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Back in the truck, Nico kept us alert by spinning yarns about his hometown. “Most people have probably heard the standard shit the surf media pumps out,” he said languidly. “All that stuff about icebergs and month long flat spells and occasionally epic surf. But the characters in the water are what really make the place interesting. You wouldn’t believe some of the guys we’ve got. Ex-hockey stars, musicians, writers, trailer park boys, rich city kids, surf bums, drug dealers, bootleggers. A 65-year-old man who lives in a bread truck. Oh, and the 827, our version of the Hui. You take ’um all out of the water for three weeks, throw in some fog, add a few bootlegged beers, and that’s pretty much our average month. It can get crazy.”

Nico’s descriptions populated our imaginations as the road scrolled past us for hours, a shining river pulling us south. We doggedly drove through a steady tirade of angry weather—it seemed we’d never shake the vile stuff. But in the afternoon, the system cleared, and by the time we arrived at a point Nico simply called “Rights,” we were wriggling in our seats with anticipation. The breeze blew lightly offshore, and though the sky remained grey and the air chilled, we saw clean lines of tropical groundswell sweeping past us and steaming down the sweetest corner of coastline we’d encountered yet.

And as we ran over the cobblestones to the top of the headland, I pinched myself, unable to shake the feeling that I’d fallen asleep somewhere—in the truck, perhaps, as it navigated a rutted dirt track. I worried that this frosty La Libertad—this speeding replica of an El Salvadorian classic—was simply an idealized apparition of my dreams, conveniently conjured without the drawbacks of political strife, razor-sharp barnacles and banditos. But as I watched Nico stroke into the first set of our marathon session, I knew the wave was real, and we surfed until the wind turned again and blew the place to ribbons, reveling in the soft landing we’d finally found at the end of a long and jagged ride.

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