Kerig's Korner Thursday, May 13, 2004: Thirty-eight clicks south of Tijuana is a place where Abu this and Osama that recede wetly from memory, where the only rule of engagement is in relation to how hard you paddle and whether you go all the way to the bottom, or get down the line faster. It’s a place where the secrets are many, but gleaning them has nothing to do with donkeys or elephants. States of blue or red, or even which Yalie you support.The break is called Rauol's for the Italian restaurant that sits on the bluff next to the highway at the exit. Down a dirt road with the requisite hungry curs, trailer/shacks, and barbed wire is a precipitous pitch of runneled ochre mud that slopes steeply toward the Pacific. At the bottom of the pitch, just before the fifty-foot drop to the rocky scag of beach, sits Ron's white pickup, and his girlfriend Cindy in the folding chair with the can of PBR. It's morning, but it doesn't matter, it's Mexico. Besides, she's got a job to do -- watch our trucks so that the windows don't get smashed (kids, petty thieves, etc.) as we ride waves.The swell comes with metronomic regularity, every five minutes or so. A quintet of successively larger humps march toward three rubber-clad straddlers of fiberglass floats. The swell hits the reef and rears up, as if stung, before tossing forward in frothing white reaction. The rumble goes on down the line, triangulating the jutting ocean floor with booming, inarguable authority. The peak is fickle and I'm ignorant to its quirks. One moment it's here, the next, over there. This time slapping down in an insultingly brazen close-out. This time, offering its bare shoulders to a surfboard's caress. Deaf to her whispers, clumsy with my caress -- so pale and pudgy from long days in the editing room -- I nonetheless find myself in the right spot. The two other surfers, gentlemen both (aged and patient as gray hair, sublime on their longboards) bow out and leave me this dance. Being goofy, I try for a left, but she's already covering that shoulder with a rough shrug. So I turn my back on her and hope she doesn't want to mosh. Backside from the bottom I'm curving up her green shoulder and she's letting me. Inviting me for more. Topside she tickles with fingers of milky white. And the flirtation is on. The cuts and caresses, shoves and nods, the give and take. I can ride this wave forever. Except that I can't. It's only a moment. Only a flicker. But it and the week of fish tacos and sand and sun are enough to let all the dark things sink to the bottom of my now-lighter consciousness. Back now. At my desk, creating stories out of digital flickers, sending messages to people I've never met. The distance from that wave is long (12 hours by car) but not insurmountable. Planning a season of shows now and trying to digest Israeli history before the next trip. It's dry work. But somewhere out there, there's a wave... Bill // 10:49 AM ______________________
Thirty-eight clicks south of Tijuana is a place where Abu this and Osama that recede wetly from memory, where the only rule of engagement is in relation to how hard you paddle and whether you go all the way to the bottom, or get down the line faster. It’s a place where the secrets are many, but gleaning them has nothing to do with donkeys or elephants. States of blue or red, or even which Yalie you support.The break is called Rauol's for the Italian restaurant that sits on the bluff next to the highway at the exit. Down a dirt road with the requisite hungry curs, trailer/shacks, and barbed wire is a precipitous pitch of runneled ochre mud that slopes steeply toward the Pacific. At the bottom of the pitch, just before the fifty-foot drop to the rocky scag of beach, sits Ron's white pickup, and his girlfriend Cindy in the folding chair with the can of PBR. It's morning, but it doesn't matter, it's Mexico. Besides, she's got a job to do -- watch our trucks so that the windows don't get smashed (kids, petty thieves, etc.) as we ride waves.The swell comes with metronomic regularity, every five minutes or so. A quintet of successively larger humps march toward three rubber-clad straddlers of fiberglass floats. The swell hits the reef and rears up, as if stung, before tossing forward in frothing white reaction. The rumble goes on down the line, triangulating the jutting ocean floor with booming, inarguable authority. The peak is fickle and I'm ignorant to its quirks. One moment it's here, the next, over there. This time slapping down in an insultingly brazen close-out. This time, offering its bare shoulders to a surfboard's caress. Deaf to her whispers, clumsy with my caress -- so pale and pudgy from long days in the editing room -- I nonetheless find myself in the right spot. The two other surfers, gentlemen both (aged and patient as gray hair, sublime on their longboards) bow out and leave me this dance. Being goofy, I try for a left, but she's already covering that shoulder with a rough shrug. So I turn my back on her and hope she doesn't want to mosh. Backside from the bottom I'm curving up her green shoulder and she's letting me. Inviting me for more. Topside she tickles with fingers of milky white. And the flirtation is on. The cuts and caresses, shoves and nods, the give and take. I can ride this wave forever. Except that I can't. It's only a moment. Only a flicker. But it and the week of fish tacos and sand and sun are enough to let all the dark things sink to the bottom of my now-lighter consciousness. Back now. At my desk, creating stories out of digital flickers, sending messages to people I've never met. The distance from that wave is long (12 hours by car) but not insurmountable. Planning a season of shows now and trying to digest Israeli history before the next trip. It's dry work. But somewhere out there, there's a wave... Bill // 10:49 AM
