Peace and War will appear in The Lost Coast, a collection of surf stories by Drew Kampion, to be  published by Gibbs Smith (Layton, Utah) in the Spring of 2004.

An excerpt from:

Peace and War

It's only fiction by Drew Kampion

I arrived in M_____ on Monday evening, the 10th of September, 2001. Loaded my gear into the trunk of a beat-up taxi and headed straight for the Doriat, a cheap hotel with a penchant otherwise unknown in these parts for clean sheets and fresh towels. The ceiling fan spun me into dreams of insect armies on the move, gruesome dismemberments, and pools of awful blood. I awoke in the dark, sweating, went looking for a clean, well-lighted place, and found the Pi'sto Aristo open to the damp pre-dawn air, a few besotted patrons glued to some overblown disaster movie.

I ordered a Bloody Mary and sat at the bar, savoring the cool tomato juice braced with the clear spirit of vodka, the heat of pepper. The movie played in the mirror, and I looked away. The skinny bartender watching, transfixed, gave me not a glance as he said, "Tear wrists ... new walk traits enter ...hair play crosh ... es plote." Then I noticed the onscreen logo - CNN - and something in my chest caved in.

* * * * *

The 13th, the world teetering on the edge of Armageddon and Apocalypse, found me aboard a hired prahu (basically a proa). The morning dank and slick. The smell of it gave me an overpowering sense of doom, feelings of foreboding. Not a breath of wind. We motored out of the harbor like Imperialists. The captain and owner of this wreck, burly and as Islamic as I was Southern California SUV Surf - grinned with his mouth and teeth but not with his eyes. He aimed to kill me, I was convinced. I had been given his name by a friend who had never met him, who got it through a local and (I now realized) very primitive booking agency. According to the documents, his name was M. Suta.

The mate (just the three of us aboard) was a skinny black-eyed island boy scantily dressed in the ruins of American sportswear. He seemed nervous. His face appeared emotionally bruised and volatile, mobile with expression - now tender and vulnerable, now dull but sinister.

I was uneasy, but I held an optimism that all was basically well with the world, and that if I behaved with strength and composure and good cheer, they would honor our arrangement. Even so I gathered my gear around me on the filthy deck and, sweating profusely, began to collect the most important items into a small pack that I would keep with me at all times.

* * * * *

Beyond the rip-rap break wall, the sea was smooth as gelatin, burnished a pale ochre by a dirty haze. Volcano weather, if you believed the lore. The boat was slow. The 4-knot breeze brought little relief from the heat. We were headed for V____, a small island in a remote archipelago known for quality surf and a mellow population of sea-going natives. There was no "tourist industry" - not yet anyway - and really no way to get there except this way, or with your own boat, which was how my friends had arrived a month earlier.

I had planned to be with them, but the sale of my company (a one-man outfit that produced emergency software for holographic applications), which was actually the celebratory inspiration for the trip, was delayed when the lead man for the acquisition team (proving that truth is stranger than fiction) was seriously injured by a shark. The guy (Gary Laughlin) wasn't a surfer, he was a recreational diver. He got caught in a heavy rip off the Farralon Islands with a bag of abs and blew right into the jaws of a Great White. He swung the bag around just in time to basically stuff the thing down the shark's throat, but both his arms were stripped of massive amounts of skin and tissue in the extrication process. Luckily his major plumbing was intact. He spent almost three hours in the water (bleeding!) before his buddy found him. A shot of the Coast Guard helicopter plucking him out of the Boston Whaler made all the national TV news.

To make a long story short, I said good-by to three of my best friends at the Santa Cruz boat harbor and watched them literally sail off into the sunset. That was in May, almost four months earlier. They'd had a great crossing, not without an adventure or two, and arrived at V_____ in mid-August. They'd been getting good surf ever since, while I was going nuts.

And then one day I was on a plane headed halfway around the world to meet my buddies. They were anchored off a small island among a scattering of other small islands in a tropic sea. The deal was done, my business was sold, the business I'd started six years earlier, the business I'd cleverly named for that famous emergency telephone number: 911.

* * * * *

Late Friday morning, Suta steered Nab-i-Lat into a small, unexceptional lagoon and brought her to a stop in deep water a hundred feet or so off a nondescript island. He idled the foul little engine while the mate (the captain called him something like "Drak") cranked the rotting punt down from its rusting davits until it sat on the water below. I scanned the scene - no sign of the others, no boat, no buildings or huts. Just palms and a low jungly underbrush fringing the white sand.

"Are you sure this is the place?" I asked. Drak was reaching up for my bags, rubbing his bony fingertips together with impatience. I lowered the two big bags, then the three boards. Suta ignored us, looking around at the other islands, up at the clouds, at his watch, the sun, the smoke of the diesel's exhaust.

"Is this V_____?" I demanded of the captain. He nodded sharply two or three times without looking my way, motioning with a downward push of his left hand that I should descend the decomposing jute ladder, which I did. I still remember the smell of it, like salt, nori, and creosote.

The mate stood in the wobbling punt and poled the shallow-bottom boat tentatively in over the shallow reef until he'd beached its square bow into the coral with a pronounced crunch. I strapped on my reef-walkers and stepped over the side into a couple of feet of warm water between mounds of brain coral. It felt delicious. I gathered up two boards and waded gingerly to the beach, itself a coarse litter of pummeled reef. As I returned for the rest of my stuff, the punt was shrinking rapidly towards the prahu and Mr. M. Suta.

© Drew Kampion, 2006