Fear and the art of surfing
At a surf camp for adults on the Costa Rican coast, the regimen is simple: surf, sleep and eat.
December 26, 1999
By ROBIN PIERSON
Special to The Orange County Register
In my dreams, I can see their lips froth and their faces grow, rolling ever closer. At night, when the wind changes to onshore, I can hear them pounding. And in the morning, as I paddle out among them, I puff like a LaMaze student, throttling my fear, psyching myself up to ride them.
As we wait for the next set, the Costa Rican air force, a phalanx of pelicans, glides over us. Stay next to me, our instructor, Rick Walker, orders. I'm a wave magnet.
Flat on my belly, looking over my shoulder at the silent walls of water rushing toward me, my body spurts adrenalin at the approach of the smallest set of waves. Four-foot rollers appear positively monstrous.
Instinct tells me to go under or over them, farther out where it's sane. Paddling in front of a peaking wave defies common sense.
I tell Walker how scared I am. What could happen? he asks. Its only water.
At this surf camp for adults on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica — a branch of Corky Carroll's Surf School, based in Huntington Beach — the curriculum is simple: Surf, eat, sleep.
Three times a day, we slip into 80-degree water and attempt to glide across the glassy faces of blue-green waves. Between sessions, we bask in luxury local-style with fresh food, cold drinks and great music in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle.
While surfing legend Carroll takes clients to a wave haven north of Puerto Vallerta in Mexico, two years ago Walker started taking wanna-be surfers to Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula, a wave-rich jungle paradise a seven-hour drive west of the capital, San Jose.
Walker's headquarters are in a thatched-roof hut off a dirt road beside a beach, where consistent 4- to 6-foot waves go mostly unridden. The wind is most often offshore and the temperature, in and out of the water, hovers around 80. His clients are mostly A-type urban professionals with a few grand in disposable income and a week's vacation time.
An overgrown kid with a head of sun-scorched hair and a booming in-your-face bark, Walker allows whining — but only about surfing. "Here you are in paradise, so I dont want to hear about your loser husband, your flaky kids or any of that stuff," he says.
Fast and light on a longboard, I easily catch a wave, but as I drop down the face, I lose my focus and tumble into an underwater body-whomping joy ride until the wave moves on, leaving me scratching for the surface. I try again and make the drop. As I careen across smooth, green water, I hear crashing behind me. White water envelopes me, and again I am tossed down into a roaring washing machine.
Session complete, we sprint along a sun-baked path into the jungle. Breaching an oasis, the baked path turns into a trail of green clover tipped with tiny yellow flowers. Jungle sounds soften the rumble of pounding waves, and lush vegetation shades the blazing tropical sun. Collapsing in a hammock under a palm-frond roof, I smell garlic chicken roasting and watch iguanas drop from trees.
FIVE AGAINST THE SEA
It is last spring, and five of us — from very diverse walks of life, with surfing abilities ranging from beginning to intermediate — have left our families and our jobs to surf in Costa Rica. Out in the water, each of us has his or her own agenda.
Marc Hamilton, a 32-year-old Fountain Valley business consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, wants to paddle less and catch more. He brought his laptop along, and when he's not surfing or eating, he's often e-mailing colleagues and clients, cinching deals.
"Little Bill" McCann, a pasty, pudgy construction supervisor from Portland, Ore., has never surfed before. He wants to leave the white water and ride a green wave. One thing is certain — this guy will return to Portland a different color than when he left.
My friend Cindy Heal, a 40-something geriatric nurse practitioner from Laguna Beach, has also never surfed. Lithe and agile, with more muscle than fat, Cindy paddles well and easily propels her board beyond the beach break. But to get outside, she has to learn to turtle, to flip her board over, get under it and hold onto it, as waves crash above her. It's an exhausting technique but functional as our longboards are too big to push under waves.
Big Bill, Bill Jarvis, a gangly 6-foot-tall attorney from Riverside, already rides smooth and clean. His goal today: a midday nap. Walker calls him "Nips" after a surf camp dog that spends her days sleeping and eating.
Me? I'm a middle-aged woman who spent a chunk of her youth sitting on beaches around the world watching guys surf, because that's what most girls did then.
WATCHING AND WAITING
These days, I'm still surrounded by surfers — budding surfers — my young sons who consider the ocean their front yard.
One of them, Dashel, 8, wilts if he doesn't immerse himself in the ocean — daily.
As my boys regaled me with their stories of waves — of being encased in tubes of water as they body board — I saw my future as a taxi driver, ferrying them to waves only to sit on the beach and watch, still curious about what happens out in the water.
Been there, done that — I signed them, and me — up for a week of Corky Carroll's Surf School in Huntington Beach the summer before last.
As the oldest person — let alone only grown woman at surf camp, I got a lot of attention.
Each summer more than 600 students — the majority ages 8 to 16 — attend the weeklong sessions at Bolsa Chica State Beach.
On our first day, as the 20-something hard-bodied instructor tried to select a surfboard for me, he asked my age instead of my height.
When Carroll, now a well-fed family man who can still inspire and impress surfers half his age, stopped by for his morning inspection, he was so stunned to see a contemporary of the female persuasion out in the lineup, he paddled out into the mush and gave me personal pointers.
Later at lunch in Huntington Beach, at a local's place decorated with photos of surfing greats, I pointed to a picture of Carroll in his heyday, bragging that I'd just been out in the water with the former world champion.
Best of all, we caught waves. Exhausted, with raw knees, when the five-day session was over, I felt wonderful. I had the glow — a bubble of resistance against the hassles of everyday urban family life.
Surfing was an all-encompassing adventure that I could have in my own front yard — the ocean is the last big undeveloped parcel of raw nature left in Southern California.
BIGGER, FASTER, FARTHER
I wanted more. When the water here turned cold, I signed up to go to Costa Rica.
The waves in Costa Rica are bigger, stronger and longer than the mushy beach break at Huntington. It's all a matter of muscle memory and physics, Walker tells me.
As a surf instructor and director of Corky Carroll's Surf School, Walker, a 47-year-old Fountain Valley family man, has found his forte and his passion.
Three-and-a-half years ago, he left his video production business and daily commutes to Los Angeles and started surfing again — mainly as something to do with his teen-age son.
He got hooked, partnered with surfing legend Carroll and never looked back.
"Girls" are better to teach, he says. They don't have the ego. But then Walker reveals a previous female student's take on his theory. The reason we listen so intently, she told Walker, is because we're scared to death. That woman spoke for me.
I can only catch waves that scare me. Try as I might to catch the little mushy bumps, I can't. It's only when the waves are at their most awesome, cresting, stretching to their ultimate height before toppling into a roaring froth, that I can catch them.
Thanks to Walker's constant banter, I have new mantras that help muffle my anxiety. If I keep my head and shoulders lifted, feet together and positioned on the board on my stomach so the water hits my nipple line when I catch the wave, my board glides down and doesn't pearl.
Balanced, I ride white water all the way to shore and I'm beaming. I can pick you out from the beach, Walker implores, inches from my face. You just go straight. You look like a statue out there. I tell him that I'm just so happy to be riding a wave that I don't want to do anything to blow it. But to stay longer in the smooth green water, I need to learn how to turn.
ON THE BEACH
Lying in a hammock, watching emerald-throated hummingbirds plunge their beaks into pink hibiscus, I wait for lunch and think about turning.
Walker tailors the accommodations to his clients — with options ranging from small, cozy resorts with pool bars and air-conditioned rooms, to local homes like Club Tuba Azul (The Blue Wave Club), an immaculate, open-air thatched-roof ranchero a minute's walk from the water.
Walker has made some accommodation changes since his first few trips. The quiet hillside home he and his clients stayed at on one trip had turned into an official International Swingers Club destination when the next group of surfers arrived.
At dinner one night, Walker was sandwiched between a naked man and a similarly unclothed woman. His clients on that trip, two single guys from New York, loved the place. That house is no longer part of Walker's constantly evolving repertoire.
Three of us, Cindy, Marc Hamilton and I, opt for the ranchero. Towering nearly three stories tall with hardwood floors and no walls except in the bedroom and bathrooms, the place is tropical perfection.
The furnishings are spare — a hammock downstairs and one in the loft, a queen-size futon in the living area (perfect for massages) and a large dining table resting on legs made of splayed tree roots. The outdoor rain shower is hidden from view by flowering hibiscus.
Living at the ranchero is like living in luxury outside, in the jungle. During the day, bats hang upside down in the kitchen, purple and orange crabs scurry across the bedroom floor and iguanas slither through the dried palms covering the roof.
According to house legend, guests were sitting at the bar one evening when a porcupine, lounging in the rafters above them, relieved itself.
Cindy and I share a room and we never close the shutters, letting in the sights and sounds of the jungle day and night. Lying in bed just after dawn, I watch red butterflies flit above purple bougainvillea.
As the day heats up, the static drone of cicadas grows. Sometimes the noise from the jungle overpowers the music and our conversations, ringing in a high-pitched chorus, as if the creatures decided in unison to make everyone aware of their omnipresence.
In darkness, fireflies flicker above a carpet of clover. We learn that the deep, growling rumble that wakes us at night comes from bands of howler monkeys.
Our jungle house also comes with a cook, a very fine cook. Every day at 6:30 a.m., before our first surf session, Maria cuts up mangoes, papayas, pineapple and watermelon for us, makes coffee and sets out thick German bread for toast.
After our first surf, we laze in the hammocks as Maria cooks bacon and eggs. Lunch is always an elaborate, multicourse feast featuring huge salads, sometimes with hearts of palm, and entrees like spaghetti with filet mignon, lobster — both broiled and made into sushi rolls — and a Costa Rican mainstay, pork with green chili over rice and beans.
While at Club Tuba Azul we awoke with the jungle at dawn, others in our group opted for the cool darkness of the air-conditioned rooms at a nearby resort. They slept in, and when hungry, stumbled into the hotel restaurant and ordered meals already paid for.
At night, we add a bit of drinking and a lot of dancing.
DAWN BREAKERS
At daybreak, after a snack of papaya and pineapple, I walk barefoot down the sandy path to find a 3-foot swell and offshore winds.
The water temperature seems the same as the air's and slipping into it is like walking into a gentle embrace. It's as close to perfect as any scene I've been in for a long time.
I have a good session. I'm in the right place at the right time and slip down the faces and turn — a little — feeling the power of the ocean beneath my feet.
No one except us campers is out so the guys take off their trunks and surf naked, their white butts glaring against their tanned torsos. Everyone has fun and I'm not too scared.
Life is wonderful. And we've scheduled a masseuse.
An Austrian woman we met at the bar the night before comes to work out the knots in our necks and backs. She does acupuncture massage, she explains, holding up a thin metal probe, which she proceeds to poke around the outer edge of my ear.
She outlines my body with the tool, from my bellybutton, around my lips, to the center of my forehead. It's a strange, not-unpleasant experience, and while my back goes unkneaded, I seem to feel a bit looser. We do not, however, ask her back. Instead, the cook's 8-year-old daughter, Rebecca, with her long toes, walks on our backs as we lie on a giant futon in the living room. We moan and Rebecca never stops giggling.
The waves are bigger at our sunset session, definitely more powerful, and the guys swoon over the possibility of a fresh swell rolling in by morning. I don't say anything, but silently hope it's not any bigger.
That night we watch "Five Summer Stories," a surfing video from the '70s. Legends like Gerry Lopez, Shawn Thompson and Carroll ride massive walls of water at famous breaks like Pipeline on Oahu and Gas Chambers in Puerto Rico.
On their longboards they merge with the wave, carving smooth and graceful lines on a fluid canvas. Lopez squats on his heels, arms outstretched as he emerges after what seems an impossible length of time in the tube. Out, he stands upright and tilts his pelvis to the green-faced monster with the calmness of a Zen master.
"I'm trying to show you the soul of surfing, the style," says Jimmy, a self-acclaimed tube rider of the Nicoya Peninsula. "Not that jerky stuff that kids do today. Tomorrow," he says, "we'll be surfing with the masters on our shoulders." I wonder if Lopez was ever scared.
Morning. From the loft I check the surf. Of course, it's huge, and instead of studying the new swell I focus on a black bird with a brilliant yellow breast and turquoise flight feathers gliding by at eye level.
All the sets are overhead and many top 8 feet. My fear is back in full force and as I walk down the path, I can feel the sets pounding in my body, resonating deep in my chest.
Out among them, I quickly learn that these are the kind of waves that hold you under too long, leaving you struggling for the surface long after you've run out of breath. These waves hit hard and contort your body, making it hard to know which way is up, out or in.
As soon as I can, I catch a wave and milk it all the way to shore, riding the last of it on my belly, bouncing, grateful.
Everyone, even Jimmy, the master of the tube, and Walker, get trounced. They also get some very fast rides on some very big, clean waves. The masters would be proud.
By afternoon, the sky is clouded and the sea a foaming, gray monster.
After lunch, Rebecca and I head down for a swim. We bob in the white wash and she practices swimming in the foamy lulls. I float on my back and let the froth flow over me.
LA VIDA ES UNA PLAYA
Pura vida, "pure life," is a salutation they say in Costa Rica. And I got to taste it. There's something about being in the ocean that is very wonderful — cleansing, going back to the source, energizing.
Riding an ocean wave is just about the pinnacle of ocean therapy and I got to taste what it's like to be out in the water, trying to get a free ride from nature.
Next time I go to Costa Rica, I'll be ferrying my kids. And if the waves are huge, I'll sit on the beach and watch, knowing what it's like to be out among them.
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