Free Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn Page A

water and how to line them up with the old Tijuana lighthouse at the edge of the bullring so that he could wait for the waves in the spots from which he would be able to catch and ride them. And it was Hoddy who pointed out to him that it was a mistake to call the fourth peak the Mystic Peak. Better, Hoddy said, to simply call it Outside the Bullring because that far out, the lineups didn’t work anymore and one needed to be in tune to other, more subtle hints of seismic activity—like the eerie whistling sounds that seemed at times to emanate from among the great stones washed for a thousand years from the mouth of the river to create the broad alluvial fan that lay now beneath the surface of the sea, to form there the contours and configurations that allowed for the spot’s thick, open ocean waves with their long, peeling shapes. This, or the sudden disappearance of the Coronado Islands, at which time one would do well to hit the deck of one’s board andpaddle for one’s life in the general direction of the Baja Peninsula. In short, Hoddy taught him all he knew, and for a time there it really did seem that he had become the son Hoddy never had, and Hoddy the father of which any boy might have been proud, and in fact Hoddy renamed him as well, for it was Hoddy who dubbed him the Gull.
    For many years, Hoddy never owned a house. He lived in a hut made from driftwood and whalebone tucked behind the dunes at the edge of the valley and he taught the Gull about more than the waves. He taught him how to run traps and lobster cages, where the wild squash and tomatoes grew, how to trade with the Mexicans in Tijuana before the coming of the fence. A man could live in the valley then, live off the land and the sea, for Hoddy was more than a surfer. He was a waterman and that, to the mind of the young Fahey, was not so much about practicality as it was about following a path. It was like finding religion, the Gull, his benediction.
    Eventually, when the city of Imperial Beach, at that time little more than some vestige of the wild western towns that had once preceded it, decided it needed a lifeguard—which in turn was akin to the town of Tombstone deciding it needed a sheriff—they sent for Hoddy Younger. So that for a while the old surfer moved into a big wooden framed house right down on the sand at the edge of town and filled it up with aspiring surfers and gave them jobs as lifeguards because Hoddy believed, as the city fathers had believed before him, that any man who could handle himself in the straits could lifeguard for the city and this went for the Gull as well. Fahey was sixteen at the time, and those were the golden years, the days he went to now in his mind, days of offshore winds and evening glass-offs, of rides so long one’s thighs burned at their ends. Then came the first in a series of El Niño winters and with it the waves—one great swell after another, sweeping down from the Gulf of Alaska. In Hawaii, at the All World Wave Masters Surfing Contest,Jason Duane earned fifty thousand dollars and got his picture on the cover of half a dozen surfing magazines. In California, a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, at the mouth of the Tijuana River, the Gull and Hoddy had ridden waves every bit as awesome, perhaps more so when one took into account the colder water, the longer swim, the absence of helicopters or other emergency vehicles. Yet the feat was witnessed by none save a carload of stoned locals, and even they lost much of it to the fog that had hovered upon the horizon all that day, so that in the end it was the Gull alone, caught inside, awaiting obliteration, who’d seen Younger on what just might have been one of the largest mountains of water ever ridden. It was not much more than a peek, really, for in a moment the very same wave that Hoddy was riding would send him diving for deep water, holding to the eel grass that grew among the stones to save himself from being pulled back up into the