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.

I'm not a bad swimmer. I almost caught them. It wasn't until Suta laughed that I knew he had me beat, and by then the water was full of sharks. I had swum into a cloud of baitfish and jack, and beautiful silver black tips were boring holes in the formation, snapping and gulping as they flew past me. They didn't seem to be interested in me, it was the jack they were after, and I managed to make it back to the beach without an unpleasant incident.

The beach was empty, the lagoon was deserted, and they (the Nab-i-Lat just then rounding the northeast corner of the island) had my food and water. It was the first time in my life I felt exactly that way - sort of a larger version of how you might feel if you'd just locked yourself out of your car in a Rio back street.

I couldn't afford to be angry; I was in too deep. The beach stretched in a smooth arc along the shallow crescent of the lagoon. A walk around the island took less than ten minutes, so it was about a half mile. There were islands to the north, east, and west, open ocean to the south. The lagoon was on the north side.

I scrambled through the middle of the island and after about50 yards (144 feet to be exact) emerged on the south side, where a hollow scoop of bay curved out to a low, rocky headland. It was a great setup for surf, might actually be V____., except there were no mellow sea-going natives and no sign of Roy, David, and Leslie or the Lorenzo. Wondering what to do, I watched a foot-high wave curling towards me down the west side of the bay.

There were plenty of coconuts. The long, narrow east side of the island was almost a monoculture of coconut, although it bore no organized resemblance to a plantation. Some thick-leafed bushes nested in the brighter areas, and they were loaded with small pepper-shaped fruits that tasted like guava.

The west end was volcanic and elevated, rising all of 12 feet, and the bouldering was defined against the grassy terrain out where the headland tumbled off into large black boulders off the south point. This side of the island was larger - a jagged square or oval populated by nut trees and passion vines. By contrast, the east end seemed to be a sand spit, supported along its south shore by another, smaller outcropping of rock.

The west end faced into a prevailing wind, towards the nearest island, lower and more spare than this one. Not a sail or boat in sight. The sea deep blue and deep. No structures of any kind. Only palms to gauge size and distance. This western shoreline was rocky except for a strip of white sand fringing a tiny natural harbor tucked into the south end of the headland, bounded by nearly submerged rocks that strained all the energy from the surf and left a pool of dappled calm. Within a week I'd created a regular path around and through all of this. Eventually it seemed like a highway.

I had a 6'6" Rusty and an 8-foot Hamilton. The Rusty had traction, but the big board needed wax. I had two bars of tropical Sex. I had two board bags, a key for the tri-fins and an allen wrench for the single. A 6'6" leash and an 8' leash. I had a rash guard and towel in the pocket of each board bag, replacement fins all around, plus a pair of Churchill fins and a Hawaiian sling.

I wore board shorts, a t-shirt, reef-walkers, and a company hat (that "911" again).

In the day pack I had trunks, t-shirt, a third towel, dive mask and snorkel, Leatherman multi-tool, compass, 100 yards of duct tape, 100 feet of quarter-inch nylon line, 250 feet of cotton string, 500 feet of 10-pound-test monofilament, a wallet-sized tackle box with a dozen fishhooks, sinkers, floaters, and a few plastic lures, a small plastic sewing kit, one pair of sunglasses, two tubes of SPF-35 lotion, a tube of Bondo, a tube of shampoo, a block of soap in a zip-lock bag, 100 water-purification pills, a pack of double-edged razor blades, a fishing knife, a Swiss Army knife (with two blades and a variety of tools including corkscrew, toothpick, and tweezers), a small spiral notebook, a no. 2 pencil with eraser, a Bic pen, compact Nikon binoculars, a Nikonos camera (with only the one 36-exposure roll inside - the rest of the film was in the large bags), my wallet, my toilet kit, a small first-aid kit, a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a half dozen plastic trash bags with ties, three Clif Bars (peanut butter), a Bic lighter, a film can of wooden matches, a tin of Altoids, and another tin filled with an assortment of items, including straight pins, safety pins, paper clips, guitar picks, some cash and a few coins, and the fortune from a cookie I'd picked up from the bar at Pi'sto Aristo, which read: WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING?

Twenty feet off the beach, over a ridge of coral, the lagoon looked deep, rich, and ominous. Its blue was dark and opaque, as thick as paint on a canvas. But it burst into a froth of fine white bubbles when I dove over the edge and began to follow the wall down. For all intents and purposes, the lagoon was bottomless, since I was only good for about 20 feet at the most. Even so, it was clear that I wasn't going to starve.

The wall was like the apartment scene in Fellini's Satyricon, pocked with holes and hollows, almost every one an occupied apartment - lobster, eel, urchin, grouper, octopus, snail - and the lagoon itself was thick with baitfish, a hundred kinds of sierra, jack, barracuda, shark, and millions of reef fish. Within five minutes I was picking my way carefully up onto the reef with a bleeding five-pound jack, a step ahead of the sharks.

I had set up my camp in the lee of the headland, tucked back against a tumble of large boulders under a nut tree. The point was just out front, framed by a weeping roof of fronds, but there was no surf. Curiously, there were no animals on the island either, not even rodents, just the occasional seabird. 

I cooked over a fire pit that I'd framed with alternating chunks of black rock and white coral. I drank the liquor and ate the flesh of delicious windfall coconuts. To collect freshwater, I built a kind of cistern nearby - a hole in the sand, about two feet deep, lined with a plastic bag, and covered with shingled leaves that drained the rain to the center. This proved quite effective, since it poured almost every night.

Each morning, then several times a day, I walked around the island, searching the surrounding waters through the binoculars. A trail now led through the palms to the north shore and the lagoon, where I had prepared the requisite signal fire, but it was always damp. I wished I had a mirror, but I never saw anything anyway. Still, I was relatively comfortable, relatively well-fed, relatively safe ... for about a week. Then came the terror - fueled by sudden, graphic recollections of the images I'd seen on television in M_____, playbacks of jets exploding into towers, people flailing in the air as they fell a quarter mile, monumental landmarks imploding into great clouds of ash. These images seemed to contain much more detail than what I'd actually witnessed, and this detail only increased over time.

My imagination went to war - a war waged in utter isolation. It was a war of conflicting vision, cross-purposes, and lethal power. I was already lost, but now I began to lose my soul.

Late one afternoon, I wrote in the notebook: "One way or the other, life requires you to be a warrior." Then I went over to the west side and watched the sun melt, smearing the ruffled sea with gore. Darkness sucked away the daylight. Planets and stars poked holes in heaven. Black thoughts coalesced around brilliant images.

I had been in a repressed state of panic since the five Supreme Court "justices" elected George W. Bush, an individual of apparently modest intelligence, as President of the United States, even though he'd lost the election by over half a million votes. I knew just enough history to be dangerous to myself, and this knowledge fed a hideous fascist nightmare that seemed utterly believable. I knew that George W's grandfather, Prescott Bush, father of 43rd U.S. president George Herbert Walker Bush, was one of the directors of Brown Brothers, Harriman, an American financial institution that bankrolled the Nazis from 1925 until they were shut down for "trading with the enemy in 1942," almost a year into World War II.

I knew that our 43rd president himself had been CIA director in the '70s and was widely recognized as an architect of Central American oppression, death squads, cocaine trafficking, and all the rest of the sordid business. I knew a little about the Iran-Contra affair, the see-saw backing of Iran and Iraq, and the persisting irony of our government's support of dictatorial despots around the world.

During long dark nights beneath moon and stars I sweat fear for the accumulating logic of this vision, remembering the McCarthy era, then Ike, then the Kennedy assassinations and Martin Luther King's. And for some reason I remembered the fall of The Wall in Berlin - November 9, 1989 - on the Nazi high holy day of Blutzeuge, the Blood Witness, Hitler's favorite holiday, last celebrated in 1944.

I recalled the OPEC crisis of the winter of 1973-74 and the environmental incentives that came out of it with visions of alternative energy and sustainability. But then, 25 years and one Gulf War later, our SUVs were swollen metaphors of collective greed, and national ad campaigns once again depicted 4WD monsters chewing through nature's most perfect refuges as if the world was an American theme park.

I'd seen television, too, and knew that some CIA-trained Taliban "fanatic" was likely tuning into Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, and Sex in the City to see what America was up to, and no way do they want that in their backyard! Was it so hard to see why they saw the West as Satan? It wasn't exactly rocket science. Islam was fading from the world in direct proportion to the shrinkage of its oil reserves. What was so hard to understand? What could possibly stand in the way of Apocalypse now?

An infinitely layered sound - rush upon rush upon rush- woke me to hot sun slanting in on my tormented carcass. It had been another rough night. But it was gone now, erased again and again and again ... as wave after wave wrapped into the bay and surged up onto the beach in front of me.

I paddled out into a dream. The water was lucid, riffled with a sentient texture (surely it was alive!), spinning elliptic curls down the point toward me. I looking in on them, over their shoulders. I surfed. I rode wave after wave after wave, and the experience transformed me I don't know how else to put it. Folded into the rhythms of the world, I marveled. Sliding on liquid echoes. How could this be anything but miraculous? It was miraculous. How could this universe be anything less? How could it be anything other than perfect?

The passage of energy through matter organizes matter. What better way to see it than surf? Ride waves. Chaos, eternally bifurcating, but always organized into waves. The blood light of a setting sun is waves. So is the instinctive logic of fear, the cycle of the seasons, the patterns of societies and relationships. The wind is waves, these words are waves, and a wave is a wave. That's how it was.

I heard the ultimate question: Why is there anything? The answer at last: Because something is happening. Further and deeper reason cannot go, though everyone pretends. But something from further and deeper comes through, and it always comes through in waves, breaking into existence. Waves is how reality happens. That's how it was.

Once that swell hit, it stayed a good long time - 24/7for weeks. Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, but -2' to 8' - always there. Utterly hypnotic.

I was in a hypnotic dream of perfection. I ate, slept, and surfed, utterly fulfilled in the present. Dreaming the now - that's how it seemed.

One afternoon (it was getting late, the sun low, and I hadn't caught a fish for dinner yet), I was paddling back out for another last wave when it hit me that the dark thoughts - murder, torment and pain, disaster and ruin - were no less dreams, no less conspiracies of sleep and blindness, than the positive thoughts. Failures of vision, these dark thoughts made hope hopeless by failing to drink at the undulating well of the present. Somehow all of this, along with the wave-riding, began to fill me with a profound (that's how it felt) optimism.

Like the sun and the moon (both of which I now knew more intimately than I could have imagined possible), these disparate entities (light and dark) orbited my consciousness, and if I stayed in the present, I could see them both. I could even see the confluence of massively accelerating environmental and social forces as the organic and correct unfolding of human nature, a test of the Human Species with concomitant transformational possibilities and opportunities.

If it sounded Biblical, I realized that it was. The situation was challenging all of our boundaries, pushing us past all of our limitations. However narrow, we were being stretched, and the broadest of us were broadening even further.

On the one hand I saw that the outcome was obvious. Good would triumph over evil, and it had nothing to do with the United States of America or the United Nations or NATO or any "civilized" entity. It had nothing to do with terrorists or madmen or Islam. It had to do with consciousness, plain and simple. If the world was to survive - the world of humans, that is -the most conscious, aware, and honest among us had to rise up and drag the rest with them. People - we - would have to wake up. We'd have to find a truly sustainable plan that admitted to the realities of our situation - organic beings trapped together on a planet in outer space. Tearing each other apart, blowing each other to bits, burning each other with poisons ... it was all so utterly medieval and ancient, so utterly wasteful.

"On the other hand," came the thought (it was night, the rhythmic surf chant filling the bay and my hut), "there are way too many people on Earth. Maybe this is the best way to get rid of a whole bunch of us."

Walking the beach alone (always alone!) I pondered this great population purge, the great battle of Armageddon, East and West devouring each other in the name of Allah and Oil-Fueled Capitalism, like a snake eating its own tail.

I looked around, alone as Adam, and saw no conflict. But I knew that - far from my island (and I truly felt it was my island by then) - one of these visions (or some another) was playing out, or maybe it was already finished. Perhaps the air I breathed was heavy with billions of lost souls.

Riding a wave one morning, I wondered. Where are the great poets of our time? Where are the spirits that will lift our spirits? I wondered. I had seen our leaders - presidents and generals. I knew their visions.

Is it every woman for herself and every man for himself? Or do we share a kind of "morphic field"? If so, can our so-called "collective unconscious" simultaneously conceive a sustainable future and lift us towards it? What about our collective consciousness? I wondered.

Watching the sun lift over the eastern horizon one morning, I wondered. How could these Taliban - these emirs of repression and perversion - have sprung from the same seed as Omar Khayyam and the mighty Rumi? What's wrong with them? Are they asleep in a dark dream of mythic hatred, or are they simply the last of the displaced nomadic peoples, backs against the wall of extinction?

If truth - make it: Truth - has power, then what is the truth? What is the Truth of the current situation? Wherein lies its resolve? I wondered, knowing that resolution was working itself out somewhere beyond all my horizons.

Years went by. I lost interest in how many. Certainly more than one.

Boats had gone past in the distance - I don't know how many. Signal fires were lit, smoke sent aloft, but no one ever came. Who knows how many sailed close by that island while I was fishing or surfing on the opposite side? Once, perhaps a year after I'd been stranded, I discovered two sets of footprints, a litter of beer cans, some cigarette butts, and a few spent matches on the beach by the lagoon not 50 feet from my heaped-up burn pile and the chunks of coral spelling HELP.

But one afternoon there was a boat, an old proa not unlike the one that left me here, but crowded with a ragged assortment of islanders, none of whom spoke English, French, or German.

Be patient, I told myself, as we were heading back towards civilization. Time will tell.

But time wasn't talking. I watched the wave curling a crystal sheet back off the bow of the boat, endlessly shattering into foam. I imagined Confucius asking me the question, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

Well, I answered, it takes two hands to clap.

© Drew Kampion, 2006