THE STRANGER TIDE

CHAPTER ONE — THE GHOST CURRENT

THE STRANGER TIDE

A Ghost Story of the Black Pacific

CHAPTER ONE — THE GHOST CURRENT

We come to Black Reef in June, me and mi mamá, in a U-Haul that smelled like somebody elses life. Dad was three months muerto by then. Muerto, puerto — funny how in my head them words rhyme, the dead man and the harbor, like dying is just pulling into a port you didnt book. His heart give out in the driveway with the hose still runnin, agua pooling round him like the ocean come inland early to colect him. Thats how I think of it now anyways. Back then I didnt think nada. Back then I was just a kid with a camera and a board and a hole in my chest shaped like a man.

Mamá said we needed a fresh start, un nuevo comienzo mijo, and I said aint nothing nuevo about this place, it smells like fish guts and rust, and she said Danny por favor, just por favor, and that was the whole conversation. Thats how we talked that summer. Half sentences. Half english, half español, all of it broke. Like we was both scared of finishing anything becuase finishing things is what dying is.

i keep thinkin bout how in spanish the word for wave is ola.

ola like hola with the H drowned out of it.

every wave comes in sayin hello with a letter missing.

every wave goes out and dont say goodbye at all.

maybe thats all the ocean is. a million holas missing somthing.

maybe thats all i am too.

Black Reef use to be somthing, I guess. You could tell from the bones of it. Theres a boardwalk nobody walks no more, gray wood gone soft as old bread, and a pier the county condemmed back in ‘79 that just stands out in the water like it never got the memo. Theres a ferris wheel rusted the color of dried blood and surf shops selling tshirts about waves nobody rides anymore, puro nostalgia, homie, that whole town runs on remembering. Somebody spraypainted NO FUTURE on the lifeguard tower and somebody painted over it and somebody painted it again, and I figured that was probly the realest converstation happening in the whole zip code.

The swell my first week was shoulder high and dirty. South wind. Plastic bags drifting threw the kelp like jellyfish that gave up on being alive. Agua mala, mamá calls jellyfish, bad water, and I love that, like the water itself can go bad, like the sea got a temper, se pone malo. I surfed alone mostly. The locals watched from the seawall with there arms crossed, viejos with faces like wet rope, saying nothing, mad-dogging me like new kids was a kind of weather. They didnt say one word untill the day I started paddling north. Toward la niebla. Toward the fog.

Theres a fog bank off Black Reef that dont move. I need you to feel that, because I didnt at first. Fog is suposed to come and go, ese, thats the whole contract with fog, it burns off, it rolls in, it behaves itself. This fog just posts up out past the outer break like its waiting on somthing. Been there longer then anybody can remeber. The fishermen go around it. The charters go around it. Even the birds go around it, and birds is bien stupid.

daydream, paddlin out:

what if fog is the oceans breath held in.

what if the whole sea is one animal holding its breath since forever,

and la niebla is the little bit that leaks out the corner of its mouth.

my dad held his breath at the end. i seen it. one big inhale and then nada,

like he was duckdiving under somthing the rest of us couldnt see comin.

maybe everybody dies mid duckdive.

maybe heaven is just the other side of the wave.

An old guy grabbed my rail when I come in that day. Actual grabbed it, hands like driftwood, and he looked at me with eyes gone the color of dishwater and said you dont paddle at the fog son, not never, nunca, and I asked him why not and he give me two words I been carrying around ever since like rocks sewed in my wetsuit. He said Ghost Current. And then quieter, like the words cost him: la corriente de los muertos. The current of the dead. Which slaps way harder in spanish, no cap, everything about death slaps harder in spanish, we got more practice with it.

The official explination is rip currents. Thats what the plaque by the harbor says, rip currents, swim parallel to shore, dont panic, have a nice day. Twenty six surfers gone since 1962. Bodies recovered: four. You can do that math however you want, homie. I done it every way and it always comes out haunted.

The local explination dont fit on no plaque. Somthing lives out past the fog. Thats what they say once theyve had a few. Somthing old. The Awasu knew about it before any of us ever wrecked a ship here — the first people of this coast, whalers, sea hunters, people of the outer breath they called themselfs, and there stories talk about a thing sleeping under the ninth wave. Not a god. Not a animal. Not even a spirit exacly. El Dormido, I call it in my head now. The Sleeper. But I didnt know none of that my first summer. Im telling it out of order becuase thats how the ocean tells things. The sea dont do chronological. Every wave is the begining and the end of somthing at the same exact time.

i think waves are cliffs lying down.

a cliff is just a wave that forgot how to move.

maybe a skull is the same thing.

maybe everything breaks becuase everything use to be water.

mar, amar — the sea, to love. one letter apart in mamás language.

add an A and the ocean turns into love. take it away and love dries up into salt.

sorry. i do that. ever since the accident i —

no. not yet. im not telling that part yet.

What I want to tell you about is the photographs.

I got dads old Pentax and a habit of developing my own film in the bathroom with a towel stuffed under the door, and when your the new kid in a dead town you take alot of pictures, fotos de nada, fotos of everything. One day Mr. Calloway who runs the Reef Break Surf Shop, which is mostly a museum that dont know its a museum, he lets me shoot his wall. The wall is fifty years of surf photos. Black and white, then faded color, then polaroids, then nothing, becuase nothing worth shooting happened in Black Reef after about 1989.

And thats when I seen him the first time. Not in the water. On the wall.

Theres a photo from 1967, Summer Classic it says in white pen, and theres a boy in it maybe seventeen, blond, laughing, beautiful in a way that makes other boys uncomforable, and I aint to proud to say it made me uncomforable, holding a longboard like it weighed nothing at all. Theres a photo from 1974, diffrent boys, diffrent boards, and hes in that one too. Same face. Same age. Theres one from 1983, Op shorts and zinc noses, and there he is at the edge of the frame, not aged a single day, looking not at the camera but at whoever was holding it. Like he knew. Como un fantasma that learned how to pose.

I asked Calloway whos the blond kid, and Calloway looked at the wall a long long time and then looked at me even longer and said what blond kid, and his voice come out flat and carefull, the way you talk around a dog that bites. I pointed. Right there, I said, hes in like six of these, mira. And Calloway took the 1967 photo off the wall and laid it face down in a drawer soft as closing a coffin and said we’re closing early today Danny. And that was that.

that night i lay in bed doing ghost math.

twenty six surfers since 1962. four bodies. one boy grinning

out of three decades of other peoples summers like a tax the sea forgot to colect.

fantasma. phantasm. theres a fan in fantasma,

like even the dead got fans, like even drowning gets reruns.

and somwhere under all that black water somthing was keeping the recordings.

So you know what I done. Course you know. Your reading this, aint you. You already clocked that Im the exact kind of stupid that paddles toward the thing everybody says paddle away from. A huevo. Dawn patrol, next morning. Gray light, glassy water, nobody out. And lemme tell you, good waves and nobody out is natures way of screaming somthing at you, but I paddled past the inside bar, past the outer break, out to where the water goes black and cold like the ocean changing its mind about you. The fog sat there same as always. Up close it dont even look like fog. It looks like a wall that learned how to breath.

I floated there with my legs hanging down in all that dark, heart going like a busted reel, telling myself there aint nothing in there, its water vapor, its tempature diffrentials, its science, cálmate Danny, cálmate.

Then the fog moved.

Not blew away. Moved. Bulged outward, slow, like somthing bien grande turning over in its sleep, and the water under my board droped, just droped, the whole ocean sucking backward into the gray, and every surfer alive knows what that means. Somthing very large was standing up out there.

A wave was coming out of the fog. A wave from a place waves dont come from, no wind, no swell, no reason, tall and green-black and perfect, una ola imposible, and it shouldnt of been ridable, no human being alive coulda rode that thing —

And there was somebody on it.

Blond hair. Laughing.

Coming straight at me out of fifty years of photographs.

TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER TWO