Puerto Reflections

Puerto Escondido shows off gorgeous sunsets nightly

Made it home from Puerto Escondido late last night. Arrived at JFK in New York around 11 p.m. after an interesting travel day (more below) and drove back to Plum Island in one shot — which may not have been the best idea since I was, quite literally, hallucinating over the final half of the drive. Arrived at home around 4:35 a.m. and went to bed around 5-something. Woke up around 8:30 so we’ll see how today goes.

But here are some — okay, a lot of — thoughts prompted by my recent trip. More verbal diarrhea from Yours Truly…

    • God, I needed to get out on the road again. It’s been WAY too long. But at the same time the trip pointed out the ongoing need for some structure and discipline in my life — just not in the typical, 9-to-5 sense of those terms. When all the family stuff is straightened out once and for all this summer I will endeavor to combine those two needs — travel and structure — into a plan for the second half of my life
    • Puerto Escondido was fabulous. It’s small enough that it’s not overwhelming or (too) gaudy, but big enough to have anything you want or need. (For what it’s worth, I heard the population is about 45,000.) There was good food of all varieties to be found, including some great Italian, plenty of hippy-dippy stuff like smoothies and acai bowls (it IS a surf town, after all) and, of course, the ubiquitous tacos and burritos and the like. And as with everything in Mexico, it’s WAY cheaper than in the U.S. I did find the food better in my little neighborhood than on the tourist drag on Playa Zicatela
    • Speaking of Zicatela: If it was a swimming beach it would be one of the most famous beaches in the world. Long and wide with beautiful, course sand ranging from white to gold…it’s just a great beach. But the conditions that make it great for surfing make it unsuitable for swimming (seriously; I watched a rip current snatch a guy off his feet and out to sea prompting a rescue by the lifeguards) so it gets overlooked. And nightcaps at the bars on the beach are a nice touch we don’t get to enjoy in the U.S. thanks to the fucking lawyers, insurance companies and do-gooder fundamentalists. A plague on all their houses
    • Everyone in Puerto that I met was really nice. Everyone — bums to BMW drivers — says “hola” as they pass on the street and even Beemer guy was pretty chill. Hell, even the vendors on the beach aren’t overbearing. And while plenty of people speak English so you can get by, not everyone does so it behooves you to speak Spanglish…or better yet, work on your Spanish, which is what I was doing. I prefer the locals NOT bend over backwards to accommodate my selfish need to speak my language in their home. Yeah, it makes things a little bumpy but in the long run I believe the effort is worth it. “When in Rome,” ya know?!

The before-and-after versions of the view from where I stayed

  • There are hotels and apartments everywhere, some ridiculously cheap. Get your plane ticket early enough so it’s cheap and with the cheap room and board you can get a month in Puerto for less than you’d get a week in Paris or some other fancy-pants location
  • Speaking of airfare: I flew on Interjet, which my pre-trip research had me wildly nervous about. But the flight down was great AND they don’t charge for surfboards and other sports gear. They have three classes of service and folks traveling in either the mid- and top-range classes get plenty of perks for not much extra money. In fact, I flew down in the top-level class because they had a deal: it was 40 percent LESS than the second-level class. Let’s see how the flights home go…
    Addendum: Oh well, it was a nice run. But truth be told: it wasn’t Interjet’s fault. Weather in Mexico City had air-traffic control delaying everything flying into that hub. So my two-hour layover in the capital wound up being a sprint from one terminal to the next. I literally JUST made my flight to New York. My surfboard and bag, sadly, did not. They arrived on this morning’s flight and Interjet is FedEx-ing my stuff to me. Still, I will fly Interjet again. I had good, clean planes with friendly staff and good service, all for affordable prices. Stark contrast to most U.S. airlines
  • The drivers in Mexico…holy shit. They make New Englanders look like capable, safe drivers. Just…wow. And I had been prepared to mention how bad their roads are but after just a few hours of driving between New York and New England, we really can’t go pointing any fingers. Seriously. Our roads are just as bad. But unlike our roads, all of the roads in Mexico have huge speed bumps that drastically slow the traffic entering town and throughout city streets, which I believe is a good idea. They force maniacs to slow down in areas where there are a lot of pedestrians. Can you imagine an American municipality daring to force the almighty American driver to slow down and be safe?! Neither can I
  • And holy shit was it hot. If not for all the beer I drank, I’d have lost a ton of weight just walking around during the day — and walking around during the day makes you realize the whole concept of siesta just makes sense. Up and at ’em in the morning, chill during the heat of the midday, back at ’em as things cool off. How civilized! (Addendum: Even with all the beer I drank, I still managed to lose a few pounds. How doubly civilized!)

    The Puerto Escondido cliff walk with Playa Zicatela in the distance

  • There’s a sense of freedom that pervades Puerto Escondido and other places I’ve been to in Mexico. Granted, I’m a tourist and don’t see it day in and day out like a local, but there’s none of the nanny state or Big Brother, which is so refreshing. And by and large you don’t see people fucking it up for everyone with their selfish, “to hell with you, I wanna do THIS…” attitudes. Sure, there’s graffiti on the beautiful cliff walk below the lighthouse in Puerto but kids are kids pretty much everywhere on Earth. By and large the folks in Mexico live and let live. I believe it’s a nice way to go through your day. And your life
  • Last but not least, check out Anthony Bourdain on Mexico. It’s a few years old but all too relevant in this day and age

For the surfers among you, here are few ocean-specific thoughts on my experiences in the waves of Puerto Escondido:

Not a very graceful takeoff but…oh well

  • If the swell pattern during my visit had been reversed — so it was small when I got there before building to big and way big — it would have been better for me. I’m not ashamed to admit I was intimidated at first and stayed wary throughout. As an excuse: I realized that since I left San Diego in May 2016, I estimate I’ve had about 15-20 sessions in the water in New England (each session 1-2 hours; two per day when conditions allow) TOTAL. So not much surfing, really. Hell, I’d get 15-20 sessions every two weeks when I lived in San Diego…and I was working 10-plus hours a day. Surfing is not like riding a bicycle; at least it isn’t for me. Next time I surf Puerto, I’m going with my groove already on because once I got mine going I had a blast
  • I’ve surfed big waves before but not at a beach break like this. Blacks Beach in San Diego in December 2007 came close and it took me three tries to get out there that day. That this is a hollow, crushing beach break changed everything. That first day I got here was seriously awe inspiring. No, it wasn’t Mark Healey going XXL but it was well beyond big and into the mega category
  • Here’s some of what Magic Seaweed said about Puerto: “Swells hit the…sandbars at Zicatela Beach in such a way that the waves jack up in size, which is often emphasised by a backwash. Magazine photos of this place are misleading – the waves close-out often and the paddle-out can be severe…The wave is fickle, and will often be blown out by 11am…It’s still a year-round Mecca for big barrel hunters!”
    Yup. What they said: year-round good bet for waves (even when it was small it was still doable). Wind definitely goes onshore around 10 or 11 a.m. — but it’s still doable in the afternoon though no one goes out until the sunset session around 4. And the paddle out CAN be punishing (though the ever-present rip currents can definitely help though they can also hinder. Stay alert)
  • Next time I come, I’m buying a step-up big-wave board for that next level of surf. I saw perfectly good, used thruster guns for 6,000 pesos — about $300. I’ll buy one when I get to town, ride it and then sell it back for even half or a third of that. My performance-focused shortboard was fine for the days I was out, but it would be insufficient for the Zicatela waves once they ramp up a notch; indeed on some of the bigger sets on the days I was out I was a bit undergunned
  • All of this said, point breaks are just SO much easier and less nerve-wracking. Maybe next time I’ll tack on a run down to Salina Cruz, a few hours south of Puerto. Same swells but at point breaks with fewer people? Sounds good to me
  • Magic Seaweed also said, “There’s large numbers of skilled surfers in the water.” No doubt about it. In the lineup I saw middle-aged women on bodyboards, body surfers, aggro teenyboppers, all the full-bore 20something surfers…and everything in between (except, interestingly, the older guys I expected). And most of them were more than capable. Percentage-wise, the surfers are much better in Puerto than what I see in New England (no surprise there) and even better than what I dealt with daily in San Diego. Puerto locals rip

I’ll be cleaning the Zicatela sand out of my ears and nose for a few days. But it’ll be SO worth it. I can’t wait to go back.

They say Mexico changes you. It obviously did me…beginning and end of this trip

Ocean Fun, Personal, Travel, Uncategorized, ,

Calling Gumby

Some of the other participants in this morning’s
yoga class.

I could have stayed in Happy Baby pose the rest of the class. Fortunately, there were only a couple more hip openers to go before my favorite part of any yoga session: Savasana, or Corpse pose.

In Happy Baby, I lay on my back with my legs off the floor above me, knees bent, while my hands grabbed the outside of my feet. I also rolled around a bit on the base of my spine, which felt wonderful after the contortions in which I’d spent the previous 50 or so minutes. Like I said: I could have stayed there for a long time but in short order the instructor had us grab a belt and extend our legs (one at a time) out to the side then over to the other side. That felt good too, and the Savasana that immediately followed was very peaceful. But most of the session had been a torture-fest, a struggle to bend and twist this 47-year-old frame into rejuvenating positions. I did it, but it wasn’t easy.

Which is a bummer because I was good at yoga a while back. I did it quite frequently and I have no doubt it was yoga that enabled me to play full-check hockey well into my 40s.

I took up yoga in the fall of 1992. I’d returned home to Park City, Utah, after my first trip to Alaska. On that trip I had several revelations, and they all conspired to get me back into proper form. I went vegetarian and gave up alcohol for almost a year, I started working out in the gym and doing cardio work regularly, and I took up yoga.

Yoga made sense because of a book I’d read by Ram Dass, in which the guru of the ’60s pointed out that if you were an active person, seated meditation was going against your nature. Better to try active meditation: whirling, tai chi or yoga, things like that.

My first teacher was an ex-Army guy who taught in the gym in Park City. He was super nice and super laid-back, and he was very helpful to a rank beginner like me. In later years I worked with some pretty high-profile teachers, including one who studied with B.K.S. Iyengar, THE yoga dude in the world. But C.J. remains my favorite, largely because of his cheerful, happy-go-lucky approach to the practice.

And the practice paid off right away. I felt healthier and more capable on the slopes, on the ice, everywhere. Several years later, while playing for the Sun Valley Suns, I’d get shit from younger teammates as I’d go through my 10-minute pre-game routine. The funny thing was: they were the ones getting hurt, not this old-fart yogi. That was what clinched the value of yoga to me: that health and strength and suppleness that practicing yoga gave me.

But as with every healthy discipline in my life, I’ve wandered off the path in recent years. I haven’t vegged since I started eating meat again in ’93, and heaven knows I don’t lead a teetotaling life. In recent months I at least kept up a gym practice (abandoned since May) and a regular yoga practice? Well, that’s been years. So this morning’s class — a slow-flow class, no less — was humbling.

There weren’t any of the Gumby-like rubber-band practitioners in this morning’s class, but there were plenty of people — male and female alike, older and younger than me — who made me feel like the out-of-shape blob I’ve become. Poses that were once easy for me are now challenging — some so challenging I can’t do them other than at the complete beginner level. I came out of the class feeling it in every muscle of my body. Which, I suppose, is the point, right?

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty,” wrote Frank Herbert in Dune. I’ve let that discipline go over the past months and years, but I’m confident that a slow-flow yoga class this morning represents the first step on the road back to where I was not so long ago. “Begin again and again and again and…” was the mantra of an old trainer of mine years ago. Sound wisdom. Maybe I can even get back to Gumby status someday.

Sports and Fitness, Uncategorized

Live and Learn

The perks of learning to fly fish: king salmon in Alaska.

I learned to fly fish in the summer of my 16th year. My father taught me while we were in Utah for my older brother’s wedding. We used a private, stocked pond that had no trees or anything else to interfere with my neophyte casts, and I was spoiled by catching huge, western trout well before I had any right to believe I had even the slightest inkling of what I was doing.

My father taught me as well as he was able given that it had been a good 20 years or more since he’d last been fly fishing. Prior to the invasion into his life of three kids in three years starting just prior to his 42nd birthday, my father had fished all over the world, according to stories I heard in my youth. He’d even turned down a PR gig with a fishing company that would have enabled him to get paid to enjoy the best fishing on Earth. “Don’t let your avocation be your vocation,” was the reason he gave for staying in newspaper journalism. That truism became ingrained in me as a result, and now that I’m older I find myself disagreeing with the sentiment.

In any case, I got a couple of hours of tuition in fly casting that August in Utah and returned home to figure out the rest of the art on the small New England trout found in the tree-lined ponds on my prep school campus.

So while there was none of that “In my family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing” sentiment that opens Norman Maclean’s classic A River Runs Through It, there was at least a lineage that was handed down from one generation to the next. In later years, my father would join me on a couple of fishing trips on the Green River in northeastern Utah, one of America’s premier fly fishing waters. The trips were my attempt in adult life to find a common ground on which we could exist as individuals and yet share a deeply rooted experience between father and son. Because beyond fly fishing all we really ever had in common was hockey, and once I was no longer in the running for a life in that sport my father and I drifted ever farther apart.

Which is why I found it so poignant reading the writings of Dana Lamb, an outdoors writer from the mid-20th century. A friend shared a book of Lamb’s with me recently and I was transfixed by some of the short columns I read. The theme of finding continuity in the face of changing times ran through all the pieces, and Lamb’s evocation of the universality of a river despite irrestible outside forces was both comforting and upsetting at the same time. Lamb’s writing provided living examples of the philosophy from Heraclitus that no one steps into the same river twice.

Particularly strong among Lamb’s stories were those highlighting that changing of hands between generations that John Mellencamp called “so sad and glorious.” It was while getting choked up reading those stories of multiple generations encountering the same river — in name at least — that I realized that other than location and DNA, my father and I might as well be from different planets. Which is ironic since we attended the same college, we worked in the same profession and we fanatically played the same sport. But in reality, my father and I share almost nothing.

Maybe if I’d had a family of my own my father and I would have that most elemental of experiences over which to bond. But that didn’t happen and it didn’t happen in large part because I didn’t want to continue that disconnected and impersonal family life in which my father raised his kids. And now he and I find ourselves where we are now: sharing a house while living a million miles apart and having essentially zero contact.

As I read Lamb’s collection, I was jealous of fathers and sons fishing together, of guides passing on their knowledge to their sons who became guides themselves. And that made me jealous of those friends of mine who have strong family bonds and powerful relationships with their fathers.

Ironically, the book was given to me by a friend whose father died when my friend was just a boy. Mike joined my father and me on one of those Green River trips, and the two of them really connected over their common experience in newspapering. At the time I felt blessed that I’d had my father beyond my 12th or 13th year, and was honored that I could give my friend a taste of the kind of father-son fishing trip that Lamb wrote about. But today, looking at the father-son relationships that some friends of mine are now passing on to their boys, I realize that my upbringing was more like Mike’s, I just didn’t realize it. And though I tried with those fishing trips in the ’90s, and again in the past year or so as my father has been infirm, no connection was ever really possible.

2 CommentsNavel Gazing, Uncategorized