The one night road trip

Highway 20 runs 130 miles from Bend to Burns, effectively cutting the state of Oregon in a horizontal line, dead center in the state. The 7.3L Turbo Diesel in my 2001 F350 lumbered up to speed as I pulled onto the two-lane highway. I skipped the game of Russian Roulette I often play on road trips, calling friends and seeing who picks up, and resumed the audiobook I’d been listening to.

William Finnegan’s reserved voice, describing remote atolls in the South Pacific, contrasted starkly with the grey sky and rolling hills punctuated by entrances to vast cattle ranches of the high desert. I’d listened to Barbarian Days before. I often reread books I like. I’ve read The Monkey Wrench Gang a dozen times at least, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich half a dozen times. The repetition allows me to focus on the writing. It lets my brain wander, my memory of the story filling in the blanks.

Encouraged by Finnegan's stories of wayward surf travel, my brain drifted as I navigated the series of straightaways and slight rises along the 20. One day in particular jumped out: February 19th, 2012, the day of my first barrel at a botched harbor turned fickle point break on the Central Coast of Baja. It was my 24th birthday, and Dan Opalacz and our friend Trevor Griffiths had been traveling out of my Vanagon Syncro for three weeks. With an annotated AAA map from a friend's dad, a surf guide of the peninsula, and naive optimism, we'd driven all the way down to Cabo in search of surf and were on our way back north. Save for our first day north of Ensenada at a rocky point break and a few crowded days at Pescadero, we'd found little surf. Over a decade before the days of Starlink-equipped sprinter vans providing instant surf reports in remote places, we relied on little more than a tide chart purchased at a gas station in San Diego and our frayed surf guide to focus our attention and set destinations. From a hill above the small fishing town, we watched as the tide dropped and waves started connecting from the tip of the jetty to the cove. Dan and I suited up while Trevor watched from the rocks. I was riding a waterlogged, 80s twin fin we bought on Craigslist for $150 in Long Beach.

We surfed until the tide came up, effectively turning off the wave like a light switch. Sometime in the middle of the session, I caught a set wave. It lined up perfectly at the pinch point between the failed breakwater for the jetty and the cove leading to the fishing village and started pitching in waist-deep water. As a relative newcomer to surfing, I treated the face in front of me as if it was a wall in a bowl at a skatepark, pumping along, working to maintain enough speed to outrun the crashing noise behind me and keep enough momentum to stick to the increasingly steep wall. I don't exactly remember how, but suddenly I was tucked behind the lip of the wave, peering out at the fabled almond-shaped hole, made famous by slow-mo footage and airbrushed paintings on vans. It was brief; the wave tracked into the deeper water, and the barrel receded. We bought a calico bass from some locals in a beached Ponga, made tacos back at camp on a greasy Coleman two-burner stove, and washed them down with warm beer. As the sun set, we huddled on the leeward side of stacked cobblestones shaded from the wind, and I finally told Dan and Trevor that it was my birthday.

Grunts and shaking legs of a puppy deep in an innocent dream state snapped me back to the rumbling bench seat of my truck on an empty highway in Central Oregon. Tim and my cargo for the long-haul delivery of Walter, a 12-week-old puppy, were asleep in the passenger seat. Finnegan was now in Australia. I wonder how long I’d daydreamed, and I wonder what my life would have been like if I continued on that fabled surfers path. Rubbing Tim’s ears, I checked the map on the retrofitted touchscreen, two and a half hours to the campsite.