The Dogs of Winter (2 page)

One was the old lion, the holy ghost of professional surfing. The other was California’s premier mysto wave, the last secret spot. They said you had to cross Indian land to get there—a rocky point somewhere south of the Oregon border where Heart Attacks was the name given to an outside reef—capable, on the right swell, of generating rideable waves in excess of thirty feet. There were no roads in. They said you risked your ass just to reach it. If the tide was wrong, or the swell of insufficient power, or not properly aligned with the coast, if there was poor visibility, due to fog or winds or heavy rains, or anything else that might prevent you from actually seeing the wave, you would never know whether you had reached it
or not. If, on the other hand, one did find it, one risked one’s ass all over again. The reef lay among some of the deepest offshore canyons in the northern Pacific, naked to every hateful thing above and below the water. Nor were the homeboys keen on visitors. At least one photographer Fletcher knew of had been badly beaten. Others had gotten in but come back empty, convinced it was a hoax. Still, the legend remained, kept alive by the occasional murky photograph, the tale told by someone more reliable than the average idiot, someone who claimed to have actually seen that outside reef work its cold, gray magic.

Photographs of the place were understandably rare. The ones Fletcher had seen were of a uniformly poor quality, shot from the hip, on the run, making any real estimation of wave quality difficult if not impossible. A chance for access with someone who knew the ropes would have been any surf photog’s dream; that the guide should turn out to be Drew Harmon was so perfect it was almost a joke.

There was a time when you couldn’t pick up a surfing magazine and not see Harmon’s picture. World champ. Pipe master. One of the first to charge Hawaii’s outer reefs. And then he was gone, walked on the whole deal. Some said he had run afoul of the law. Others said he had simply tired of the sport’s growing commerciality, the consummate soul surfer gone off to surf big, soulful waves. A decade’s worth of rumors floated in his wake. Recent photographs were as rare as those of Heart Attacks.

The last anyone in the surfing community had heard of him was that he had shown up in Costa Rica for a legends event, then pulled out before the contest. That was five years ago and he had not been heard from since. Not until September, when Michael Peters had picked up a phone to find Drew Harmon on the other end. The man was calling from Northern California and he had called to say that Heart Attacks was for real—a world-class big wave hidden among the rocks and fog banks, the recipient of Aleutian swells. He’d been surfing the place for the past two winters and he was ready for pictures. His only stipulation was that Jack Fletcher take them.

Peters had called Fletcher the following day, asking to meet at the Pier restaurant in downtown Huntington Beach. Fletcher’s machine had taken the message. “Don’t bother to call back,” the
message had said. “I’m gonna be there anyway. Just meet me in the bar. Five o’clock. I’m sure you can find the bar.”

Had things been better, Fletcher might have blown the guy off. As it was, the month of September had found him beset by leering in-laws and moon-faced brides, shooting weddings as far inland as the Pomona Valley, the land of the powder blue tuxedo. He had accordingly, at precisely five o’clock on the following day, made his way to the Pier restaurant overlooking the graffitied boardwalk and polluted waters of his old hometown.

•  •  •

In fact, the meeting had not been especially cordial. Fletcher had found his former employer seated in the glow of a magnificently swollen sun, poised to descend behind the isthmus which bisected the northern quarter of Catalina Island. The scene was framed by the tinted rectangles of glass which formed the bar’s western wall, and the room was filled with a dusty orange light.

Peters was a tall, heavily built man, roughly the same age as Fletcher. Both were in their early forties. Peters had lost most of his hair. What was left he wore pulled into a shiny black ponytail just long enough to dangle over the collar of his shirt. Fletcher considered this something of a bullshit hairdo, more appropriate for aging Hollywood types than former big-wave riders. As Peters rose to greet him, however, Fletcher was reminded that a big-wave rider was exactly what the man before him had been, that beneath the rounded edges there was still the man who’d ridden giant Waimea—in the old days, before wave runners, leashes, or helicopter rescues—then gone on to make enough money in the drug trade to buy his way into the good life. He was still, Fletcher supposed, somebody you wouldn’t walk to fuck with.

“Dr. Fun,” Peters said. He spoke without enthusiasm.

Fletcher seated himself at the bar, facing the beach. No one had called him Dr. Fun in a long time.

Peters sat down next to him. “How are you, Doc?”

“I’m okay.”

Peters studied him for a moment. “I hate to tell you this,” he said. “But you look like shit.”

Fletcher had responded by ordering a drink.

“You still in the movie business?”

“Oh, you know. A snuff flick now and then.”

Peters forced a laugh, leading Fletcher to conclude the man was probably a connoisseur. As for Peter’s remark, it had been aimed at a recent project of Fletcher’s, an off-beat little opus called
The Dogs of Winter,
a phrase generally reserved for big waves generated by winter storms. In Fletcher’s movie, the doctor had trailed a pair of metal heads from one wave pool to another across the continental United States. In fact, Fletcher had been rather fond of the film. He’d thought it prophetic and funny, in a bleak sort of way. Others seemed to miss the point entirely, particularly those in the industry. Most, Fletcher believed, were pleased that it had failed, Michael Peters among them.

“Okay,” Peters said. He sighed, tapping the bar with an empty bottle, allowing Fletcher to see that he intended to come right to the point. “I didn’t get you down here to bullshit with you. I’ve got something and I need to know if you’re up for it. I should add that it’s more than you deserve.”

“Intriguing.”

“Manna from fucking heaven, that’s what it is,” Peters said. At which point, Peters had told him about Drew Harmon’s call.

Fletcher’s first impulse was to believe that he was being fucked with in some way. It was too good.

“Don’t worry,” Peters assured him. “I tried to talk him out of it. I told him you were out of the loop, that you had become a fuck-up, that I had half a dozen guys could do the job.”

Fletcher decided the man looked just unhappy enough to be telling him the truth. The knowledge did something to the pit of his stomach, a sensation not to be had in the wedding chapels of Santa Ana.

“Jesus. I’m surprised he even remembers.”

“Come on.”

“So I shot him in the islands.”

“No shit.”

Fletcher had smiled then, giving in to the memories. For he had been young and innovative in those days, one of the first to
experiment with poles and helmet rigs. He’d backdoored a peak behind Drew Harmon at Rocky Point once. Fifteen years ago, and the shot was still radical.

Peters had looked unhappily toward the beach, where a considerable number of gulls circled in a thickening orange light. “This isn’t going to be easy,” he said. “You know that. We get the place on the right swell, surfing it is one thing, getting good shots is something else. You get fog up there. You get rain. You get clouds. The light is shit. Harmon knows that too. That’s why he asked for you. Radical conditions, a narrow window. You better have somebody who can get the shot. His problem is, he thinks you’re still the one.”

“What do you think?” Fletcher had asked him.

Peters had given him a hard look. “What I think don’t count, Doc. He’s the man on this one. But I’ll tell you this. You go, we’re all going to find out. We’re going to find out if you’re still the one or not.”

And that was how they had left it, until this morning, until the coming of the swell.

•  •  •

Fletcher finished his protein drink. He added the soiled blender to the mess in the sink and went outside. It was the finding out that occupied his mind just now, standing at the side of the garage, searching for the proper key in the moonlight. He had begun to swim again, marking his progress by the number of lifeguard towers he could pass as he slogged along beyond the surfline, but his progress was slow and he had counted on several more weeks of preparation.

As he slid the key into the door, it occurred to him that not long ago he had stood in almost this same spot. His daughter had come for a visit. She’d brought a friend and the girls had played at being fairies, paper wings taped to their backs, clad like gypsies in a funky array of old slips, gaudy belts, and feathers. The friend owned a dog—a small brown-and-white terrier—and as Fletcher stood on the deck, he’d become aware of the children and dog racing around him in dizzying circles, and he had felt himself at the eye of something. In its midst, he had experienced only loss, a sense of
dislocation. The feeling was an unnerving one and had haunted him for several days. It suggested, he decided, a continuum from which he was set apart, a failure of purpose.

Fletcher’s gear was stowed in the garage, in a metal filing cabinet to which the owner had granted him access. It was gear he had not used in some time. The Gore-Tex stuff bags were dusty and the home of spiders. He brushed them off then wiped them with a towel. He pulled out the old waterproof housing he’d made himself, examining it by the dim overhead light that filled the garage.

The housing was composed of a bright orange plastic, its seams stripped with silver duct tape. It was, by any contemporary standard, too big and too heavy, but it had served him well and he had once made something of a name for himself by losing it at the Pipe on a huge day, then staying outside to dive for it on the reef where eventually he’d found it, lodged in a crevice among the coral. It had been his second winter in the islands, and he had needed the pictures to pay his bills. To have lost the camera would have blown his entire scene. Still, diving for it had been a rash act. It was a big day and beneath the surface there was no way to see what was coming. He could easily have been caught on the reef and stuffed into a crevice himself. But later, people seemed to remember what he had done.

He took out his old Nikon and his 230 mm lens, which was the largest he still owned. They were using 600s from the beaches now, with converters and automatic focus, and the camera did half the work. Fletcher believed a man should find his own focus, should be forced to pull the trigger himself. It was also true he hadn’t the money to modernize his act. His, it seems, had gone for such items as doctors’ bills, an acrimonious divorce, a failed movie. He supposed he’d had it coming, for his desultory ways. For that failure of perception which had allowed him to conceive of the extended party as a suitable response to life’s trials. He had meant no harm. He had failed to compensate, was all.

When he’d laid out what he intended to take, he went back to the apartment. He took his heaviest wet suit from the closet. He took booties and gloves as well, then discovered that he had lost his hood. It was while he was looking for the hood that he found the book, a battered paperback with the ludicrous title:
A Wave Hunter’s
Guide to the Golden State.
He’d picked it up years ago, thinking it might be good for a laugh, only to discover its authors had, in fact, worked their way from Oregon to the Mexican border with a thoroughness Fletcher had been compelled to admire. He sat with the book now on his futon, suddenly curious to see if the authors had managed any photographs of something that might pass for a world-class big wave in the northern reaches of the state.

The appropriate section was filled with small black-and-white photographs and Fletcher was treated to a monotonous parade of murky slate gray humps marching over slate gray seas toward slate gray rocks, set before slate gray skies. Disappointed, he turned to the text where, to his sharp delight, he found something of interest—a rumor, even then it seems, but the elements were accounted for.

“In a place where Northern California’s most pristine and remote public lands meet with the reservations of the Yurok and Hupa Indians,” the authors had written, they had picked up word of a long point capped by grasslands, around which huge waves had been known to wrap, exploding finally upon a deep, natural bay. The place was known to the locals as the Devil’s Hoof, and they had gone in search of it.

They had approached from a campground to the north. Access was difficult. Fletcher could imagine them out there, a pair of hippies slogging through creek beds in baggy shorts and huarache sandals, coming at last to the coast only to find themselves nearly trapped upon a huge bolder field without exits.

A medium tide and small surf had permitted a northbound crossing where they had huddled for the night on a sandy beach at the base of steep cliffs. They had awakened to spectacular scenery and a flat ocean but had looked with a surfer’s eye upon the configuration of land and sea, permitting their imaginations to run wild with what might have transpired there, had they hit it on another day. For they had indeed seen the grasslands capping an arm of land which formed the northern end of a great bay and around which a northern swell of sufficient size and power might push. “As yet unconfirmed,” they admitted. “Definitely unridden and likely to remain so. Too big. Too cold. And too lonely.”

“Still,” they had crooned, in a riff appropriate to the age, “this is
sacred wilderness. The path is treacherous and at times unmakeable. But if one perseveres, the magic of this land will be yours to appreciate. It is a place where native Americans lived in harmony with the land, long before the white men came. It is a land of the Great Spirit—the place where the wilderness meets the sea.”

They had concluded with a last item of interest. It had to do with the nearest town, a small, logging community where they had stopped long enough to buy a tire for their bus. The name of the town was Sweet Home. It was the town Peters had named as their destination, the place from which Drew Harmon had made his call.