Coastalsurvey

Deserted pointbreak, Pacific coast of Mexico

From below, it looks like the bottom of a thundercloud — dark and roiling — until it begins to bend. Get too close to the curve and it will suck you over. So you hug the bottom, swimming seaward like a turtle trying to dodge an oil tanker. When the shadow passes overhead and the roar of the monster recedes, you swim for the light. You surface in blue water at the edge of a hissing field of white foam, gulping air, mouth open wide trying to fill your lungs. In another minute everything would be fine, but you don’t have a minute: the next wave is already feathering, towering over you and falling so hard it kicks the air right out of your chest.

After that, a few frantic seconds of consciousness, a terrible realization, perhaps peacefulness, and then . . . nada.

At least that’s how I think it goes, or went, for that guy I found on the beach.

We had arrived in Puerto Escondido, on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, by way of the overnight bus from San Cristobal. After finding a hotel on the Playa Zicaleta, Harry and I went for a swim.

That evening I walked down the beach to check the surf. The winds were still onshore and swell has some size — maybe double overhead on the sets — but no shape.

That’s when I saw him. A guy about my age, flat on his back at the center of a crowd of tourists. His face was as white as paper and his lips were blue. A surfer kneeled over him, applying CPR. The crowd stood around expectantly, waiting for the swimmer to revive like on television. But this wasn’t TV. He was already dead.

Later that evening, in the bar overlooking the beach, Harry and I drank bittersweet margaritas while the sun dropped into the ocean. “L’hora felis,” Harry said. “Happy yet?”

“Maybe another round,” I suggested.

When the drinks came, Harry raised his glass. “Here’s to keeping air in your lungs.”

In the mornings at Puerto Escondido the wind blowing off the land carried the smoke of brush fires. The waves were at their best when those offshore winds were blowing, usually from sunup to about nine. Most mornings I surfed Puenta Escondida, a fat left pointbreak south of the main beach. The swell never reached the epic proportions I had seen in photographs of the place, but it never dropped below head high either.

Puerto Escondido was once truly hidden, a sleepy little fishing village best reached by boat. Then in 1970, a road was built from the Rio Verde that connected Puerto Escondido to Acalpulco and the rest of the world…Surfers began to hear stories about a flyspeck town in Oaxaca with a tiny sheltered bay and, further south, a beachbreak with enough size and power to warrant comparisons with the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii. In the 1980s the surf magazines put the “Mexpipe” on the map, and now it has an international jetport and an international parade of surfers, posers and scenesters.

Harry left in the middle of the first week. Not being a surfer, he couldn’t appreciate the satisfying monotony of the eat-sleep-surf routine. He went back to New York to be with his girlfriend and to look for work. I had no girlfriend and no real desire to work, so I stayed. I planned to head up the coast as far as San Blas, near Mantachen Bay, rumored to be the longest right-hand pointbreak in the world.

Grocery run, Puerto Escondido

Yet I found it difficult to leave Puerto Escondido. Somehow, I let two tickets lapse before I finally boarded a bus to Acapulco at dawn on the morning after Easter.

This bus was a semidirecto on the Estrella Blanca line. The Mexican government subsidizes many of the bus lines since it is the only form of transportation in much of the country, consequently Mexican buses are cheap and go almost anywhere. My ticket for the day-long drive to Acapulco cost only $12 at the current exchange rates.

The road gradually pulled away from the coast and into the brown foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur. The country was exceptionally dry. Later that season brush fires would burn and keep burning until the cloud of smoke reached Texas.

The switch backs on that section of the Cartera Costera are relentless and every half-mile, it seems, there is another detour around another washout. The State of Oaxaca has deployed many men to fix these roads, but has provided few tools. In the US the construction of a short bridge with a conduit beneath it would require earth movers, pile drivers and cranes; in Oaxaca the highway department simply dispatches a dozen men with shovels and a wheelbarrow. Of course, there is no money for things like bulldozers, and there is a great need for steady employment. So the highway exists in a constant state of not-yet-finishedness that characterizes many projects, both public and private in Mexico.

“Trash heap Mexico,” it’s been called. The place where things are half-broken or half-fixed, houses, lives and ambitions are in a general state of disrepair and every roadside is liberally sprinkled with garbage. But most things in Mexico work about as well as they need to. In a land where nothing can be taken for granted, the inhabitants get good at improvising.

Just east of the turnoff for Punta Maldonado we had a blowout. One of the double rear tires had blown and, after a brief inspection, our driver turned down the ranchero music to a polka-tinged murmur and limped the bus along at 20 miles per hour until a repair shop could be found.

The vulcanizadora, or tire shop, sat at a crossroads. Across the way, a truck driver had parked his two-ton and spread a mat in its shade. The trucker was fast asleep on his mat, in the intersection of the two roads.

Luckily, the shop had a tire to match the one that had blown. A teenage boy and a one-armed man rolled out the replacement tire. They were followed by an old lady in a flower-print dress carrying a length of pipe longer than she was. While ten men stood watching in the noonday sun, the one-armed man and his teenage assistant pulled off the two rear tires, replaced the bad tire, and put the two massive wheels back in place. The whole operation took about an hour.

Beside the de riguer portrait of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, the bus driver had built a little shrine of family pictures around his rearview mirror. This driver had also fitted an electronic box next to the wheel. It made three sounds: two were warning beeps; the third was a wolf-whistle that he used whenever he saw a halfway pretty girl by the side of the road.

All these drivers have their own thing, the signature flourish of el cabellero de camino real. One driver on a night crossing of the Yucatan had framed his windshield with Christmas lights and recorded a bit of opera into the noise box. At the approach of another truck, the bus driver flicked on the lights, played his aria and made gesture with his hand that looked like the Barber of Seville brandishing his razor. He probably appears in trucker’s dreams, rushing at them out of the darkness lit up like a carnival fortuneteller and grinning a maniacal grin. This constitutes fame on the road.

We made Acapulco by late afternoon. I retrieved my surfboards from the bay under the bus and found a cab to take me to the airport, where I rented a small car. Bus service north of Acapulco is a bit spotty and there were some places I wanted to visit that no bus would ever go.

In 1967 Peter Dixon wrote, “From Mazatlan, where Mexico’s western surf begins, to the Guatemalan border there are more than 2,000 miles of Pacific Ocean-fronting coastline. And with the exception of known old-favorite surfing spots such as Mazatlan, San Blas, and Puerto Vallarta the whole long mainland coast has yet to be explored by surfers.”

The Cartera Costera, or Route 200 as it is labeled on maps, was pieced together over a period of 20 years. Before Route 200, the drive from Puerto Vallarta to San Blas took three days over dirt roads that wound through inland hills. Now it can be done in three hours. South of Manzanillo, all the way to Acapulco, there were no roads at all.

“The lack of coast-following roads,” Dixon noted in his book Where The Surfers Are, “along the beaches of central Mexico limits the exploring surfer to about 150 miles — unless he packs his board on a burro and sets off down the beach on foot.”

About 80 kilometers north of Acapulco a small sign points to the village of Tetitlan. Tetitlan is a town of four cobblestone streets beside the Rio Tecpan. It’s a quiet place where the arrival of a strange car is well noted by the villagers lounging beneath shady verandahs along the main street. At last I arrived at a fork in the road and stopped to consider. A man passing by glanced at the gringo and the surfboards and pointed to the left. “La Playa,” he explained.

The beach was another three kilometers by way of a rough dirt track through the coconut palms. The track terminated in a clearing beside a green lagoon. A large gray truck filled with soldiers was parked there. The men sat sullenly in the truck looking out at the water where a soldier in full battle dress struggled to stay afloat and push a 55-gallon drum across the surface of the lagoon. His commanding officer stood nearby, cradling an M-16 in his arms. The soldiers must have known that rivers and lagoons in that part of Mexico are favorite feeding grounds for caiman, some of which grow to be 14 feet long. Certainly, the man rolling the barrel looked concerned.

A teenage boy stood in his boat watching these maneuvers. He was the ferryman; for two pesos he took me across the lagoon, motorboat scattering herons into the air and cutting a bubbling white swath through the floating green carpet of lily pads.

The beach at Tetitlan is little more than a sandbar with a few palapas, or thatch-roof huts, planted upon it. I followed my boatman to one palapa where a rainbow of hammocks swung in the shade around a couple of picnic tables and a barrel- shaped woman was tending to a trio of kettles steaming over an open fire.

Beyond the fishing boats pulled up to the high-tide line and the nets laid out on the sand to dry, the Pacific was placid. Neatly formed three-foot high waves broke on the beach. Beneath the palapas I could see a half-dozen boogie boards scattered about, but no surfboards. Tetitlan looked like a sponger’s wave — short, steep and fast. More swell might provide a few good tube rides, but waves of any real size would surely close this beach down.

After a meal of fresh fried snapper, rice and cervescas I asked the boatman to give me a lift back to the road head. The army truck was still there and the soldiers looked wetter and sadder than before. Another unfortunate recruit was learning the barrel roll.beach resort mainland mexico

Back on Highway 200 I skirted the Zihuatenejo and Ixtapa, got lost in the port town of Lazaro Cardenas, and arrived at Playa Azul late in the afternoon. Playa Azul is the Jersey Shore of the Pacific Coast. It’s a popular spot for families with a few mediocre hotels and a string of restaurants that comprise a sort of boardwalk alongside a broad, flat beach.

I found a cheap hotel and went for a surf. The waves looked like slop, but after two days of driving, I just needed to get wet. Punching through the white water took a good half hour and the swell on the outside bar was disorganized at best. I rode one lumpy surge until it collapsed and then bellied in on the foam.

It’s strange, but even an awful session provides some restorative charge. Some surfers consider these training sessions, time spent preparing for real swell. Others wax New Age, talking about the massive negative ion charge one gets from moving water or the spiritual connection they feel with the sea. I don’t know. Even a bad session leaves you with an abiding calm that you can feel deep in your bones.

It was a relief to get out of Playa Azul and back on the Cartera Costera. The road crossed a coastal plain and then ran into the hills. This was Michoacan, the last piece of the road to be built. Like sections of Route 1 in California, Route 200 cuts a defiant line across the mountains that rise from the blue Pacific. Hairpin turns, dazzling views and rock falls were the milestones on this section of highway.

In the dry season these hills are brown and the rivers only sandy pathways leading to the sea. The entire coastal range is covered with low, thorny scrub and towns are few and far between here. Many of the settlements clustered in the river valleys are without electricity or phones. But if you look for it, the State of Michoacan has some of the finest surf in all of Mexico.

Another week and a few hundred miles up the road, I stopped for a hitchhiker. He told me his name was Jesse and that he came from Illinois. He had been in Mexico for about a month and he was on his way home.

Back on the road, I took another look at my passenger. He seemed familiar, but there a lot of gringos that looked like him. Jesse had long blond hair rolled into dreadlocks and rope sandals on his feet. Underneath a blond beard his features were delicate, almost feminine.

On closer inspection, I realized that I had met Jesse before. One drunken evening in Palenque, while discussing flying dreams with a pair of American archeologists, a dreadlocked kid appeared to tell us about his theory of lucid dreaming. “All you have to do,” Jesse explained then, “is to tell yourself to look at you hand. If you can do that, then you’re in control of the dream.”

secret spot

The mountains of Michoacan gave way to the broad plains of Colima and Route 200 merged with Highway 110, the only four-lane road on the coast. We stopped in Cuyutlan, an old resort town bypassed by the highway that had seen better days.

In 1964, George Van Noy wrote in SurfGuide magazine, “I have heard of the place where the Ola Verde comes one day in spring, and such is the height of the wave that the sun is no longer seen save blue-green through the eye of the wave. Finally the wave can grow no larger and it begins to collapse onto the hot, black sand at the edge of the jungle.” That wave was supposed to come ashore at Cuyutlan.

The trouble with chasing legends is that they rarely stay still. The Ola Verde was the product of a particular time and place — or maybe Noy’s imagination — and the particular road that he followed. The sand was indeed hot and black, but there were no waves. Jesse caught up with me beside the water.

“So why did we stop here?” he asked.

“No reason,” I said.

North of Jalisco, we came to a town I’ll call Sarta. A surfer from San Francisco had told me about the place. We set up in a motor court called Las Gaviotas, the Seagulls, a cinder block building painted sunny yellow with dark green trim. All of the rooms face a central courtyard where laundry was strung between mango and durian trees and the only other guests were two 50ish longboarders from Santa Cruz.

In the evening, I opened a bottle of cheap tequila and had a few shots. Jesse, bored, decided it was time for a fire show.

On this trip Jesse made food money by putting on fire shows. In these demonstrations the performer twirls and tosses a four-foot-long wooden staff while both ends are alight. The shows, which are given at night for maximum effect, have a mesmeric quality to them that belies their danger.

It was then I recalled something else about Jesse: I had seen him do the show before, in Palenque, and he nearly set a building on fire.

We walked back through town to where a carnival had set up near the zocalo, or town square. Little toy cars and rocket ships orbited one carousel. Another had benches that rose and fell around the hub, whirring and clanking under a garland of yellow fluorescent lights, making an entropic music of worn metal and loose bolts.

The beach was obviously the safest place for this spectacle. We found a spot where one of the town’s roads ended in a flight of stone steps on the sand and Jesse conscripted a bunch of local kids to collect plastic cups and matches.

With his staff dipped in the gas-filled cups, Jesse lit the ends of the stick and began twirling. The flames made no reflection on the black Pacific. Even the light of the stars winking on overhead was absorbed by the dark sea. The steps soon filled with a crowd of curious villagers.

Nearby, the local carnies had set up a portable Karoke booth complete with enormous speakers and cue cards with lyrics written out in felt-tipped pen. As Jesse began his second act, spinning blue circles and orange figure-8s of flame around his naked torso, a young drunk stepped up to the microphone to slur a version of Credence Clearwater Revival’s faux folk hit “Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home”. Although my home is in Brooklyn, I sang along, nostalgic for a place I had never been.

The next morning at dawn I drove Jesse back out to the coast road. He planned to catch a bus to a train that would let him off two days later in Tijuana. From there, Jesse would take another bus over the border and hitch home.

On the beach that morning a quartet of fishermen were readying their boat for the day’s outing. They loaded their nets, a spare can of gas, floats and bait into the open boat before dragging it to the water

When the boat had receded to a colorful splash on the sea and the sound of its engine diminished to a beelike hum, I carried my board to the water. It was still cool on the sand, in the shadow of the trees, but midway to the lineup I paddled into the sunlight and felt its warmth on my back.

The ironic thing about surfing is that the more waves you catch, the less there is to say. It’s the feeling you remember, a handful of electric moments and an abiding peace that settles into your bones. What I remember about that morning is the mist, which steamed off the hills and billowed out over the bay, and the color of the water – a clear blue, lighter than cobalt, not quite sapphire. And I remember one wave: the sudden acceleration as I dropped from its crest; the rippling sound the board made as it sliced its face; and the tremendous force of the thing as it pushed toward shore.

At the corner of Sarta’s town square is a cafe with strong coffee and an informal lending library of week-old American newspapers. I’d taken the habit of visiting the cafe after my morning surf.gekko snak

It was a fine place to sit and watch the town wake up. Each morning the vendors stalls on the zocalo that sell everything from plastic curlers to playing cards with pictures of naked women on the back, roll up their canvas shutters. Each morning the men of the town trudge to work with their tools and a clutch of ladies gossip in the shady square while they await the arrival of the bus to the city.

Eventually the bus does come, a 30-year-old leviathan of blue paint and sparkling chrome with the name of its destination written in soap on the inside of the windshield. The ladies watch the new arrivals step from the bus and paste kisses on their friends who will go to the city, nearly two hours away by the coast road. A gaggle of sunburned tourists gets on carrying grips and fat detective novels; a few get off to stand blinking in the sunlight. The engine rumbles to life, the last passengers board and the old bus wheezes off down the main street.

I did drive as far as San Blas and I saw Mantachen Bay (it was flat), but I came back to Sarta. The surf was better there and the routine suited me. I surfed when the sun came up, drank my coffee by the town square, read in some shady spot through the heat of the day and took long walks in the late afternoon.

Some miles from Sarta there was a point that held great waves concealed in its headlands and coves. On an afternoon when the south swell began to show, I took a walk out there. I carried my good board, some water and a towel. Two dogs met me at the start of my trek and greeted me like an old friend. One was black and the other was tan. They splashed through the shallows as I walked along a beach of broken coral. In the distance, I could see faint lines of white water radiating from the first promontory, a good sign.

The path turned inland and the dogs hunted ahead through the bush. When I lost the trail, they circled back to find me. The last half-mile to the break we walked along the water. The coral underfoot claimed bits of my sandals with each step.

It was late when I arrived and the trees along the shore cast long shadows. There was a small boat anchored off the point and a few guys in the water. The wind had died and the swell came through clean and glassy. I paddled out in a lull between sets and joined the others lined up alongside two large rocks. “Buenos tardes,” said the man closest to me. He had a round face like the Buddha creased with a slight smile. “Hola,” I replied, unused to the civility in strange lineups.

A seaward rush of water between the two rocks signaled the approaching wave. The guys sitting outside missed it, but Buddha deftly held his position in the surge until the wall bore up behind him and he shot from between the rocks like a racehorse coming out of the gates. Before he kicked out his buddies were already cheering him on with a stream of accolades too fast for my poor Spanish.

We fell into a rough rotation, taking turns at near perfect waves. With each completed ride, another swell of rapid-fire commentary would roll from locals.

As the sun dipped to the horizon, the waves took on a coppery sheen. It’s hard to know when you’ve found what you’re looking for, because it never looks the way you’d imagined. During one ride I caught a glimpse of my hand, palm pressed to the face of the wave, fingers trailing in the warm golden water. Maybe this was my Ola Verde.

One by one the surfers caught their last rides and paddled back to the boat. When the water began to move again, it was just me and Buddha in the slot between the rocks. I put my head down and stroked hard against the current. I could hear the quiet rush of water as it flowed around the rocks and yells and whistles of the surfers in the boat. I looked around for the fat man and saw him sitting up on his board, clear of the takeoff zone. He nodded once and before I caught the wave I heard him say quite distinctly, in English, “Go for it.”