Better Than Fiction 2 (3 page)

We knew that our relationship was neatly circumscribed by my imminent departure. He didn’t ask me to stay and I didn’t ask him if I could. What Iceland had to offer me was strangeness, the theme of seven and a half months on my own now gently expanded by his knowledge and mobility. My vocation, I knew,
was to return to America and keep writing, but to have Iceland deeply engraved into my own sensibility, not only by the land and the people I met, but by the ghostly presence of the Saga writers and the living Icelandic writers whose work I read, most notably Halldór Laxness, who was still alive and writing not far from Reykjavik, and whose books, especially 
Independent People
, entered into me as if they had existed forever.

On the way home my plane flew over Greenland. The sky was clear, and I stared down at the glaciers and the icy coast, and felt more deeply into my fascination with that far-flung offshoot of Nordic restlessness. After I arrived in New York, the first movie I saw was
Annie Hall
, perhaps the least Icelandic film ever, and the first food I ate was a bagel with lox and cream cheese from Zabar’s, Icelandic in a much-translated but still evocative way.

I went back to Iowa City. My old boyfriend was gone for the summer. I moved my suitcase and my typewriter into his apartment. Now, when I wrote, I was looking out the window at green grass and the white siding of the Foursquare house next door. I kept on with the grandparents in Idaho, my mother as an adventurous two-year-old wandering among the cattle while my grandmother cared for the new baby in the house. But I knew that the work to come, whatever it would be, had taken on a deep Nordic tinge, let’s say a combination of wind and sky and snow and grass, of making the best of isolation and hard work, tragedy, luck, and magic.

T
he journey ended with a knife. It wasn’t in me, but it was directed at me, by a swaying drunk in Loreto. I don’t recall anything about his face, but instead the shiny sweat of his torso combining with the Sea of Cortez behind him, until it became one thing.

The plan was to hitchhike, camp, and surf my way around the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. My reasons for choosing this particular trip are now somewhat hazy, but I suspect that I simply liked the geography of it: an enormous finger of land, from top to bottom, from Norte to Sur, a point to reach and say I had made it. I had also spent the previous year living and surfing in Hawaii and after grueling wipeouts, being held down and used as a pin cushion by an ocean floor comprised mostly of spiky black sea urchins, I had graduated to the next level of surfing and as any fresh graduate, I wanted more.

The border crossing from San Diego to Tijuana was filled with the same trepidation as any trip into the unknown, but with added fear from the horror stories of Tijuana that various fearmongers had instilled in me prior to departure. The bus passed row upon row of white crosses, marking the deaths of those who had attempted to cross the border illegally, and I saw these as some ominous warning.

I had already promised the aforementioned fearmongers that I wouldn’t stop in Tijuana, so I continued south to the not-much-safer beach of Rosarito. I camped on the beach that night while a family had a fiesta around me, booming mariachi and sizzling various meats to be cupped in soft tortillas later. I was happy for their company. Earlier in the day, a drunken fellow had stumbled across the dunes to where I was setting up camp. He had held a glass coke bottle as a black and yellow snake weaved out of it. He kept thrusting the snake towards me and laughed when I flinched. I was twenty-three and it was my first trip to a foreign country alone. That night I slept with my surfboard next to me, like two soldiers before an ambush.

The next few days were spent oscillating between my ambitions to get decent mileage under my belt and my agonies over every potential surf break I passed. I decided to take it slow and ease my way into the trip, stopping for nice gentle surfs in Calafia, La Fonda, and Salsipuedes. Things were going well, and by the end of the first week, I had reached Ensenada. I wandered the streets and visited the fish markets where I saw a man selling enormous lobsters, a tattoo of a woman making love to a swordfish on his arm. That evening I surfed the famous point break of San Miguel. It was a magnificent session and I stayed out after sunset. As the wind dropped, the waves seemed to break in slow motion and my fellow surfers turned to silhouette,
moving seamlessly around me like seals in the thick, oily water.

Then, when I left Ensenada, something changed. The tourists disappeared. So did the traffic, buildings, and any sense of comfort. Things were drier and the landscape opened up. There was no longer anything to hold onto and I felt untethered, like a balloon let go. I leapt out of the tray of a truck in San Vicente. It was a small dusty town after San Isidro just before the turn-off to Erendira, where I planned to spend the following couple of nights. Women with creased faces sat on stools outside closed-up shops and everything was covered in a thin veil of red dirt.

I turned and started to walk down the road towards the coast. Endless plains dotted with scrub rolled on like an ocean of rust. I began to sing aloud, elated at being in the middle of nowhere, heading towards the unknown with nothing but my bag on my back and my board under my arm. As I kept walking, though, small seeds of doubt planted themselves in my mind more frequently, and before long I was drenched in sweat. I was also almost out of water. No car had passed. The brittle scrub on the side of the road shuddered as a hot breeze passed through. Then fear started to leak into the place where doubt had been.

I walked for over two hours before I heard the thin buzz of a motor. I turned and squinted in the direction it was coming from, and the relief I felt when I saw a small rusty red thing moving in the distance was overwhelming. As it neared, I took off my battered straw hat and waved it down. The car came to a stop and the guy wound down the window. Crucifixes and beads swayed from the rearview mirror and tinny mariachi music rattled from the speakers. He was speaking in rapid Spanish and moving things around in the back, which I took as an invitation to get in. I somehow managed to squeeze myself and my board into the car and we raced off. I felt the warm wind battering my
face, closed my eyes, and dissolved in relief.

There was a beautiful rustic old backpackers that stood out at the point of Erendira and I pitched my tent under a palm tree nearby. Later I would regard this chapter as the safest, and possibly happiest, part of my trip. I suppose it is the way the entire trip should have gone. I met fellow travelers; we had bonfires. There were beers and striking sunsets. We dove for mussels. On my final night, I surfed with a pod of slick dolphins as the sky became streaked with red. It was an adventure, but part of me wanted it to be harder. I had already begun to romanticize the walk out here and knew that my time at the backpackers was simply too safe to achieve what I wanted from this trip. So, somewhat reluctantly, I packed in the pre-dawn haze and left the comfort of Erendira to head back out into the unknown.

The following weeks instilled the fear and wonder and triumph that I was after. I hiked down long roads, lay out under the stars, sat with small local fishing families as they rolled up small tortillas on a grill. I rode in the back of seaweed trucks over impossibly bumpy dirt roads. I climbed dormant volcanos and watched the sun set, turning the small islands into spilled coffee beans. My map of Baja was now cross-hatched, scarred, and dotted with markings and asterisks of where I had traveled, surfed, and slept.

I was getting too confident, too far ahead of myself, already imagining the retelling of my glorious adventures, when I crashed the car. I had been so fanatic about hitting every surf spot on my map, and making it out along every spidery dirt road that straggled off towards the coast, that I was now running out of money and time. I needed to get further down Baja towards Todos Santos and the coast that stretched down to Cabo San
Lucas, where I would celebrate the completion of my adventure. Then, hopefully bearded, stronger, and wiser, I would turn around and head back up to California in one straight shot.

The man said he was driving all the way down to La Paz and could drop me wherever I liked. As we drove on, though, I could see that my driver was nodding off. Looking back, I shouldn’t have offered to drive. We should have pulled over and napped. But what good is retrospect? I took over while the man slept. I clunked along, wrestling with the gearstick that jutted from the floor of the pickup. I had to swerve to avoid potholes that pockmarked the road. It was my first time driving on the other side of the road too, and in my disorientation I was veering dangerously close to the curb. It was when a herd of cattle started wandering onto the road and three trucks appeared racing down the center line from the opposite direction that it happened. I swerved to avoid the cattle, then swerved to avoid a collision with the trucks, and I lost control. It all happened in a blur of brown and red. When the car settled, the front window was smashed. Dust and smoke hung around us. It could have been worse; we suffered only minor injuries and managed to get the thing going again. I wasn’t murdered for my recklessness. We drove on silently, in our separate fury and guilt. When we reached the small town of Guerro Negro, the driver stopped by an ATM, pointed at it, and leaned over to open my door.

After emptying most of my bank account to the man whose car I had crashed, I was determined to finish what I had started, so I kept going. I spent the next three days sleeping in a freight truck carrying 3000 cartons of pineapple juice. The driver and I were stranded together in the small fishing village of Santa Rosalita due to flash floods that had torn out an entire chunk of the road that led out of town. On the third day, after assisting in
the clearing of a new makeshift road, we drove on through La Paz and I was dropped in Todos Santos, which would serve as the
next chapter
of my journey.

I lived frugally, surviving on only soft flour tortillas and tomatoes, and the trip started to find its foothold and sense of purpose again. There were some big swells, full moon surfing, and bonfires with scattered travelers who had found each other there. Baja didn’t let me get too comfortable, though. After a horrendous hurricane that tore my tent to shreds with me in it, and a heavy swell that snapped my board in half, after being chased down by a pack of dogs, witnessing an intense fist fight, and getting stung fairly seriously by jellyfish, I decided to draw this chapter of the trip to a close and get to Cabo so that I could get home.

The morning after I snapped my board, a mid-fortyish surfer whom I had seen around gave me a lift into town. He introduced himself as Kristoff from Canada, and mentioned that he had seen my snapped board on the beach that morning. Kristoff was typical of the
gringos
I met down here. He had made some ‘wise investments’ before coming down to build his dream surf house. Unmarried and without children, he was hesitant to talk about himself but eager to surf. He said he was going to Punta Conejo on the East Cape to catch a big swell that was approaching and asked if I wanted to jump on board. He had a whole stack of boards I could choose from. Exhausted and penniless, without a tent or a board, I heard myself say yes.

We packed up the campervan and drove straight through Cabo San Lucas, where I was meant to have celebrated my crossing of the finish line and the conclusion of my trip. But I didn’t feel like I had reached anywhere. I was in the clutches of something bigger now, and it was seeming less and less like
a peninsula rather than a labyrinth of dirt roads and deserts, dogs, snakes, cacti, and dust. California no longer seemed like a place I could ever reach again. As we sped down the dirt road to the coast, wild horses galloped in front of us, appearing then disappearing in the dust they left behind.

Punta Conejo was wild. We camped for three days on a sand dune down the beach from the small collection of oyster farmers’ shacks. I don’t remember any specific waves that I dropped into. I remember it was quiet and grey and cold for brief moments before sound returned and I roared across the face of giants.

When we returned to Todos Santos and Kristoff’s house, I got food poisoning. In various lucid intervals, as sweat poured from my body and drenched the sheets, I watched the fan turning slowly above me and realized that the trip had ended. When I was well enough to leave, Kristoff drove me to a highway and wished me luck. I hitched with a great urgency to reach the border and California, where my uncle and my credit card waited for me. I had no more money. None. People often say they are broke when traveling on a shoestring budget of sorts, but I really had spent everything I had and had nothing left but my thumb to get me home.

I hadn’t eaten for two days when I woke to the knife in my face. I had managed to get to Loreto, where my friend from the hostel in Erendira had given me the number to his trailer. I hadn’t counted on the endless neighborhoods of trailers, huddled together like cattle, and after searching for what seemed like forever, I lost hope and laid out my board bag to sleep on the beach. The next thing I knew, there was a knife in my face and the sweaty torso of a man blending into the light bouncing off the Sea of Cortez behind him. I gave him three t-shirts. He spat on me and left.

There isn’t much else to say. Desperate but extremely doubtful, I inserted my card into the ATM machine to see if some sort of miracle had occurred overnight. My mum told me later that she had received my final check from Hawaii and thought I might need it on my big Mexico adventure, so had taken the liberty of depositing it into my account. I had moved through everything, all the car crashes and hurricanes and knives and sickness, all the isolation and loneliness with a numbness that I suppose was some sort of survival tactic. In that moment, I cried. I cried for everything that had happened, knowing that it was over, that I could go home, and that I would live.

The strangest part is that now, after many journeys, I actually long for that fear. Not the fear of a certain neighborhood dog on your paper round as a twelve-year-old, or the fear of being caught as you snuck back into your house drunk as a teenager, or the fear of failing exams, but the true fear that you may not survive something. I’m relatively older and wiser now, so there is always enough money, a rental car, a hotel, and friends to mitigate the likelihood of finding myself in situations where true fear could exist, and it’s begun to feel as though I’ve lost the capacity for it. I have been close, during huge swells, or extreme hikes, but it hasn’t reached the glorious despair of my journey down the Baja Peninsula when I was twenty-three. Still, I continue to search for it, as far as my mind and body will let me, because it is what lets me know, in the strongest voice and in the clearest way, that I am alive.