Chapter 1

Playa Norte

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TOCAYO
Part 1
Prologue
Playa Norte
Charly the American
A Catholic Education
Cold Showers
A Peruvian Name...
Tossing Armando...
Bob Cousey's Shorts
Inside Immaculada
Warming the Bench...
A Little Socrates...
Running From Lola
Ping Pong Politics
A Perfect Basketball Day
A Man Needs His Friends
A Pig In a Hole
Condors Over Ticlio
Wrestling in the Plaza
Handcuffs and Curfews
Rochabus
A Hero Hiding
Hitting A Brick Wall
Part 2

One by one they dipped their boards into the water, crossed themselves, and began to paddle through the swollen waves. The waves were more powerful than they appeared to be from shore. The thin line of surfers bobbed, bounced, and weaved over, around, and through them, advancing, receding, and advancing again. The farther out they paddled, the more violently the waves slapped them, dragging them backwards, spinning them around, and making them advance through the same section again and again. When it was swollen like that, Playa Norte could take an hour of hard paddling to cross, and every year at least one surfer gave up. Exhausted, he walked out of the surf dragging his board behind him, and cast bitter glances at the waves for which his body, his mind, and his soul had proven to be no match.

"Idiota!" I would shout from my deck. "Imbecil!"

No surfer ever shouted back. Not even a dirty look. Every fool knows that humiliation is the price of impudence.

As I grew older I stopped taunting the losers and watched instead as the surviving surfers slipped over the largest of the waves and rode the current to Pico Alto. With Papito’s binaculars I could see them from the cliff behind the house, tiny in the distance, stopping beside the shoulder and watching the big wave move under and past them. One behemoth every two minutes. In between, a few unborn swells. Giant, but not powerful enough to crest and break. The surfers let many waves go past. Sometimes they waited thirty minutes. Sometimes an hour.

It is a terrible wave, Pico Alto. Sullen from a long slumber, it rises heavily into a deep blue wall four stories high, eager to punish whatever has awakened it. It takes a special man in an unusual state of mind to paddle his board into the path of Pico Alto. As the wave rises beneath him, he must thrust his arms into the water and paddle down the catapulting mass with the frenzy of a madman so he can reach the crest with enough speed to hop onto his fluttering board before the wind rips it out of his hands. When he slaps his bare feet onto the board he is suspended in a wind-blown burst of sea spray for a heart-stopping moment of weightlessness. Then he drops into the concave abyss yawning open beneath him.

A big-wave surfer often thinks about this moment. You can imagine what you will do, but until you put yourself in that place and time, you cannot know what you will do. You might drop fast enough to slip under the collapsing tonnage, and with a menace of unbelievable proportions rising behind you, find the courage to dig the rail and carve a stream of starlight into immortality. O, to share heaven with the immortals! It is a moment we all dream of. To roar back up the shoulder of the wave and burst into the sight of your friends with your arms straight in the air and your shorts stiff with bravado! To know, as the board skidded across the water and slowed, as you dropped to your chest and paddled slowly back into the lineup, that you were one of the great ones.

Or not. It could be something as tiny as a drop of sea spray in your eye. Or your foot slipping on the board. Maybe you couldn't quite find your balance. Or your nerve. The top of Pico Alto is a bad place to lose your nerve. The gods watch with disinterest as you fall that great distance with your board twisting and turning around you like a leaf in a whirlwind. When you slap into the surface of the water forty feet below, they turn away as the brute force of the wave crushes your twig of a body, thrusting you down, ten meters beneath your next breath, pinning you in a swirling, lung-bursting tumble for thirty seconds before it lets you crawl to the surface for a single gasp of foam-filled air. Only one. Because while taking that breath your panicked brain realizes that you are now in the place we call Poseidon's Anvil, where you will experience the singular terror of turning to face the next wave unfurling four stories above you.