QUEST FOR FIRE

May 1 Andaman Sea

Another dawn at sea; hot foundry, glowing from beyond the eastern horizon, its unseen fire flickering against a curtain of purple night and bright silver stars. The deck where I lie is wet with dew and my towel blanket is soggy, but it occurs to me, before I have to get up, before another day of long inactivity begins— before I have to prove again that real love means patience, that the voyage is the destination, that if you’re bored you’re boring— that finding one’s self curled up here on the deck of a sailboat cruising through the Andaman Sea at sunrise is a fine place to be. I’m just drifting back to sleep when suddenly there’s a hand on my shoulder, a whisper. It’s Chris.

“Sam, get up. There’s waves.”

Our first landfall. An island, one of hundreds, a shoreline, an arbitrary point on the chart, no different than any other. Promising, perhaps, due to some dispassionate markings in fathoms and shoal. “The Scene was one of striking beauty,” wrote naturalist C. Boden Kloss, upon first hoving-to off these waters in 1901. “Against a background of bright blue sky the little island rose from the sea of lapis lazuli, which ceaselessly dashed white breakers on the rocky shores.”

Chris, having developed I what later deemed “left-eye” on numerous Indonesian boat-trips, stands on the bowsprit and points his right arm, as if steering the ship.

“There’s a rideable left there,” he announces We creep toward the sleeping island and circle, looking for a place to anchor in what turns out to be a shallow bay. The shore is a tawny slice of sand, pressed closely by a wall of foliage: hardwoods and pandanus, banks of hibiscus, vines and creepers running rampant (“like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world,” Conrad put it, taking us upriver in Heart of Darkness, “…when vegetation rioted on earth and the big trees were king.”)

To the north the shoreline curves out, sand swallowed up by ferns and shallow-rooted palms, and an exposed black reef extending into the mirror-smooth blue sea. Everything is still— not a ripple, not a breath of wind. Then, flapping purposely from a branch high in a gray-trunked padouk, a white-bellied sea eagle takes wing, beating up out of the forest shadow into the sunlight. As we watch, shielding our eyes with hands, we hear a splash: Chris has quietly pulled out his board, jumped off the Crescent and is paddling across the glassy water toward the reef. I am next, racing aft to grab my board and bail, stroking quickly to catch up. We see no waves, but paddle hard, like we’re caught inside.

And… Suddenly there’s this shadow, as if the sun is shining from beneath the water outside the bend of the exposed reef, casting contrast. The shadow steepens, takes shape, rolls onto itself: a wave, a left, 6 feet on the face, silver curl pitching out and folding toward a smoothly tapered shoulder. A perfect surfing wave, here, at the first spot we’d come to, before we’d even dropped anchor. And here are Chris and I alone in the lineup, watching the first peel past, the second wave in the set humping up in the exact same spot. We can only sit up and grin at each other as a third wave hits the reef in flawless symmetry. Like the Jarawa tribe whose island this is, we can’t make our fire— we have to discover it.

Faint hooting from the distant ship—the lineup will be full in a minute or two. But for now it is ours. Chris finds his voice first.

“Well…” he says.