My Wild Youth: An Adult Writer Looks Back

Surf

by John Landretti

When I was seventeen, I lived for a while in northern Peru. I was sent to the local school, where I soon discovered that my simple Spanish could not keep pace with the lessons. After a few weeks I gave up even the appearance of understanding and passed the long hours drawing pictures in a notebook. Eventually I quit the school. The thing to do, I decided, was to go up to Ecuador and see what was there. Someone loaned me a rucksack, and a few days later I was on a bus that crossed the border and started into the Andes Mountains. From my seat in back, I watched the front window swivel out over cliff corners, the dangling saints leaning in unison—now left, now right—always, it seemed, toward the highland clouds which towered along the horizon like one of the outer zones of heaven.

I suppose had my mother known what I was doing, she would have died.
In such a state, she could have come out to the edge of those clouds and waved me clear back to Wisconsin.

As it was, my arrangements proved so informal that I could go off on my own with astonishing ease. During my months as a student abroad, I made several unscheduled trips—to Lima and Machu Picchu, to desert beaches, up to Lake Titicaca. But the journey to Ecuador marked my first time out into the strangeness of the world and so was charged with that almost dreamlike energy of initial experiences. After an eye-opening week in Quito, I boarded a bus down to the coast. While the high Andes are beautiful—a bracing world of fragrances and angles uncommon to a flatlander—it was only a prelude to my desire for the ocean which all my life had been confined to the featureless blues of classroom maps. Yet even such representations had intrigued me: I was taken by the way our language seemed to crowd itself onto the continents, the names of cities, rivers, mountains, countries all tilting this way and that in a cramped jumble of proclamations. The vast oceans, meanwhile, remained nearly wordless. The effect gave the world an air of mystery, as if the majority of our planet were beyond description. 

For what seemed ages, my bus for the coast refused to leave. We were somewhere in the middle of Quito, without a driver, idling under the stars. As I sat there, an urge to use a restroom grew increasingly insistent. But the bus had no facilities. At last I slipped outside, looking for a spot that was discrete and yet not far from the door. I settled for a deep shadow directly behind the bus. But as I was about to begin, I noticed a girl watching me. She was around my age, an Indian with long braids and a bowler hat. She may have been another passenger, or just someone from the neighborhood headed home. At any rate, she had stationed herself at the curb much like a spectator waiting politely for a parade. Her expression was nothing I’d been prepared for: unconcealed fascination. I stepped away from her, farther into the shadows, and she stepped toward me. I stepped once more, and once more she followed. I waved her off, but to no effect. Finally I just turned my back to her and did what I had to; she, meanwhile, began to move around me, still determined to witness the details of this extraordinary event. I continued turning my back to her, all the time painting myself into a distressed circle, while she persisted in her serene orbit, leaning and looking.

At last, the bus left. Hours later, before dawn, our driver pulled over for a break. I stumbled out with about a dozen travelers, all of us mulling around near an old monument. The chill of mountain air was gone. Palm trees ran back into a jungle and the stars seemed moist and heavy. Someone indicated that we were on the equator. It was a galvanizing bit of news; as we huddled there on that famous line, a spirit of fellowship overtook us.  I returned to my seat teamed up with two young guys headed for the ocean.

Later that afternoon we arrived in a city near the coast and waited together for a second bus that would complete our long journey. As we sat outside the station, a couple of girls approached us, two sisters. They had noticed us looking out at the fields of broken concrete so explained in halting English what had occurred. Unsatisfied with their explanation, they hired a cab and took us around their city, pointing out different places where the earth had shaken. We passed among blocks of ordinary buildings and open stretches of rubble. We saw several high-rises still standing, their corners startled apart and now mortared with fissures of air. The sisters brought us to their home, a few rooms behind a plank-board door where their parents welcomed us in with the most memorable warmth and delight.

Thirty years later, I have all but forgotten what these parents looked like. What remains is distinctly partial: a father’s eyes beaming with kindness, a mother’s arms setting before us platters of bread and fried eggs—such fragments of a memory have a curious way of surviving the otherwise wholesale disappearance of  a recollection. It’s as if what remains had been touched by some sort of divine fixative. When such indelible bits lodge in our hearts, they often transform into something more profound than the mind’s reference to anything specific. In this case, when I ponder human kindness—what it is and how it has touched me—those eyes, those arms, appear before my consideration not as the features of one man and woman, but rather as images with a more mystical affiliation, gazing or reaching my way from the body of the life itself. The father hired two cabs and the family traveled with us back to the station. They bought our fares, and then refusing our protests, purchased our three bus tickets to the ocean

The next morning, we arrived at a sea village. In a dark shop we stocked up on sardines and bananas off the stem. We walked until we found sand and then crossed a foot bridge over an expanse of mud roasting in the sun. On the far side, under palm trees, a man rented us a tent. While my friends rested, I hurried out to the wide ocean. In one direction, the beach ran for as far as I cared to look: mile after lonely mile of breakers playing across the sand. In the other direction lay a point of black rocks. I hiked to them; the point faced an expanse of choppy sea that ended at an island which was no more than a series of stone benches not quite above the surface. Hundreds of sea birds were lifting and settling among its popping and twisting waters. I thought about dog-paddling over to those mysterious rocks; it wasn’t far, perhaps I could even wade across to them. But something inside of me prohibited the adventure and so I turned reluctantly away and wandered back toward the tents.

As I was walking along, five native women emerged from the palms. They were at a distance: older and dressed in the long black underclothing of an earlier age. They approached the surf with the casual aplomb people bring to any simple pleasure done well and without reflection. Soon they had settled gracefully among the waves, a group of female heads talking and laughing. I cannot say they were swimming; that seems oddly incorrect—too modern. It was more that they were having a sea bath. Despite a little guilt, I stared intently at them, the marvel of these older women frolicking in their archaic underwear—I, now, in the same voyeuristic position as that of the Indian girl who had so intently watched me. How human, this irrepressible hunger to witness what is hidden, to expand our discovered country, and so test the boundary between what must remain forbidden and what is rightfully ours to know. Surely this tendency keeps the angels busy—sometimes smiling, sometimes admonishing, sometimes just holding their breath.

As evening came, my two companions and I went looking for coconuts. I suppose we could have bought one at a shop, but that would have taken the fun out of the hunt. As it was, the sands around our tents were sterile of those huge pods, so we wandered up the beach until at last we encountered one—a small, beleaguered-looking thing that had probably washed in from Polynesia. We did only as people reared in the middle of a continent would do: we propped it up and tried to beat it open with a stick. An hour later we went to bed worn out and with no coconut.

For a long while I lay in the dark listening to the surf; it was as though the thunders of a thousand storms had found their voice again; the sounds, though, seemed much older, beyond anger, speaking only in tones of self-proclamation and sighs. And then I came out of a dream and all the sounds seemed different. I crawled from the tent and found that the sea was gone. Stunned, I ran onto a wet desert made glossy in moonlight. It was a scene as fantastic as a folktale, as if that First Chinese Brother had filled his head with the ocean and left behind a basin of shells and broken ships. I  kept walking out, farther and farther. When at last I looked back, the edge of South America seemed far away: just few points of light along the horizon. Finally I could see the surf: it came rushing toward me from out of the darkness. It seemed a living veil, roiling and hissing. Though just inches high, it rustled in with such intent that I began to skitter backwards. The surf continued after me for several yards and then slowed into a mass of quiet bubbles that paused at a border of its own choosing. It seemed to hesitate there, as if observing me, before wheeling around and sliding back into darkness.

I thought, well isn’t that something! and made myself kneel in the soaked sand to await the next charge. Seconds later it came, ghostly and galloping, three inches high. As it boiled in, I was suddenly leapt to my feet and run backwards just beyond the line where it all came to a stop. Again, the bubbles seemed to observe me and again, as if satisfied, wheeled around and slid back into night. I kept to my place—tense, thrilled—and laughed uneasily at whatever inside me refused to receive that bewitching froth. I tried again, but no amount of will could keep me kneeling there in that damp moonlight. What was this contest? What was it that made me jump up and run away? I sometimes think that my life would have turned out differently had I stayed put, much the way the fate of Schrödinger’s Cat depends on who looks into the box. But that is conjecture, and I can no more force the truth of it than I can break open a coconut with a stick. As it is, that antic surf has returned to me again and again from its place out of time. Through my own reflection and the alchemy of years, those moonlit waters have gradually revealed to me something more of their nature: a presence both feminine and divine. Some might call such a presence the Eternal Bride, others the Beloved. By any name, she is a fiercely joyful figure, and at peace with her darkness. I can now look back over a lifetime and sense her mischief in everything. That night at the edge of my manhood, she gave me a dance to remember.