Okay, so…it took a few days

It took me a few years to get to Puerto Escondido. It took a few days longer to get into the surf at Playa Zicatela, aka: the Mexican Pipeline.

I spent the first few days after my arrival surfing the waves at La Punta, a point break at the south end of Playa Zicatela. The irony was thick: instead of a hollow beach break right, I was surfing a mushy point break left. On top of that, the break was packed with people.

Like all point breaks, there are only one or two takeoff spots, and those spots were dominated by the locals. Curious sidenote: at La Punta, those aggressive locals were a pack of kids, maybe teenagers, and a lot of them girls; seeing such a lineup was a first for me. And since I’m way past being overly aggressive when it comes to battling for waves (and I also didn’t want to be yet another aggressive visiting American surfer), there was a lot of sitting around and only sporadic wave riding. Oh well. The waves I had were fun and each day was an enjoyable outing. Having pelicans divebombing fish just a couple of feet away from you is surprising at first, but the birds do it so much that it becomes barely noticeable. But it’s still really cool and made me smile every time. As the birds would surface beside me I’d ask them if they’d been successful. Most just gave me the stinkeye, as if I were going to steal their lunch, before swimming away.

But the goal was to get out at Zicatela and with the swell dropping over the week, I made it. I’ve spent the past few days surfing Zicatela. There are still plenty of sets — groups of waves quite a bit larger than the average waves — and I’ve taken a couple on the head and survived, which was reassuring — but paddling out and staying out of trouble has been doable, letting me concentrate on surfing.

Though I’m not sure I’d call what I’ve been doing “surfing.” Mostly, I’ve been struggling with my wave selection and my takeoffs. I’ve been staying away from the well-overhead set waves (and some that were double overhead-plus) but I still wind up paddling into waves that do nothing more than close out (for nonsurfers: a close out is a wave that breaks all at once, leaving you no face to ride). And on plenty of waves, closeout or not, the steep drops have led to a lot of face plants and free falls. I have not been carving a graceful figure in the water.

The fact is: I don’t have a lot of experience on steep, hollow waves. Even in California, the waves don’t stand up like they do at Zicatela. It’s REALLY cool to be in the water and see waves break the way you’ve seen them in the magazines for decades, the way you drew them on your notebooks in school. But it’s another thing to successfully ride them. At least it is for me.

The difference between this type of wave and what I’ve been surfing on both coasts of the U.S. is night and day. I’ve often said that, as with many of my pursuits, I’m not a very good surfer but I am an avid one. My experience at the Mexican Pipeline has, thus far, been very humbling. I don’t know how far I’ll get in the few days I have remaining — a lot of that will depend on the swell — but I will keep trying. And when I get home, I’m going to be a lot more aggressive about taking off on seemingly unmakeable waves. That way, the next time I come to Puerto Escondido — and I will be back — I’ll be better prepared for the Mexican Pipeline.

Ocean Fun, Travel,

Okay, so…it took a few years

The ’78 VW camper van that started a lot of dreaming. Fall 1991 at Christmas Meadows, Utah, with Tom McLaughlin.

In the summer of 1991 I purchased a Volkswagen camper van. I found it parked on a street in my hometown with a “for sale” sign in the window. It was a green, 1978 full-camper version by Westfalia, and it was the exact model I’d looked for in previous years while living in two places — Germany and California — where you’d expect to find such a vehicle. Instead, I found mine in coastal northern Massachusetts upon my return there after a winter in Utah.

I went back to Utah a month or so later and started plotting where I was going to go the following summer. I had some money saved up and I wanted to go on an adventure in my new camper. There were two potential destinations.

The first was Alaska, a land I had often dreamed about thanks to the tales of Jack London and National Geographic specials on TV. In fact, living in a cabin in the wilds of Alaska was, along with sailing around the world, one of two dreams I’ve had since I was young. And my brief (to that point) explorations of the mountains of the western U.S. only added to the allure of the Last Frontier: bigger mountains, wilder places!

The second option was a small town in Mexico called Puerto Escondido. It was a newcomer to my awareness, only registering in my late teens and early 20s as I got more into surfing. Puerto Escondido was home to a break known as “The Mexican Pipeline,” a hollow, tubing wave the likes of which I had never seen in person, and unlike the famous break in Hawaii for which it was named, Puerto Escondido broke to the right, meaning I would ride facing the wave.

As summer turned to fall in 1991, my research picked up. And the universe sent me what seemed to be a few signs. In October, I got my dog, Spooner, who was an Alaskan Malamute. Later that winter, I started dating a woman from Anchorage, Alaska. And through it all there was the fact that I didn’t speak Spanish.

In May 1992, I drove to Alaska and fell in love. No, not with the woman — she dumped me before I even got on the road — but with Alaska. And I spent the next 12 years looking for jobs there that wouldn’t put a crimp in the career I was building. It took until 2004 and though Anchorage was hardly a cabin in the woods, I loved my time in the Great Land and have missed it dearly since leaving.

I never did make it to Puerto Escondido. Until now.

It took me 25 years but on Feb. 27, 2017, I stepped off a plane in Puerto Escondido. The heat and humidity were in stark contrast to the cold, dry winter I’d left in New England. And the waves were WAY more intimidating than the waist-high longboard waves I’d ridden in Massachusetts two days earlier. (The water was also twice the number of degrees in temperature.)

So now I’m here in Puerto for 10 days. I spent a couple of hours yesterday just watching the main surf break, awed by the power and size of the Mexican Pipeline. Twenty-five years ago, I’d have charged out there and probably gotten my ass kicked. I’d have survived — my conditioning and fitness then would have seen me through it — but I would not have performed well, if at all. Yesterday, even though I’m a better surfer now than I was then, I opted to just watch and learn…and then went to a smaller, more manageable break nearby. The water was just as warm, the waves were a lot smaller and more gentle, and I still had a bunch of fun.

I looked this morning and the swell looks to have dropped enough to make it manageable, but there are occasional sets of waves that appear that induce a bit of sphincter-clenching. I hope that means that I’m older and wiser, and not that I’ve become a chicken as I’ve aged. But I will give the break a try today. Better late than never, right?

Or I won’t, and I’ll go back to the mellow break. Damn! Older AND wiser…who’da thunk it?!

7 CommentsOcean Fun, Travel

Get Busy Living

Late yesterday afternoon I visited what I consider to be the crown jewel of Plum Island: the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. It’s a wonderful place. Magical, even, when you consider how close it is to the urban sprawl of metropolitan Boston. And the peace and calm of this oasis is even more pronounced on a cold day in mid-December when there are only a handful of people in the entire seven-mile stretch of island and none at all on the trail one chooses to walk.

Every time I visit the Hellcat Swamp trail I remember back to a time when I was six, maybe seven, years old and I walked this boardwalk path through the marsh and dunes of primal Plum Island with my father. He and I came to the observation blind that overlooks the freshwater marsh and sat for a few moments while we peered through the gaps in the blind’s camouflaged walls. We hadn’t been there long when — WHOOSH! — an osprey blew past us in a blur, no more than a handful of feet away from my wide, young eyes. To this day I swear I heard the roar of a jet engine powering the bird as it arced low over the water.

It left an impression, obviously, and as I stood in the blind yesterday recalling that moment once again it segued to other, similar moments of such energizing joy: powder runs in the Utah backcountry with my dog, Spooner; hiking with Spooner in the then-secluded canyons of southern Utah; on the lookout for grizzly bears along a salmon-choked river at the remote end of Kodiak Island; seeing white-tailed deer bound away from me while wandering the woods on Clausland Mountain in New York, not 25 miles from Manhattan; and banding ducks at dawn with a refuge researcher when I was about 8 or 9.

The memories prompted an inner (and slight outer) smile, but they also prompted remorse — remorse at how distant those moments had become. It was less a distance of time (even for those memories from when I was really young) than it was a distance of lifestyle. I realized that over the course of the past couple of decades I’d slowly been domesticated. Not that there was anything wrong with enjoying good food and comfort and a nice home, but I realized that I was truly happiest in my life when I was out there on the hard edge. And while some easing is natural, there’s no reason I can’t get back to living a life more outdoors — away from desks and office chairs and the internet. Instead of reading others who chronicle and photograph those things I used to do, I can get back to doing and chronicling and photographing those things (or at least some of them) again like I used to, and before it’s too late.

So I’d come to the refuge with my camera, a piece of equipment that in my younger days used to prompt many of my adventures. Back then I sought to be a new version of Galen Rowell, photographing the “art of adventure” (as his book is titled). I never got remotely close to his talent and vision, but at least the quest led to many of the fun times of my life. And I got a few good shots along the way.

I was hoping to get a shot or two of the lovely, late-afternoon light of Plum Island in early winter. It’s a unique light, and November and December sunsets at Plum Island are the best I’ve ever seen anywhere. Really. The shades of red, purple, magenta, pink and blue sneak their way into your vision, wrapping around your psyche like a warm blanket in the cold air and making you feel comfortable, safe, at home.

Yesterday, a clearing storm made for a layer of cloudiness that cleared not long before the 4:15 p.m. sunset, and once the sun dropped below that ceiling, the light got interesting. It didn’t last long — the gap between ceiling and horizon was just a handful of minutes — but the warm glow on the trees and marsh plants promised that the storm was indeed over. The almost-full moon rose over the dunes and a harrier glided slowly over the frozen marsh. I snapped a few photos and savored the twilight and headed home.

And it was upon returning home that I learned that a guy I knew when I lived in Idaho had died in an avalanche a day earlier. Chris died while skiing the Montana backcountry near Yellowstone National Park. He knew the risks from having lived a life full of adventure such as backcountry skiing and commercial fishing in Alaska. And while I’ve always called bullshit when people say, “Oh, at least he died doing what he loved” — bullshit…he’s dead and won’t get to do that thing he loves anymore — Chris’ passing pointed up that at least he was still living a life full of that energizing joy I had once known. It was to that notion that I toasted Chris last night. That, and the realization that the universe will slap you in the face when it wants to get your attention.

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