling off the names of surfers he knew on Guam and insisting he come to our hotel to meet Bryan. Ritter was soft-spoken, watchful, in his late twenties. He had bushy, sun-whitened hair and granny glasses patched with duct tape. He didn’t try to hide his irritation with Lynn. But then he seemed to decide that the jig was up, and he agreed to come have a beer.

The wave, he told us, was not in the Yasawas. That was a ruse. It was in the Mamanucas, which made way more sense. Actually, it was out on the Malolo barrier reef, which protected the Mamanucas, on the southern edge of the Nadi Waters. The island was called Tavarua. It was roughly five miles off west Viti Levu. The wave wrapped all the way around the west side of the island and broke back into the trades. Ritter drew a rough map on a napkin. It could be fickle, he said. It needed the right swell. He didn’t seem to want to say more.

The next day, while we were getting ready to go investigate, I found the missing chart. Bizarrely, it was in a rack of tourist brochures. The prohibited chart had been used as the backdrop for a placemat-sized ad for a “three day magical lagoon cruise” on a yacht running out of a resort down the coast. The ad was on heavy browned paper, with ragged, scrolled edges drawn to look like a pirate-age treasure map. The chart, evidently pulled from somebody’s prewar library, was the real thing, however, the missing piece in our collection. Tavarua was on it, and the long barrier reef running northwest from the island, with “Blind Rollers” and “Breaks Heavily” and “Awash” written along its billows. The closest village to Tavarua on Viti Levu was called Nabila.

We took a bus there. The village was several miles from a paved road. There was a miniature sugarcane railway running under burnt brown hills. Mangroves grew in dull profusion along a waveless coast. The bus stopped under a breadfruit tree. “Nabila,” the driver said. The village was hot, silent, sleepy. There seemed to be nobody around. We climbed a big hill that rose behind the village, slowly winding past thatch-roofed, mud-walled huts into which surprised-looking children scampered. They didn’t see a lot of tourists here. The trail was dusty and very hot. A few hundred feet up, we came to a good lookout spot. We turned and trained our binoculars on the tiny island across the channel. We were looking straight into the wave. It was coming from the northwest, having wrapped nearly 180 degrees. It was a long, tapering—a very long, very precisely tapering—left. The walls were dark gray against a pale gray sea. This was it. The lineup had an unearthly symmetry. Breaking waves peeled so evenly that they looked like still photographs. There seemed to be no sections. This was it. Staring through the binoculars, I forgot to breathe for entire six-wave sets. This, by God, was it.

 • • • 

THE FISHERMEN WHO TOOK US across from Nabila had never seen a surfboard before. They had never seen even a photo or a drawing of one. They refused to believe that we rode waves on them. They figured our boards were little airplane wings. Did we use them for fishing? When we got to Tavarua, coasting in with outboard engine lifted through a coral-studded channel on the northeast shore, we could see that the swell had dropped sharply from the day before. It actually looked too small to ride now. But our companions would be confirmed in their doubts if they didn’t see some surfing, so I quickly paddled out. The water over the reef was absurdly shallow, less than a foot deep, and the waves were knee-high and weak and really too quick to surf. But I managed to snag one, and when I jumped to my feet I could hear shouts and whistles coming from the beach. I rode for a few yards, then bellied in. The swell we had seen from the hillside was dead.

Tavarua Island, Fiji, 1978

By staying for even that short demonstration, our friends had been trapped by a dropping tide. They tied their boat to a tree. It was soon left high on the sand. There were four of them, all ethnic Indians. Bob was the leader. Stout, voluble, middle-aged, he liked to shout orders at Peter, his nephew, who was twenty-nine. Then there was an eight-year-old boy, Atiljan, and a thin, quiet, very old man with a white mustache. Bob and Peter were full of instructions for us. First, the snakes. Banded sea snakes, highly poisonous, would come ashore by the hundreds each night in search of freshwater. “Play with the snake, you will have to suffer,” Peter said. He went down the beach, quickly found a snake, grabbed it behind the head, and held it up. It was about four feet long, striped black and white, with a paddlelike tail. Peter returned it gently to the water. We had heard that this snake (Laticauda colubrina), whose name in Fijian is dadakulachi, was nicknamed the three-step snake, since that was how far you were likely to get if it bit you. It was supposedly the sixth-deadliest snake in the world, firing a fatal cocktail of neurotoxins and myotoxins through its fangs. The good news was that its mouth was very small. Peter showed us how to make a fist while handling one, or while paddling past one, so that it could not bite between one’s fingers.

And between one’s toes?

Peter shrugged. They were normally not aggressive.

Bob showed us three big piles of dry wood at the edge of the jungle on the eastern shore. These, he said, were for signal fires. Fishermen used them to communicate with their families on Viti Levu. One fire meant you were fine—just staying the night to avoid rough water. Two fires meant you were not fine and would need help. “Maybe the engine not working.” Three fires meant an emergency. If one of us got badly hurt, we should light three fires at nightfall. A boat would come, “even if bad weather.”

They showed us where wild papaya trees grew, not too far into the bush, and where good eating fish tended to run near shore at high tide. The tide was coming in now, and would soon be full enough, I thought, to let them cross the reef, but Bob said the wind was blowing too hard. They would spend the night. He would light one of the signal fires later to let their families in Nabila know they were here. Peter took a handline to the fishing spot and quickly caught a string of a dozen grey mullet. We grilled them on sticks, ate with our fingers, and washed the meal down with green coconut milk. Bob inspected our supplies. He was not impressed with our unused fishing gear. He ordered Peter to leave us some stouter line and better hooks. High above us, the wind thrashed in the coconut trees. The sun dropped into the western Mamanucas.

Our campsite, which was at the edge of the jungle, facing the wave, was well sheltered from the trades and included what the Nabila men said was the only man-made structure on Tavarua: a fish-drying rack. The rack, which consisted of six short wooden poles driven into the sand and a thatch netting, was about two feet off the ground. It was the size and shape of a single bed. I tested the strength of its thatch. It seemed sturdy. Bob nodded approvingly. That was a good place to sleep, he said. The snakes, which were fast in the water but inept on land, could not climb those poles. Bryan planned to sleep in the tent. He had it pitched and zipped tight, and he let me know, with sign language, that if he ever found the zipped mesh left open I could expect to be tortured with sharpened stakes and Bob’s machete and our can opener. A brain fork—a popular Fiji tourist souvenir, purportedly used in cannibal days—might also come into play.

The moon rose. Peter, staring into the fire, told us that his hair was cut short and strangely because he had recently lost his father. Peter had a cheerful, innocently confiding manner. He was tall, toothy, unshaven. His personal life sounded complicated. He talked about a girlfriend toward whom his intentions were unsettled. “If I leave her, she must marry,” he said. “She cannot stay home. You know the peoples, they cannot stay without sex.” Bob ordered him to go check on the boat, which now needed an anchor set. Peter jumped up and threw off his clothes. Bob said, “Get on, you bloody bastard, he doesn’t want to look at your dirty prick!” Peter loped off into the dark.

Bob rolled up in my board bag. Peter used Bryan’s like a sleeping bag, draping the end flap over his head like a hood. The old man kept the fire going. Each time he threw on a dry palm frond, Peter would wake up and whip out a paperback and read a few lines by the light. His book was a detective novel in Hindi with a garish, worn cover. Little Atiljan slept in a nest of green leaves he had made. The old man did not sleep. He quietly prayed and sang, and his songs and prayers threaded through my dreams. He had a very thin face and high, sharp cheekbones. Whenever the fire flared, I could see he was gazing east, out into the night, at Nabila, across the channel.

 • • • 

ON THE FIFTH DAY, or maybe it was the sixth, we surfed. It was still too small, really, but we were so surf-starved by then that we scrambled out at the first hint of a swell. Thigh-high waves zipped down the reef, most of them too fast to make. The few we made, though, were astounding. They had a slingshot aspect. If you could get in early, top-turn, gather just enough speed that the hook didn’t pass you by, and then set the right line, the wave seemed to lift the tail of the board and hurl it down the line, on and on and on, with the lip throwing just over your back continually—a critical moment that is normally no more than a moment but that seemed to last, impossibly, for half a minute or more. The water got shallower and shallower and even the best rides didn’t end well. But the speed runs were dreamlike. I had never seen a wave peel so mechanically.

As the tide peaked, something very odd happened. The wind quit and the water, already extremely clear, became more so. It was midday, and the straight-overhead sun rendered the water invisible. It was as if we were suspended above the reef, floating on a cushion of nothing, unable even to judge the depth unless we happened to kick a coral head. Approaching waves were like optical illusions. You could look straight through them, at the sky and sea and sea bottom behind them. And when I caught one and stood up, it disappeared. I was flying down the line but all I could see was brilliant reef streaming under my feet. It was like surfing on air. The wave was so small and clear that I couldn’t distinguish the wave face from the flats in front of the wave from the flats behind the wave. It was all just clear water. I had to surf by feel. This was truly dreamlike. When I felt the wave accelerate, I crouched for speed, and suddenly I could see it again—because the waist-high crest, seen from down there, was higher than the horizon.

The trades puffed, the surface riffled, and the hyperclarity was gone.

The tide dropped and we were back on the beach.

Our hands, feet, knees, forearms, and Bryan’s back all streamed bright blood from brushes with the reef. Even medium tide seemed to be out of the question.

 • • • 

I HAD WRITTEN BY HAND eight pages of first-aid instructions in a small all-purpose notebook. Infections, fractures, shock, burns, poisoning, head wounds, heat exhaustion, even gunshot wounds—the basics of field treatment were spelled out in careful lists, extensively underlined. I had no training, and neither, as far as I knew, did Bryan. But I showed him where the instructions were, between drawings of Nuku’alofa and notes for my railroad novel, and I sometimes reread them myself, trying to commit the material to memory. Not much stuck. Near-drowning, splinting, tourniquets, unconscious victim—it felt, to my primitive mind, like bad luck to picture this stuff too clearly. Bryan mused that something common, like appendicitis, could quickly finish off one of us out here. We’d have to wait till nightfall even to light the signal fires. True enough, I thought, but, again, bad luck to imagine.

It took twenty-five minutes to walk around the island, if you didn’t rush. Bryan counted the fresh snake tracks across the beach one morning: 117. The snakes were, as Bob said, ungainly on land. It took them minutes to cross the ten yards of sand between the high-tide line and the jungle. They were easy to spot and, indeed, not aggressive. Away from the campfire at night, a flashlight was useful to avoid stepping on one. But most of my close encounters with dadakulachi were in the water, where they were plentiful, both on the surface and in the depths, both on the reef and in the lagoon.

Everything was plentiful on the reef: urchins, eels, octopus, and, by my conservative estimate, eight million species of fish. I swam out every day at high tide, drifting with mask and snorkel but no fins or spear, following schools of ridiculously beautiful creatures through shallow coral canyons, around great crimson fans and stolid greenish brain-lumps and wicked-looking staghorn. I recognized a few familiar faces: parrot fish, goatfish, triggerfish (humuhumu!), grouper. There seemed to be a hundred different types of wrasse. There were angelfish, goby, puffer fish. I thought I saw sweetlips, tilefish, surgeonfish, snappers, blenny, coral breams, Moorish idols. I did see barracuda and a small whitetip shark. And yet, to me, most of the countless fish going about their business on the Tavarua foreshore were nameless, mysterious. Some were so pointlessly gorgeous I found myself groaning in my snorkel.

Our fishing was pitiful. Even with the hooks and line the guys had left, and knowing the best spot and tide, we couldn’t seem to catch a thing. I pried an octopus off the reef, pounded and boiled it to a fare-thee-well, using way too much freshwater, and it was still too tough to eat. (I should have used salt, I learned later. That was if we had salt.) We did a piss-poor job generally of living off the land and sea. We soon picked and ate all the ripe papayas we could find. I climbed the shortest, most wind-bent palm trees for green coconuts, but I was defeated by the taller, straighter trees. There were lots of beefy bats with yellow-striped faces—they hung like gray seedpods in the upper story of the jungle by day and swooped overhead at night—that would probably have made great fruit-bat soup. We had no notion how to catch them. There were crabs of various types, but the ones that looked like the best eating lost their allure when we saw how efficiently they excavated and devoured human excrement.

We had brought food, in any case. Cans of pork and beans, beef stew, corned beef, packaged soups, ramen, crackers, jam. And just enough water. There was no potable water on the island. The dadakulachi drank, apparently, dewdrops and tiny mud puddles in the bush. We wished we had thought to bring something sweet. We reminisced about favorite meals back in the world—fried chicken, big American hamburgers. Even the goat chow mein in Suva came to seem delicious in memory. We made a list of every bar in Missoula, Montana, where either of us had ever had a drink, coming up with fifty-three. We were becoming characters, we knew, in a desert-island cartoon. “Do me a favor, will you—stop saying ‘entre nous.’” At night we saw airliners flying overhead, and ships passing into the Nadi Waters, headed for Lautoka, all ablaze with lights. We were like cargo cultists, agog at the idea of electric lights. I particularly missed chairs.

Bob and the gang returned, as arranged, after a week. We left our boards and most of our gear on the island, went into Nadi, a market town south of Lautoka, bought more supplies, and were back on Tavarua the next afternoon.

 • • • 

THE FIRST SOLID SWELL hit the next week, around the first of August. There were head-high days. There were overhead days. Oneiric, highly charged, the sessions run together in memory. On August 24, according to my journal, it was double-overhead.

The wave had a thousand moods, but in general it got better as it got bigger. At six feet it was easily the best wave either of us had ever seen. Scaled up, the mechanical regularity of the speeding hook gained soul, its roaring, sparkling depths and vaulted ceiling like some kind of recurring miracle, the tracery on the surface and the ribbed power in the wall full of delicate, now visible detail, each wave suffused with the richness of a one-off. Sometimes the wind swung east, blowing into the hook and sending a hard chop up the face, particularly in the last hundred yards to the channel. When the wind blew south or southwest, it came around the west side of the island, making a mess of the waves as they approached us on the half-mile-long wrap from the southern edge of the reef. But then they cleaned up suddenly as they made the last turn into the lineup, and the slingshot aspect of the wave was doubled by a trailing wind that slipped under your board and whispered, Go.

We slowly figured out the takeoff. There were extra-tall trees that, triangulated, worked as lineup markers, and reliable boils over big coral heads near what seemed to be the uppermost takeoff spot. The current ranged from slack to fierce, and it ran both up and down the reef, depending on the tidal flow. As the surf got bigger, breaking out in deeper water, being dashed on the reef receded as an issue. But it was still important to get in early. Catching the wave, even at the optimal spot, was like jumping on a train that was not slowing down. It helped to paddle deep, stroke hard against the grain of the water drawing off the reef, and then angle left as the wave began to lift your board, digging extra-hard into the bottom of the face, jumping up early, finding the speed in the wave’s belly with a quick pump before picking a line—before setting, that is, an initial course, to be intricately adjusted as the wave unfurled. When it got bigger and more consistent, deciding which wave to go on was a challenge in itself. What I struggled with then was adrenaline overflow. Paddling over the first wave of a set, seeing the lines stacked up behind it, with the next wave already cracking and peeling far up the reef, I would find myself gasping, heart slamming, mind juddering. What to do? I had never, in a lifetime of surfing, been confronted with such abundance.

It was, for me, as a regularfoot, a considerable irony that the wave was a left. I could surf it only half as well as I might have surfed a comparable right. My backhand technique improved, though. Esoteric questions of rail unweighting that I had never considered were suddenly illuminated in the endless screaming run under the endlessly pitching lip. I began switching rails straight off the bottom turn, keeping my outside rail, my toe rail, down on the water even as I tracked up the face, thus staying ready to bank downward on an instant’s notice, and not letting the offshore breeze get under my board and blow me up higher than I wanted to be. My board went faster than I thought a board could go. I learned to relax, to a degree, in critical positions where my instincts shouted that it was time to brace for impact. Again, it seemed that, on this wave, that last-second moment could go on for a very, very long time.

Bryan was on his frontside. He could rise to his feet on the drop and watch the whole thing come to him. He didn’t have to twist and look over his shoulder. He could let his left hand trail on the face. He refused to hurry, even when I thought he should. The first part of the wave, where you had to quickly get up to speed, sometimes picked him off when a couple of scrambling pumps near the top after the takeoff might have let him escape and set sail. But he didn’t appreciate my saying so, and the stylishness of his attack was unimpeachable—the casual entrance, the bullfighter’s calm as the wave stormed around him, then climbing and dropping in long arcs at hull speed. Bryan was still surfing Rainbows, I thought, back on Maui, drawing his own idiosyncratic lines far from the madding crowd, and I was still surfing Honolua, high-amping because I thought the wave demanded it.

Paddling back out after a long ride was a nerve test. Exalted and depleted both, I found I could not calmly watch another set pour through unridden. I was hardwired to grab a wave, even just an end-section. The idea that there would be more, that in ten minutes we would very likely be looking at another, equally good set from a much better takeoff spot far, far up the reef, simply had no traction in the psychology of scarcity, which was still mine. Bryan laughed unsympathetically as I hesitated, moaning, hyperventilating.

Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, and therefore nothing to say. “Look at this one” felt like grandiloquence. And it was only inadequate shorthand for “My God, look at this one.” Which was in turn inadequate. It wasn’t that the waves beggared language. It was more like they scrambled it. One overcast afternoon, with a southwest wind scrawling small-bore chop like scrollwork across the approaching faces, I realized I was seeing long German words in Gothic script, Arbeiterpartei and Oberkommando and Weltanshauung and Götterdämmerung, marching incongruously across the warm gray walls. I had been reading, in my hammock, John Toland’s biography of Hitler. Bryan had read it before me. I told him what I was seeing. “Blitzkrieg,” he muttered. “Molotov-Ribbentrop.”

I rode a wave one evening, long after the sun had set, with the first stars already out, that stood up and seemed to bend off the reef toward open water, which was impossible. There was a dark, bottle-green light in the bottom of the wall and a feathering whiteness overhead. Everything else—the wind-riffled face, the channel ahead, the sky—was in shades of blue-blackness. As it bent, and then bent some more, I found myself seemingly surfing toward north Viti Levu, toward the mountain range where the sun rose. Not possible, my mind said. Keep going. The wave felt like a test of faith, or a test of sanity, or an enormous, undeserved gift. The laws of physics appeared to have been relaxed. A hollow wave was roaring off into deeper water. Not possible. It felt like a runaway train, an eruption of magical realism, with that ocean-bottom light and the lacy white canopy. I ran with it. Eventually, it bent back, of course, found the reef, and tapered into the channel. I didn’t tell Bryan about it. He wouldn’t believe me. That wave was otherworldly.

Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They’re quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell. The best days at the best breaks have a Platonic aspect—they begin to embody a model of what surfers want waves to be. But that’s the end of it, that beginning. Bryan had no interest in perfection, it seemed to me, and his indifference represented, among the surfers I’ve known, a rare degree of realism, maturity, and philosophical appreciation of what waves are. I didn’t have much interest in the perfection chimera myself. More than he did, though.

Another last-wave-of-the-day, this one at the end of the longest single session we had on Tavarua. The surf was big—this may have been August 24, the day my journal said was double-overhead—and we had abandoned our established policy of surfing only at high tide. The wave was ridable at lower tides, perhaps even at low tide, provided it was big enough, we saw now. I had been out nearly all day, from sketchy midtide when only the brawniest turquoise screamers cleared the reef by a reasonable margin, through peak tide and the peak of the swell, when the biggest sets actually swung wide, breaking out so far and in such deep water that they sometimes lost the reef and shouldered, rumbling straight in for five or ten seconds, big solid walls of foam with no breaking hook, until they felt the reef again and the walls stood up and resumed their wailing progress. A couple of sets had scared me, not because I took any especially bad beatings, or because I was held underwater extra-long, but simply because the waves were now stepladdering into serious size and I had brief, unpleasant visions of finding something from another realm behind the big wave I was already scratching to get over. Maybe we had no idea what this place was capable of, and the price for all this joy and good luck was about to be exacted? It was the first time I had been afraid of the waves on Tavarua. My fears were unnecessary. Nothing too heavy came. Instead, I caught and rode so many waves, through four or five distinct phases of the day, that I felt absolutely saturated with good fortune, and more deeply connected to the rhythms of the wave than ever before.

And so came that last wave. The tide was dropping. Bryan had already gone in. The swell was also dropping. The wind had clocked around and gone light northeast—onshore—making for messy conditions and a hard-looking, army-green surface that resembled Ventura more than it did the tropics. A very solid set appeared, backlit and thundering far up the reef. I paddled over a couple, having learned a measure of patience, and took the third wave. It was bumpy but beautifully shaped, and I hurried because the onshore wind was likely to make it crumble quickly. That happened. The wave also swung around harder than most, so that the long wall ahead seemed to be hitting the reef all at once, peeling even faster than usual. I began to wish I had not chosen this wave, but it was too late to pull out or even, I realized, dive off—the tide seemed to have dropped two feet since my previous wave, and coral heads were suddenly boiling up everywhere. Worse, the wave seemed to be growing as it ran down the reef. It was now several feet overhead and the face was not clean. There were weird little sections and chandeliers falling and throwing. But it was extremely fast and I was low in the face and now it was dredging, sucking all the water off the reef. I had, again, no exit, no choice but to drive, pedal smashed to the floor. After a rapid-fire series of critical sections, surfing blind, things happening too fast for me to react except instinctively, I came skittering out into the channel. I lay down on my board, shaking. Then I struggled in, paddling against the current. On the beach, I got only halfway up to our campsite. On my knees in the sand, in the twilight, absolutely spent, I was surprised to find myself sobbing.

 • • • 

WE DIDN’T ALWAYS SURF ALONE. John Ritter and his friends came back and anchored outside the channel. There was no swell at the time, though, and they left without surfing again. Alias and Capella also came, and they got waves. Bryan and I actually served as pilots on Alias. We took that bus, finally, from Lautoka to Suva, got mail from home for the first time in months at General Delivery—our loved ones seemed to be fine, carrying on in a parallel universe—and then, finding that Mick now had mostly correct coordinates for the wave, we sailed back west on the cement ketch. Alias anchored off Tavarua, and we went back to camping on the island. A swell hit the next day, and Mick and Graham, both goofyfoots, were gobsmacked. They surfed themselves silly. Graham, in particular, was a lovely surfer. When the swell dropped, they sailed to Nadi. Capella also left. Then, as soon as the yachts were gone, more waves arrived, with a light southwest wind, the trailing wind that slipped under your board and whispered, Go.

We went.

By the time we left Tavarua that year, we figured nine surfers knew about the wave. That number included a couple of Aussie crew guys and it assumed that Ritter and Gary were the first to surf there. In the small world of surfing, the wave was a major discovery. In the scarcity logic of that world, it was essential to keep it a secret. We all swore a vow of silence. Bryan and I got in the habit of saying “da kine,” Hawaiian pidgin for whatchamacallit, when we meant Tavarua, even with each other. Mick and Graham, with whom we ultimately sailed away on Alias, called it Magic Island—an uninspired name, I thought (but there were worse to come).

From a vine on the island I took a handful of tiny, bright red-and-black seeds. On the night after we left, we got roaring drunk on Alias while at anchor off a resort near Nadi. I woke up with a freshly pierced right ear and one of the bright seeds hanging on a fishhook from the hole. Within days, the ear was horribly infected. I sent the rest of the seeds to Sharon, suggesting she string them on a necklace. She did, but later told me that she never wore the necklace because the seeds gave her a rash.