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Outside Magazine, May 2005

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Riding with the Ghost Dolphin (cont.)


	EYES ON THE HORIZON: Leon Perez at El Rancho, a break north of Ixtapa (Photograph by Kurt Markus)

I CHANGE INTO A SNUG RASH GUARD, lock the car, and pick up the six-and-a-half-foot board. By now there are a dozen surfers bobbing 30 yards offshore. I don't want to compete for waves today, but if I did, these teenagers—unlike the locals in California—wouldn't mind. They're tolerant, even encouraging. Yesterday, when I collided with a local kid—my bad—he didn't emerge from the tumble yelling, "You !@#$ing kook, get the !@#$ out of the water!" I said, "Lo siento," and he shrugged and smiled, as if to say, "Don't worry, we all sucked at the beginning."

The air is chilly. I turn down a smooth path toward the river. Beyond the far bank is a curve of desolate beach that stretches for miles. Out in what seems to be the middle of this shallow bay, I can see the swell form and break. I can see the small figures of four surfers.

At a tangled pile of drift logs, I unwind the leash from the board and secure the Velcro strap at my ankle. Then I wait for a little shore wave to break, jog into

"Everything moves," a local told me with a grin, describing Leon catching a wave: His arms windmill, his feet kick in a violent flurry.

the water, jump onto the board, and start to paddle. The strong tug of the rip current pulls northward. I make it over a few steep swells and hit a low ridge of whitewater, paddling hard. It floods over me, stops my progress. I bob up paddling like a possessed turtle, shoulders burning, and when I shake my eyes clear, the only thing in front of me is a pelican and a head-high wall already breaking. Oh, shit. Duck-dive! Wait until the white pile is almost on top of you. Big breath. Rock the nose down hard with both hands, press the tail down with one foot . . . Yes! When I buoy to the top, the wave is past. Dang. "Paddle again even before you can see," Leon said. I do and make it over the next wave just as it peaks. And then there's only open, rolling water. Phew. For me, there is always this race to get past the break, always a little desperate.

I catch my breath and look left in time to see Leon hunting the next set. While the other three surfers are just sitting on their boards, he is already moving, paddling smooth and fast, angling both toward deeper water and down the beach. Abruptly, he spins. He is just in front of a perfect peak, the rounded top of a glassy, inexorably forming mountain. No one else has seen it coming. And then he is an explosion of motion. "Everything moves," a local told me with a grin, describing Leon catching a wave: His arms windmill, his feet kick in a violent flurry. But what you remember most is his expression: He looks like a gunfighter in the middle of a fast draw against five men. When the wave is steepest, hanging for a split second at its own angle of repose, with just the top beginning to fold, Leon is up, rocketing left down the wall with the speed of a diving tern. He is crouched, perfectly balanced, the wave ripping white down the line, unpeeling behind him and trying to devour him like a jaw. He stands upright and pumps, bouncing the front of his board for more speed, swings up to the stiff lip, and caroms down off it in another crouching swoop. I laugh out loud.

I am thinking, like the six-year-old Leon, I want to do that.

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