Added November 11, 2015.

I finished that painting I was talking about in this post! Love this picture.

“Diego’s Hunhunahpu” acrylic on canvas, November, 2015, 36” x 36”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

As always, more info on my Paintings page.

And now back to the original November 3, 2015, post.

That new hip I got in March, 2015, didn’t take, that is, its cup never bonded with my pelvis bone. So day before yesterday, on Monday, October 26, I had my third artificial left hip implanted. There was the usual jump-cut in consciousness. I’m lying on the operating table with an IV in my arm, and then I’m waking up in bed in the recovery room. I couldn’t move my feet at first, as they’d given me a spinal block injection to paralyze the lower half of my body. I could hardly talk.

“Is the operation over?”
“Yes.”

And then I’m looking around the room, lying there for maybe 45 minutes, a large room with other patients, nothing very interesting to see, nothing alive except for the humans, just steel and white, cloth and plastic. Now and then a nurse. And then they wheeled me to my room, and Sylvia came in, and my life began again.

A hospital is the opposite of Guanajuato. Knowing this operation was coming up, I’ve been feeling kind of down for the last few months. The day on Route One with Isabel, and the four days in Mexico—those were breaks that gave me a much-needed lift. And Syvlia and I went to see The Magic Flute opera in SF the day before the operation, so uplifting.

But here I am in the post-op present tense, venturing out once again into the psychic surf, wanting to get back on my board and ride some painting and writing waves.

On my last day in Guanajuato, I toured Diego Rivera’s childhood home, right next to my hotel. They’ve made it into a museum with replica/reconstructed furniture, and a few of his smaller works.

I hadn’t really grasped how great an artist Diego Rivera was—in the US he’s mostly known for his murals, which are wonderful, but he could do really lovely fast stuff at smaller scale. Like this one here is a 1943 painting of an exploding volcano called Paricutin—Diego was sent there as part of a journalism gig. There’d be no good way to get a photo, so they sent a painter. Wonderful brush strokes.

Maybe the most interesting works on display are drawn from a set of 24 watercolors that Diego made, intended for use as illustrations in an book based on the legends in the hieroglyphic Mayan codices, a book to be called Popol Vuh, never published, to have been edited by one John Weatherwax—I wonder if William Burroughs knew this guy, Bill was always talking about the Mayans and the codex.

Re. the codices, in an amazingly evil act, the conquistadors and the Spanish priests burned most of them. Writing in July of 1562, Bishop Diego De Landa wrote:

“We found a large number of books in these [hieroglyphic] characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they [the Mexicans] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.” Such codices were primary written records of Maya civilization…

Anyway, back to the good Diego, you can find the manuscripts for the book he was going to illustrate for this John Weatherwax guy, a 1930’s Communist pal, online in the Smithsonian collections. I get the impression the texts are more or less public domain at this point. It would be cool if some small press could finally publish the book with Diego’s illos.

Wonderful, wonderful images by Diego, like alien cartoons. Mayan gods, yes! So gnarly. I’m going to work them into Million Mile Road Trip. A number of gods cooperated (or competed) on creating our cosmos and on creating human beings (shown above). Think of a Hollywood movie, or big budget videogame. Hundreds of people are involved, contributing to it. Graphic art, CG, makeup, costumes, sound, cinematography, casting, actors, and numerous directors. Not just one director. No boss, no top director, no head producer. Like some Hollywood movies will have a “second unit” filming stuff. And a universe emerges.

Here’s Hunhunahpu , the tonsured corn god, making humanoid shapes on this calabash(?) plant, including perhaps a copy of his head.

Later a woman lies under the bush and the head drips spit on her crotch and she gets pregnant, and I think bears twins, one of whom is just plain Hunahpu, with Hunhunahpu the dad. At this point I know next to nothing about the Mayan cosmogony.

As part of my post-op physical and psychic rehab program, I’m working on a copy of that first Hunhunahpu painting. After three days in a daze, I kicked the oxy meds and went, more or less, back to being Rudy. And then I wanted to do something creative, and I wasn’t quite ready to write, so I started painting. I’m using acrylic paint instead of oil paint, as the clean-up is easier this way. And acrylic paint dries so fast that it’s easy to paint over things and revise. That’s a working mock-up shown above. The colored part is my painting thus far, and the Hunhuhahpu is just a collaged-in copy of Diego’s version that I still need to paint in. [You can see the finished version at the start of his post.]

There’s a harsh, saturated, Mexican-wall-paint quality to the acrylic colors that I like.

Cool composite painting of Don Quixote. Artist’s name is Trigos? (Correct me if wrong.) Click for a larger version of the painting.

The last touristic type site I saw in Guanajuato was a surprisingly interesting museum of paintings and statues of the character Don Quixote—from the Cervantes novel.

I’ve never managed to read much of the novel, so when I was home I sought out a couple of translations, and give it another shot, but to no avail. To me, the character Don Quixote is just an idiot.

But you could say there’s a sense in which Don Quixote stands for writers. His lance is like a pen. He’s surrounded by books at home—which is like having a manuscript you’re working on. He goes out on missions and gets everything wrong—because he’s overlaying his transreal novelistic notions upon the world. Tedious, long-winded, overbearing.

Out in the surf.

Today’s post is photocentric, and the theme is Nature’s perfection.

Kicking it off is this nice shot of a sunset at Pigeon Point lighthouse on Route 1 south of Half Moon Bay. I like how the roughness of sea echoes the clouds. And the vertical shadows of the clouds along the band above the horizon.

Backing up a week, I went to see the Oakland Raiders with some of my SF writer friends. This dude shown above is not, so far as I know, an SF writer, he is, rather, the ultimate exponent of a certain type of pregame festivity. Note how his sunglasses are adjusted to hold the empty 12-pack in place.

Cecelia Holland organized our outing. She’s published about 40 novels, some with warriors and Vikings, and she feels at home in the endzone “black hole” seating in Oaktown. I really get a kick out of her. A full-on writer.

Lively, passionate fans all around us. Imposing, but friendly. We were all in it together.

I dug this hat, which was in effect a football.

Very loud in the crowd and I forgot my ear plugs. I tore off the margins of a draft book proposal for Million Mile Road Trip that I had in my pocket and chewed them up to make something to put in my ears, and when that didn’t de-decibel-ize me enough, I tore strips off my handkerchief. At one point the Blue Angels few by overhead as well, but you could hardly hear them. Peaceful in the BART car riding home.

A few days later, my daughter Isabel and I spent the afternoon along Route 1 driving from Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. Isabel was visiting from Wyoming. Our initial goal in Half Moon Bay was to find the 1,969 pound biggest pumpkin of the year 2015. It’ll be the star of the annual Pumpkin Festival on Oct 18, 2015, but it’s already in place there, a captive alien, on a stage in front of a building called I.D.E.S. We had to ask around for awhile to find it, but it was wonderful to see it there, and nice to be there before the crowds arrive…all these years I’ve wanted to see the Great Pumpkin without the crowds.

Here’s me posed as city-slicker alien-hunter with his big-game trophy. A slain Freeth. Soon to appear in Million Mile Road Trip. “You…you made my sister into pie?”

Maverick’s wave mural in Half Moon Bay. Click here to see larger version.

Isabel spotted this life-size (?) Mavericks wave mural. Dig how the surfer has a 3D lightbulb in his path. Very Magritte, especially with the window on the wall. SFictional flash: mappyworld (or maybe even our own world) is a hypermural “painted” on the 3D hypersurface of…some 4D alien structure…and you notice—huh?—a 4D dvoornik’s 3D cross-section hanging in the air in middle of the room, the dvoornik being part of the underling hyperobject that our world is “painted” onto. And the window is a hole into unspace. Obv, right?

A few miles south of Half Moon Bay we came to a sheer roadside bluff with the Tunitas Creek Beach at its base. The path down was so steep that there’s a fixed rope that you have to hang onto. It was basically insane for an old man with a bad hip like me to follow Isabel down the path, but I did.

Click here for a larger image.

Wonderful to have all this space to ourselves. That’s Isabel in the middle, and that giant puddle is where Tunitas Creek pools out.

We walked around for quite awhile there. Nature on her own is so perfect. The artful disorder, not too regular, not too random, on the edge of chaos, ever-changing, the waves, the ripples, the birds scattered just so, and in motion as well, and don’t forget the clouds, it’s an endless dance of beauty. “Nature is god!” I exclaimed, trying to express what I felt. “Totally,” agreed Isabel, who’s known this all along.

It was getting dark and we still had a way to go. We scored some halibut chowder and “Mexican coleslaw” at Duarte’s tavern in Pescadero, and stopped by the Pigeon Point lighthouse hostel at sunset. One of these days I’d like to spend a couple of nights there. So fully off the grid.

A whale bone was hanging there by the ocean in a wood frame with the sunset in the background.

The lighthouse is kind of rundown…they’ve been raising money to refurbish it for about 10 or 15 years, but it’s fine as it is. Better than fine, perfect. Everything’s perfect, okay?

Perfect? Aren’t there still all the problems in the newspapers? And the issue that each of us is going to age and die? Well, you could, on a given day, and in a certain mood, suggest that we live in the best of all possible worlds—“possible” relative to the various ineluctable physical, statistical, and sociological constraints of it having to be a real world.

Perfect for that afternoon, anyway. An afternoon of peace.

Great to see you, Isabel!

Here’s my latest painting, Vlad and Monika. This was technically difficult for me—trying to make those circles look like translucent colored bubbles. This is meant to be a kind of spacy and intimidating alien world, a part of my novel in progress Million Mile Road Trip.

“Vlad and Monika” oil on canvas, Oct, 2015, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

At first I was going to call the painting “Bubbleman,” and have the viewer imagine that the two eyes belonged to a single alien creature, but then I decided there were in fact two of them. But “Bubblepeople” didn’t seem interesting as a title, so I decided these characters speak in Polish accents, and their names are Vlad (short for Wladimir) and Monika. I usually give my alien characters oddball accents so that, in reading the novel, it’s easy to tell them apart.

Technically speaking, this was one of the more difficult paintings I’ve done. It was hard to give the bubbles the effect of being colored, translucent spheres—and I’m still not sure I got it entirely right. But I’ve done about eight layers on the painting now and I’m going to stop. Those volcano-like mountains took me about five or ten minutes each, by the way, as did the cliff, the sky, the patches of grass, and the two eyes. It was just the bubbles that were hard. More info on my work on my paintings page.

So what else is new? My son Rudy and his wife and kids were down here over Labor Day weekend. One of the girls took my photo with my good camera. Note how my expression is much kinder than usual.

This is a heavy-duty valve on a water pipe that runs from a hidden reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains to Los Gatos. Freshly painted. Love the colors. The pipe runs along the public, and nearly dry, Lexington Reservoir next to Route 17. I like to go out walking or biking around Lex Reservoir,

I’ve been writing really a lot, like maybe a thousand words a day, pushing forward on Million Mile Road Trip, getting into that bloodlust frenzy that you get when you can sense that the end is in fact attainable. I mean, it’ll still take me till early next summer, but by now I’ve got a lot of the plot wrinkles worked out, and the characters’ personalities have settled down, and, on a good day, I can just sit there “dreaming while I’m awake” and write down the scenes I’m seeing, and transcribe the funny things that my characters say.

But I get worn out, and I get the need to escape the house and the coffee shop, so now and then I make an expedition into the Great Outdoors. The most interesting thing I’ve done lately was to go up near the west end of Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos, like I was just talking about. I clambered down a slope to an exposed stream that runs through the somewhat green upper end of the reservoir, and hike up along the stream in my Keene’s shoes. And here’s a shot of some standing-wave type ripples where the stream goes under a log.

Patterns like this entrance me. To my way of thinking , that’s what my physical body is. That is, I am a moving, persistent pattern in the bustling cloud of matter in this world. Surfing Schrödinger’s wave equation, you might say—only I’m not on a surfboard, I’m a bump in the wave. Or, from a spacetime viewpoint, a macrame pattern in the weave.

I do like the image a feather floating on life’s stream. But, again, I don’t really see it that way. I’m a ripple, a part of the whole.

I saw a nice cattail. I’ve always thought cattails look like hot dogs on sticks, right? That you’d roast over a fire. The first time I saw a cattail was at a cookout on a family friend’s farm in Kentucky, we just drove out there across the pasture. And we had a fire, and we roasted things, like hot dogs and biscuit dough wrapped on a stick and of course marshmallows. I was five. I was sure that if I could manage to yank a cattail out of the pond, it would roast up just as good as a hot dog. I mention this in my recent, curiously neglected, novel The Big Aha.

Last week we went up to the Union Square area of San Francisco. Amazing how many stores have come and gone over the thirty years we’ve been living here. Saw a couple of guys tap dancing.

We hiked up the hill to the Grace cathedral. Saw a nice painting of Mary Magdalene. I like how she’s pointing at that egg. It gave me an idea for my novel: put a magic egg inside each of the big flying saucer, and if you kill a saucer and you can get hold of that egg—which is really a ball of smeel—well, then you’ve got something very valuable.

There’s a fountain in a tiny park in front of Grace cathedral. Got a kind of obvious shot here of the fountain, an sprite’s hand, and the Flag. Sort of a Robert Frank shot.

Here’s another standard kind of shot—the world-holding convex mirror by a parking lot entrance. I liked fitting in the dwindling grid perspective as well. And I think it’s good that I don’t show in the mirror. I’m the invisible man. A ripple in the cosmic sea.

This is a partial draft of a chapter named “Surf World,” from my novel in progress, Million Mile Road Trip, which will appear in late 2016 or in 2017. It’s in some ways inspired by the surfin’ SF stories I’ve written with Marc Laidlaw. See, for instance, our recent “Water Girl.”

Mount Shasta seen on a road trip in 2014…a moment that inspired this novel.

The cast of characters in “Surf World”: Villy and Zoe are on the point of graduating from high-school in Los Perros, Califorina. But they’ve left town for a road trip. A road trip across the worlds of a parallel universe. Their companions are a pair of “Szep” aliens named Pinchley and Yampa. Villy’s tenth-grade kid brother Scud has come along.

And now they’re entering a zone called Surf World.

“Endless Road Trip” oil on canvas, Sept, 2014, 30” x 24”. Includes images of my alien characters Pinchley and Yampa. Click for a larger version of the painting.

The Surf World light is a honeyed gold, like the light you get in Santa Cruz an hour before sunset. But as for the surf—maybe the waves are bigger than Villy realized before. Hard to judge, with their shapes so strange. And there’s no consistent flow. The waves go every which way, surging through each other, with no apparent regard for physical law. Staring at them does something unpleasant to Villy’s head and, in the weirdness of the moment, everything seems small and overly animated. Like he’s looking through binoculars the wrong way.

“Too gnarly?” asks Pinchley, waggling his lower jaw in an open-mouthed Szep grin. “You know what’s with them waves? They alive.”

“You mean ”˜alive’ in the broad, stoner sense that everything is alive?” says Villy, trying to sound all ironic and calm.

“Alive in the sense that the Surf World ocean is ten percent smeel,” says Pinchley. “A brimming cocktail of consciousness, bro. Pure trippiness unmodified.”

It’s not remotely like anything he’s ever seen. The waves really are alive. Quirky, willful, and no two of them the same. Shape, shade, speed, size—everything’s up for alteration. The waves do what they want.

They’re driving a highly modified station wagon which they call the purple whale. They’ve equipped it with enormous paddle-wheel tires, and with a waterproof dark-energy engine. Pinchley issues his considered advice about how to launch the purple whale into massively chaotic wrong-way surf.

“Bomb on in there like you’re crazy and high.”

Four Mile Beach

“Yeek!” says Zoe, getting into it. She revs the dark energy engine to the max and rockets into the sea. Almost immediately, a massive pup-tent wave blindsides the car. Like it’s a rival skater in a roller derby. Zoe stays cool. She keeps the wheels churning, turns the steering wheel, and maneuvers them through a stretch of puffballs and onto the backside of a monstrous comber that’s rolling away from the shore.

“When you get to the top, drop and ride,” counsels Villy.

And, yes, Zoe makes it up the back of the hundred-foot wave, teeters on the lip, and then drops onto the tube’s clean, smooth face. She idles the engine and the purple whale begins endlessly to skim along the self-renewing hill of water. It’s like riding a titan at Mavericks. Sweet.

It’s calm for awhile—the big wave is swallowing everything it hits, sweeping a path through the living sea. The greens and blues of the sea are beautiful in Surf World’s golden light. The whale rides the wave for nearly an hour. According to the car’s altered speedometer, they’re moving at four hundred miles an hour.

“Blub, blub, bloo!” yells Scud. He’s got his window wide open, and he’s hanging out like a tongue-lolling dog on a car trip. “Here comes a pyramid covered with rice paddies?”

Yes, it’s an Incan ziggurat made of smeely seawater, a water-pyramid with stairstep escalators for its sides. Three times as high as the enormous comber and moving twice as fast. As it angles into their big wave, vicious eddies swirl towards the purple whale. The water’s surface is, like, pocked.

Skillful Zoe adjust their car’s rudder and uses the gas, speeding up and slowing down, and then—behold. She’s maneuvered them off their disintegrating pipeline and onto the rising terraces of the epic ziggurat.

“Ride the terraces to the peak,” Villy advises Zoe,. “Then gun it down the other side.”

Gravedigger monster truck, Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

“What a way to die, huh?” says Zoe, shooting him the briefest of glances over he shoulder. A pert smile. Okay, fine, Zoe’s not suicidal, but she does have a reckless side. Why else would she hang with Villy?

“Ready to surf?” Yampa asks Villy. “We’ll climb on the roof and mount our boards.”

“Not yet,” says Villy. “Too blown-out. Let’s wait for those giant walls we saw. Archetypal surf.”

The ziggurat is picking up speed, swallowing up a platoon of mammoth comber waves. Cathedral-sized pup-tent waves spawn off of these collisions and come pinballing up the pyramid’s terraced steps.

“Rock it, Zoe,” says Pinchley, “By the way, y’all, we’re flat-out unsinkable with these fatso tires. But a wave could wash a dumb-ass out one of these windows. If they was greenhorn enough to have it open and to be leanin out in a situation like this. Talkin to you, Scud.” Pinchley says the name like, “Scuuuuud.” He’s steadily amusing himself with his Southern accent routine.

Scud closes his window just in time. When they get to the top of the ziggurat, it turns out the very highest level—the square on the tippy-top—well, it’s a hole, an insane horror-movie elevator shaft running down into the dim, churning core the vast ziggurat’s metabolism.

“Yeek!” yells Zoe once again. She floors the gas and the responsive dark-energy engine screams. Tires spinning like buzz saws, they rocket into the air and—arcing across the fearsome hole. And nosedive into one of the blocky pyramid’s square terraces, where they spend a full two minutes underwater, tumbling in the complex currents. When they bob back up, they’re on that same ziggurat terrace—or maybe it’s another one—bur for sure they’re descending towards sea level at a steady pace.

Various waves are moving into the smeel-rich waters around the drifting purple whale. Combers, pup-tents, puffballs, ziggurats and—

“A giant corkscrew?” says Zoe. “Like a big drill spinning through the water. Only the drill itself is made of water, too?”

“Catch it!” says Pinchley. “Those twisty suckers can carry you a thousand miles express. Get up to speed, Zoe, and edge onto it while its passing.”

“Yah, mon,” goes Zoe. “I have the whim-whams.”

The corkscrew wave is a helix of of curved, sloping faces, one behind the other, with each face rising out of the sea on the left, and arcing down on the right. A wave-train many miles long. The successive faces are linked by powerful underwater currents. A low bulge runs down the axis of the corkscrew, like the shaft of a ship’s propeller. Zoe has a little trouble getting the whale into a stable position on one of the blades. More than a little. At one point the car is totally submerged—tumbling ass over teakettle like a surfer in a wipe-out, and everyone screaming at once.

Villy and Scud are itching to take over, but Zoe persists. Eventually she finds a sweet spot where the car is endlessly sliding down a glassy face whose vortical motion is lifting then as fast as they descend. Like running on a treadmill. For the moment they don’t need the paddlewheels at all.

“Ready to surf?” says Yampa, leaning right into Villy’s face. She smells like curry and gasoline.

“Almost.”

“Buk buk squawk,” goes Yampa. Her notion of imitating a chicken.

“Look out there way ahead,” says Villy. “Those giant moving walls. They’re the waves we’ll ride. Zoe will tow us in.”

“Yaar,” says Yampa, parroting Villy. “Make tow ropes for us, Pinchley!”

Surf Pilgrim

Pinchley produces his green spider, and the indefatigable tool critter spins out a pair of lines that Pinchley rolls into two coils, each with a spider-woven tow-handle on one end.

“Need foot straps, too,” says Villy.

Pinchley’s tire-making marker bird pops his head out of the tool-belt and coughs out four fine, padded foot straps with sticky, fractalized ends. Easily on par with the finest tow-board straps that Da Kine makes.

“Tree of Life” oil on canvas, February, 2015, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

They’re coming up on the big waves very fast. The first one seems to fill the entire horizon. It’s moving away from them. But the long line of the corkscrew wave is faster. Up ahead of them, the corkscrew wave has already drilled through the great sheet. Like a tunnel in a cliff. The surfers will jump into the water before the wall-wave, and the car will ride the corkscrew through it.

“That wall leans backwards a little,” observes Villy. “Towards us. And the top leans forward. Like a long S.”

“Or like an integral sign,” says Scud.

“Oooo, math!” says Zoe in mock merriment that’s close to a scream.

“That integral wave is gonna to have a tube on the front,” says Villy. “Up at the top, where it curves over. We’ll shoot that tube, right Yampa? Mucho Goob-goob in there.”

“Tree of Life” oil on canvas, February, 2015, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

“Yah, mon.” Yampa tosses the two loops of spider rope over her shoulder and grabs the four foot straps with one of her complex hands. She gives Pinchley a hug and opens her window. With surprising nimbleness, she crawls onto the roof of the car. Meanwhile Zoe’s holding a steady course on the slope of the corkscrew wave. Only minutes till they pass through the wall wave’s base.

“So, uh, goodbye for now,” Villy tells Zoe. “Right before you punch through the wave, be sure to veer. So you, like, slingshot us?”

“You’ll fall right back off that big wave. It tilts the wrong way. You just said so.”

“It’ll have a flow to it,” says Villy, hoping this is true. “And a stickiness to it. It’ll lift us up. We’ll be like water-striders.”

“Don’t go.”

“It’ll work, Zoe. The waves are alive, Like Scud said. They want to play.”

“How will we find each other afterwards?” says Zoe, flicking her eyes back and forth between Villy and the wall-wave.

“No sweat,” says Pinchley. “Yampa and Villy ride the gigundo wobbler as far as they can. Zoe and the rest of us ride the corkscrew to shore. And we meet at the Flatsies’ village. Beach party.”

“I’ll be able to locate everyone with my teep,” says Scud.

“And if there’s a prob, the gingerbread men surf out and round us up,” says Pinchley. “The Flatsies are really slick on these smeely waves.”

Villy begins levering himself out his window. He takes one last look at Zoe. And he sees stark sorrow on her face.

“Hey,” says Villy softly. “I’m gonna shred. And then we’ll camp together again.”

“If only,” says Zoe. Her hair flutters in the wind. She fastens her eyes on his. “My dear Villy.”

Before he can properly answer, Yampa grabs his hand and yanks him onto the roof. She’s stronger than she looks. And more organized. She’s already attached the straps to the boards and she’s tied the two tow lines to the whale’s roof rack. The big wall is coming up fast.

Scud leans out the window for a last look at his brother. “Good luck,” he says.

Villy snugs his feet into his foot straps, grabs one of the spider-woven tow handles and—yeek—he hops off the tilting roof of the car.

He’s going so fast that the water hisses when he lands. He hunches and sways, finding his balance. And then he’s tobogganing down the steep, helical pitch of the corkscrew wave. He hears a shrill, exultant cry behind him. Yampa’s with him.

Even in this tense moment, the Surf World light makes everything look mellow. Nostalgic almost. Like the scene is something he’s remembering. Glancing down at his feet, Villy notices that a sizable teep slug has affixed itself to his ankle. An orange little nudibranch with a cluster of lavender feelers at one end. Fine. It’ll heighten his awareness.

The plan is to angle out to the side and hope Zoe can sling them onto the big wall. The supernal wave is making a creepy sound— a deep, endless roar, like the soundtrack in a horror film just before a hideous ghoul appears. Villy is definitely sensing teep from the waves. The corkscrew is purposeful, gleeful, happy about drilling through the immense wall. As for the wall itself—it’s chanting a single cosmic Om—or something like that—a sacred syllable with no beginning and no end. And under that is—not exactly contempt, no, it’s more like the wall-wave is mildly amused. Like a woman noticing two tiny ants on her nail-polished toe. Ants with nearly invisible antennae.

Focus, Villy! Hold the handle tight!

And just as he thinks that, zonng, the slack plays out and the tow rope is like a steel cable, with drops of water flying off it. Villy clings to the tow-bar for all he’s worth. It feels like it’s pulling his arms from his sockets

He catches a glimpse of Zoe’s pale, determined face glancing back at them from the car up ahead. He can’t wave, but he nods. Zoe puts the hammer down, she accelerates down the corkscrew’s slope, veering away from the corkscrew’s axis. In her wake, Villy and Yampa sluice up great fountains of water.

And now he surfers are at the edge of the helical wave—a sharp cusp, woven from a thousand flow lines. Villy bends his knees and jumps. Sails through the air for maybe a hundred yards, then slaps down and goes skimming across the eerily calm patch before the sky-high water wall. It’s not quite level, no, it’s sloping a little. Meanwhile, Zoe arcs further out from the corkscrew, then speeds back. Villy’s going faster than he thought possible. When to release the tow bar? All his thinking is in his arms and legs.

The moment comes and goes. Villy’s on his own. It’s hard to see, with the spray in his eyes, but the teep is helping. Come to me, says the mighty wave. Villy crouches low, cutting his wind resistance. He feels a rapid chatter of pulses from his board skimming across the washboard surface, and he hears the sound echoed from Yampa’s board. And then—thank you—they’re on the all but vertical face of the horror-movie Om wave and, yes, it has a flow to it, and they’re sticking to it, and it’s raising Villy up and up and up. Like a woman lifting a child.

Far below, Zoe and the purple whale disappear through the rumbling cliff of water.