I almost got away, but Ray pulled up just as I was about to walk home with my board and my wounded pride tucked under my arm. He got out of his van and put himself in my path. His skin was pale. He was sweating even though it was cool.
“Humbling, isn't it?” He could read me like a book.
“No philosophy lesson today, okay?” I was feeling mean and didn't want to have to hear any of his little speeches.
“Thought you were going into the longboard division too.”
“I had enough for one day.”
“Hell, man. If you're losing, be the best at it. Go for broke. Be the best at losing. I take it things didn't go well in the juniors.”
“Gee, Ray, you're, like, psychic. You should have your own tv show.” I had never been this rude to him before. I just couldn't help myself.
“You could probably use that edginess. Make it work for you.”
“I'm done with contests, Ray. I wish you hadn't talked me into it. It sucks all the fun out of surfing.”
“Sorry about that,” he said seriously. “Some things do suck all the fun out of anything.”
“How would you know?” I asked, wanting to be out of this conversation.
“I'll tell you one thing that kind of takes the joy away. Dying, Ben. That's the chip on
my shoulder. I'm dying. I've known it for a while, and the thought does get in my way sometimes. Like on a good day back there with you at Nirvana Farm. I kept thinking, I may never get to experience this again.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ray had to lean against his van. Mickey D poked his head out the window and licked him on the cheek. “I came here to die, Ben. I've been fighting cancer for about three years, but it's been winning. I was feeling better when I came here but knew it couldn't last.”
“You're making this up.”
“Hey, I wish I was. I didn't write this script. I'd pencil in a happy ending, but maybe this is as happy as it gets. I was at the hospital this morning. Reviewed the whole thing with the cancer doctors here. They figure I should have been dead months ago. So it could be any time now.”
I felt light-headed. “Ray, I'm sorry.”
“Don't be sorry. I got to live one hell of a life. No big complaints.” He paused. “I could have stayed home in California and watched all my buddies feeling sorry for me.
Hell, they'd even let me steal their waves because they knew I only had a few more rides before lights out. But I had this vision in my headâbeing on the road with Mickey D and coming here. I'd always wanted to come to Nova Scotia. So I decided to come here to surf and then...well, you know.”
My throat was tight and I couldn't talk.
“What can I do to help?” I finally said. The dog was licking his face again. For the first time, I could see it in him. I could see death catching up with him. I could see it in his eyes.
“Surf, Benjamin. Go in front of all those people and surf in the longboard heat. Surf like a god or surf like a gremlin, but just go do it. And I'll watch.”
It was the last thing I wanted to do.
“What if I suck?”
“If you're gonna lose, lose big-time. Have some fun with it. Show 'em all you can take it.”
Twenty minutes later, I was paddling back out into those gnarly, bumpy brown waves.
The chop was worse. The waves were worse. My competitors were all older guys who knew how to handle the conditions. They were good. They made it across difficult sections, they had some longboard movesâ walking to the nose, and one guy could even do a spinner.
All I could do was make the drop, get a few feet across a wall and then get walloped by the dirty lip of the thick wave. I took off on six waves. I got creamed by every one. But I just kept paddling back out for the punishment until my twenty minutes in hell were over.
When the horn sounded and I got out of the water, people started cheering. They had loved the wipeouts. Spectators always do.
Ray was smiling at me as Tara ran up and put her arms around me. “You were amazing,” she said.
“I did terrible.”
“Yeah, but you kept paddling back out and didn't seem to care that the waves were eating you up.”
“How'd you do in your heat?” I asked.
“I lost,” she said. “But I didn't lose as well as you.”
Ray joined us and we waited for the scoring. I came in dead last in my heat.
“Warrior mentality,” Ray said. “Congratulations.”
Ray only let me visit him once in the hospital, and it wasn't easy. I was still hurting from the death of my grandfather. And now this.
“I bet there are some kind of waves wherever it is I'm going,” Ray said the one time I did see him. “May not be the Atlantic or Pacific, but I hope they're blue and fast and full of light. Think of me as a cosmic surfer when I die.”
He was still making a joke out of it. And I was mad at him. It didn't seem fair and it didn't seem at all right. Ray had taught me a lot of good stuff and now he was leaving. I almost wished that he had never shown up. Never taught me what I needed to know about surfing. “I still don't get it,” I said with some bitterness in my voice. “Why did you come here to Nova Scotia if you knew you were in such bad shape?”
He took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “I wanted the feeling of a fresh start. I wanted it to be like back at the beginning.” He paused and looked at the ceiling. “And I guess I wanted to meet a kid just like you. Someone young and uncertain but with a great future ahead of him.”
“What makes you think I have a great future?”
His manner changed, and he was back to the old Ray I knew. “Hey, dinghead, when the big kahuna tells you about your future, you listen up. The man don't lie.”
I wanted to tell Ray I didn't have a clue about what I was going to do with my life,
but I kept my mouth shut. The room felt awfully hot.
“You gotta take care of Mickey D for me,” Ray said.
I nodded. I couldn't speak. I was about to cry. Mentioning Mickey D made everything suddenly seem real. He really was going to die if he was giving me his dog.
Some of Ray's old friends and girlfriends from California started showing up midweek. I met a few of them at the beach. They knew who I was because I had Mickey D with me. It was flat all week. Not a ripple in the ocean. It was as if the sea knew about Ray.
Ray died on a Saturday, one week after the contest. On Tuesday, a taxi arrived at the beach right after sunrise, and the driver, holding a golden urn, got out and looked nervous. Tara and I were already there in our wet suits. So were about twenty of Ray's friends from California. A big Hawaiian-looking guy named Carlos took the urn with Ray's ashes from the driver and carried it down to the water's edge.
Then Carlos picked up his twelve-foot board, set Ray's urn on it and began to paddle out to sea. We all followed him. The water was like glass. The gulls dipped and swooped above, and you could see the kelp waving back and forth in the clear water below.
We paddled about a mile out to sea, near Shut-In Island. I'd never been this far from shore on my board before, and I felt excited, spooked and sad, all at the same time. I could tell that Tara was a little scared, but she was trying not to show it. Carlos stopped paddling and we all formed a circle. Four seals popped up close to us and stared with those big sad eyes. And from high above, you could hear the beating wings of a pair of Canada geese flying over. Even higher up you could see the vapor trails of American jets on their way to Europe.
Carlos held up the urn, and each surfer in turn said something to Ray. Some said something funny, some said something serious. I knew that everyone said something that was true. When it was my turn, all I could
say was “Thanks, Ray. Thanks for teaching me to surf.”
Then Carlos poured Ray's ashes onto the surface of the sea and there was silence. After about ten minutes we all paddled back to shore.
By mid-afternoon, a funny thing happened. The sky became overcast and yet there was still not a breath of wind. Waves began rolling in. Sleek four- to six-foot waves came in sets of seven. There was a lull of nearly five minutes between each set.
“I've never seen anything like this before,” Tara said. We were sitting on the beach, eating vegetarian sandwiches that one of the Californians had made for everyone.
“It's a long time between sets,” I said. “Ray told me that means the waves are coming from really far away.”
Carlos was sitting nearby and he smiled. “Yeah, bro. Long way. Like from off the coast of Africa or something. Time to surf, my friend. Looks like Ray pulled some strings somewhere.”
And so we all got back into our wet suits and paddled out to the Reef. The waves were fast and smooth, and the glassy walls allowed us to carve up and down. I had never seen such graceful surfing before. Then Tara and I took off on a wave together. I took off closer to the peak but told her to stay on. We both arced high up onto the wall and tracked in perfect unison, and I felt like we had bonded in a way I thought was impossible.
The waves lasted for two hours and then, as mysteriously as they had begun, they stopped. It was as if someone had just thrown a switch.
“Someone forget to put money in the machine?” Carlos joked. But we all knew that it had something to do with Ray. Somehow.
By the time we paddled in, the city surfers started arriving. They'd all been to the beach earlier that day and seen that it was flat. Then someone phoned in the news of the freak swell. But now it was gone. I'm not sure who said it. I just know that it wasn't me. I was petting Mickey D, scratching him behind the ears, when I heard the words: “Man, you guys should have been here an hour ago. You missed it.”
After that the summer kind of evaporated. I felt haunted by the loss of Ray. I sat in my grandfather's fish shack with Ray's old boards and his photos and thought about a lot of things: surfing, school coming up in the fall, Tara, me. Ray's old van sat rusting out front. I slept at the shack sometimes and once invited Tara to stay the night with me.
I guess I tried to push things a little too far and she stopped me. I got the point so I
apologized to her. She still spent the night, but we had a hard time talking to each other in the morning.
Through August and September, the hurricane waves never made it to these shores. I was back in school. It felt like a door had shut forever on some happy chapter of my life. I got in the ocean when I could and paddled a lot, but I can't say I had much in the way of exciting surf.
But then in early October, a tropical storm off Florida turned into a monster hurricane that tracked north and stalled offshore. The sea went wild with monster brown foamy waves pounding the coastline. There were traffic jams at the beach as people from Halifax and Dartmouth drove out just to look at the storm waves.
A couple of guys tried to paddle out only to be slammed back in the shore break. It was an out-of-control ocean and the waves were not to be surfed. I tried to tell one of them it was stupid to surf in these conditions. He said it was none of my business. I could see that he was really cold from just a few minutes
in the water. That seemed odd, so I walked down and stuck my hand in the ocean. It was bloody cold.
The storm had moved north, just below Newfoundland, and kept churning big killer waves our way. And it had created an upwelling that made the water icy cold. The water was so uninviting I wanted to give up on surfing. But there was a kind of fever in the air and surfers arrived in the parking lot each morning, waiting for the ocean to clean up, waiting for a chance to surf double-overhead waves.
And then it happened. The wind went offshore. The waves were steep and hollow. All the usual places were still unsurfable, closing out with killer waves. But on the west side of the Lawrencetown headland, right where the river emptied into the ocean, was a clean surfable peak. A lot of guys were standing on the headland, looking down at the wave in awe. It was hugeâa fast, hollow, salt-spray-spitting, grayish green wall of water that looked big enough to eat a man alive. But was it makeable?
I watched Gorbie and Genghis putting on their wet suits, heard them arguing and watched as they ran down the steep side of the headland to surf the peak. I wanted to say something to them. I wanted to remind them that it was near low tide. The river was emptying into the sea. A powerful currentâ not a rip, but a powerful river currentâwas sweeping straight out to sea, right alongside the break. If someone lost a board, they'd be swept to their doom.
All I got out was “Guys...the river...”
It was Genghis who spit on the ground as he ran past, and all he said to me was “Piss on it,” which I assumed meant he didn't want my advice.
Everyone watched as they entered the water below and paddled that same river current out toward the break. It looked almost too easy. Some of the other surfers started unstrapping their boards to follow. I knew how dangerous that river was. Swimmers had drowned here before.
Tara arrived then and looked at me. “You're not going out there, are you?” She
touched my arm and looked in my eyes. She still cared about me.
“Not today,” I said. “I'm dying to surf. But this is all wrong.” I pointed to the foam from the colossal breaking waves that was being swept out to sea in the current.
Genghis made a heroic takeoff and almost made the drop before a big mushroom cloud of exploding white water knocked him off his board. He came up sputtering. We could see that his board had been broken clean in two. He was in close to the rocks in the shallows. All he had to do was drag himself out without getting knocked down and he'd be okay. There was a crowd of surfers and non-surfers on the headland, and they cheered as if it had all been a performance.
Next, Gorbie executed an amazing late takeoff, made the drop down a twelve-foot wall and made a bottom turn, heading away from the peak. It looked like something out of a magazine. He tracked across the wave, dragging his hand and barely keeping his balance. I was sure he was going to make it.