Having curled up with this other fine book, Caught Inside, by this guy I’d just surfed with, I read into the wee hours, then found myself slouched at La Casita’s settee table, all disheveled and droopy-eyed and peering around me at the utter squalor of my own in-progress oeuvre: runny, sea-stained notepads and raggedy paper scraps and matchbook covers scrawled with poorly-wrought descriptions, half-baked observations and transcribed bits of inane surf-jive scattered about; printed-out chapters splayed nonsequentially across the bench seat, not a single page unmauled by my own editorial violence (mostly Xs of various sizes, colors and degrees of obvious disgust); my tape recorder, wrapped in its disgorged and stretched and twisted innards, lying on the floor by the door where it somehow fetched up, whatever searing witticisms it once stored gone now (the literary world will survive the loss, I suspect); my sad old dinosaur of a laptop cantilevered precariously over the table edge as if I were hoping it’d fall and break (its flat, permanently depleted battery possibly a minor metaphor of sorts). And all those cheap useless Bics, brimming with blue and black ink that would not flow outward onto paper, scattered around like bad news I-Ching sticks where I one-by-one flung them in frustration. And my daily journal, that ode to drivel; where was the goddamn thing?

What a fucking mess. This is where I live?

Having no real choice, I crawled back into my bunk to finish Duane’s book and found myself taking grim, opprobrious solace in the fact that Duane has never surfed Hawaii – never ridden big Sunset and so forth (Hah! What can he do to me?!) – and then hoping he’d fuck up and his narrative would fall apart at the end. But it didn’t and I was suddenly and truly glad for that, and aghast that I had had such a thought. Having put the book down, I lay on my bunk thinking about envy and self-doubt and the fear they engender, and then dozed fitfully for a while.

Meanwhile the Earth turned and when I awoke a subtle warm glimmering in the eastern sky was emanating faint shafts of color and hope, which tentatively probed the abyss overhead. Shivering for all sorts of reasons, I squirmed into my dank, sandy wetsuit and went out for a surf. There was still a star or two visible low in the brightening indigo over the western horizon as I sat my board and waited for my first wave.

It was a couple weeks ago, this scene I describe, the last day of the New Year’s swell. The waves were chest high at the point in front of my campsite and even as first light turned to dawn and then to morning I had the lineup to myself – the week of boomers at the points and reefs below Punta Lobo had surfed everyone out. Shiner, God bless her, followed me down as far as the high water mark. As usual, her snoozing form was a perfect reference point for gauging side shore drift.

I started tight, flat and clumsy but gradually relaxed and found my rhythm and ultimately had a fine session.

I believe I rode this one particular wave about as competently as it could have been ridden on a longboard. As I paddled back out I relived the wave in as much detail as I could. If I don’t immediately do this – re-imprint the sensory experience upon my conscious mind while it’s fresh – all traces of a ride quickly fade from memory and I will not be able to reflect back on it later. Riding waves and dreaming are alike in this way.

Some time later, while vacantly drifting between sets, a sentence I had written weeks before up at El Rancho de Chicho popped into my mind, except that it was better now. I’d added a certain adjective that had been wanting, not so much for descriptive reasons, but for flow. I immediately recited aloud the improved sentence and pictured it on the page. If I had ridden a wave before doing this, I likely would have lost the idea, because of the way surfing clears your mind and forces you to live in the present.

I paddled in as the wind came up hard onshore, creating ugly surface irregularities where before was burnished marble, as if time had been run back on some oceanic sculptor’s finishing work. And the swell was in its final throes, barely waist-high and dropping still, as I watched from the beach. The suddenly poor surfing conditions meant that all the late risers had missed out; the empty lineup remained so. My own two hours in the water now seemed like pure serendipity, an unearned honorarium. Had I not been vexed with envy of another writer’s good, hard work, I would have slept on through the morning glass like the others. The improved sentence struck me now as a subtle and sordid miracle, the perfected offspring of random chance and an appalling personal defect. You’ve seen that sentence, its added adjective; you passed them by in your reading, unmindful of this quirk of their history. 

I set to putting right the paperwork and general disorder in La Casita Viajera, which is of course my means of travel, my home and where I write. Then I sat outside in my beach chair and sipped my coffee and thought about Dan Duane’s book and Kem Nunn’s book and some other books I admire. At some point in my musings it occurred to me that although I’m not gifted, I have sufficient talent that if I work very hard I’m capable of creating something worthwhile.

Relaxing in the lee of my little house on wheels, I also thought about the wave I’d ridden perfectly – as perfectly as I could’ve ridden it. Putting myself back on that wave, I imagined myself in the place and the state of mind that is sometimes referred to as The Glide.

I dozed off as the encampment below Punta Lobo began its late arousal. For the moment, I was less worried about what lay ahead, both in my life and in this chronicle. I would make do. Things would work out. 

The following is a list of articles Allan has written for the magazine:

• The Caribbean On $25 A Day ~ Affordable Caribbean
• A Dispatch From Down South Costa Rica ~ The End-Of-The-Road
• A Night At The Cantina ~ Pavones, Costa Rica
• MY LITTLE WORLD GETS SHAKEN ~ Pavones, Costa Rica

To contact Allan by email Click Here