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THE FORGOTTEN FOUR
by Ithaka Darin Pappas
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There are no waves there…
there are no beaches.
Not exactly encouraging,
but in this case considered a lead.
My L.A. neighbor Cristina Casmiro,
telling me this now,
had said exactly the same thing
about her native island Pinheiro
three years ago.
I’d ignored her warning,
gone looking for surf anyway
and ended up SCORING.
This time the inquiry
was not about Pinheiro,
(the main island in the chain of five),
but of the much smaller
“forgotten four”
located a hundred miles to the south.
Two of the islands
were strangely absent
from one of the three world-class atlases
I’d purchased.
And although each
over five miles long,
none of the four
were even individually named,
appearing only as Ilhas Abandonadas.
Cristina was the only person
I’d ever met
who had even seen these islands.
As a teenager,
she’d been there a few times
on her Dad’s fishing boat
and had described them to me as:
Narrow, very mountainous,
with steep, near vertical cliffs
falling directly in the sea…
with NO waves.
But I wasn’t convinced the place
was a complete write-off.
Fourteen hours out of California
and three hours off
the European continent,
I landed on the mother island,
and was now heading
toward the docks
to meet Gustavo,
a forty-something year old fisherman
Cristina had put me in touch
with by internet.
Via-email,
he’d already agreed
to take me to The Forgotten Four
and I’d already agreed to the fee,
but first impressions were not solid.
The guy looked liked a junky…
and his boat even junkier;
an open 15-foot wooden skiff
with a small outboard motor attached.
No cushions. No lifejackets.
Hardly an ocean-worthy vessel.
But hell, the guy had lived this long, right ?
Gustavo wanted to leave at sunset,
but it was still only about 5pm,
Vamos jantar ? (let’s eat ?), he suggested.
We entered a small,
whitewashed restaurant
where he obviously had history
with the toothless girl
behind the counter.
And judging from the way
they goo-goo eyed each other,
that was probably
his basketball in her tummy.
He introduced me
to the girl me as,
Americano
(fucking bastard had already
forgotten my name).
She brought us a huge
ceramic pitcher of red wine
and a cheap three-gallon,
plastic fishing bucket
full of about a hundred rock-barnacle,
snail-type creatures.
Tiny sea-fleas jumped out of the bucket
and on to the table
as my honorable captain
showed me the proper way
to eat live “lapas”
……scrape them out of their shell
using another shell
and throw them down your throat
before they have a chance
to crawl away.
Two strangers playing a kind
of gastronomical version
of Russian Roulette,
competing who could eat the most.
It was pretty sick
to tell you the truth,
the endless supply of wine
making it only slightly more bearable.
But in Pinheiro…do as the Pinheirenses.
As we approached
the bottom of the bucket,
I looked around the small dining room.
Most of the other clients
were eating Lapas too,
except theirs were cooked
and served on blue and white plates
and covered in melted butter,
lime juice and salt.
Gustavo started giggling like a sissy,
with the girl right by his side,
about to have an asthma attack.
Some of the other eaters
were cracking up too.
It wasn’t the first time
they’d played this joke.
Of the four isles,
three had never
even been inhabited.
The fourth (the southernmost)
had supported a fishing village
of about three hundred
and fifty people until 1989
when an earthquake
and following mudslide
killed thirty residents
and buried most of the town.
Most of the survivors left.
Some went north to Pinheiro.
Most migrated to the Americas.
But a core crew of about twenty stayed,
shoveling mud for months,
Surviving on subsistence farming and fishing.
Clear calm night
with about a zillion stars.
For the first couple of hours
we stayed in the swell shadow
of the main island,
then crossed behind
the Abandonadas
where it was even calmer.
Sheet glass.
In the half-moon light
we could see their silhouettes,
all continuing segments
of the same submerged mountain chain,
each separated by
only a couple of hundred yards
mirroring off of the oceans surface.
One of those rare visuals that are
so beautifully real ,
they appear to be false
like a soundstage at a
Hollywood movie studio.
At dawn we chugged
into a small transparent inlet.
Two tiny boats were dry-docked
on the rocks.
Behind them,
a red dirt trail zigzagged
up the mountain,
disappearing into
almost fluorescent green growth.
After ten hours at sea,
Gustavo didn’t even get
out of the boat to rest
or eventake a leak.
The place is cursed
he’d said repititivley .
We’d agreed to meet here
at the cove seven days from today.
What was left of the village
was located on the opposite side
of the island,
a thirty-minute walk.
But thirty-minutes in Gustavo-time
was really two and a half hours
of steep traversing
just to reach the summit.
From the perch off the island,
it felt like standing on the hump
of a colossal sea monster.
Surveying from north to the south,
it was easy to see
both west and east sides
at the same time.
On the east, lake-like calmness.
But on the west…lines.
Not big, but consistent.
Traveling all the way
from the northernmost Atlantic
to be wasted along the base
of a thousand-foot cliff.
But about a third of the way
down the island
was a flat low-lying peninsula
extending out from the cliffs
for five-hundred yards,
(the result of thousands years
of seismic dismantling).
The wind was onshore
and the tide a little too high,
but rolling down opposites sides
of the flat were surfable right
and left point waves.
On the peninsula itself were
the carcasses of about fifty
black, lava-rock houses
that had laid abandoned since 1989.
And about ten other homes
painted in white.
The black ones had no roofs a
nd were all at least half- strangled
by the overgrowth.
But the white houses,
those closest to shore,
had red clay shingles
and were surrounded
by immaculate gardens.
Olaaa! cheered a baritone voice
scaring the shit out of me.
The smiling brown man
with ridiculously large ears
introduced himself as
Antonio, a resident farmer.
I identified myself as
Pappas, a traveling….student.
BEM-VINDO, he greeted
as if I’d been an expected guest,
Vamos almocar ! (let’s lunch!)
he proclaimed.
We arrived at Antonio’s
two-room home
where his wife Luisa
was preparing a communal meal
for all fifteen residents of Atalaia Island,
(the place had a name after all).
Potato soup mixed with red wine
and LIVE lapas !!!
Gustavo
and his prego-bellied accomplice’s joke
hadn’t gone to waste,
it had been training.
Luisa was complaining
that ants that had gotten
into the bread dough.
Are there ants on the mainland,
young man ?, she asked me.
Believe it or not, s
he’d never been to the mainland,
or even up to Pinheiro.
With my new friends
looking on in approval,
I casually downed about twenty
of the biggest lapas on the table
(bridging both the language barrier
and generation gap in a single sitting).
Hadn’t slept in days
and was about to drop.
Prepared to camp,
but they weren’t haven’t it,
insisting that I stay in the large stone shed
that had once housed the island’s padre.
______________________________________
In the nocturnal depths of delusion,
the lapas were breeding
in my stomach,
Trying to take over my body
from the inside out…
Whack !!!
The first shot rang.
Whack !!!
I was on my feet.
WhackK !!!
What the….???
WHACK !!!!!!!
Sounded like a Texas-style hail storm.
I inched the door open.
The storm was coming
in from the East.
WHACKK !!!!!
Whizzing by in a vacoom,
fist sized raindrops were
exploding like small water balloons.
In addition, the wind was carrying
small stones off the top of the cliff
and a quarter of a mile down to my roof top.
When it rains here, it rains rocks too.
But by daybreak
both wind and rain had stopped.
And by lunchtime,
the right was doing
a pretty decent impersonation
of overhead Swami’s…..
(with no other surfer or surfboard
around for a hundred miles).
It’s always freaky surfing
somewhere where no one surfs.
No one’s around to tell you
where to get in and out of the water,
which tides will kill you
or warn you of any antagonistic sea life.
I tried paddling out at the micro- cove
just south of the village
and was violently swept farther south
toward the cliffs.
From there the only way
too get out would’ve been
paddling down the entire length
of the island,
around the tip and back up
to the boat cove on the other side.
Six miles with current.
Fuck that.
I took the foam straight back to the rocks,
walked up a quarter of a mile
to the beginning of the left,
paddled through an assault of white water
and found myself being pulled
into good position for the right.
A few ceiling high waves
came through.
I snagged one thinking
it would be an easy down- the line run
and got slammed.
A LOT faster than it looked.
Makeable, but not
from the absolute outside.
Paddled down a-ways,
found my groove and started gettin’ busy.
A year’s worth of quality waves
in a single afternoon.
The next morning,
I rode the middle left
in front of the salt pond.
Softer-shouldered
but connecting all the way to the inside.
Unfortunately, the wind
kept shifting directions.
Offshore. Onshore. Side shore.
Offshore. Onshore. Side shore.
I’d be ready to get out of the water
and then it’d switch offshore again
or go glass.
I’d been ignorantly assuming
That the primary swell direction
this time of year was always from the North,
but this swell filling in definitely
had southern orgins.
And the following,
the right revealed it’s hidden personality.
Meaty and bowling hard.
The waves now launched you
down the point like a catapult.
Felt myself going faster than I had
in a long, long time
with little effort of my own.
For this reason, it was difficult
to stay deep enough
to get really barreled.
A couple of nice slots though,
got slaughtered on a few too.
Saturday: small
(the swell window
is really small here).
Up on Pinheiro,
these 24-hour swells were actually three-dayers and
probably twice the size.
New arrivals today
from the main island;
a family that had left after the
earthquake-now back
for their annual vacation along with their kids
(the daughter, an exotic twenty year old).
Because the shore
was too steep and jagged
for beach-going,
the spot to hang
was a fifty-foot strip
of black sand
on the village side of the salt pond.
One of the most euphoric days
in my life…eating fish
and gulping down wine
and firewater
with nineteen kindred souls
in the Garden of Eden.
I never return to places
I’ve experienced real magic.
And after only a couple of days
on Atalaia,
I already knew I’d never
be going back there.
You never know if it’s the place itself
that’s incredibly special,
or that small envelope in time
you spend there.
You walk around through life
with these amazing Technicolor memories
(it’s all we really have in the end)
and if you go back
and it’s not the same,
it’s destroys everything preceding.
The sun disappeared
and a big fire was lit.
Expecting someone to fetch a guitar,
I was amazed
when four large African jimbaes
appeared out of old Mr. Campos’ hut.
The men drummed.
And Luisa, Mrs. Campos,
the newcomer wife
and her babe daughter
hauntingly sang to all
who had been lost at sea.
Looking like voodoo goddesses
under a silver moon,
these were Ulysses’s sirens reincarnated.
Being in old dialect,
I didn’t understand
many of the words,
but it was enough
to get my spine tingling.
