Nineteen Ways of Looking at a Wave

Fickle, haughty, beguiling, untrustworthy, knee-buckling, terrifying, glorious, gorgeous, indifferent, ever-mutable, irresistible, everlasting. Words, years later, he would come to use. But this was the first time, and ever so long ago: viewing the ocean, from the prow of a mighty bluff, beside his favorite uncle.

Big. His sole adjective then.

“She’s every bit of that,” his uncle answered. “And remember, we’re not even seeing the half of it.”

*

The surfboard, his first, was thick as a dictionary, wide as a sidewalk, so heavy he had to drag it across the beach. The sand was yellow, large-grained, littered with cans, crosshatched with driftwood. A dozen people, more, some mornings—in jeans or shorts, tee-shirts, or oversize flannel longsleeves, or trunks, or black-rubber beavertail jackets—stood in small groups along the shore bend. Downcoast, a spider-leg pier. Upcoast, more sand, cobbles, tough, low shrubbery.

In the water, a loose group sat on their boards, lay on them, facing asea. The wind blew soft, onshore. The water neither bright nor dull, the sky the same. 

He kneeled on the thing, steadied himself. His uncle pushed him toward the horizon.

Paddle deep! Watch the others! Vaya con dios!

The hard flat surface of the board wobbled, stiff as Jell-O.

*

Those waves were ever so slow, walled, creaky. They were meager, spindly, dog-butt ugly. They were close to home and he loved them every one.

He was among them almost daily, in sun and rain and wind and fog, on small days and rare larger days and even on days when there were no waves at all. Sometimes he would be the only person in the world: skinny, shivering, boney knees knocking, lips and toes and bulging knee knots blue from the cold. He scraped himself a thousand times against rocks large and small, protruding and hidden, his feet so cold he never noticed the injuries until he had thawed. His cold winter blood—dark, not bright—oozed and set in dark jellied crusts, thick with sand that stuck like glitter on glue. 

He liked it bright and he liked it stormy. He liked it green and he liked it blue. He liked it glassy and he liked it, some of the time, even windy. He liked it sunny but he didn’t, absolutely, like it foggy. No.

When it was foggy the world had no beginning, no end, no top, no bottom. His mind would race undersea, where it was thick with dangerous sodden things. He would paddle with fingertips only. He thought of an ancient wharf—he had seen it in his dreams—surrounded by yellow-toothed rats, themselves stalked by gargoyle fish fanning their preposterous fins, waiting in the wetdark below him.

*

The sun rose above the sharp-sawn California mountains, speared the sky with blinding white flame. The day was still, the water smooth as spun stone. He paddled out delicately, his arms making deep, stately loops. The waves that day didn’t pop like gunshot, loud and sharp and gone. Nor did they spill and tipple—applause of featherfingers. They broke differently, in-betweenedly: a pound, a whomp. Distant, smarting thunder with a side of shriek.

Pelicans glided north in a line, atop their shadows, breakfast in mind. The leader slowflapped. The others followed suit, a flailed length of living rope.

They dipped, shadows touching their bellies, a feather away from wetness. Flap glide flap flap glide glide glide. They banked when a wave rose, tilted, then sideslipped down the face before rising again, theirs the softest kickouts ever.

The sunlight pooled in watery patches. The water, no matter how glassy, how flat, he knew, was never actually still. The birds’ reflections, his own, wobbled, stretched like rubber-band finger-guns in elementary school backrows, became woozy oblongs, crude figure-eights, groggy circles. He stared, eyes inches above the deck of his board, at the jelly refractions staggering along the surface like mallet-slugged cartoon creatures.

The stillness undressed the waves. He could see every dip and dive and pooch and scar and bulge of an approaching wall, every imperfection, because there was no such thing as a perfect wave, only those less imperfect than others. 

Every wave has a birthmark, he had learned. Many of them lovely indeed.

On that still, sere, morning, the water stalked shoreward, a cat through tall grass—sure and swift and heedless—then reared, pounced.

Energy. What he rode. Not water.

*

But when it’s glassy, the wind is somewhere a-coming. First the water tightens, ruffles, puffs and sighs against a drowsy curtain, the same nothing-to-humans something that makes a cat cease purring, cock and swivel an ear. Then a tickle on the neck. Then a pair of tickles, a scoring of the surface. The sigh becomes a breath, the puff a huff. 

The wind rolls up its sleeves. Enough fun, you. Shoo! Land-warmed air is drawn toward heaven; cooler sea air takes its place. Shavings litter the smooth-bark surface. The shavings gather in piles. The piles become bigger piles and finally all is toppling trunks and branches and the sea itself is jittery and jagged, going in a thousand frantic directions and those sheer, marble-bright waves rubble and there’s nowhere to run but shore.

*

Town, it’s called, the south shore of Oahu, and he loved it. He was in the water four, six, eight hours a day, never enough. He loved the sweetwarm waves, their bouncy faces wide as patios; the ever-moving sky, reloaded daily with heaps of fresh fast clouds; the aerated, oh-so-blue water, the distant buildings, small as toys.

Country, it is called, the north shore of Oahu, and he loved it. A goat-clipped yard, avocado trees, cockroaches, mosquitoes, an unreliable water heater, a corrugated tin roof upon which rain smacked furious as horses’ hoofs. Nine renters, three bedrooms. Sleeping bags on musty mattresses on a wavy floor. Snoring, farting. Bulk weed. Ramen. Guacamole sandwiches. Rice with ketchup and soy. Scrambles for rent and a grim Chinese landlord. Cases of Lucky Lager stubbies. Flat days, Kona wind days, the bored, listless crew picking out chords on cheap guitars, listening to albums on the Silvertone, thumbing through the same wet-bloated surf magazines, half the photos clipped and taped to walls. Rumors of swells. Dawn dashes across the highway to see for himself. Broken-butted, three-legged chairs, the smell of resin and rotting fruit. Scattered cakes of sandy wax. Masking tape, sandpaper, strips and squares of tattery fiberglass.

Days on end of magnificent and mighty waves.

­­­*

He welcomed them, those waves. They came at him, those waves, snagging themselves on the reef, rising, pitching forward, howling like gut-shot Kodiaks. Insanity helped. He kept paddling as the water lifted him up, up, up. And the wave face went towards vertical. Vertical. Beyond vertical.

Then he gave it one more: the final deep stroke, the standing stroke.

*

The sky a brightwash of yellow until he was inside the wave, cupped, under its canopy, and he became a shadow. He stood in a swirl of turquoise and pale green, diamond studded. He stood there at ease, hands palm-out, chest-high, a stagecoach passenger being robbed.

And silent. He had never heard such silence. He could hear his heart, the pop of pulse in his wrists, his neck. His hair tingled. When he emerged, thrilled to bursting, he ran his hand over his head. Indeed, his hair was at attention, as if he had run a 440 over high-twitch carpet.

*

He had traveled so far, fingers crossed for good luck each mile, time zone, hemisphere. At last, before him, the rumor come true, a present for his 35th year: an island. Deserted, virginal. No, more properly, an islet. A rise. A fist of sand, knuckles of coral. A speck offshore a larger speck that was itself offshore a larger speck. So insignificant it appeared only on maritime charts. So insignificant that even early explorers—reeking, rotten-toothed, scrofulous, vain, ignorant, breathlessly audacious, doomed, opportunistic sodomites aboard high-white, worm-riddled and sopping barks—had not, after claiming it for the distant mother country, deemed it worthy of christening.

*

The invisible moon that day had been, inch-by-inch, hour-by-hour, at work worrying the waters of the world. He had despaired, seeing the break at first light, at low tide: the waves were thick, not high, not rising, instead, falling forward, slabs pushed by some machine blade, splaying madly on exposed, carnivorous reef. Try to surf it? Why not instead run barefoot across barbed wire stretched over a field of broken glass as rooftop maniacs bombed him with boulders?

But, as ever, the moon stopped her hoarding and returned the water, let it lap toward the islet, fill the reefs, turn it into towering ovals, circles.

Long hours later, the re-pulling began anew, the disrobing. The astonishing waves of mid-day became wickeder and wickeder and finally, wickedest of all, unrideable.

*

On land, he was just another shambling, shuffling, somewhat charming biped. Out there, he was something else: a creature elegant and unclassifiable, one that could whoop and smile and walk and glide and swoop and dive and even, briefly, fly, all the while solving salty mysteries large and small, answering aquatic questions few others had even thought of posing.

He didn’t just have moves. No. Instead, he made music, brought forth notes that rose and hovered and trailed, above around behind, as he made his way on his board across and up and down and into and out of waves conceived in distant low pressure systems large as ancient empires, great barometric failings that sucked into themselves the very ether and pushed them along the water, mammoth, chaotic workshops of wind that became—hundreds, thousands, of miles later—humping curling spangled, dark, windswept, glassy, warm, cool, cold, big, small, left, right, hollow, delicate, rearing, benign, dangerous, heavenly things.

These notes he made were haunting, rare, not those of a fine violin but of something stranger: a blueshine longsaw perhaps, bent across the knee of a savant; notes bright as a heroes’ medals, delicate as the wafting of butterfly wings, heedless as a toro’s charge, loud as rock canyon thunder, quiet as the closing of an evensong hymnal.

Brief notes, finally. Irretrievable, unforgettable, never twice the same.

*

He visited the gelid waters of the far north, where the waves broke in deep, ever-shadowed coves guarded by bird-shrieking cliffs, from whose crags and crevices trees sprouted, the whiskers of giants. There, the lineups were peopled by aging, unsmiling, bearded men, whose shaggy, oversize dogs patrolled the Stygian, cobbled shores, waiting for their masters to return from the sea.

*

The beach was indistinguishable from any other on that endless African bight. Neither flat nor banked, it was dazed yellow, thick with plastic bags and unbothered by surf. The filmy, decaying, water offered no rideable waves, and no promise of rideable waves. Outside, wispy bands of whitewater appeared, briefly, over some meager shallow only to disappear, quick as the heads of drowning swimmers. They became, instead, spindly, onshore-blown cords, which fell to shore without drama, without hope. Exhausted, unimaginative travelers.

He trod into the ocean to his waist, trying to escape the blasting sun. He held his wallet and passport in the air and dunked his head. The water felt warmer, even, than the air. He pissed and returned to shore.

*

He traveled to far worlds where squadrons of shrill, voracious things ruled the night air. He pitched sodden tents in a fetid mangrove borderland, where he listened to the earthfloor scuttlings of crustaceans, rodents. He lay on under crisp sheets, against down pillows, in Old World splendor. He sojourned in sagging villages in thick, hot countries where the growing never ceased, and other lands, the air was heavy with spilled wine and spiced meat, or exhaust, or wood smoke and rotting fruit and the evacuations of legions of bowels sluicing along open sewers; ancient lands where old men hunkered in rolled trousers and thin-strapped tee-shirts, smoking, smoking, repairing nets.

He gazed on befouled waters lapping the harbors of howling, chaotic capitals; camped in baked, treeless flats, where scorpions clicked over the cracked earth and where, it was said, the greatest of whites swept the deep, cold waters.

He took chance after chance in distant, vacant seas, dreadful chances.

*

Sometimes he sought the company of others: the genial lads of Donegal; the growing gangs of travelers and settlers at Jeffreys Bay, whom he regaled with stories of the old days until they turned away, politely; the ever-changing, never-depleted bundles of Aussies—“I remember you, mate”—in Indonesia; the handfuls of welcoming locals of Brittany and Galicia, chattering like birds on a wire, careening along serpentine coastal lanes; the gaunt back-country boys of Victoria and Queensland; the spoiled spawn of South American diplomats, and the wary, kif-haunted renegades, clustered without calendars in the shadow of great Moroccan capes.

*

Then, later, he stood on the south rail of a famous California pier, rebuilt and looking like the entrance to a minor amusement park—Mission Land!—and watched two squirts play in an unremarkable afternoon wave. They spurted, swiped, vaulted, volted, blurted. They made three moves—five!—to every imagined one of his. He found himself leaning as they leaned, squatting as they squatted, flying as they flew. How he had once.

Insane vectors! he thought. Centrifugal! he thought. The kids are all right! he thought. No, really.

*

Then, another pier. Another strand. A young woman carrying a canvas tote bag and a folding beach chair watched her small child churn wide-legged toward a seagull. Bulldozers threw black smoke heavenward, filled a rain ravine, an ancient riverbed.

Warning

Storm Drain Water

May Cause Illness

No Swimming

No Nadar

He sat on a bench whose back was stenciled: Not skateboarding is NOT a Crime.

It was warming. The haze lifting. On the promenade, kids appeared, with boards under their arms, on foot, on skateboards, bikes, push scooters. Men walked by holding hands. Women walked by holding hands. Men and women walked by holding hands. A unicyclist. Long-legged beauties in-line skating, pulled eagerly by large yellow dogs. Bikinis, boardshorts, tanktops, wetsuits. Volleyball players. Frisbees. Hacky Sack. Buff. Buffer. Buffest.

*

The one knee ached and didn’t bend elastic like it always had. Then the other went south. His goddamn back. His trips became shorter, rarer, his sessions shorter. Occasionally, he found himself not suiting up, not going out, not because it was flat, or onshore or small or because he was busy, but for no good reason at all. 

Don’t get him wrong, he got out plenty, more than most, anyway. It wasn’t a divorce, not by a long shot. Not even a separation. Not even a spat. He just found himself…panting a little less, after all these years. 

*

Sky waterblue. Water skyblue. Pufferbelly clouds. He likes it bright and blue the best, when it becomes a water ballet: splishing and splashing and dolphins dancing, trailing fountains of silver; slippery seals ork ork orking; bigbelly whales spouting hello, slap slap slapping their great grinning tails, gulls and sandpipers dancing jigs.

When the yellowball sun rules the world, puffed and delirious. When the water is warm, the sand loosefresh, squeaking golden as it slides warm past fingers and toes. When the bouncy soup is white as clothesline sheets waving below billowing kites. Red kites, maybe, with high snappy tails. 

When the soup skids like a pup across a new waxed floor, belly-sprawling itself on the sand, racing back to where the bubbles are popping.

That’s when he likes it the best: when it’s blue and the water is filled with diamond tips, when its edges are glittery, squintbright. When a million billion bright bobbing silver jangles rise with the face of every wave. When the water is no color at all when he cups it in his hand and tosses it cool on his face, his hot brown back.

Put it on a smiling postcard, he thinks. Send it everywhere at once.

Bryan Di Salvatore lives in Montana, has written for The New Yorker and many other magazines, and features as William Finnegan’s globe-trotting companion in Barbarian Days. This is his third appearance in TSJ, and our second deployment of an excerpt from the (as of today) unpublished novel I Still Miss Someone.