Free Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn

farmers, the business teeming with miscreants and scam artists. An especially popular form of subterfuge in those days was the buy-back scam in which a grower, promising to buy back the offspring, sold worms to a mark. When the appointed time for this transaction arrived, however, the grower was generally somewhere in Mexico or Chapter 11 and the mark was left without buyers, alone with a herd too small to attract the attention of more serious clients. Appalled at once again finding himself the object of such humiliations, Lucian Fahey made yet one more disastrous decision. He decided to build the size of his herd, possibly hoping to engage in a buy-back scam of his own. He did it on the cheap, of course. He brought in garden-variety yard clippings and other forms of green waste because they were less costly than manure, piled it on too thick, and caused his windrows to combust. The image that followed was a haunting one and Sam Fahey tothis day could still see the gaunt figure of his father set before a patch of night sky turned to crimson by the flames of sizzling red worms and European night crawlers cowering amid the pall of his smoking windrows and bawling like a baby.
    Fahey took it as a comment on the nature of life that he should only now find himself moved by the image of that broken old man. On the night in question he had been able to summon nothing but contempt. On the night in question, Fahey had been more interested in the direction of the wind than in his father’s most recent calamity. On the night in question, the wind had been hot and dry, blowing down out of the canyons and the deserts beyond, promising clear skies and long, clean lines of surf. For Fahey was a surfer then. It was the act by which he defined himself and already he had begun to distance himself from the bitter and abusive old man whose calamities came so quickly, one upon the heels of the other, that Fahey had begun to suspect the two of them were not actually related. His mother must have been fucking the milkman, or the postman, or the guy in the ice-cream truck, or any bum on the street . . . anyone at all, save this scarecrow now howling at the edge of the great worm cookout. In the best of his fantasies, she had of course been fucking Hoddy the Dog Younger, the first and greatest in a long line of watermen who would come to challenge the big waves at the mouth of the Tijuana River.

    A lanky cowboy out of the Dakota Badlands, one quarter Lakota Sioux, Hoddy Younger first rode the place in 1937 and never left. It was that kind of wave. He dubbed the spot Tijuana Straits and so it would be known, though principally among those watermen who, in time, would make of its liquid giants the stuff of myth and legend, much like the man who had authored the name.
    Younger could have been any boy’s hero, cowboy handsome andcowboy tough. Hoddy could paddle a hundred-pound redwood surfboard a mile out to sea through lines of churning white water, lose it to a wipeout in thirty-foot waves, swim to shore in Mexico, walk back across the invisible line that then separated the two countries, retrieve his board from the beach, paddle back out and do it all over again, in the dead of winter, with nothing to keep him warm but an old-fashioned woolen bathing suit. As time passed, he came to ride the waves Island-style, always in trim, always in the fastest part of the wave, at one with the sea. A man of enormous physical power and charisma, he had many admirers but few close friends for he was also a strange and often silent man. If he liked you he would give you the shirt off his back. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t piss on you to put out the fire. For Sam the Gull Fahey, in the summer of his fifteenth year, Hoddy Younger did the unthinkable, he showed Fahey the lineups he used to surf the straits. He drew them in the wet sand with a stick—Goat Canyon, Smuggler’s Gulch, Spooner’s Mesa . . . He showed him how to find these landmarks from the