You No Eat This?

By Michael H. Kew

All photos: Kew.

MONDAY AT THE MALIBU OF AFRICA. Walid, a white Ivorian, is a black dot on his shortboard thruster a thousand yards from land, floating in the brown Atlantic off the tip of a luxuriant point. Sent here to die, long-period groundswells afford overhead tubes and lengthy walls that croak as closeouts near the mouth of a lagoon. This is where the elephants play. Twenty-two of them, big and small, young and old, spraying themselves with their trunks of water, trumpeting, flaunting tusks, wallowing in mud laced white with seafoam. Sociable elephants on a desolate beach backed by a deep-green rainforest unaffected by poaching or illicit logging. Here at the Malibu of Africa, Walid shuns the chaos of Abidjan, his home city, the decaying Paris of Africa, a hive of crime and cocaine. The elephants don’t notice the goofyfooted figure flirting with the wave, zipping along the glassy wall, smacking its lip, thrice burrowing into the barrel. He does this for them. The elephants. They squirt more lagoon water from their trunks as Walid is blasted with compressed tube spit, then bottom-turns and boosts a spectacular flyaway kickout over the closeout end section. Daily, the elephants see this wave. Right now, the Malibu of Africa is far better than California’s Malibu, where it is near midnight yesterday. In Côte d’Ivoire—the Ivory Coast—today has just begun.

THAT NEVER HAPPENED. No elephants on the beach. They are extinct.

Wartime dust seems unsettled as we leave a shaded alleyway home in the dense Abidjan commune of Marcory. Walid’s English is bad, his French accent thick. He chainsmokes his hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes. He is 35 years old.

In his olive-green Renault station wagon, we weave through Abidjan, pass a big cocoa-processing factory—the air smells of chocolate—and blast out onto the A100, Voie Express de Bassam, under a hazy bluey-brown sky. The road is paved but crowded and lawless, noisy and dirty and stinky and loaded with litter. Walid says that, during the civil war two years back, nobody could drive their cars in or around Abidjan. “Here was many war, many sniper. People getting shot everywhere.” He waves his left arm out the window. “Dead guys right here!”

We pass a gloomy French military camp, the 43rd BIMA (43rd Marine Infantry Battalion), ringed with razor wire. “They saved Ivory Coast,” Walid says. “If no intervention from this army, Côte d’Ivoire was finished.”

Flanking the A100 are several billboards in French and dozens of impromptu-looking stalls offering thousands of things for sale, almost everything imaginable for anyone with West African CFA francs. As in the rest of the Africa, the stuff is all the same—furniture, fruits and vegetables, lumber, clothes, tires, electronics, cell phones—things locals need, not tourists, because Côte d’Ivoire tourism is dead. During my trip, except for a few business travelers, I saw no foreigners.

At one of the road’s many checkpoints, a soldier stops us. Says he’s hot, implores Walid for cash for bottle of cold soda. Walid informs the soldier that I’m an American tourist, and it would look bad if he palmed money to the unsmiling man in fatigues holding a loaded AK-47.

“If the military and police see me, a white Ivorian guy, not from France, they like this,” Walid says as he resumes driving. “I born in Cocody (an Abidjan suburb) in 1977, my father Ivorian, my mother French. Côte d’Ivoire is many mixed. I have double nationality, Ivorian and French, but I don’t want just Ivorian. Ivorian passport I want for go Ghana, go Liberia, for go Dakar. Is good. No visa. My big passport is France. Is better for travel. Is nice.”

Two minutes later, we veer off into the dirt and stop in front of a yelping group of small, rag-clothed boys. Their arms and hands reach frantically into the car, pushing small cellophane-wrapped bundles of sugar cane at our faces, haggling with Walid. He buys two bundles and hands me one. “Good for chew, eh?” he says with a smile. “Delicious sweet.”

“Yeah, sugar highs are great. I think those boys agree.”

Aside from acres of coconut plantations, the road from Abidjan is essentially one long marketplace, stalls hawking all sorts of things. We stop aside one of the many roadside stalls to peruse a colorful spread of fresh, locally grown produce. In fertile Côte d’Ivoire, full of farms, such bounty prevails—nearly 70 percent of Ivorians work in some type of agriculture.

But no one really farms in Abidjan, and we’re happy to leave. Exiting one of Earth’s most dangerous cities is a retreat from pain, mental and physical. Muggings, robbery, burglary, and carjacking are common. The world’s third-largest French-speaking metro (after Kinshasa and Paris), Abidjan’s weary black heart throbs among the inlets and headlands that pierce Ébrié Lagoon. It is West Africa’s largest, covering a surface of 120,000 hectares, one of three long, thin lagoons that parallel the Ivorian coast. Once the pristine “pearl” of the country’s lagoons, the Ébrié is now a woeful cesspit of urban and industrial waste here in Côte d’Ivoire’s economic hub.

For its first 33 years of independence, under its first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny (“Very nice guy,” Walid says), Côte d’Ivoire was famous for its cultural harmony and robust economy, the latter due to Côte d’Ivoire’s status as the world’s leading cocoa producer and Africa’s main exporter of pineapples and palm oil. But when Houphouët-Boigny died from prostate cancer in 1993, a new president was needed, and the nation found itself struggling with its first democratic process and a new national identity, impeded by the divisive influence of the three Rs: region, religion, and resources.

Henri Konan Bédié, then-National Assembly President, succeeded Houphouët-Boigny, ruling until 1999, when he was overthrown by Ivorian military leader Robert Guéï in the nation’s first successful coup d’état. At issue was Bédié’s law, hastily drafted and approved before the 1995 election, that required both parents of a presidential candidate to have been born in Côte d’Ivoire.

Before the 2000 presidential election, Guéï sparked ethnic hate and xenophobia against his main political rival, Alassane Ouattara, who represented northern Côte d’Ivoire’s immigrants, particularly Muslim plantation workers from Mali and Burkina Faso. Due to the parenthood clause, Ouattara was disqualified from the election by his mother’s Burkina Faso heritage.

Guéï’s rule lasted just 10 months, but it marked the beginning of conflict in once-peaceful Côte d’Ivoire. Defeated by Laurent Gbagbo in the 2000 election, Guéï refused to concede, and it took a citizen uprising to topple Guéï and lift Gbagbo to power. Still, the discontent over discrimination and voting rights exploded in September 2002, when Ivorian military troops, many from the north, mutinied and launched attacks in several cities, including Abidjan. Guéï was killed the first night, and thousands more died in the conflict. Ending in 2007, the war led to the death and displacement of thousands of Ivorians.

Still, Côte d’Ivoire stayed split. French and UN peacekeepers routinely patrolled the buffer zone that separated the rebel-controlled north and the government-controlled south. Finally, in October 2010, after repeated delays, elections aimed at ending the conflict were held. But the vote sparked chaos when incumbent Gbagbo refused to concede victory to Alassane Ouattara, who won with 54.1 percent of the vote. It escalated into a full-scale military conflict between those loyal to Gbagbo and Ouattara’s people, and the ensuing stand-off stopped only when Ouattaran and French forces seized the Ivorian south, capturing and deposing Gbagbo. Since Ouattara’s inauguration in 2011, Côte d’Ivoire has remained somewhat stable.

Political tensions persist, however, namely via Gbagbo supporters, who launched violent attacks near the Liberian border in 2012 and 2013. Then, four months before my visit, municipal and regional elections held were generally quiet aside from incidents of localized violence when results were announced.

CHILDREN SCREAM and wave as we rattle through another rural village, kicking up dust. “Michael, this is good,” Walid says, smiling, tapping the ash from his spliff. “The young good, happy. They look the white man—hello!” He waves his left hand at me. “Happy. After years of war, it’s very nice, you know? Future of Ivory Coast is good.”

The swell has jumped. Sheltered right points entice. En route: plantation workers stroll along the track, holding machetes for coconuts. Many trails into the wilderness, in all directions, no signs—easy to get lost. Tall weeds and fields of maize. Walid has not ventured this way for a long time; he stops the car to chat with a hobbling old man and ask for directions to the beach. Walid hands him a cigarette; the man clasps his hands in thanks.

“Cigarette no easy for the villagers to buy,” Walid says. “Everybody want the cigarette. I keep the ganja. Ha!”

He drives for a while. We listen to reggae. I eat peanuts and drink orange Fanta. Eventually we find the heavily rutted, overgrown track that winds to the edge of the forest, the glassy Atlantic offering large, severe shorepound.

“The jungle is quick to reclaim the road,” I say. “This place was almost impossible to find.”

“No problem, eh?” Walid replies with a wink. He parks in a small clearing between palms. “The spot is over there,” he says, pointing left as he exits the Renault. It’s a sharp bend in the coastline—a hidden right point—pounded with thundering whitewater, a place my guidebook describes thusly: “With its curling breakers, it’s enough to inspire poetic musings.”

We walk for a few minutes. The heavily eroded beach is littered with driftwood sticks and garbage, mostly plastic bottle caps. The sand is course and pink, the air thick with salt mist, the sky a low, ominous gray. Big, powerful groundswells explode along the uneven rock shelf. The lineup is a roiling mess of currents and closeouts, an odd corner off the edge of the channel. But the set-up looks nice for a smaller swell—the shelf piercing the straight backbeach, which falls away into a gradual beach curve before restraightening down to what appears to be another right point in the distance.

“Is shit, eh?” Walid says, relighting his spliff. “We keep going.”

“Where?”

“Spots. Places need big swell like this.”

Back at the car, I study the map where I’d marked 38 possible right points between Abidjan and Liberia. Most look inaccessible by land, but there is one southeast-facing nook in our general vicinity that looks like it would “need big swell.” Finger on the map, I show Walid.

“Ah! This spot very good for fishing. Last time I there for surfing, one guy caught a snapper that was 45 kilos!”

“Does it need a big swell to be surfable?”

“The big swell, yes. Long time I went there.”

The day itself is long, as are the drives to find anything remotely surfable. Checking this spot: misfire #1. Much time wasted.

Retrace north into the crickets and tall grass, to the main road, lined with maize, swaying in the wind. We are westbound again, this time in a national park. The route is marked by tall, deep-green trees, reminiscent of driving through Northern Californian redwoods. Twenty minutes of non-talking, just reggae on the radio.

Beach turn-off approaches. But first, a roadside stop: flyblown roasted corn, handled by filthy fingers.

Pass.

The seller, a man, in a black leather jacket, mildly offended: “You no eat this? You no belong in Africa!”

WE ARE HUNGOVER in a vile city, a lilliputian sketch of Abidjan, on the opposite side of the country, 350 kilometers from the Paris of Africa.

Its surf is not what I’d grokked via Stormrider Guide detail: A black lava reef where waves break in crystalline waters surrounded by lush jungle. It also has a consistent low-tide shorebreak. Reality: consistent, closed-out, onshore beachbreak. Polluted, murky water. Rusty, industrial setting. No jungle.

A late start today. Breakfast on the beach in front of our decaying hotel, which is empty. They all are.

Low overcast sky, looming rain, haze. As Walid navigates the city, honking the car horn and shouting at bad drivers, I shoot stills and video from the passenger-side window. “Wrap camera strap around your arm,” he warns me. “People can take and run.”

At the city border, a soldier (large bread crumb stuck to one side of his mouth) demands money for the surfboards stuffed in our car. Then, the stink of citified Africa: traffic, beggars, sellers, sewage, open drains, garbage, thick crowds of people. Lawless, impromptu, impermanent. At one intersection, where we are nearly broad-sided by a truck, a man is holding a chicken in one hand, using his other hand to publicly piss into the roadside weeds.

“The future of the road is very good,” Walid says. “You look, you have many guys trucks, many guys work. The new government is very good. I see money, you know? I see money in the population working. Very nice for Ivory Coast.”

Pens of live chickens for sale. Vegetables and roasted corn. Peanuts. Slabs of raw meat. Overcrowded blue taxis, oppressive low clouds, cocoa factories, diesel exhaust, vinegary scent to the air (chocolatey on the outskirts). More dusty red roads, more potholes, more skinny men on bikes hauling bundles of sticks behind them. “For barbecue,” Walid says.

Hard rain. Liberia is near. Smell of burning leaves and Walid’s spliff. Swamps, fields of maize and cocoa, splattered red mud on roadside foliage. Cassava rows growing up low hillsides. Dense jungle—palms, ferns. Earthen scent to the air, like what it must smell like inside the many homes in villages scattered throughout the bush. Women washing clothes in the rain, idle men and lurking kids beneath awnings and umbrellas.

Jagged with snags and dead trees, the road becomes singletrack and nearly impassable. The jungle suffocates, crowding our sight and scratching the car. Then the Atlantic appears, draped around a palmy headland doubling as a right point.

The water looks cool and dark, with fish traps several meters off the white beach, on which two men repair their green fishing nets. Behind them, two men with large machetes group freshly harvested coconuts into a pile. Behind them is a decrepit hotel, recently abandoned, now consumed by termites and the wild jungle it was built amongst. African idyll, returned.

The four men stop tasks and walk to us. Handshakes, smiles exchanged. Walid hands them cigarettes and there are words in French. He translates: Where you come from? For why you come? Long time no guys come here. We want guys to come to our beach for surf and fishing, good for the people when we have money for barbecue.

“I tell them in one year, maybe two maximum, you have many guy return in west Ivory Coast for tourist, because the road is finished.”

I want to send message to white guy: you come. Ivory Coast problems finished.

Peace is precarious, perishable, like that ex-hotel over there. Like the reality of military truth.  Like the majority of rural Ivorian homes. How long, really, do those mud huts last?

Through African Dreams

By Michael H. Kew

Entering downtown Abidjan; flags raised for Independence Day. All photos: Kew.

TWO MONTHS BEFORE I landed in Abidjan, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs website issued a warning:

The Department of State urges U.S. citizens to carefully consider the risks of traveling to Côte d’Ivoire. U.S. citizens who reside in or travel to Côte d’Ivoire should monitor conditions carefully, maintain situational awareness, and pay very close attention to their personal security. Although the security situation significantly improved in 2013, security conditions can change quickly and without warning.

And near the bottom of the page:

Swimming in coastal waters is dangerous and strongly discouraged, even for excellent swimmers. The ocean currents along the coast are powerful and treacherous, and several people drown each year.

Though great for surfers, the latter is permanent on all travel warnings for Côte d’Ivoire. Fifty-five kilometers from Abidjan, near the Ghana border, are turbulent beachbreaks and leisure homes along a palmy sandspit between a canal and the muddy mouth of a lagoon, which Walid says it can be a fun place for longboarding. “Maybe we go there, but maybe not. Longboard, this I don’t really want to.”

“Same.”

“Shark and crocodile there. Lagoon, you know?”

According to my guidebook, the area “tugs at the heartstrings of overlanders, washed-up surfers, and rich weekenders from Abidjan, who run their quad bikes up and down its peroxide-blonde beach.”

Today is Tuesday—“washed-up” or not, Walid promises we’ll have the onshore, head-high closeouts to ourselves.

“If you come here in January, February, wind offshore all the spots,” he says, lighting another spliff. “Now is onshore but bigger swells coming. Summer good for waves big, good no for wind normally. But is okay. We surf.”

Soon the road deteriorates into a bumpy, palm-lined, red-dirt lane, its potholes filled with smashed coconut husks. Once in the village, we pass several colorfully painted, cement-walled bungalows, most with thatched roofs, but there are no people present aside from a woman walking and a small, dazed boy standing atop a large pile of husks. Walid pulls aside one of the bungalows and stops the car behind a small pickup with two shortboard thrusters in its bed.

“My friend staying here for today. Come. We surf.”

The surf facing us is junky, the salt air soft and breezy. In an open veranda Walid’s tattooed, non-English-speaking friend sits with a bikinied girl, both looking half-asleep, cross-legged on wicker chairs, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. “Salut,” I say when they nod at me. “Comment ça va?”

The water is steps away; the soft white sand squeaks underfoot. The sunlight is wan and low, the air thick with the haze typical of coasts in the Gulf of Guinea. Needing to shed my travel grime, dumpy low-tide beachbreak or not. Mostly closeouts, strong currents, many duckdives. The biggest waves are slightly overhead, the water reddish-brown and murky, not as warm as I’d expected. Just past the surf line is a near-constant stream of local fishing canoes heading west, their outboard-motors humming through the windchop.

Toweling off post-session, Walid says the surf will be smaller but cleaner down the beach, where his parents’ house is. To get there, he parks the Renault in a rocky, dusty lot on the north bank of the canal; we load our gear into an elderly smiling man’s (Walid: “He my second father.”) long blue wood canoe that will slide us a half-kilometer across to the canal’s south bank, which initially appears to be a long wall of coconut palms, obscuring the pleasant oceanfront homes beyond. This is where upmarket Ivorians, including President Ouattara, often spend their days off. “On the weekends,” Walid says, “many people here. Weekends is crazy—many jet skis, boats, wakes….” His eyes widen as he twists an imaginary jet ski throttle with his right hand. “Vroom-vroom!”

The water near this dock is vacant except for two other canoes, one with two squatting fishermen, the other with a small boy and his father slowly moving with a stick, pushing off the shallow sand bottom. The late-day sun coats the glassy water in liquid gold, silhouetting the land, and within minutes we step onto the rotting south-bank dock, walking with backpacks and surfboards along a mossy covered pathway directly to Walid’s parents’ tile-floored house, built in the 1970s, replete with beachfront swimming pool and exceptional peace and privacy. As Walid predicted, the surf here is smaller but much cleaner. We opt out of surfing and instead, while daylight fades, relax by the pool with sweating bottles of Flag beer.

Inside the main house, Walid’s housekeeper is cooking dinner—barbecued chicken, attiéké (fermented and grated cassava, a Côte d’Ivoire staple), French fries, chilis, onion/tomato salad. Later, while heavy rain pelts the roof, we slouch on a too-soft sofa, our feet on the glass coffee table. On my laptop screen appear the six videos on Walid’s YouTube channel, including a 39-second clip filmed from the inside of his Abidjan house—gunshots shatter the air outside; Walid gets his handgun; Walid shuts the sliding metal barrier fence around his front room; Walid is panicked. When the shooting stops, three men lay dead on Walid’s driveway.

“Scared? Oui. Yes. Very.” He drinks some beer. Long pause. “This thing happened all the time during the crisis.”

“Did you ever grow numb to it? The public killings and chaos? Blood on the streets?”

“No. I never do this. Impossible. My country torn apart. Nobody want this.”

“So how did you deal with the fact that your immediate domestic surroundings became a battlefield?”

In reflective resignation, his right eyebrow lifts.

“I can do nothing.”

He swallows another Flag swig. Shrugs. Blinks six times. Frowns. Coughs. Leans back and gestures at my computer screen.

“What we do? Not in military. Not politician. Can only wait. And hide in our homes. Not go outside any night for long time.”

This night: windless, with near-constant rain. Can go outside, but we don’t.

Next morning: dreariness, a gray haze. Muffled, like I’m wearing earplugs. Faint hum of fishing boats heading west. I peer through the fogged window. Surf: clean, a bit up from yesterday. Thirty minutes later, the end game of stove-boiled water is bad imported instant coffee, odd since Côte d’Ivoire is a big coffee exporter, once the world’s third largest, behind Colombia and Brazil. While coffee remains its second biggest export (behind cocoa), the industry has been struggling for years, particularly after the turbulent 2010 election. Ex-president Gbagbo, who initially investigated corruption amongst so-called “coffee barons,” tried to nationalize the coffee industry in 2011, suffocating production and export.

In Abidjan I’d bought a 500-gram bag of Café Malaga robusta beans (“Coffees from the Ivory Coast are strongly aromatic with a light body and acidity,” says the National Coffee Association of USA website. “They are ideally suited for a darker roast and are therefore often used in espresso blends.”), planning to sample some here, but Walid’s house holds no coffee grinder nor strainer nor anything of the sort. Could use a sock a la Pat Curren on O’ahu in 1955. But no socks, either.

Still, the hot cups of instant move us to surf. For an hour, the sun shines. In Atlantic murk, I admire the soft terrestrial backdrop of white sand and tall palms and nice homes. An exclusive, empty place when distanced from weekends.

We race closeouts till the wind comes. Walid and his helper take two hours to prepare an outdoor lunch (taquitos de parra, salad, mango for dessert) whence twice a butterfly landed next to me on the table. “Here, that is sign of good luck,” Walid says. “Oui, maybe we get some good waves tomorrow, eh?”

Jet-lagged, I doze the afternoon away. Outside: cloudy and bleak, surf junky and smaller. Only sounds are occasional soft birdsong and the whoosh of waves, surreal and serene.

Floating through African dreams.

Many Food for the Shark

By Michael H. Kew

All photos: Kew.

LUMPY PILLOW, BAD SLEEP in the empty three-story hotel on a hill. It overlooks a town and its harbor, once used to ship timber from now-deforested Mali.

My gut shakes, result of last night’s langouste feast with Solibra Bock beers in the hotel’s restaurant, where Walid and I were the sole diners. This morning, the little town is abuzz—birds, honking cars, sawing, hammering, rap music, lumber being stacked, wind, people talking, kids yelling. The sky is sunny with some clouds; there is, of course, the smell of burning trash. Muezzin creeps into the airspace. Shanty clusters are stacked up the hill, little square boxes of white and brown smooshed unevenly aside one another, with sparse relief patches of green trees. Atop the main hill are the larger, richer homes. Many people walking—where are they going?

The Atlantic shimmers in the heat, the low, hazy skyline a silhouette of immense jungle stretching eastward to infinity. Down on the steep beach, fishermen push their wooden canoes into the backwashed shorepound near a brown rivermouth that has a right-hander mushing off of it. Last night, over the beers and lobster, Walid told me it can get good, “but many big fish.”

Near noon, he knocks on my door.

“We go. Waves should be okay.”

In town we stop at a stall for an unrefrigerated bottle of orange Fanta, which soothes my belly. The midday sun is searing, the track to the remote fishing village bumpy and overgrown, unsigned and obscure. Not obscure is the onshore wind, trashing the mushy, lumpy righthanders smashing off pinkish granite rocks that cradle a small cove, featuring a small fleet of fishing pirogues.

The wave here is a summertime favorite among Walid and his friends; they drive from Abidjan to surf and relax with bearded, cheerful Jules, a part-time bodyboarder who lives full-time with his family in a shack overlooking the cove, 200 yards west of the main village. The extent of Jules’s English is “Yes I,” something normally said by dreadlocked rastafarians.

We shake hands.

“Je suis heureux de vous rencontrer, Jules.” (I’m happy to meet you.)

“Yes I!”

He laughs in that crackly, deep-voiced, African-smoker way. He’s happy. Walid brought cigarettes.

I survey the scene while Jules hacks a couple of coconuts open for us. Burning leaves scent the air, while on the small pocket beach fronting the wave, men hammer on a new pirogue. Aside from going to sea, the boat will never leave this village.

Drinking from the coconuts at Jules’s shaded plastic outdoor table, while the wind eases, rustling palm fronds above us, Walid describes a great outside interest to develop the beach touristically. He suggests this would essentially corrupt and dull the shine of the place, so he’s taking charge, donating money, helping Jules to establish a surf camp, which today is nothing but two flimsy rooms with sand floors but no beds, toilets, or running water.

“If we don’t help Jules, in two or three years, here is finished. Hotel, you know? Place like this no change because of the war, but war is finished. Development now, you know?”

“So you think that, because the war is over, people are going to want to come here?”

“Yes! Many guy want this spot. Many opportunistic. Not now, but five years, 10 years, they come. So we preparing. It’s not good to have l’étranger (strangers) to come here and take this place. Good for local person, long time life live here. I live here many war, many population, no problem.”

Édouard.

An orange/white/green (Ivorian flag colors) pirogue with Dieu Merci (“Thank God”) painted on its bow sails around the headland, soon beached with its bounty of fish that look like big sardines. The whole village reacts—naked boys, giggling girls, women in colorful dresses and men in ripped soccer jerseys. (In rural Africa, attire fashion often contrasts between those preferring traditional [colorful sarongs, wraps, headdresses] versus western [straightened hair, counterfeited designer clothing]).

As if in a tug-of-war with the canoe, men chant and grunt as they drag it from the bluey-brown shorebreak and onto the sand, past the tideline. Commotion and haggling about who gets what and how much. A group of small boys clown for my camera. Three small girls cry and yell at each other; their moms yell at each other. Many goats and chickens, some dogs but no barking. One man divvies the fish, filling large stainless steel bowls and white plastic buckets (I Love Africa on one) into which the women pour seawater before carrying them to the village.

Back at Jules’s, Walid rolls a joint while I wax my 5’4” Lovelace quad fish. The day fades but the tide has dropped and new swell has arrived. Long lulls.

Appearing from the village is Édouard, the village’s surfer, tall and shy, in prime physical shape but smoking a cigarette. Underarm is a thrashed, yellow, too-small (for him) 6’0” AXL thruster from Anglet, France. Walid gifted it 15 years ago, when Édouard was a boy. He speaks no English, so we communicate with hand gestures and facial expressions during the short walk to the slippery jumping-off spot on the nose of the point.

Backdrop: steep pink crescent beach, dense palm forest, colorful pirogues, sagging shacks in the square of village. A scene of purity, devoid of commerce or overcrowding, an innocence of subsistence owed to isolation, its absence of pavement, proximity to wilderness.

The ocean is cool, murky. Despite whitecaps behind the point, the waves are smooth and playful, the good ones running for a while, past a large washrock, ending in shorepound at the edge of the village, where young boys clap and cheer.

The sets pulse; Édouard and I trade. No talking. His surfing is economic and smooth despite his anorexic board. At one interlude, he stands on the headland and hoots, pointing to sea at the approach of a rogue set. Nice one. Paddling back out, a turtle surfaces to my left. (Walid, later: “Shark like turtle. Turtle like surfer. Ha! But here, many food for the shark.”)

During the session, fishermen in four pirogues row around the point and weave through the lineup before beaching in front of the awaiting folks, eager to see the day’s catch. Following this afternoon ritual, the women return to the village, buckets and bowls of fish atop their heads, followed by exhausted men, walking slowly with Yamaha outboards on their shoulders; the youths carry buoys, green nets, gas tanks. Each night, nothing but wet hulls are left on the beach.

Gone since dawn, a blue pirogue slides into view. Four figures: two men frantically rowing; one man frantically bailing; a teenage boy lazily steering. The arrival causes a stir. Three men leap from the point to help the sinking pirogue, which surfs a wave sideways. Returning to the beach with their empty buckets and stainless steel bowls, women wait for fish; the men building the new pirogue seem to notice nothing.

The sun drops and daylight dims. Villagers—Édouard included—return to their homes, most to stoke fires and embrace ambient darkness, the thunder of shorebreak filling the night. Tomorrow will be a repeat of today and yesterday, last week, last year. Because in the village, so somnolent and marginalized and self-sufficient, a world outside does not exist. Yet nothing but the outside can ever change it.

This Is Where You Kill Things

By Michael H. Kew

TWENTY-EIGHT: Feet, length of the black Lincoln Town Car limousine in which Daniel Jones, Nico Manos, Trevor Gordon, and I are driven for three hours, starting at 3 a.m., from the seedy Anchorage hotel to the port of a deglaciated valley town, population 3,000.

“Just driving through that place makes me feel hungover, man.”

Astride his broken captain’s chair, gazing through thick glass at the fjord waters, bushy-browed Mike smiles and sips strong coffee. He’s happy. I’m happy. We’re on his boat. The back of his navy blue T-shirt shows a goofyfooter pulling into a tropical, head-high left over the words Ride the Fury. Yes, we’d like to.

The port, groggy and foggy at 6:39 a.m., shrinks astern. Flanked by tall, white peaks, we’re southbound at eight knots inside the cramped third-story wheelhouse of this 48-year-old, 58-foot-long steel purse seiner. Built in Seattle, she spent her commercial life salmoning off the southeast Alaskan coast and off Washington, dragging for bottom fish.

We’re not going fishing.

 “Don’t you guys feel that way, man? Hungover?”

No. The town was dead. I saw nil but the dotty headache of orange streetlights and their hazy glow on orange sidewalks and orange storefronts and orange parked cars, roofed with orange snow. No humans except the gaunt convenience store clerk who sold me weak coffee and a peanut butter Clif bar. She was high on meth. Thankfully, our fat chauffeur was not. Thankfully I was not hungover — just one Alaskan Amber Ale in the hotel pub last night.

Mike sips more coffee, swallows, exhales. Smiles again. Smug. The new floor heater is working. It’s warm in here. He leans over and taps a few laptop keys. On-screen there’s a tempting nautical chart. The Kenai Fjords look like shredded witch fingers. Eagle talons. Bold headlands, wide bays, beachbreaks, coves. Pointbreaks. Rivermouths — lots of rivermouths. Scenic grandeur. Attributing J. London, it’s to be an odyssey of the north.

Gordon, Manos, Jones.

FIFTY-NINE: Degrees of north latitude which we occupy inside beanies and down parkas, sitting on black steel gunwales, grilling lingcod. There’s ice on the deck. Holding strong ales in gloved hands, we admire the hallucinatory reflect of snowy cliffs across this tranquil, funnel-shaped anchorage that latitudinally drifts with Siberia.

Trevor is fly-fishing for his first time. Swish-swish-swish. Off the transom he whips the line to and fro but hooks nothing. The bottom here is hard mud. The water is deep green. The time is 10:30 p.m., but still the sky glows blue.

Pausing, Trevor looks shoreward and swigs from a bottle of stout. Halfway hidden on the forested beach, he sees three old wooden cabins waiting for summer.

“Somebody’s idea of a good time right there,” Captain Mike says from the barbecue, his chin bisecting the gray fish smoke.

“Lonely,” Trevor says.

“Yeah, unless you’ve got it packed full of Bush Company dancers.” (laughs)

The Great Alaskan Bush Company, Mike means. Look it up.

A shaggy white male mountain goat grazes fairly low above the pit of the anchorage, above the cabins, on that really steep cliff.

“It’s amazing where you see them,” Mike says, flipping fish fillets. “They do fall sometimes.”

“Why would they be there and not up where it’s not so steep?” Trevor asks.

“There’s snow up there,” Mike says, pointing at the top of the slope, then lowering his arm. “The grass is down here. Good munchin’ spot.”

In a month or two, this goat will laze in high alpine meadows, eating shrubs and herbs and grass at leisure. For now, though, he risks life to live. Like us. Sort of.

SEVEN: Millimeters of neoprene required to sheathe extremities whilst surfing. Hoods and black six-millimeter fullsuits seal the encumbrance.

THIRTY-SEVEN: Degrees, Fahrenheit, of ocean water temperature, the going rate of glacial-stream-fed sting. My hands burn. It’s bone-seeping cold.

We’re sitting rib-deep in black water at a playful, shapely spot that Trevor likens to Hammond’s Reef, one of his (and Tom Curren’s) preferred waves in California. Unlike sunny Hammond’s, however, no surfers will flock here. Unlike Hammond’s, no billionaires sleep within sight. Unlike Hammond’s, this reef is tucked back in a primordial fjord, fronted with crumbling rock spires and seal-flecked pinnacles, shadowed by dark mountains and licked by the longest glacial ice tongue in Kenai Fjords National Park.

Over there, behind the gray-boulder moraine beach and its gray till and low, serrated green line of spruce, white icebergs float in the lake. Two miles behind that lake is a massive white glacier, cracked and fissured, which means this wave experiences katabatic winds howling off the icefield, 5,000 feet up and 12 miles in. Brash ice chunks often float in the lineup, which occurs regularly, per page 91 of my kayaking guidebook: Stay in deep water and away from the beach. The bottom rapidly shallows and accentuates the swell and surf.

The windless morning’s drizzle has become rain and hail and the ambiance is a cold, drab gray, the black mountain trees melding with quiet browns of nude earth and smatterings of snow.

Downstairs in the boiler room, full of wetsuits, Daniel, a creature of warmth, labors from his. He rubs his nose and cheekbones with the back of his numb hand. Two days ago, he surfed Rocky Point in boardshorts.

“Yeah, we Hawaiians usually only come to Alaska to go snowboarding,” he says to bearded Nico, another creature of temperature but, as a year-round Nova Scotian, he thrives on the opposite scale. Nico’s already got his wetsuit/hood/booties/mittens off. He’s used to surfing with snow on the beach. He says the vibe here is reminiscent of home, if only home had spell-binding glaciers and 4,000-foot sea cliffs.

FORTY-NINTH: State of the U.S.A., its largest and most northern. Also an exclave. Spiritually, Alaska is another country.

TWO: Huge icefields, named Harding and Sargent. Somewhere behind each estuarine spot we surf, they coat the Kenai Mountains up to a mile thick.

ZERO: Feet, in height, of the swell. We glide along. The other gents are belowdecks, sleeping or reading or drinking coffee. It’s good coffee, from Homer, where Mike lives. He runs a fish-processing plant.

Above, the sky is huge and blue. The mountain snow is blinding. Aloud, I wonder if such weather is rare.

With a small rag, Mike wipes his sunglasses. “Maybe rare is not quite the word,” he says, “but it’s nice to take advantage of ‘em when you see ‘em. That’s for sure. Doesn’t really do much for swell, though.” (laughs)

The fjord water is silty green and glassy-smooth — a little too glassy, too lake-like. Last night, Trevor suggested we try wakeboarding.

 “Are we going to get some big breakers today?” I ask Mike as he pulls the throttle back with his right hand. With yellow binoculars in his left, he’s studying the gravel beach we’ve approached.

Neighbored by a wooded peninsula and steep talus cliffs, this beach is bereft of whitewater but strewn with driftwood logs. The adjacent lagoon is serene. There are ducks and river otters and harbor seals, bushes of lupine and salmonberry amongst the moss-bearded spruce and alder. I’d like to stay and sunbathe and beachcomb, perhaps pitch a tent and wait for swell.

“Not a lot of confidence we’ll find big breakers today,” Mike says. “We’ll take a look here mainly to put some new info into the memory bank. I know guys have camped out and surfed along this beach here, but I don’t think we have the right swell conditions today, by any means.”

Awesome.

SEVEN: Million dollars, for which Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867. Two cents per acre.

FIFTEEN THOUSAND: Acres, densely forested, comprising the biggest island here. It is jagged and lung-shaped, rife with eagles and seals. There’s surf, too — peaky, punchy beachbreak, its black-sand shore poked with bear tracks among the driftwood and stray container-ship flotsam: orange basketballs, black fly swatters, blue aluminum water bottles. A ghost forest, immortalized after 1964’s four-minute, 9.2-magnitude Great Alaskan Earthquake, tops the steep beach.

The surf is fun before the sky bleeds gray and the air is seized by an onshore gale. We’re done. Tea and books in the calm anchorage. Cozy downtime again.

In the afternoon we buzz the skiff to the hidden entrance of a tiny cove. Along the shore are the skeletal remains of a bulldozer, a barn, and a termite-wrecked cabin. Through falling snowflakes, I see “Herring Pete” and Josephine Sather tending to their noisy fox farm here. But they abandoned this place in 1961, and the barn’s decay, scented with river-otter dung, makes me sneeze. Pete too was a reputedly ripe and eccentric guy, his rarely washed clothes afoul of rotten fish. His wife was an obsessive clean-freak, forcing Pete to take cold showers after his fishing trips, even mid-winter.

Admiring his view out over the cove, I picture Pete shivering wet in the bathroom while Josephine stirred a hot pot of fox stew. But, foolishly standing in snow, I realize I’m the one shivering.

TWO THOUSAND: Years ago, when the first humans migrated from the Alaskan interior to the Kenai Fjords coast. These were the Unegkurmiut, a hardy Eskimo breed of maritime subsistence who so excelled in boat-making that they were exploited by Russian fur traders to hunt sea otters. The Russians, who’d arrived in July of 1790, also brought smallpox, which trashed the once-harmonious Unegkurmiut population. Ensuing panic, starvation, and Russian bullying contributed to complete Unegkurmiut demise by 1912, one century removed from us.

THREE: Days, consecutive, which are too flat to surf. Vexing in a such a storm-washed place.

“Maybe we should go fishing or hunting,” Nico says over his oatmeal in the galley. “Get some deer or moose or something.”

“Most people do come to Alaska to kill things,” deckhand Scott says.

Fresh halibut sounds good. The inflatable white skiff is launched with tackle and Trevor and Scott aboard. Their bright orange and yellow rain jackets contrast well with the gray of the sea and the dark, conical headland, which flattens into a long gravel beach and berm supporting a large tree-lined lagoon and a foraging black bear. And topography for a perfect left pointbreak. Mike says he’s surfed it — slabby up top, ropey through the middle as it wrapped around the crescent-shaped barrier beach.

Later, black lingcod and rockfish are hooked, cleaned, and served as dinner. Alas, salmon season is two months off.

The next morning, Trevor confides to me that the west side of the fjord, three miles opposite the left point, has a long, tapered right cobblestone beach, also with a lagoon behind it. “If we had swell, that place might be just like El Cap,” he says, referring to another perfect wave he surfs at home.

“The El Capitan of Kenai Fjords” has a nice ring to it, I say. A dead ring.

FIVE HUNDRED NINETY-TWO THOUSAND: Square miles, surface area, comprising the Gulf of Alaska. Plenty of room to cause trouble. In winter, the Gulf is a weather kitchen, a sea of severity, a near-constant stream of cyclones and anticyclones. Sixty-foot waves with 100-knot winds are routine. Depressions twist east from Japan, stalling once they hit the Gulf and, trapped, they mutate and shove swell down to western North America and eastern Oceania. North swells deny the south-facing Kenai Fjords. We need south.

But this is a fjord and there is swell in this afternoon’s marine forecast, the charts showing a pair of modest, local low-pressure systems with favorable fetch.

 “It’s a good reason to feel optimistic instead of just feeling hopeful,” Mike says, watching a bald eagle soar in the updraft, its spearing blackness against the white snow bowl of a hanging valley. Below the raptor are steep slopes and shale landslides, chalky brown, laced with thin snowmelt waterfalls. It’s late April — Alaska is beginning to thaw. Soon, bears will be everywhere. Post-Memorial Day until September, this fjord will be flush with cruise ships and fishing boats because Seward is a major fishing hub, America's ninth most-lucrative fisheries port.

A diehard surfer and ex-merchant marine, Mike isn’t thrilled about other dingy fishing towns — Yakutat and Dutch Harbor, for example — he’s had to work in and around since he moved from Hawaii to Alaska to work at a fish cannery in the summer of ‘76.

“What’s Yakutat like?” I ask.

“Small. Some good waves over there.”

“Dutch Harbor?”

“Drunk.” (laughs)

He leans and starts steering the ship with its wooden wheel, the first time I’ve seen him do this.

“Don’t you always steer with the compass?”

He nods. “It just started acting funny. Maybe it blew a fuse, or a wire’s loose, or there’s a bunch of iron in that mountain and it threw the compass crazy. Happens sometimes.”

We approach the fjord’s entrance, or, in this case, the exit. Instantly the scene shifts.  Out here, the wind howls from the east, deeply corrugating the open ocean. The boat dips and lurches.

“At least we’re looking at waves now,” Mike says. “It’s a start!”

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX: Feet, in height, of the rock pinnacle that looms at the reefy fore of this exposed bay, a two-mile stretch of black sand of which my guidebook states: Beach landings are difficult because of constant surf.

We anchor 100 yards out. The beach fronts another deglaciated valley and an icy glacier lake below a glacier. Mike has surfed in front of this, at a shifty sandbar west of the faux left point we’re paddling to. It looks good from behind, the whitewater tapering in the proper direction for an ideal length of time. Stroking shoreward, there’s a nice backdrop of spruce and alder. In the rockbound lineup, we’re looking at two big, horn-shaped spires which may or may not dilute the head-high sets as they hump in from the southeast. The waves are clean but soft, the sun warm, the sky blue, the air temperature mild — our exhaled breath is invisible. The scene implies Carmel, Monterey, even Big Sur.

EIGHTY: Times the crabber’s fatality rate of the average worker. On average, one crabber dies weekly during Alaska’s crab-fishing seasons.

TWELVE: Feet, in height, of the swell. A certain rivermouth cove could massage it, Mike says, the region’s “crown jewel” of the spots he knows. He’s been talking about it all week. Studying his poster-sized nautical charts, I reckon that, on the right day or hour, there could be dozens of crown jewels along the 250 miles of Kenai Fjords seacoast. Goodness knows there is ample daylight this month.

“We can get there at 8:30 p.m. and still have a two-hour session,” he says with a grin.

But first, it’s a rough ride. Huddled in the wheelhouse, we pound west through the rain, rounding an exposed cape, a balding head of granite with hairs of spruce trees and smears of dirty snow. Its base has 13 tall, narrow black sea caves placed like sharp teeth. Joy for a spelunker. Thousands of murres and kittiwakes swoop about. Three sea lions bark. We slosh past porpoises and a pod of orcas.

Out the starboard exterior, a large gray trawler steams east, likely for shelter as fishing today would be tough. Daniel, lounging on the couch aside Mike in an unzipped black hoodie, takes a swig from his bottle of Alaskan Black IPA. “You think that’s a crab boat?” he asks.

“Nah, not around here,” Mike says. “They’re probably out for halibut. Salmon in summer. Crab season doesn’t start till October.”

“How many crab seasons are there?”

“The opilio and the king crab are the two big ones, but then there’s a different king crab way up north, near St. Matthew Island, and there’s the Adak brown crab. Some years, there’s a crab I see that’s a cross between the king crab and opilio.”

“How do the dudes know which one they’re fishing for?” Nico asks.

“Crabs live in different areas and at different depths.”

“Do the same boats hit them all up?” Daniel asks.

“Pretty much. Some of them, there’s only a couple of boats that fish.”

“A lot of the boats aren’t on that one TV show, right?” Trevor asks, referring to Deadliest Catch.

“Yeah. For the most part, the dudes on that show are a bunch of real frickin’ idiots.”

“Really?” Daniel asks.

“Yeah. I’ve bought crab from all those guys.”

“Does the TV channel pay them?” Trevor asks.

“Nope.”

“Why are they doing it if they’re not getting paid?”

“Just trying to get famous.”

“So why do they pick the dickheads?” Nico asked. “Just to make for a more interesting cast?”

“Yeah. A bunch of ‘em are crackheads. One night after the show was done taping, one of the guys was found dead in a hotel room.”

“Do a lot of those fishermen have to smoke crack to stay awake?” Daniel asks.

“In the old days, they were all cokeheads, when there was a lot of money, and nobody knew how dangerous it was. You had to pretty much go around the clock to catch your share, or more than your share.”

In three hours: Lumpy rivermouth tubes. Shallow and hard-hitting. East-wind slag bump. Rain.

Daniel: “Coldest session ever.”

ONE: Little-known fact: Two beachbreaks cradled by the ragged, most swell-exposed barb of the Kenai Fjords can be almost flat, like they are the day our marine forecast had promised a 16-foot southeast swell. Guidebook: Here, the surf is constant. The waters are renowned for their intensity.

Previously unknown: The largest Alaskan seas Captain Mike has faced. “I don’t know,” he says, chewing a bite of banana muffin. “I try to avoid them.” Later he reveals: “There were these white lines, standing waves, and all I could do was steer right into them. My pilothouse was 60 feet above the water, and for three waves in a row, I couldn’t see a thing.”

What you probably know: Sixty-foot waves are big waves.

Partially true fact: The Kenai Fjords possess many slabs and at least one world-class surf spot. This wave may or may not employ Jeffrey’s Bay, Mangamaunu, Malibu, Scorpion Bay, or Rincon Point.

Unequivocally true: I left Alaska with a hangover.

Dog Food

By Michael H. Kew

Daniel Jones, Tonga. Photo: Billy Watts.

IT'S TOUGH TO LOOK GOOD when a metal pole has been shoved through your ass and out your mouth. You’re roasting clockwise over a pit of coal. You’ve been eviscerated. Your eyeballs have evaporated. Your legs and tail are stiff. Your tongue is out. You seem to be laughing.

You’ve got a red hole in your belly where your organs once were, now wolfed by a big brown dog in a corner of the yard. Your neck has another red hole with boiling blood bubbling from it, trickling around your shiny, pink corpse.

“What kind of meat do you get off of it?” surfer Ryan Burch asks the man turning the pig. “Ham?”

“Yeah, ham."

“Is it nice ham?”

“It’s like pulled pork,” photographer Billy Watts says. “But I can honestly say I’ve never had a pig like this.”

A fat woman in an orange dress sits on dirt near the pig. She’s using aluminum foil to wrap onions and pieces of taro and breadfruit to be set in the umu (earth oven) to be cooked by hot rocks. Tonight we will feast Tongan style to celebrate the first birthday of the daughter of the guy who’s cooking the pig. His wife is the one doing the umu stuff. Neither has a problem with eating the family pet.

“Many more where this came from,” the man says.

“Not sure if I got a pig on a spit when I turned one year old,” surfer Daniel Jones says. But it’s  possible since he’s Hawaiian and they do this sort of thing there and throughout Polynesia. I guessed that umu was a far healthier and wholesome alternative to the usual modern Polynesian diet of Pacific Brand corned beef and other imported junk.

But dog is modern fare, too. All meat is fair game — Tongans have been eating Fido for millenia. Back in the day, dog was a delicacy, tastier than pork, and both species were raised domestically. To sweeten their flesh, dogs were fed only vegetables and, in 1774, when Captain James Cook landed in Tonga, he likened the meat to English lamb.

Photo: Kew.

I glance across the yard to the dog chewing pig intestines.

“Are you guys going to eat that mutt?” I ask the pig-roasting man.

“Yeah. But not tonight.”

With his teeth, he removes the cap from a green bottle of beer. Back home I was told that, since Tonga is home to thousands of Mormons, drinking was bad. But this man was Mormon and visibly buzzed whilst swilling from his bottle of Mata Maka, the weak so-called “Tongan” lager that’s only available in Tonga but is brewed in New Zealand, 2,000 kilometers away.

“This beer sucks,” Watts says to me. He’s just finished his second; I’m on my fifth of the afternoon. Watts and I are the drinkers of this trip. Burch and Jones rarely booze.

Mata Maka is also the name of a low hill on Nomuka Island in Tonga’s Ha’apai Group, clamped between Vava’u and Tongatapu, an archipelago my guidebook described as a “sleepy, seductive place.” Nobody really surfs Ha’apai, but I know of at least one excellent left. Nomuka and its surrounding reefs might have good waves, too. So might nearby Mango, Kelefesia, and Tonumeia, green stars on a galaxy of blue. There are dozens more — Ha’apai has many secrets. A boat is required. Viewed from space, the group looks like two big atolls with no western sides, which would be clean and offshore most of the year. Yet another cruelty for surfers since east swells are painfully rare. Our boat is small, so we won’t visit Ha’apai this week.

Starting with Ha’apai, Captain Cook spent three months in Tonga. He commanded the HMS Resolution while his colleague manned the HMS Discovery. When the two ships landed on the isle of Lifuka, a lively food festival was underway. Cook and his men were so gaily greeted that he dubbed Tonga “the Friendly Islands,” a motto still used by the Tonga Visitors Bureau.

Cook didn’t know the warm welcome was actually bullshit and that Lifuka’s opportunistic chiefs planned to kill and eat him and all his men, then loot the two ships. But the nobles couldn’t agree on a plan.

I’m drunk by nightfall. Finally, with equally drunk Tongans, we eat the pig. The white meat is leathery, unchewable. I feed most of mine to the big gut-eating dog under my chair. He’s happy. He’s not on the menu — yet.

Ryan Burch eyes his prey. Photo: Kew.

No SOB Story at RAM

By Michael H. Kew

Scott Saulsbury at RAM Brewery in Medford, Ore. Photo: Kew.

MIGHT AS WELL hit the ground drinking.

After weeks in the tropics enslaved to Bud Light, I am desperate for some fresh Oregon IPA. Luckily, I know Scott Saulsbury.

I take a three-mile cab ride from Rogue Valley International Airport to RAM, Southern Oregon’s newest brewpub. There I find a smiling Scott Saulsbury, 49, lording over RAM’s shiny 10-barrel JVNW system.

Immediately he hands me a pint of tasty Table Rock IPA, his first personal-recipe seasonal for the new 7,245-square-foot building that hosts a busy restaurant, a large multi-televisioned bar, and Saulsbury’s brewhouse. Open since December 2016, the Medford site is Oregon’s fourth RAM, a chain launched near Seattle in 1971; there are 30 other RAMs across Washington, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Naturally, RAM’s newest brewmaster is thrilled with his new gig.

“Many of the regular Southern Oregon Brewing drinkers are coming to RAM,” he says. “They sort of followed me here. It’s really surprising and great. Been nice seeing the familiar faces. And they want some of the SOB beers to resurface here as specialties, so I’d like to do some knock-offs of what I was making over there.”

Over there is the once-popular Medford taproom fed by SOB’s 20-barrel brewhouse where, until a year ago, Saulsbury made popular flagships like Nice Rack IPA and Pin-up Porter. With the property’s owner Tom Hammond, a Medford anesthesiologist, Saulsbury had helped start SOB in 2007, after working in real estate for a few years. SOB’s sales were steady through 2012, then dropped 10 percent annually until 2015, when Hammond chose to sell.

“We don’t have the resources to compete in today’s beer market,” Hammond told Medford’s Mail Tribune last September. “The idea of scaling back to be just a local brewery was not a possibility. Being in a smaller market made us very dependent on distribution to other parts of the state and region…we were never able to establish and maintain a big enough part of our local market to be stable in the long-term.”

“Tom hung on as long as he could,” Saulsbury tells me. “He loved it and wanted to keep it going and it got to a point where there wasn’t a way forward without a lot of capital. The business model working today is more of this heavy-on-the-retail/growler fills, because shelf space is so jam-packed. A good model for SOB would’ve been—if there was money—to own two or three retail outlets where they just serve SOB beer. More SOB beer sold over SOB taps, less through distributors, because you’re just not making money after they take their sales percentage.”

SOB poured its last pint the night of Sep. 30, 2016. The business remains for sale, turnkey and intact.

“I show it to prospective buyers all the time,” Saulsbury says. “It’ll be interested to see what happens. It’s a beautiful brewery.”

Last summer, after brewing his last SOB batch, Saulsbury worked for O.A.R.S., a major outdoor outfitter, guiding multi-day whitewater trips through the pine-forested canyons of the lower Rogue, from Galice to Foster Bar, the river’s official Wild and Scenic section.

“It was epic. I had a great six-month period, exercising and being outdoors. If I could afford to, I would retire today and be a dirtbag river guide.” (laughs)

The guide job stemmed from the company’s craft-beer rafting trips. “I’d gone on some of those,” he says, “being the beer guy with the jockey box.”

Makes sense. Growing up in Grants Pass, Saulsbury was raised on the Rogue, running right through town. Tailing a short college stint in Santa Barbara, Calif., he studied philosophy at the University of Oregon. “Then I needed to get a job,” he says with a laugh. “I’d been homebrewing a little, and I thought brewing would be a fun career. I was lucky to be in on that early-1990s microbrewery wave.”

By 1993 he was an assistant at Eugene’s Steelhead Brewing, then moved to Bend in 1995 and started Bend Brewing, where he was brewmaster. But he owned property down off Highway 66, east of Ashland, and wanted to build a cabin there, so in 1997 he zoomed south from Bend to launch Caldera Brewing with Jim Mills. “I knew Jim just from the local Ashland scene,” Saulsbury said. “Caldera was his baby, and he needed someone to make beer. Good timing.”

But initially the business dragged, so in 1998 Saulsbury found another job back in Bend, this time at Deschutes Brewing. “My time there was probably my most creative. We had a group of brewers interacting constantly, talking about the possibilities. We were able to put quality ahead of cost. Carrying that along through the years has allowed me to keep that alive in all the brewing opportunities I’ve had.”

Amid river guiding, Saulsbury got wind of the RAM slated for Medford. “An ex-Deschutes friend of mine was the brewmaster at the Salem RAM, so I contacted him, then RAM directly through a recruiter before they’d even posted the job. The building hadn’t been built, and RAM likes to hire locally, so they were sort of waiting for people to come out of the woodwork.”

Serendipity?

“One of my questions for them during my interviews was: how much creativity will I be able to bring to the table? With the flagships, RAM wants people who have had RAM beers elsewhere to have the same experience here. But with the seasonal specialties here, RAM is definitely encouraging me to make crazy stuff and have fun. It’s going to be great.”

RAM Restaurant and Brewery

165 Rossanley Drive, Medford, Oregon

458-225-9816

theram.com/locations/or-medford/

Bullet Birds

By Michael H. Kew

Île Rodrigues. Photos: Kew.

ANNABELLE, A DOCENT, was to show me a coralline sand cay islet—a nature preserve—three miles out in the lagoon. We stepped aboard a fiberglass skiff driven by a middle-aged fisherman who spoke no English; he told her he was confused by my surfboard—nobody surfed this place.

Short, smiley, and enthusiastic about her island, she worked for Rodrigues Discover, a non-profit conservancy group that started in 2007. She was 27 and from Port Mathurin; she’d spent four years as a pharmacist on Mauritius, commuting daily from Beau Bassin to Port Louis, but missed Rodrigues so much she returned and vowed never to again live on the mainland which, to the average Rodriguan, was alien.

“Mauritius is too fast,” she said. “Here, we take time to live.”

By air it was expensive for Rodriguans to visit the mainland, so most went by sea aboard the Mauritius Pride. The eastward crossing took 24 hours, 36 on the return. “It’s not so comfortable, but we prefer it,” she said. “Everybody gets seasick.”

As we headed out on the shallow lagoon, the boat driver line-fished but caught nothing. We passed Pointe Fouche, which was treeless and bone-dry. Cattle drowsed on the beach. “Here, rain is precious,” Annabelle said. “This part of the island, the animals here, they drink saltwater. They drink the sea. When we eat them, there is no need to add salt because the meat is already salted.”

We skimmed across the water, passing waving fishermen, and since the tide was out we went slowly—the hull scraped sand a few times.

I asked Annabelle if she’d brought lunch. “Only for you," she said. "I don’t eat on Tuesdays and Fridays—not every week, but sometimes—to pray to my god. Are you Catholic?”

“No. For me, nature is god.”

She worshiped at the Apostolic Vicariate, a Roman Catholic church in Port Mathurin. “No smoking, no alcohol,” she said. “I prefer purity.” I told her I was slightly hungover.

The islet’s leeward side offered a bright whitesand beach sheltered from the wind, a private paradise, the kind where a honeymoon resort could exist. Instead there was a shack with a resident warden and thousands of birds—terns and noddies squawked and flew at us as we stepped ashore.

Casuarina trees provided shade from the sun. The leeward air was hot and still, but out along the edge of the lagoon, amid mild spindrift, the surf looked sublime. Perhaps head-high and symmetrical, the swells bent along a curve in the reef, creating a mellow left-hander that was ideal for the 5’6” Andreini Bullet I’d brought.

Wearing reef booties I walked a kilometer across the sandy shallows of the lagoon, avoiding urchins and bits of sharp coral, and paddled through a thin gap in the reef. Under small swell the setup was benign, devoid of current; each wave broke in the same place and peeled along the reef for 50 yards before expiring in deep water. It was sectiony with an almondy tube and a thin, high-line lip. The sets were consistent and from a steep southwest angle, hitting the reef properly. I doubted the spot could hold any larger, but Jerome later said a friend of his had kitesurfed there on a much bigger, slabbier day, prompting the name L’Etape, French for “The Step.”

But at head-high the wave was user-friendly, something C-grade that you might find in the Maldives or a small day at One Eyes. Its sea was alive with baitballs and diving birds and flying fish chased by barracuda; L’Etape was undoubtedly sharky and volatile and inherently risky as it was a long way from help. It was a wild wave that I enjoyed surfing, and it was unlikely to host another surfer for a long time.

Back beneath the shade of the casuarinas, Annabelle asked me if I had ever seen snow, and if California had beaches like this.

“Yes, and no."

“But I thought California was like a paradise place. The snow is so cold, yes? How do you live in it?”

“It never snows where I live. Snow is in the mountains, far away.”

“Are there many birds, like here?”

“Yes, but they are much more skittish and wary of humans.”

We walked to the eastern windward side of the island, doused with litter. Annabelle said there was a man who comes specifically to remove it. Terns and noddies soared around and swooped at us—a few nearly landed on my head—and they were both curious and territorial since the islet was their breeding ground. Human presence was a massive intrusion. Us.

Built By Betel Nut

By Michael H. Kew

Yapese betel nut. Photo: Kew.

PALAU IS A BOATER'S SURF COUNTRY. The passes are far offshore and fickle and usually flat, but our map displayed a few swell-and-wind-exposed reef rifts where we could park the car and paddle out. Ours was a mission to find something new, someplace William had never surfed, accessible not by boat but with his “4X4 Off-Road Surf” car, as we were again traversing dirt lanes, soon to be paved.

“Palau’s existing 15 miles of paved road are a maintenance disaster,” William said, shifting into four-wheel-drive up a rutted hill. “There’s no reason to think that they can do a better job with 56 more miles of road to maintain.”

For five hours we combed the coast from Airai to Chol, finding nothing but small windswell, foul currents, and onshore wind that strengthened as the day waned. The air temperature increased, too, and by 3 p.m. we were ripe, our bare backs sticking to the upholstery.

Sometime mid-trip we found a bay with two surfy reefs, garnering interest until William mentioned its hidden crew of saltwater crocs. Then we found the Ngatpang Waterfall, one of the known four on Babeldaob, and chose to have a quick rinse near four fat Pohnpeian women wallowing and eating in the pond below the falls. They wore sarongs and bras, and used their fingers to shove food into their mouths from three floating Tupperware containers.

We swam into an empty pool on the fall’s opposite side. The water was cool and murky, mossy-smelling, over a floor of soggy wood and sharp rocks.

“I feel like an alligator,” Craig said.

“There’s probably a lot of eels in here,” William said.

Then we ventured beneath the fall itself for a loud tube-riding rush.

“This is the deepest we’ll get today!” William yelled above the roar.

In the end, it had been a scenic photo trip but a hoax for surf—the passes were ill-formed, or too narrow, or too deep, and they were all too windy. What looked good on the map looked bad in person, and we ended up groveling in chest-high slop back at the place our trip had started.

Downing a cold beer as we set out for Koror, Craig raised the mood: “Well, boys, at least we got some good photos.”

“Hope so,” William said.

“I’m sure we did,” I said. “But you never know.”

“Did you have film in your camera?” Craig asked me.

“Of course.”

“Then we got good photos. You can’t take bad photos of this place. It’s too pretty.”

It was Monday. “The conditions are supposed to be like this for the rest of the week," William said.

“That’s fine, mate, ‘cause I’ve got a bloody shitload of work to do,” Craig said. He was here on business, consulting for something involving Palau’s youth sport teams in their preparation for the next South Pacific Games, Oceania’s version of the Olympics.

“I don’t have anything to do,” I said.

“There’s always beer,” Craig said, crushing an empty Budweiser can.

Photo: Kew.

THERE'S ALWAYS BETEL NUT, too, which is what occupied me late the following rainy afternoon, after a long, idle day indoors. I had been in Palau for two weeks, was leaving for Pohnpei the next morning, and I hadn’t sampled Palau’s fabled natural narcotic. So it was a stroke of luck when I happened upon a stout, betel nut-chewing man sitting on an aluminum chair at a wooden picnic table in front of my hotel. His teeth were red and rotten; he spoke good English. His name was Timmy, and he was calm, pudgy, mustachioed, about 60, wearing a black cap that said USS Peleliu and a dark green shirt that said Samoan Pride.

“Are you Samoan?” I asked.

“Nah. Palauan all the way. But I been to Samoa many times. Many friends there. You from the States? I live in San José for eight years. I study at San José State. Right now my daughter lives in Arizona.”

He pulled a small plastic bag from his shirt pocket.

“You want a chew?”

“I’d love one.”

With dirty fingers he cracked a betel nut, laced it with lime—a white cocaine-esque powder made from cooked coral—then wrapped it in a piece of pepper leaf and handed it to me. This was the second time I'd tried betel nut; the first was in Papua New Guinea, where the stuff was bitter, and I was drunk. This time I was sober.

“Chew for maybe five, 10 minutes,” Timmy said. Then he spat. “But don’t swallow the spit.”

The nut was very mild, almost ineffective, but I did feel a tinge of light-headedness as I stood there. We chewed and spat and talked.

“Yap and Palau were first to chew betel nut,” Timmy said. “Then other places chewed it—Chuuk, Pohnpei, Solomons, New Guinea, Marshalls, Kiribati. All over the Pacific.”

“What about Indonesia?”

“Yes, they have betel nut there.”

“What about Hawai’i?”

He sat upright in his chair. “I know of a Palauan lady on O’ahu who grows betel nut. She sold enough betel nut that she built a house!”

“The house that betel nut built.”

“Yes! So it is in Hawai’i, too.”

“Have you chewed all your life?”

“I started when I was a young man. Then I stopped for maybe two years, but I started again.” He spit then coughed, nearly ejecting the nut from his cheek. “When I have maybe three beers, I have a chew. Then it makes me ready for three more beers!”

Dusk—the humid air was still, punctuated by chirping crickets and an occasional bird. Cold beer sounded good. Timmy popped another nut into his mouth and put his feet on the table.

“Have you heard of Yap Day?” he asked.

Yap is known for its topless women who gather for a two-day celebration of dancing and sporting and feasting and hooting in and around Yap’s capital of Colonia.

Timmy’s bloodshot eyes widened. “Never have I seen so many tits! Even the white Peace Corps girls have to dance topless.” He chuckled and spat. “I go every year. I have already made my reservation for next year.”

“I’m going to Pohnpei tomorrow. Are girls topless there?”

“Oh, Pohnpei. No, not topless. Nice place. I spent lot of time there. The women are beautiful. You surfing there, too?”

“Doubt it.”

My betel nut had grown stale, my spit pink instead of red.

“Have another chew,” Timmy said, pushing the bag at me. I plucked one out and grinned at him.

“Are my teeth red yet?” I asked.

“Nah.”

“I want teeth like yours.”

He chuckled. “You have to chew more. How long you go to Pohnpei for?”

“A week.”

“Okay, so you chew the whole time you in Pohnpei and your teeth will turn red.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I guarantee.”

This coming from an old Palauan, I believed it. Later I learned he was Palau’s secretary of state.

William, Palau. Photo: Kew.

Pious Perfume

By Michael H. Kew

Église de Notre-Dame des Martyrs, Futuna. Photo: Kew.

STOCKY AND MUSTACHIOED, gentle-eyed, glasses perched near the end of his nose, Charles is an anomaly—a caucasian born on Futuna, an island that lacked electricity until the 1990s, that still has no real hospital (but 15 immaculate churches, one per village), where the bank is open three days per month, where perhaps 15 tourists deplane annually.

“Have you ever seen or heard of anybody surfing Futuna?” I ask Charles.

“No surfing Futuna, no?”

“What do you do for fun?”

"Relax, no? Possible a fishing. Church often. You know today there is the ceremony of death, eh?”

“What is today?”

June 29 marks the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, a holiday unknown to agnostic me. I later learn it is a big deal, venerating the two famous saints—Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, and Peter, supreme pontiff and Rome’s first bishop. On Futuna, Mass is held at the imposing Église de Notre-Dame des Martyrs. Behind it is a long, narrow cemetery. Already, along the thrashed cement road from the airport to the hotel, among dense flora, fale, and infrastructural decay, I had seen seven or eight chapelles.

“You should go to the ceremony,” Charles says, blue glare of his computer screen reflecting on his glasses. “You can use my car.”

“How will I know which church it is?”

“When you see many people.”

I find it facing the blown-out southern coast in the village of Ono. Two hundred meters out, there is a small channel that might dish a slabby right with more tide and if the wind blew from the north. Even with the onshore wind, the surf looks fun—when bodysurfing, each wave is overhead.

But first: Mass.

Beyond Vatican City, Wallis-Futuna is likely the world’s most staunch Catholic place. Possibly cleaner and nicer than any public building on Futuna, the Ono basilica is an impressive feat of Polynesian-fused/neo-Romanesque architecture, all stone, rosewood, and stained glass. The ceiling seems a hundred feet high. A fat woman in a colorful dress drapes a fragrant lei around my neck.

Flooded with natural light, the many rows of pews can house a large chunk of Futuna’s population, and today there are hundreds, sweaty in colorful dress, cooling their faces with Samoan-style ili (fans) made from pandanus leaves. A few murmurs but otherwise the room is mute, serenely so, the seabreeze sedating the somber vibe.

The basilica fills to capacity; there is the gathering rite, loud bell-ringing, a beautiful song, followed by the priest’s greeting of the congregation. Next is the forward chorus, singing over recorded ballad-style music, the sound reverberating throughout the basilica while people—most of them now standing—frantically fan themselves as the indoor temperature rises, despite the open doors and windows. From the ornate altar, the priest delivers the vigil lectionary in solemn monotone—the first reading (Acts 3:1-10); responsorial psalms (Pss. 19:2-3, 4-5), a Galatians reading (1:11-20); an Alleluia (John 21:17) with music, and finally a swig of gospel (John 21:15-19). Then homilies, a creed, prayers, and a long communion, after which most folks (some are leaving) return to their seats. More mellifluous singing, more ballads, more homilies—the whole thing lasts two hours.

At last, stern bell a-tolling, several men carry a flowered, white-sheeted casket from the altar and out the front door, down the steps, and around the left side of the church to the backyard cemetery. The congregation follows. Nobody I ask speaks any English (my French is bad)—it is unclear to me who (if anybody) is in the casket, or if it is a prop representing Peter and Paul. Then, with wagging fingers and frowns it becomes apparent that, as a foreigner, I am not allowed near the cemetery.

I walk across the road to check the channel in front of the church’s grass carpark. The midday austral winter sun is low and searing; the surf is bad but inviting. Flanking the pass is messy windswell, but some waves are hollow—within 20 meters the depth looks to rise abruptly from the steep dark drop-off (next stop: Fiji) to very shallow before dipping back into the deep the channel. Just don’t straighten out.

Imagining my chest being grated by lava reef, sandals are swapped for swim fins and soon I am squinting at the big backlit cathedral from the inside of little Futunan tubes, settling into a quick in-and-out rhythm, carefully avoiding the reef. The water is a bit deeper than expected, and refreshing, perfectly clear, mild in temperature. Several parishioners stop and stare at me before entering their cars and leaving, probably to go drink kava and laze the afternoon away.

Thanks to a guy named Pierre Chanel, Catholicism has thrived here for two centuries. Formed in France in 1816, the Society of Mary (aka Marist Fathers) missionaries appeared in Wallis-Futuna in October 1837 after la Métropole appointed Jean Baptiste Pompallier to be the vicar apostolic of Oceania. Aboard the Raiatea, before continuing to Wallis, Pompallier stopped at Futuna with Chanel and Pierre Bataillon, plus Brothers Marie-Nizier Delorme and Joseph Lugy. The Futunans liked Chanel and Delorme, so the Marists took root, establishing a mission in King Niuliki’s zone of Alo. At the time, Niuliki, who had only recently forbidden cannibalism, was Futuna’s sole chief; he let Chanel live near him at Poi, on the island’s lovely north coast.

After a few years of Futunan brainwashing, Chanel’s own brain oozed onto the fertile Poi soil—Niuliki felt the pagan conversions (including his son’s) were dulling his kingliness. The final ax blow was dealt by Musumusu, a noble whom Niuliki loved. Oceania’s first martyr, Chanel was beatified in 1889, when Wallis-Futuna became a dependency of New Caledonia. In 1954, Chanel was canonized and deemed the first patron saint of Oceania.

When I see or hear Chanel, I think: perfume.

Another day. Fleeting fun on Futuna. Photo: Kew.

Creature of Habitat

Interview by Michael H. Kew

Reynolds, Spruce Coast. Photo: Kew.

IN THE 1980s, Spencer Reynolds loved surf media—the vogue outerworld. Oregon was innerworld. He was a boy in Brookings, a wet coastal bump six miles from California. This was no surfer’s eden. Cold and stormy. Bad waves. Huge swells. Rocks and closeouts. Epic fishing—an angler’s eden. But Reynolds, 43, doesn’t fish. He paints. Sometimes in his sylvan hillside studio on the Chetco River. Sometimes in Semi Aquatic, his clean midtown gallery. Sometimes atop a scenic glen amid spruce and spindrift. The coast that cast him away. But recently he returned—for life, for family. Natal homing, like salmon to his dear Chetco.

I can breathe now. City life choked me. But it took 20 years to reach this mindset. I wanted to be everywhere else.

Brookings was a remote, blue-collar town built for logging. Now it’s mostly for retirees and tourists. Making art for money here is an odd concept. But outposts need culture. I’m not spearheading anything—I just want to contribute, despite my insecurities. I wasn’t raised with the idea of art being a way to survive.

I constantly question my abilities: whether they’re real or just a result of my overactive imagination. I have a lot of doubt I can pull off making a living from this.

My art needs to improve. Always.

Tranquil scenes are boring. I’m a product of this area. Like the Pacific Northwest coast, my art is raw. I’m also compelled to do my art here because I care about culture in small communities. People in the city can disregard art so easily because there’s so much of it there. In tiny Brookings, art affects them.

It’s not a new concept. Yin and yang, order and disorder, Apollonian and Dionysian. My art balances opposites. I tap into something bigger than me, balancing raw and refined brushwork. I like a structural element, balanced with a free flow. My brain is stretched in different directions and my goal is to find balance. Maybe impossible, but it drives my work.

“Surf artist” is limiting. I am not a surf artist. I do many things. I experiment. I play with paint and try whatever comes to mind. I feel like a jazz musician, improvising, seeing what comes out.

The purpose of art is multifaceted. My role in it may be to uplift peoples’ spirit a bit, but also there’s darkness in my art. My art is a fight for free spirit. Ultra-liberal, ultra-conservative, ultra-religious, things like that—they possess a desire to control your life. We need to fight them, and that’s what I’ve been trying to put forth with my work.

Molds and stereotypes bore me. The name of my store (Semi Aquatic) says a lot about me. It’s clunky but passionate, expressing my deep love for water.

Photo: Kew.

Some artists think you can’t capture a moment if you’re painting from a photograph. I don’t entirely agree with that, but I understand there are color dynamics happening in person that can’t and don’t seem to translate into a photo. If I’m painting from a photo, my mind goes outside the parameters of the photo, and eventually I’m not using the photo at all. Another angle in my mind is: we are so used to photos that the painting becomes about creating purposely to emulate qualities of a photo. It’s maybe not as pure as capturing the moment straight from life, but it still feels authentic to me in reflecting how layered and complex our lives are.

When an artist makes bold statements about this being the right way and that being the wrong way, I like to break such “rules.”

It’s important to know what really happens in artists’ heads rather than the image of perfection and confidence most of us want to project onto the world.

Surfing has a similar dynamic to what I experience in art. I started surfing because it was fun; after a while, it became my identity. People judge you based on your art output, and all I want to do is tap into that original stoke, regardless of whether or not that’s the hip way of making art.

I’ve never really fit in with any group. I’m not cool enough for hipsters; I wasn’t nerdy enough for my art school friends; I’m not core enough for a lot of surfers (I was a bodyboarder for many years). I'm not even a “gnarly Oregon local,” which I have every right to be. I’ve been surfing this area longer than most surfers here.

Art is how I explore life. It’s the only way I can make something authentic that someone will connect with. It’s a paradox—sometimes people want me to continue making the same sort of image that possessed that original source of passion, but I can’t continue to make the same image and remain passionate, so something gets lost along the way. In the end, I press forward regardless of all these things, because it’s my life's passion-insecurities can push you forward, but when are they detrimental?

Art needs to refresh you.

Talent isn’t always the biggest factor in making an artist successful. Sometimes this frustrates me, which implies I think I’m a good artist, but there are times I think I’m a talentless person. What the f— is talent? Self-delusion?

Vulnerability and transparency are ways I’ve chosen to create empathy with my audience. This makes me uncomfortable. I have to let out the energy I get from attention in physical ways, sometimes with intentionally weird laughing or clapping my hands, or other ways. Soaking in the cold Pacific also works well.

I’m obsessed with lines. What does this mean? I rely on an answer inside of me. I guess I believe in something bigger and multi-dimensional, like a god or a force I rejoin after death. What does my obsession mean? It’s not about what you turn out. It’s about continuing the journey. The byproduct of that perseverance is nice art.

Art is the elegant middle finger toward life and death.

artandsurf.com

Photo: Kew.

Cocody Rasta

By Michael H. Kew

Walid and friends.

MIDDAY, MIDWEEK, mid-August. Urban shantytowns—poverty, squalor, impromptu disorder. Clothes washed in brown rivers, draped to dry on roadside shrubbery. Broken glass and crushed beer cans. Scowls and rags. Twig fences and blank stares. Idle men and overworked women. Diesel-fumed, hazy air with a low gray sky that suffocates the earth. Endless roadside litter. A chaotic six-lane highway with older models of Mercedes and BMW swerving and speeding past ass-dragging taxis and crowded, top-heavy public buses.

West of Abidjan, civilization dissolves and the land opens. Verdant vistas and low hills, banana plantations, palm oil plantations, fields of maize and rice and passionfruit. Cassava, cocoa. Military checkpoints. People selling bottles of peanuts. Men pushing/pulling carts loaded with sticks. We’re inland, inside Walid’s Renault, blazing toward Liberia at 130 kph (80 mph) on Route de Dabou, the A3, a signed 70 kph-limit (40 mph) road that frequently slows us to a lurching crawl through its fields of wide, deep red-dirt potholes.

“Road is shit,” Walid says as he leans forward over the steering wheel, gripping it with his right hand, his left thumb and index finger to his lips, steadying a hand-rolled marijuana spliff, one of several today. “It’s not possible you dead from cannabis,” he says. “Not like alcohol. You can smoke kilo-kilo-kilo. It’s impossible you dead. Just smile.” (laughs)

Sunglasses cover half his face and his right hand pilots us, the car shaking with the high speed, the horn getting a workout. Walid’s seatbelt is fastened only before entering the numerous military/police checkpoints, uniformed men with rifles and a thirst for bribery, pointing and shouting at our car to stop.

En route. Photo: Kew.

“Because of the war,” Walid says, exhaling pot smoke, “police just stop the big car, the big truck, for look, for control, but the white man is not stopped for bad. He stopped for just to take the money. But no control, you know? Just pay for take the road, give the money. Also give maybe food or water, a drink.”

Liberia, a nation too resurfacing from civil war and economic death, is at road’s end in the far west.

“Many-many-many Liberians come into Ivory Coast for the war, you know?” Walid says as we pass windswept fields of tall green grass and corn and manioc (cassava). “Mercenaries. They live here in the forest, in the jungle. On the frontier of Liberia and Ivory Coast, they have many army Ivorian, French army, USA army. The mercenaries go into Liberia and return to Ivory Coast village to kill many guys, to fuck many girls, take many riches. Mercenaries finish and return to Liberia.

“You have a big war for the frontier of Liberia and Ivory Coast. Liberian government and government Ivorian is working same for this problem. For three years, it not possible you come here on this road. It no possible. Oh, no. If you white guy come here? You finished.” (laughs) “You finished.”

“Police everywhere?” I ask.

“No police! Military, mercenary, Liberian, Angola, Sierra Leone—a mix. They don’t like the white man. Long time I don’t come here because of the war. Many problem. But it’s nice now for return. Africa is the future, you know? The future of the world. It no have development, it no have many this, you know? Africa is very beginning.”

At several areas along the road are machete-wielding men, hacking at tall green grass. Others are sitting or walking aside the vast fields of manioc and maize and rubber trees and palm-oil groves, the scenery stained with incongruous billboards hawking luxury cars.

The rain that threatened all day now begins to fall, smudging the red dust on Renault’s cracked windshield. The clouds mute the land and oppress the mud-hut villages we pass. The road is lined with fruit sellers, smoky fires, tall white rice bags of charcoal, naked kids, babies hanging off mothers’ backs, women with bundles of sticks atop their heads, broken trucks, brown lakes. People strolling in zen daze, time irrelevant. No other roads, just dirt tracks that blend into the weeds and woods.

“This road no good to drive at night,” Walid says, swerving to avoid potholes.

Soon he pulls over. We piss. The sun is sinking—orange hues on green. Back in the car, he rolls a joint while we listen to Alpha Blondy’s spirited Live Au Zénith, recorded in Paris in 1992. A multilinguist singer known as the Bob Marley of Africa, Blondy (birth name: Seydou Koné) was born in 1953 about 160 kilometers due north from where we sit. For me, an Alpha Blondy fan since the ‘90s, it’s fitting to hear his music in Côte d’Ivoire.

“This Alpha Blondy, he good, no?” Walid says after using his tongue tip to seal his new spliff. “You know Alpha Blondy in America?”

“Oh, yeah. I downloaded his new album (Mystic Power) before I flew here.”

“He very nice man. When I was child, he was my neighbor in Cocody.”

Among his vast discography, “Cocody Rock” is perhaps Blondy’s nexus. I know it well. Millions do, because Blondy’s reach is global, his message firm and up. In 2005 he was crowned Côte d’Ivoire’s United Nations Ambassador of Peace; later, he launched his Jah Glory Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan charity. Ironically, his 2010 “peace and unity” concert in Bouaké (Côte d’Ivoire’s second-largest city and stronghold of rebels during the civil war) left two people dead and 20 injured.

“The workers let too many people into stadium at one time,” Walid remembers. He lights his spliff. “I was there. Very sad.” Inhales smoke. “So bad.”

Exhale.

So good.

We are the rockers from Zion Ivory Coast

We're ready, ready, ready, ready to rock, we're sayin'

Coco, Coco, is Cocody Rock

Coco, Coco, is Cocody Rasta

Photo: Kew.

Walid and spectator. Photo: Kew.

Beer For Fish

By Michael H. Kew

Hunter Creek. Photo: Ken Morrish.

"HORRIFIC what could’ve happened here.”

James Smith—brewmaster, flyfisher, naturalist—nods at Hunter Creek, just 20 feet from us, flowing fast and rain-fat this cold, late-January Sunday. Ten minutes ago, in his tiny taproom, Smith topped our tulips with his Adipose IPA, an Arch Rock Brewing Company seasonal. Now outside, behind Smith’s brewhouse, we’re shying from rain, cramped in the gray light of his boiler room.

Smith is happy. Ten days prior, U.S. Department of the Interior’s Janice Schneider signed a 20-year decree protecting southwest Oregon sites threatened by strip mining, 101,000 public acres governed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

“This represents a tremendous grassroots victory,” Mark Sherwood, beer fan and executive director of Native Fish Society, later told me by phone. “It’ll safeguard water quality and habitats for more than a dozen wild salmon and steelhead populations. A huge step forward in terms of local river stewardship. We’re thrilled.”

Schneider’s pen reflected three years of core community activism to block industrial mining plans in the Rough and Ready Creek/Baldface Creek and Hunter Creek/North Fork Pistol River watersheds.

“This area is advertised as the Wild Rivers Coast, right?” Smith tells me, twirling an index finger. “Since the logging industry is not what it once was, we rely on tourism—Arch Rock does, along with most businesses here. Nobody really wants a British mining company to arrive, scalp our headwaters, make a bunch of money, and leave.”

He’s referring to Red Flat Nickel Corp., a subsidiary of St. Peter Port Capital in Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, 5,000 miles from Curry and Josephine counties, where the 101,000 acres lie.

“In 2013 my friend Dave Lacey heard of the proposed nickel mines and approached Arch Rock to locally start petitions and spread the word,” Smith says. “Our community was overwhelmingly against mining. You could just ask people if they swam in these rivers, if they fished in them, and so forth. Also, here at the brewery, it’s imperative that I have clean water. Otherwise I can’t make beer.”

Like this Adipose IPA—James, may I have a refill? It’s delicious, quite dry and fruity, 2017’s batch hopped with simcoe, citra, and chinook. Speaking of which:

“I’ve caught wild chinook and steelhead right here,” he says, pointing to the brambly, alder-lined banks. “The adipose fin means a lot to me, because hatcheries clip them. That’s how you can tell if a fish is farmed or wild. With my IPA name, I try to bring awareness to wild fish, and I like to play around with the beer. It’s kind of wild in the sense that it’s my creativity.”

A half-mile west, Hunter Creek meets the Pacific, less than two miles from the mouth of the Rogue, a federal Wild and Scenic River. Before us is a small weedy lot poised to be Arch Rock’s tranquil beer garden, with views of wooded hills, soundtracked by birdsong and chattering creek. (Arch Rock is buying the adjacent property, too—expansion for fermenters, barrels, a pub.)

“We wondered how we could leverage beer-brewing toward helping save these watersheds,” Sherwood said during our phone call. “Unique water types all over the world have created great beers. Local water is vital. We thought we could form a community of breweries here willing to say how essential it is.”

Sherwood, Smith, and Lacey launched the Wild Rivers-Wild Brews Coalition, including 16 breweries from southwest Oregon. “It’s such a great fraternity of brewers,” Sherwood said. “They’re passionate about their environments and the beers they make. They get it.”

With Arch Rock, the Coalition are 7 Devils (Coos Bay), Bandon (Bandon), Bricktowne (Medford), Caldera (Ashland), Chetco (Brookings), Climate City (Grants Pass), Common Block (Medford), Connor Fields (Grants Pass), Misty Mountain (Harbor), Opposition (Medford), Port O’ Pints (Crescent City), Standing Stone (Ashland), Swing Tree (Ashland), and Walkabout (Medford).

In 2015, Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley plus Reps. Peter DeFazio and Jared Huffman designed the Southwestern Oregon Watershed and Salmon Protection Act, legislation to permanently protect the fragile watersheds, exempting them from the General Mining Act, a 145-year-old law giving ore mining priority over all other uses of federal land.

“Because the senators and congressmen knew their legislation wouldn’t pass in one year, and that there was an acute threat from strip mining,” Sherwood said, “with the support of the brewery Coalition and city councils and elected officials, they were able to ask, on behalf of their constituents, that the USFS and BLM enact what’s called a temporary ‘mineral withdrawal,’ to aid legislation in removing the watersheds from the 1872 Mining Act.”

Back on Hunter Creek with the tulip of Adipose IPA: “The way politics are,” Smith tells me, “it takes so long to get anything approved or disapproved, so these next 20 years serve as a buffer, giving us time to figure out how exactly these areas should be permanently protected without restricting access.”

In 2015 and 2016, the USFS and BLM held public hearings in Gold Beach, Brookings, and Grants Pass. “Those hearings were packed,” Sherwood said. “When James spoke to the audiences about beer, he emphasized how critical clean water is—for not just Arch Rock, but for all breweries, and the beer industry is a big deal in Oregon.”

Out aside Hunter Creek, the wind whips. Another cold front is pushing ashore. The sky sinks lower, darker. We watch hail pelt the roiling creek. Leaning against the open boiler room door, Smith continues.

“Throughout history,” he says, glancing up, watching gulls fly by, “people have rallied and things have gotten started in taverns and breweries. You don’t hear of people rallying at their local coffee shop, do you? People rally behind their local brewery. Beer truly brings us together.”

James Smith of Arch Rock Brewing Co. Photo: Kew.

Arch Rock Brewing Co.

28779 Hunter Creek Loop, Gold Beach, Ore.

541-247-0555

archrockbrewingcompany.com/wild-rivers-wild-brews-coalition

It Reef

By Michael Kew

YVON CHOUINARD TOLD ME ABOUT IT. We were yakking about travel, eating sashimi, drinking beer astern on a yacht in the Tuamotus. Founder of Patagonia, Inc., Chouinard saw much of the tropics—surfing, sailing, exploring, bonefishing—but he hadn’t surfed the wave we discussed.

"Somewhere I've always wanted to see," he said. "Untouched nature, lots of reef passes, no surfers, good surf. All you need is a local fisherman to take you out."

"Why haven't you been there?"

"Probably because there aren’t any bonefish."

Chuck Corbett of Tabuaeran, to where Chouinard once sailed, later confirmed the claim to me through email. A longtime merchantman and an expatriated American on his own atoll of idyll, Corbett had seen and surfed more Pacific obscurity than anyone.

“Would you like an insiders tip?” he wrote. “Buy a small Jap truck for around a grand or less, then buy a 10-foot aluminum boat with a 15-horsepower outboard. Ship from San Francisco. You will find epic, world-class surf—up to giant sizes, too. When you’re finished, you can sell the car and boat. Nobody knows the island sits with Tahiti in waves because the surf is a minimum of a few miles out, on a barrier reef.”

I was on-island at 3 a.m. after four flights, with two bags, two surfboards, and no expectations, not even for sun. The terminal was a dim concrete room with flaky paint and a foul restroom, a small sign glued above the sink: Please keep our airport environment clean and fit to work in, especially our restrooms.

At the curb outside was an old brown sedan, an orange light on its roof, which made me think it was a taxi. It was, though its driver was asleep, as was the pregnant middle-aged woman in the back seat. Both of their jaws bulged with betel nut, a natural sedative enjoyed with great vigor on the equator.

I tapped on the driver's window, startling him.

"Taxi?" I grinned, showing him some cash. He was red-eyed but coherent; I lowered the passenger seat for my surfboards, and squeezed into the back with the woman, who reeked of garlic and sweat. She turned her head slowly and looked at me.

"I am Gina."

She was pregnant but obese, with a pretty purple floral dress and an elaborate shell necklace. Her head was a mass of short, kinky black hair, her teeth kernels of red.

"You want chew?"

"Betel nut?"

She nodded. "Yes. Betel nut."

"Sure, I'd love some."

She plucked three small green nuts from a pouch she kept in a hidden dress pocket and handed them to me with a wilted pepper leaf and a dirty vial of lime. Lime is baked coral, a fine white powder resembling cocaine, sprinkled on betel nut for an effect unknown to me; by trip's end, nobody else I asked knew why all their lives they put lime on their betel nut.

I was 30 minutes off the plane and already with a cheekful. On other islands I had used a slice of an actual lime, which made the experience putrid and unforgettable.

The driver stared blankly through the windshield.

"Where you going?"

"Palm Hotel."

"Palm Hotel? Okay. We go Palm Motel." He started the car.

About a mile on, he pulled over in front of a small store festooned with cheery but faded beer posters and advertisements for the latest food shipment from Hawai’i (New York Steak just in! and Now Fresh California Iceberg Lettuce!). I too was a U.S. import but was not feeling particularly fresh, or even cheery, and I asked why we were stopped here. The driver eyed me in his rearview mirror, his face sweaty and fretful, like he was going to faint.

"Sir, I stop here."

"Do you need to buy something? The store looks closed."

"No. But I not drive you to hotel." He put a finger on his cheek. "Very tired."

"So you're dropping me here?"

"Yes. I call new taxi."

We sat in the car and waited. I was too tired to care. The road was dark. Nothing moved. The air was thick and muggy. I was grimy. Gina snored softly, both hands on her belly. The driver lowered his head, tilted the seat back, and dozed off. Rain began to fall. I closed my eyes, listened to the jungle crickets, and thought: Two days ago I was in a down parka and driving 80 mph on a Los Angeles freeway.

Then came bizarre color visions of a rodeo I'd never seen, cowboys I'd never met, cowgirls in tight jeans, bull-riding, steer-wrestling, sunglasses, tobacco, bourbon, paper plates and fatty meat, pickup trucks, aluminum folding chairs, green hills, bright lights, dirty fingers clutching pink ticket stubs. So lucid it was, I shot upright and yelped when the driver slapped my left knee.

"Sir, you taxi here!"

An hour had passed. Dazed, I loaded my bags into the other car which was smellier, with damp cloth seats. The driver made a futile attempt at conversation.

At last he deposited me in the rainy darkness outside my hotel, in the middle of the forest, several miles from the nearest village. The air smelled of plumeria and moss, rain and ripe fruit. The silence was deep. Eventually a clerk led me along a ferny path to my room—actually an old wooden bungalow, full of insects and geckos—where I showered and slept till noon the next day, awakened by an errant rooster and croaking toads. And, in the distance—Chouinard’s “it.”

Sweating It

By Michael Kew

Can a Nova Scotian really feel at ease in the Horse Latitudes? Nico Manos ponders in Tuvalu. Photo: Kew.

"DUDES, LET'S SLEEP ON THE AIRSTRIP."

He is drunk and sunburnt. He may have ciguatera.

Elbows on knees, a pink Nico Manos is hunched forward, shirtless and sweating, on the edge of an old stained mattress. He’s Canadian. He wasn’t built for this. He’s North Atlantic in the South Pacific.

For 55 Australian dollars per night, this hotel has no fresh sheets nor running water nor air-conditioning nor reliable electricity. “No water anywhere in Tuvalu!” our hostess promised, with a sweep of her flabby arm, at check-in. She’d pointed at the chipped cement floor. “Except here.” She smiled a crooked smile. “This is why I put you in my flat—to ensure you have enough water every day. And it is very cool in the apartment because it is upstairs.”

But warm air rises and her upstairs flat is full of mosquitoes and fat, stagnant air, like a sauna but dirtier. Here on Funafuti Atoll, capital of the pretty nation of Tuvalu, we are her only guests, apt considering Tuvalu is Earth’s third least-visited country. It is also Earth’s fourth smallest—nine atolls totaling less than 10 square miles of land for 11,000 people across 500,000 square miles of ocean between Australia and Hawai’i.

Shunning the cramp of their stuffy fales (half of Funafuti homes host at least nine people), many doze on Funafuti International’s (airport code: FUN) tradewind-cooled tarmac. A few feet above sea level and hogging a large slice of Funafuti’s land, the strip is barely “international,” connected just twice weekly, on one airline, with Fiji. It’s so barely international that, nightly, several folks are out there on woven mats and pillows beside their parked motorbikes.

Early each morn and late afternoon, flanking harsh heat, the FUN strip is used for jogging and ball games—volleyball or soccer, usually. During the day it is a public thoroughfare. Lots of traffic, mostly all motorcycles and scooters. Large Polynesians and gaunt stray dogs. Pigs and fowl. Pebbles and windblown trash.

Yesterday afternoon, since Tuvalu is a Commonwealth constitutional monarchy, the strip was used as a practice zone for the police squad (Tuvalu has no military) march that on Saturday will honor the 87th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, reigning from randy old England, 9,462 miles out. But ol’ Liz can’t be that excited about Tuvalu since she’s only visited it once.

In 1982.

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us,

God save the Queen!

Airstrip volleyball, Funafuti. Photo: Kew.

NIGHT FELL hours back and the moon is new, yet we can see the airstrip, backdropped with silhouettes of coco palms and pandanus and tin shacks. Sleep? Perhaps Manos’s is a valid pitch, even if it trailed eight cans of Pure Blonde lager and a paper plate stacked with rice and possibly poisoned parrotfish from the dim restaurant below.

“We need breeze,” Daniel Jones says calmly. “My chest is covered with mosquito zits.”

Hawaiian zen. Jones is perpetually calm. Lying on his bed, he stares at the cracked ceiling. He’s also sweating, but not from beer or ciguatera. He’d had the coconut crab with breadfruit. Two cans of Pure Blonde.

I too chose the coconut crab with breadfruit. Eight cans of Pure Blonde. “You guys have mats?”

Manos: “Yeah. Boardbags.”

Me: “Let’s go.”

Ten seconds later: rain on the roof.

Jones: “Let’s not.”

All rain in Tuvalu is a step toward goodness, even if the FUN sleepers are now uncomfortably wet and awake. We resign to suffer in this hot room. But locals suffer from chronic drought, hence our dry shower and stinky, unflushable toilet, full of piss. Most Tuvaluans, especially in the outer atolls, simply choose the free, no-maintenance option of crapping in the lagoon. We witnessed this each dawn while awaiting Eti, our boat driver.

Recently the government declared a state of emergency—lack of rain was causing contamination of groundwater supplies, and fresh water was rationed to 10 gallons per house per day. Drought plagued all of Tuvalu, particularly Funafuti, which from space looks like the side of a man’s head.

So rain is good, especially at night. Water tanks are refilled. The air smells clean. The grime smears and the dust dies. And with surf whoosh and rustling palms, it sounds like Oceania.

“Maybe we’ll get to shower tomorrow,” I say, clicking through the day’s surfing photos on my laptop. The waves weren’t great, but they could be. Maybe tomorrow.

“What’s wrong with this place?” Manos asks, scratching his forehead with his left pinky, squinting at my computer screen. “Why don’t they just build a big desalination plant?”

A small one exists but it produces half of what the atoll needs. And it often fails.

Jones: “Some reef-blasting equipment would be great, too, eh? Dynamite?”

Quite selfishly and myopically, in true surfer mode, our problem with Tuvalu is not its lack of fresh water but its small number of surf spots and their odd proclivity for not copping the same swell that all week has afforded well-overhead tubefests at Cloudbreak, 657 miles south of us.

It should all compute. The tradewind here blows offshore. Despite Tuvalu’s global position, the Tasman Sea is a reliable swell-kitchen, and the Mamanucas’ consistency is our planned panacea.

Previously unconsidered: Tuvalu’s surrounding bathymetry is much deeper than Fiji’s, quickly plunging to 6,500 feet and leading swell away from the atolls, allowing it to roam, freed from Melanesia, northeasterly across the open ocean, scurrying past Tuvalu, later to barrel away in Kiribati and along Hawaii’s south shores.

We also learned Fiji, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia are professional swell-blockers. We deduced the swell likely needed to be legit large to properly ignite Funafuti. Recall “Big Friday” during 2012’s Fiji Pro. That kind? Perhaps we’ll never know.

Tonight, via the slothful wi-fi of this hotel, we learn Cloudbreak has been pumping for days.

“If we leave tomorrow, I can catch this swell at Bowls,” Jones says half-jokingly. “Or at Cloudbreak.”

But today is Thursday. Saturday’s flight is canceled. Zilch till Tuesday.

Hopes dashed faster than Jones can poo in the lagoon.

Manos, Ciguatera Pass, Tuvalu. Photo: Kew.

Part of this story appears in TSJ 26.1. Subscribe.

Thanks You For Coming

By Michael Kew

Nauruan dusk. Photo: Kew.

"ARE YOU MARRIED? Are you single?” Tara is quite drunk, sucking on a cigarette. She blows smoke at a passing fly. “What happened to your eyes? You look like the devil."

“I’m not married," I say. "And nothing has happened to my eyes. What are you talking about?”

Her glassy gaze brightens; she seems confused. Her face deflates and she looks sad. Takes another drag. “Yeah. I’m single, too. Where you from?”

“USA.”

“USA! I been wanting to see Americans before. They no come here. They think Nauru is bad place.”

The high tide peaked an hour before sunset, gorgeous now. Three little girls giggle and splash in the lagoon inside the reef. The waves for my session were small, the rides brief—punchy rights into the channel. The reef was uncomfortably shallow, the coral dead and craggy, littered with urchins stuffed in cracks and holes in the reef. The ocean had that warm, soft tropical scent—sea plasma. Tufted clouds hid the sun most of my session, and the wind had swung offshore. The rip kept pulling me out. A sparkly dream—sounds of the kids squealing, families relaxing on the beach, fishermen done for the day.

Tara is an enormous, gap-toothed woman, perhaps 40, very dark-skinned, wearing a ripped blue denim skirt and a billowy purply-white floral T-shirt, soaking wet from her fully clothed, late-afternoon sea soak. As the tide recedes and the sun drops, she sits cross-legged on the sand. She has wide arms, small hands, her black hair pulled back tight. She has two metal rings on her index finger. As she slurs, she sits and sways side-to-side on the log and smokes a cigarette. The surf sound is soothing, almost dainty. A small dog is barking—harshly, piercingly.

“My name is Tara,” she says. Her jaw looks unhinged while she talks, her eyes go from squints to wide, crazy-looking. Her face seems to have no bones.

“Hi, Tara. We met here an hour ago, before I went surfing.”

“What your name?”

“Michael.”

“Your real name is Michael?” She sways side-to-side, laughing hysterically, a raspy smoker’s crackle. Then, eyes wide: “Woo-woo! Woo-woo! Woo-woo! Why are you heeeeeere, Michael?”

The small dog barks louder. Tara looks down, laughing at the sand.

“Woo-woo! Woo-woo! Woo-woo!”

“You like to laugh, eh?”

“I like to be, uh…European.”

“European?”

“Yeah, but I’m Nauruan black. I want to be European but I can’t because I’m black. The white people, they enjoy the color skin.” She uses her finished cigarette to light a new one.

“How do you know these guys?” I ask, gesturing at Devlon and Jim.

She inhales smoke and blows it out, pointing at Devlon. “I know that one there, Nauruan one, Devlon, since we were young and live in Boe.” The cigarette goes out so she relights it and tosses the old butt. She raises her right hand to kid height. “We know since children, since kids.” She coughs. “And this one (pointing at Wisam), I just know him this year. This one refugee. He nice. They friends.”

She takes another drag off her cigarette, looking at me. “I’m scared of the eyyyyes.” I open them wide; “OH!” and she leans back, laughing. “You’re something! I don't know how to say."

“My eyes are blue.”

“Yeah, and you’re something! You even show it to me.” Still swaying, she raises both palms at me. Then, randomly: “I had a sister. She’s going to marry in December.”

“Marrying who?”

“A Tongan. A Tongan man, Tonga boy.”

“Nice guy?”

“Yeah, he’s nice, very nice, he’s very handsome. Very handsome. I look at him at first and he’s very handsome. I even said to my sister: Can I take him from you?”

Her face lights up, eyes huge, mouth agape, then a hysterical laugh and a huge grin exposes her yellow teeth, the top row missing both canines. She suddenly looks serious and squints at me as she takes another drag.

“So Tongan men are of the most handsome in the Pacific,” I say. “Who are the next most-handsome?”

“I don’t usually see Australian people.”

“No Australians. How about Micronesians?”

“Oh!” She gives this some serious thought, contorting her fleshy face.

“Marshall Islands?”

“No.”

“Tarawa?”

She frowns, looks disgusted. “Noooo. No Marshall.”

“Guam?”

“Nooooo—Marshall! I forgot what they look like, the Marshall Island people.”

Another long drag followed by hacking cough. She pulls her shirt up and coughs into its neck, raising a pale chunk of lung phlegm, which she spits onto the sand behind her. Another deep drag. The dog behind me starts eating Devlon’s pack of cigarettes.

She stares at the phone resting on my right thigh. “Can you camera me and you?” she smiles, sniffing, then wiping her nose with her wet shirt. “I want USA to see good Nauruan peoples. We are here, just like you. Yes? Thanks you for coming.”

Tara. Photo: Kew.

The Last Surf Tourist

By Michael Kew

Nauru. Photo: Kew.

EXPECTING ME: Jim, Devlon, Wisam—all 30-somethings, beachfront and beatific, smoking cigarettes, idle on sand in the shade of a white tent.

“You are Michael?” Devlon asks as I approach.

“Yeah. This the surf shack?”

“Yeah. I was told to keep an eye out for you while you’re surfing.”

Flanking the small dynamited boat channel, the waves are waist-high. Crumbly, flaccid. Low tide and reefy.

Me: “Almost breaking?”

Jim: “Need high tide. The reef looks smooth, but it is sharp and shallow. Many urchins.”

Devlon and Jim were born nearby. Everything here is nearby. A Micronesian isle of eight square miles, Nauru is a quintessential dot-on-map.

“Did you learn English here?” I ask Devlon, who could be the twin brother of football star Deion Sanders.

“Yeah. It’s our second language. But many Nauruans don’t know Nauruan—they only learn English. We have no school for Nauruan language. No one teaching it. I have five children, and only two can speak Nauruan. Otherwise just English.”

Wisam is an Iraqi refugee who speaks scant English. He arrived via leaky boat and lives on Nauru for free. Comfortably. He likes this island.

“No surf in Iraq,” he says, smiling big, half his tan face in wraparound sunglasses, hands in baggy blue pockets.

I glance back at the channel. Manmade, it is 20 feet wide, 240 feet long, and iffy in any sort of swell. This afternoon, a man on a rooster-tailing jet ski is gouging circles in the water and zooming back and forth outside the reef before, at full speed, gunning toward shore, slowing just short of nine people lazing in the turquoise nearshore pool.

Above white sand and waterline, the green groundcover is dotted with trash, two upturned wooden canoes, coconut husks, some bleached whalebones. On the cracked cement boat ramp, next to large white coral boulders, are six rusty boat trailers attached to six rusty utes. The six boats are at sea. It’s a busy but lax vibe, stripped to pure purpose—fishing and swimming. Maybe some surfing.

“You surf, Devlon?”

“Yeah, some of us adults do. We’ve just started, mainly because of the lifeguard training. Before, we had a bus to bring lots of local kids to surf here, but now there is no bus, so no transport. The bus broke down a year ago, and everything faded away. Now, instead of them all coming to surf together, it’s maybe two or three at a time. But the kids, they want to surf every day.”

“Perhaps there will be a Nauruan surf champion,” I say, watching the dribble. “Is this the island’s best surf spot?”

“There is a more better surfing place, but it’s other side of the island at the Menen Hotel,” Devlon says. “Needs different wind and swell directions. This wave here, it’s a small wave, but can get really good sometimes. Maybe a few hours from now.”

Devlon, whose English holds a hint of chewy Russian inflection with words including the letter L, continues: “An Aussie bloke name John used to be the main surf club guy, but lately he’s been working so much, he handed the reins to me.”

“You’re the surf king?”

He laughs. “I’m not the king—mostly just an assistant. John’s the one with the brains.”

“So there is much local interest in surfing?”

“Yeah. Like I said, the kids love it. This club has had a positive effect on them. They are why we train. Up until a few years ago, there were lots of drownings here. Now there are none.”

“Why not?”

“We working here 10 hours a day, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day, which is why we can’t do much with the surf club now. This is all new. Before, we used to operate under the Australian Lifeguard Association; now we are controlled by our government. It’s not volunteer. It’s good. We only do training Mondays and Fridays. Saturdays we mostly have families coming for swimming.”

“Have you met any foreigners who came here to surf?”

“No. No tourists at all. Only people coming here for work, government contracts, the refugee camps.” He looks amused. “Why are you here? You’re our first surf tourist, eh?”

Likely the last.

The Macrocosm of Mark McInnis

By Michael H. Kew

Mark McInnis, Ochocolands, Ore., 2016. Photo: Kew.

FIVE HOURS FROM SURF. Three hours past dusk. Mark McInnis, 36, shouts at his friend.

“Hey, Laner! For this big main arc, drive on the inside lane! And don’t forget: running lights only!”

Down the hill, 500 yards out, behind a low ridge we can’t see, Lane Pearson—also a lensman—sits in McInnis’s new gray Tacoma, waiting to grind the sharp curves of this remote highway.

Wasco County, Oregon. The high desert plateau is black and cold, its sky vast and starry. No moon. No cell service. Sage, tussock, dirt. Nearest town: population 46.

 “See the problem?” McInnis says to me, tracing the horseshoe with his finger. “Right there, Lane is driving straight toward my lens, so we might get a weird lens flare, but if he gets to right here before it clicks….Goooo, Laner!”

Pearson stomps the gas. The truck roars; its knobby tires squeal.

Thirty-second exposure. McInnis watches his timer.

….8…7…6…5….

“Gogogogogogogo! Go! Go! Go!”

….2…1…click. The truck’s red tail lights coast out of frame.

“We nailed it!” McInnis laughs. His breath is steam. He dances a slight jig, speaks fast. “We nailed it, dude! Si-hi-hi-hi-hi-ck! Laner’s just driving like a mad dog. Dude. We’re, like, done. First try. We’re literally done. That’s all I wanted.”

Hunched and cackling, waiting for the pixels to process, he squints at the camera’s LCD screen.

“Wait, why isn’t it showing the image? Do I not have a card in this thing? Oh, there it goes. Yup. That was sick. We already nailed it. I love when stuff works out this easily. We can go home right now. Obviously we’re not going to.”

What’s your vision here, Mark?

 “I had this idea to juxtapose two photos of this vantage, one with no car in the daytime, one with a car on it at night.”

Did the dealership request that?

“No. It’s what I want to do. I love this kind of stuff. I get so excited making a cool shot for a client, or for whoever. It’s fun to do something different.”

Different from…?

“Surfing, of course.”

What kind of photographer are you?

“A kook with a camera. Surfing and adventure lifestyle. Travel. Outdoor adventure.”

What drives you?

“Photography has been my passion for half my life. The reason I started was to get an easy A in my senior year of high school. It trips me out when I’ll talk with someone or I’ll get a random email, and the person is telling me one of my shots made them feel something, or they connect to my photography. It’s cool putting something out there that makes somebody feel. I don’t know if that’s what I’m after, but when it happens, it’s badass.”

We sit on cool, pebbly soil and wait for Lane. A beer can is opened. Sage scent abounds.

“This reminds me of my childhood,” McInnis says quietly. “The sage smells vibrant because rain fell today. It rarely rains here.”

He swigs ale.

Burrrrrp.

Goals?

“One big job a month. That’s an easy way of saying it. I’d love to do big jobs to get the money to do things I’m passionate about, like surfing. The corporate shoots have been fun. I work with great people.”

Somewhere in the night, Pearson has left the truck and is walking back to us to shoot the next image using his camera from a different angle.

McInnis: “For this one, it’ll look cool as long as we shoot for at least 20 minutes. But the longer we go, the better. I want to go until at least 11:30. It’s 10:55 now. Thirty-five minutes? That’ll be a nice exposure as long as no cars come.”

We watch for satellites and shooting stars.

“The older I get and the longer I stay in places like this, the more I realize their potential for photography. In the past, I’d never think about it. This is where I grew up. Back then, we’d just hang out—shoot guns, snowboard, ride motorcycles, fish, whatever. Today, I appreciate it 100 percent more.”

Until recently, McInnis shunned the desert, splitting years between the rainy coast and Portland, where his girlfriend lived. “I thought there was nothing in Bend for me besides my mom and friends I grew up with.”

Singlehood struck in September 2014. That winter, McInnis roamed the West Coast and traveled a bit, notably to Scotland for “Seawolf,” a film project.

Then:

“My stepdad passed away in April 2015, so I spent a ton of time in Bend comforting my mom, and Lane was comforting me. It was pre-summer—my friends and I had the mountains and lakes and everything to ourselves. I was so stoked to be hanging with Lane a lot, and with my mom. It was a badass time to be in Bend. Lots of love radiating from all over.”

Love: Honolua Bay, 1995. Gray sky, three-foot swell. McInnis’s first surf. He’s 15. Willis, a skilled surfer and Mark’s biological father, lives nearby. “My dad explained nothing about surfing to me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I paddled a longboard over a wave, and it jacked; the board smacked my nose. So I sat on the shoulder, bleeding, watching my dad surf. He was bummed at himself for not offering me pointers.”

Ale.

Burrrrrp.

 “When I was 10, my real dad had moved back to Bend to be with me for my formative years. I hated summer, because all I wanted to do was snowboard. I had nowhere to go. It was like, I have to stay here? It sucked. Hot and dusty.”

In 2001 McInnis moved to Eugene, where he studied journalism at the University of Oregon. “By then, my dad had returned to Maui, so for each college Christmas break—I was 20, 21, 22—we spent three weeks surfing there. All day, every day. Those years, when we were in love with surfing, were the most we ever connected.”

Early one morning in April 2004, surfing in murky water off Maui’s Pohaku Park, Willis McInnis was fatally mauled by a tiger shark.

 “When he died, I decided I’d surf everywhere, not just on Maui, since I could no longer surf with him. Thought I’d get a wetsuit and learn whatever all this Oregon crap is about, because surfing was a way I could still connect with my dad. I talk to him every time I go surfing—out loud, if no one’s around.” (laughs) “Actually, I talk to both my dads all the time.”

Pearson approaches—a headlamped ghost. Thrilled, McInnis stands and adjusts the tripod. Completes his thought.

“This whole path I’ve taken…it’s a direct result of my dads passing.”

Star trails. Zest.

A drive.

“Laner! Ready?”

Lane Pearson (left) and McInnis, Powell Butte, Ore., 2016. Photo: Kew.

The Time We Carry

By Michael Kew

Photo: Kew.

YOU WALKED IN JULY. You carried something—phone? purse? plane ticket?

I carried a white single-fin. From my shoulders hung a black 28-liter wet/dry bag. Patagonia calls it their Jalama Pack. Of zippers and recycled polyester, it is a sound tool for bipedal surf-search. Fitted with tick-blocking pants and day-hikers, 7’0” underarm, I’d stepped through a shady hall of maple, alder, blackberry, salal, thistle, poison oak, ferns, and wind-sheared spruce down to this gap in the coast. Rocky, reefy. Google Earth porn.

You don’t surf here. Except today. Elements agreed for the first time in perhaps two years. Perhaps two decades. Perhaps never; perhaps never again.

Calm, warm Sunday. Inland forest-fire haze smudges the afternoon sun, soft-focus pastels blurring cirrus into the psychedelic sea, an orange mirror of summer. Dreamtime. Look: gulls and seals and a spouting whale. Bobbing bull kelp lazing in the drift, swaying with the surge, laced with white ribbons of foam—sea plasma. The water color, a coldly fragrant-fresh deep jade, matches the hillside groves. The air smells of salt and soot. Offshore sit seastacks and tortured rocks, relics of a coast a billion years old.

It took my feet—and 60,000 years of human pollination—to reach this beach. It remains raw, a primordial panorama: beige strip of heavily driftwooded sand, course like cracked pepper, concealed by woods and seacliffs . By you I am unseen. Publicly private. Ephemeral refuge. A naturalist zen. Church of the open sky.

I could be elsewhere.

Since Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens left the Horn of Africa, we’ve walked. We’ve carried things. Our first portable sheath was a pelt quiver for arrows, freeing our hands to hunt and gather. About 45,000 years into the migration, Alaska was reached and the East Asian pilgrims scattered, launching today’s diaspora of Native Americans from Barrow to Ushuaia. They carried things.

Jalama Pack things: steel water bottle, energy bar, hooded five-mil, booties, towel, keys, phone. This modern zippered style of backpack can glean roots of 130 years, but in 1991, two German hikers found Ötzi the Iceman in an Italian Alps gully. Veins split by a foe’s flint-tipped arrow, he died 5,300 years prior, deer-hide quiver and wood frame beside him. Bits of hide and hair suggest a hide sack was stuck to the frame. Stone Age backpacking, you might say.

I ponder Paul Salopek, a stranger whose dream I trace. Today he too is backpacking. Carrying things. Things to capture and share his global trek. “Walking is falling forward,” he told National Geographic in 2013, when the writer first faced hot wind and dust at Herto Bouri. There he launched his multi-year, 21,000-mile Out of Eden Walk—“a journey that belongs to all of us”—leaving Ethiopia, threading the Middle East and ancient Silk Road kingdoms; eventually he will ford the Bering Sea and descend the Americas to Tierra del Fuego, man’s—and Salopek’s—omega.

“(Out of Eden) is a recreation of a journey all of us have made if you just go far back enough in our family trees,” he said. “It’s going to press the boundaries of communicating in a world where there’s too much information and not enough meaning. I’m going to swim upstream against the flow of information and try to slow people down, to have them absorb stories at a human pace.”

Slow journalism.

Salopek inspires. Nearing four years of the Walk, he’s ambling across Central Asian steppes to overwinter in China, then Siberia, last stop before the New World. Today’s world. Hung from his 53-year-old shoulders is his communications kit (laptop, camera, notebook, cell/sat phone) so he can “fling open digital infinitudes our nomadic forebears could scarcely imagine…We’ve been wired by natural selection to absorb meaning from our days at the loose-limbed gait of three miles an hour.”

Four-p.m. summer sun balms my face. Slouched forward, spent from surfing, I watch the creep of tide, the diurnal teaser, the surf session-killer. The sandbar is dead. Fleeting, like us. Estimates claim 93 percent of all humanity to ever live—more than 100 billion—is gone. Soul vapor. Bone dust. Atomic reincarnation?

Five ospreys squeak and twirl overhead—fish too will die. The ancient circle. Wheel of life.

I stand and shoulder the Jalama Pack. Grip the single-fin. Slowly, from this beach, I will step toward my car, up through the foyer of forest, discovering it again. Supplanting memory. Carrying things from one Eden to the next.

The Yeast Wizard of Yachats

By Michael Kew

Charlie Van Meter, Jenna Steward, and Aaron Gilham. Photo: Kew.

BREWER ON THE ROOF: “I’m snowblind whenever I first walk up here.”

We squint in the glare. Sunday afternoon. Over there is the ocean. We’re at the beach, but we’re not.

Indian Summer. In shades and a black hoodie, Charlie Van Meter sips fresh Kölsch from a glass. From his downstairs brite-tank tap, of course.

“It’s nice being right on 101,” Jenna Steward, his wife and brewery manager, says. She’s on the Kölsch, too. “Even if people don’t expect to stop in, they see our sign and decide to take a break and see what we’re about.”

Third story—technically the flat, white roof—of Yachats Brewing & Farmstore. Used to be a bank. Look 30 feet down: Highway 101 and the somnolence of Yachats, population 700. Look up: clear sky. Look west: blue Pacific forever. Look south: the Yachats River estuary, shadowed by Cape Perpetua, the fabled green fist of rock, knuckling the white waves.

“The dream,” Van Meter says, “is to put a third-story taproom right here so we can all have this epic view. Yachats is beautiful in the sun—and in the rain and wind. It’s great for stormwatching, too. People will sit and watch the chaos around them.”

It’s pronounced YAH-hots. In 2015, from Hood River, Van Meter and Steward (both 28) moved here at the wish of Yachatians Nathan and Cicely Bernard. In 2012, with salvaged Oregon wood (old-growth bar tops, posts, beams, floors) and wine barrel furniture, the Bernards flipped the old bank into a farmstore hub, selling local meat and produce and fermented food and all sorts of cool garden gear. A bright, helpful space. An intersection for this tranquil community.

“We’ve got a ‘coast time’ outlook on things,” Van Meter says, exhaling, admiring the view. “It’s Yachats Time, like ‘island time’ in the tropics. A nice, relaxed pace.”

Unfortunately, the Bernards are not here today. Likely eight miles upriver, tending to their sunny permaculture homestead. Here at the brewery, they’ve left the proverbial gate ajar for their young yeastmaster; he and Steward (with assistant brewer Aaron Gillham) are taking full advantage. New additions to their seven-barrel brewhouse include a six-head bottling line for 500ml glass for “limited release sales, hopefully by Thanksgiving,” Steward says before pointing at a roof next door. “And over there is the proprietary wind machine that’s going to power our glycol chiller.” (The machine was conceived by hardware design engineer/inventor Steve Burkle of Yachats-based EiP Technologies.)

Van Meter is a freak. Just a few years into his wort-wrangling, he stood onstage at the 2014 Great American Beer Festival, fist-bumping Charlie Papazian and sporting a shiny silver medal. Why? A peach saison he helped brew at his (now) alma mater, Logsdon Farmhouse Ales in Hood River. But that happened after he’d dovetailed jobs at Portland U-Brew and Uptown Market into his first pro brewing gig at Sasquatch in Hillsdale. This was in 2012, the birthyear of Yachats Farmstore. Logsdon’s Chuck Porter—colleague of Van Meter and an old friend of the Bernards—then cameoed to mash a few farmstore ales with Bernard’s 20-barrel pilot system.

But the system had to grow. Logsdon again pollinated the Yachats fold, this time via Van Meter/Steward.

They clicked.

“Yachats is an eclectic collection of people who very intentionally decide to live in this town,” Van Meter says. “It has a weird magnetism. People with all kinds of crazy skills and backgrounds end up here. I like to say Yachats is a collection of wizards.”

It’s getting hot here on the roof. More Kölsch, anyone?

On draught downstairs in the bustling eatery/store/bar are 13 house beers; per autumn, four are fresh-hop, including two saisons and a sour. There’s an IPA or two, a sour wit, a dry stout, a pale ale. There are three kombuchas, seven guest beers, two guest meads, three guest ciders, and two guest wines. There’s a saison with Szechuan peppercorns, a saison with plum and lavender, a saison with sage, a saison with lemongrass and rosebud….

“We like to keep it fresh, keep it new, keep it tasty,” Van Meter says over the din. “Farmhouse ales are close to my heart—probably my ‘traditional’ beers. They capture my imagination in terms of the history of the style and the romanticism of oak and its charms and attention to the simple ingredients.”

How so?

 “Simple grain bills and hop bills. A lot of the stuff I make is just a little bit of pilsner malt, a little bit of wheat, and combinations of yeast and adding fruit or spices to it. There is so much you can do with a small palette, like a painter’s palette. You can make a lot of things within the saison/farmhouse category with only a few ‘colors,’ if you will. It’s complex, yet it can be refreshing. There are lots of subtle flavors to come out of these combinations of yeast. Brewing is like being a yeast shepherd. You try to give it its ideal conditions and food and let it take care of itself. You’re just there to help it get into a package.”

I gape at the long wooden tap wall, a palette of choice in a place that is nothing but.

“This brewery is its own living thing,” Van Meter says, handing me a glass of his Fresh Hop Amarillo Sour. “We’re just letting it grow to what it wants to be.”

Yachats Brewing & Farmstore

348 Highway 101 North, Yachats

541-547-3884

yachatsbrewing.com

The Wild Ribeers Coast

By Michael Kew

Misty Mountain Tap Haus in Harbor, Ore.

ONCE A RAINY, craft-beer desert, the rugged Del Norte and southern Oregon shores (aka Wild Rivers Coast) have become something of a must-visit for those who love beer as much as sublime ocean scenery. Today, along with whale-watching, tidepooling, and vista point-admiring, your leisurely pace up or down Highway 101, aka the Pacific Coast Scenic Byway, will deliver you to eight wonderful breweries run by wonderful people, offering cool, seabreezed portals to a well-rounded coast-cuisine affair.

[Oregon]

7 Devils Brewery, Coos Bay

Set in a snug, historic downtown storefront, the lively husband-and-wife team of Carmen Matthews and Annie Pollard provide quality craft beer and gourmet food for the Oregon Coast’s most-populated (16,000) city, Coos Bay, in the state’s “Bay Area.” Enjoyed in what has become a social and musical hub, Groundswell IPA and Lighthouse Session Ale are summer favorites, while Blacklock Porter and Coalbank Stout are wonderful companions through the long months of wind and rain. 7devilsbrewery.com

Arch Rock Brewing, Gold Beach

Anchored by brewer James Smith, winner of the 2016 World Beer Cup’s Champion Brewery & Brewmaster Award in the Very Small Brewing Co. category (whew!), this production brewery on the sunny banks of Hunter Creek, near Gold Beach, has been kegging three flagship beers for three years. Pistol River Pale Ale and Gold Beach Lager are the two top-sellers, with State of Jefferson Porter and the odd seasonal specialty (Adipose IPA, He-Man Imperial Stout) rounding out Smith’s quality-not-quantity approach.  archrockbrewingcompany.com

Chetco Brewing, Brookings

Last year, when a clean, 768-square-foot space opened in downtown Brookings, brewer Mike Frederick and his wife, Alex, wasted no time in making their homemade products publicly available. Today, it’s more than a friendly tap house with a long menu, including 12 of Frederick’s vegan creations, like the award-winning Block & Tackle Stout and the popular, potent Thunder Rock IPA. Kick back with your dog on the sunny patio, or huddle around a table inside to browse the pub library or play one of the many board games on hand. And don’t forget the house-made pretzels and chili. chetcobrew.com

Wild River Brewing & Pizza Co., Harbor

This Harbor institution, remodeled this year, opened in 1980. Ten years later, launched as one of Oregon’s first microbreweries, Wild River now has four restaurants (the others are inland—Cave Junction, Grants Pass, Medford), all run by the third generation of the venerable Miller family. Yes, the pizza is delicious, paired well with local favorites like Wild River IPA, Harbor Lights Kölsch, and Double Eagle Imperial Stout. wildriverbrewing.com

Misty Mountain Brewing, Harbor

Eight year-round beers come from Matt Camarillo’s garage-size brewhouse along the Winchuck River, three miles east of the Pacific and a stone’s throw from rare, non-Californian redwoods. It’s this green, serene view that spawned the name for Oregon’s southernmost brewery, just two miles above the Golden State. Camarillo’s tap haus is in Harbor, directly off Highway 101. The location boasts convenience, an ocean view, and offers all of Camarillo’s beers—including Weatherhop IPA, Grey Pilgrim Pale Ale, Long Bottom Lager—plus fruity seasonals and specialties, cider, and homestyle food. mistymountainbrewing.com

[California]

Port O’ Pints Brewing Co., Crescent City

After the death of Jefferson State Brewing in 2000, California’s northermost city lacked fresh ale. Thankfully, Rick and Carol White entered the ring and launched this cozy, nautical/Irish-themed pub on Northcrest Drive amid a much different clime than that of Reno, Nev., where Rick, after winning a mere 50 homebrewing medals, became head brewer at Great Basin. From the desert to the redwood rainforest, Rick’s expertise has been well-received by a new generation of Del Norte ale enthusiasts, imbibing with popular styles like Del Norter Porter, Agate Ale, and 11-Bravo IPA. portopints.com

SeaQuake Brewing, Crescent City

In Del Norte County since the end of the Civil War, the Wakefield family knew the 12,000-plus square foot space that once housed the aforementioned Jefferson State Brewing yearned to be reborn as another beer haven. And so recruited was another high-level import, a one Chad Hilgenberg, who recently left Wisconsin via Minnesota for Crescent City to make magic in his new two-barrel-systemed, industrial-themed hotspot on oft-foggy Front Street. Complimenting SeaQuake’s six signature pizzas are Hilgenberg’s fine fermentations, including his nitrogen Oat Stout, Coastal Pale Ale (CPA), SeaQuake IPA, and the hugely popular (at least in summer) Blonde Ale. The Wakefields’ motto? “Great beer is an agreement between man and nature.” seaquakebrewing.com