A light rain was falling by the time we arrived in Zarautz, on the northern coast of Spain. My wife and I walked down the wet, empty boardwalk to the Pukas Surf School. Propped against one wall was a row of surfboards; against another, racks of slick, black wet suits. Behind the counter stood a young woman with a sweet, shy smile. I smiled. She smiled back. I approached her and her smile turned frantic, in the manner—instantly recognizable to any American who has traveled in Europe—of a young woman who senses that an American is about to ask her if she speaks English. But there was no getting around it. We'd come to Zarautz for one reason: to learn to surf. An American friend had claimed that this Basque village was the best place on earth to do this. The language, he'd said, was no barrier. Everyone spoke some English. But they didn't, of course. They never do.
For some reason I've never understood, my wife believes that when we land in an awkward linguistic situation, I am responsible for getting us out.
"Do you speak English?" I asked the smiling young woman.
The girl giggled unhappily and shook her head.
"Surfing lessons?" I asked.
Again, she shook her head. The only preparation I'd made for this moment had been to practice the local speech impediment of pronouncing "s" as "th." This had proved useful just a few hours earlier, when I'd asked directions at the rental-car counter in the San Sebastián train station. No Spaniard knows what you're talking about when you ask the directions to "Zarautz," but if you ask where to find "Thaa Wowtz," they point the way.
"Thurfing lethons," I said.
"The teacher is out there with a group," said a voice behind me. The woman in the doorway motioned to the distant surf. Behind a curtain of rain, seven people clung frantically, and improbably, to giant training surfboards as the waves pounded them. Out in front of the helpless group, oblivious to their plight, a lone dark figure danced on top of a wave.
"That's him," she said.
I squinted. The man's absorption in his own admittedly dashing performance belied his responsibility for the group of people drowning behind him.
Moments later, the surfing instructor marched into the shop. Dripping seawater, he ignored me and kissed my wife, twice. But when he looked deeply into her eyes, he discovered that they were looking in horror at me. He turned to me as if I had just materialized, stuck out his hand, and offered what I took to be his name: "Who Dee Who."
"Who Dee Who," I said. "I'm Michael. I'm here to learn how to surf."
He looked me up and down and said, "Yes, English. Me Tarzan, you Jane." Then he said something in Basque that made the Basque women giggle, and then he left.
"What did he say?" I asked the English-speaking woman.
"He said he thinks it will end badly for you, but that he'll meet you here tomorrow morning." Pause. "And his name is Who Len." (Spelled "Julen." Pronounced, somehow, "Who Dee Who.")
We'd found a room on the beach in a hotel called the Karlos Arguiñano. The Karlos Arguiñano wasn't in any of the guidebooks to Zarautz because there aren't any guidebooks to Zarautz. Apparently, there's nothing about Zarautz that provokes a question or demands an explanation. San Sebastián is 20 minutes down the road in one direction, Bilbao 60 minutes in the other. Zarautz itself has as close to zero cultural and historical interest as it is possible for a charming European village to have.
We woke up that first morning, as we did the following six, and threw open the door to our terrace to find that the hotel staff had laid out hot breads and cold fruit and fresh-squeezed juices and strong coffee on a crisp white tablecloth. The sun rose in the sky, and joy rose in our hearts. It was mid-July, but, aside from a few elegantly dressed old locals out for their dawn stroll, the beach was empty. It was, it appeared, all ours.
Then came the rain. It began reluctantly but quickly gained enthusiasm. An hour later, when we reached the surf school, we were leaning into a storm.
But that was nothing to our surfing instructor, who was already waiting outside with a stack of giant training surfboards. Together with the rest of the class—two 15-year-old Dutch kids who had also been told that Zarautz was the best place on earth to learn how to surf—I stuffed my body into a wet suit and made for the beach. There, our giant blue and yellow surfboards lay waiting. Julen assumed the position before us of a general addressing new recruits. With elaborate hand signals he explained that the absence of a common language was unimportant. We had only to imitate him. He then demonstrated what appeared to be the single maneuver every surfer needs to know: the quick leap from the belly to the feet the moment the wave hits. One foot flies out to the front of the board and bears the weight while the other stays in the middle for balance. This took about four seconds to learn.
"Now we go," said Julen.
As we paddled side by side toward the distant breakers, Julen gave up trying to communicate with sign language and announced that he would try English—the only language we all shared a bit of.
"When you are ..." he began, and then made a paddling motion.
"Paddling into the wave?" I said.
"Paddling into the wave," he shouted.
"You must…" Again he was stymied. He pushed the tip of his board below the water.
"Push the tip of your board beneath the wave?" I said.
He nodded. "Push the tip of board ..." He looked at me, pleadingly. "Beneath it?" I said.
"Beneath it," he said, then grinned. One of the Dutch kids, who had been trying to translate Julen's English back into Dutch or possibly German, failed to see the wave rising behind him. It caught the tip of his board and hurled it straight up into the sky. The kid back-flipped in midair, like a circus clown, and came up spluttering.
"See! See!" shouted Julen. "If you not do this you &" He made a motion as if his head was in a noose.
"Die?" I said.
"Not die," he said.
"Break your neck?" I said.
"Yes!" he shouted. "Break your neck!"
Julen kept up this running commentary for the 20 minutes it took to reach the big waves. In a brief moment of calm, we swiveled our boards around in an undignified dog-paddling motion and waited. Julen floated behind me, one hand on the back of my board.
"Michael, if you feel the wave…" he shouted. Then he went silent.
"If I feel the wave what?" I asked. I glanced around and saw him treading water, his mouth a perfect O. He couldn't find the words for what I was meant to do when I felt a wave come.
"WHAT???" I shouted. Behind him I saw the tsunami rising out of the sea.
"No English," he said. "I'm sorry."
The next six seconds were a blur. The wave probably wasn't more than six feet, but the force of it hurled 170 pounds of middle-aged male flesh straight up into the air and then straight down into the sea. I came up choking on seawater and sand. Julen waved and shouted.
"Run!" he said. "If you feel the wave, run."
We repeated this brutal exercise 40 times that day, each time with exactly the same result. Then we did it again five days more, 40 times each day, still with no luck. Even on that first day, I could see that surfing wasn't like basketball or even skiing. It was more like breathing. Either you could do it, or you couldn't. Either you were blessed with a mind that accepted the notion of balancing on top of tipsy fiberglass while all hell breaks loose behind you, or you weren't.
Surfing, it turned out, was the price of having an excuse to spend a week in Zarautz. To the eye of a tourist, Zarautzian life has two delightfully simple rules. If you are under 22, you surf all day and dance all night. If you are over 22, you sleep all day and eat all night—which is one reason your body is not designed for surfing. Anyway, the American friend who told me that Zarautz was the best place on earth to learn how to surf also had a friend over 22 who lived in Zarautz. His name was Pedro.
Pedro Corral and his wife, Fernanda, had settled into a condominium with big picture windows overlooking the beach. Pedro turned out to be a Basque Ed McMahon, one of those people created, physically and temperamentally, to make sure everyone else drinks deeply of life. He ran the sales department of a Basque owned and operated car manufacturer that sold its products to eastern Europeans and Southeast Asians. Pedro spent most of his time making sure that visiting Asian and eastern European businessmen had something to feel guilty about when they left. Now he turned his attention to us.
On our first night out, Pedro took us into San Sebastián, where he introduced us to a favorite pastime of middle-aged Basque males—cruising for tapas. Not since high school had I approached the world in such a promiscuous spirit as I did with Pedro that night. It wasn't girls we were after; it was appetizers. As Pedro explained, there are two San Sebastiáns. One is the beach resort for European lounge lizards. The other is a kitchen for the locals. Behind every fourth door, from one end of San Sebastián to the other, lies a bar or restaurant. And every one of these places offers a gorgeous assortment of hams and cheeses and breads and seafoods. We grazed our way from one end of town to the other until, at midnight, certain we couldn't eat another bite, we went out to dinner.
The second night, Pedro invited us to join him at his eating club. Most Basque men belong to eating clubs and most Basque eating clubs exclude women. Once a week, the guys get together in a private dining room, make their own chow, and, presumably, complain about Basque women and the Spanish government. Pedro's eating club was coed. The wives were allowed to come and do the work. While Pedro and his male friends sat draining bottles of Rioja and complaining about the government, the women clustered around the stove. It was here that Pedro confessed he was mystified by my choice of Zarautz as a vacation spot. He understood that Americans liked to visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao; he knew that San Sebastián attracted Eurotrash. But American tourists didn't go anywhere near Zarautz.
"I heard about the surfing," I said. "About how the waves in Zarautz were the perfect size to learn on, and the teachers the best in the world."
"Hmmmmm," he said, and poured another glass. The second bottle of Rioja vanished and the third appeared. We ate and drank and drank some more. Pedro looked at me harder. "Michael," he said, as the women cleared the plates. "Listen to me: Why you really come here?"
There are people who believe that all you need to do to elicit the deeper motives of a fellow human being is ask. There are other people who encourage this strange belief, and I am one of them. I had, I told Pedro, several working theories of life. One of them ran as follows: The older you get, the better you become at avoiding discomfort. After about the age of 35, you don't need to be terribly resourceful to avoid hardship, unpleasantness, and indignity, but you pay a price for doing so. Often, what keeps life interesting are the things we do that, at the time, make us miserable. I had spent much of the previous year living in Paris, trying to become fluent in French, only to find that the more I understood what Parisians were saying, the less I wanted to understand. I was now without a single unpleasant new task to perform. I felt compelled to seek another. Surfing…
At this point in my soliloquy, Pedro began to shake his head sadly. "I tell you something?" he said, slurringly. "Frankly?"
"Of course."
"You are a forty-year-old man," he said.
"Yes."
"A forty-year-old man should not be surfing."
"You think forty is too old for surfing?"
"It's too old for everything."
"Canasta," said Pedro's friend, lifting his head from the table. "You can play canasta."
On the last day of surfing lessons, I didn't need much help to look ridiculous, but I got it anyway. The sun had finally won a small victory, and every citizen of Zarautz—all 21,500 of them—dropped whatever they had been doing (which, truthfully, did not seem like all that much) and made for the beach. Lithe, nimble, nearly naked young men grabbed their laughably small surfboards and raced into the sea. Pretty girls huddled together on the sand and pretended not to be impressed. It was a mating scene, the Basque equivalent of a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movie. At any moment, I expected the boys dancing on the waves to break out in a chorus and the girls on the beach to leap to their feet and do the twist.
Into this scene I strolled: a thick, 40-year-old man, pale skin pocked by cuts and bruises, stick legs poking out the end of a ratty black wet suit like the bones of a half-eaten chicken. Behind me I dragged a surfboard so long it could have passed for a small pier. Thirty yards down the beach, the two Dutch kids with whom I'd started out surfed beautifully. Out in the water waited Julen, straddling his board, impatient to finish our course. Julen had orchestrated for me perhaps 300 crash landings, no two of them precisely alike, each of them disastrous in its own special way. In a week, I'd spent no more than two and a half consecutive seconds standing on a surfboard.
"Come on, Michael!" he screamed, "One last time only!"
His English, I realized, had improved.
But no one on the beach noticed Julen—or me—because everyone's attention had been diverted by the appearance of a professional photographer. The woman—my wife—and her assistant hauled their equipment across the sand and began to set up.
As they unfurled lights and unsnapped lenses, a murmuring crowd gathered. The same question perched on dozens of Basque lips: Who is to be photographed? Which of the young studs riding the waves is the celebrity? At length, my wife motioned to me. The crowd gasped. Unable to surf, I'd agreed to stage a "surfing scene," in which I'd pretend to ride one of the six-inch wavelets rippling onto the beach. I belly flopped onto the surfboard, the photographer raced after me into the water, and the crowd hissed its astonishment. A mini wave pushed up the back end of the board, and I attempted to stand. My wife screamed: "Get up! Get up!" I struggled to get my feet in front of my belly, but before I could I plunged face first off the board and into the sand. The crowd hooted, but not in derision. They assumed I was a comedy act.
After 20 minutes of paddling, I reached my instructor. "Julen," I said, "how come I can't do this?"
He looked at me. I could see him deciding whether or not to lie.
"When you get old you get…" he said. Then he slapped his hard, flat stomach and pointed to me. "How you say it?"
"Fat?" I said.
"Fat," he said.
"Julen," I said, "how long would it take me to learn how to surf?"
He shrugged sadly, eloquently. He was as much as saying: All I can teach you is that you will never learn.
And then he offered me a picture that was worth a thousand words. He whistled. Out of nowhere, a dog came racing across the beach and plunged into the sea. It paddled through the surf toward us. "My…how you say?" Julen said.
"Dog," I said.
"Dog," he said.
It wasn't even a young dog; it was an old dog. The dog climbed onto Julen's surfboard, then looked behind him, as if waiting for a wave. Sure enough, a big one rose behind him, hungrily, angrily. I dived beneath it for cover and as I did I heard the dog bark, once, and Julen gave the board a tiny shove. Coming up for air, I saw the dog was long gone, riding the wave right onto the beach, where other, lesser dogs sat watching.