SURFER MAGAZINE FEATURES

I had no such luck. Morning found us back at the right, standing in a puddle, watching wind tattered lines bend around the coastal bight from under our hoods. Even with the weather, though, the wave looked promising; more inviting, anyway, than the whipped and foaming slab we’d checked an hour ago at the tip of the headland, a lumpy, sucking thing open to the full brunt of the sea and the howling front. But we lingered on shore, leaning against the truck, mostly because we wanted nothing more than to crawl back to bed. Louba dozed, dry, in the back seat as the radio hummed: “Officials reported several game carcasses were left without authorization outside the gates of the town dump. If you, or anyone you know has information about the parties responsible, please contact the sheriff. In other news, the keys were stolen from the ignition of a road grader late last night…”

Someone switched off the engine and Nico and I pulled on our 5-milimeter wetsuits. Yassine, who had spent the last two weeks shooting with Hawaiian guests in another rural zone to the south, and who was supposed to be on vacation, shouldered his camera gear and began hiking towards the pines at the bottom of the point.

“At least it’s not colder,” said Nico, his words wisps of condensation shredded by the storm. “I’ve surfed some days at home that were so cold, the spray from the offshore winds froze in midair as it blew up the face.” I imagined dropping into sets while being plugged with a scattershot of ice pellets, and suddenly, the weather didn’t seem so bad; apparently the joy of changing in the rain, no matter how cold, is that it is rain and not something worse. We paddled out and named the wave “Moose Shit’s” after the steaming pile I slipped in before jumping from the rocks. And after a handful of wind-warbled walls we called it quits, and piled back into the truck, shivering, and left the point and the adjacent abandoned town in the care of the only inhabitants it had left.

The hands of a skilled taxidermist had obviously worked over the polar bear that leered at us through the locked doors of the library. It had been days since our initial surf at the cobbled left—and our session at Moose Shit’s—and in that time, we’d burned hundreds of miles onto the truck in search of a setupwith the right combo of shelter from the wind and exposure to the swell.

In the process, we’d seen plenty of the local landscape: Tiny fishing villages—10 houses at the most—hunkered into the shelter of craggy fiords, their rugged trawlers bobbing on moorings; countless cemeteries—10 gravestones at the most—surrounded by well-kempt white picket fences; a flash of fur that must have been the largest rabbit on earth; caribou; more moose; the spot where Leif Eiriksson and his band of Vikings established the first European colony in the New World; sausage links made from seal meat; and—another edible oddity—a heaping plate of fried cod tongues that disappeared under a withering assault from its owner. The oral organs of fish are local delicacies, we were told.