Costa Rica Snapshot #2: Pura Vida and the Lineup

Snapshot Two: Pura Vida and King Dreadlock
For the most part the Ticos leave enough room for tourist paddle-standers in their lineup. "Pure vida," the Costa Ricans say, which translates "pure life" but means that sounds more like a slogan than a way of life, and they live out pura vida quite well. When I finally recover from my paddle out and start digging for waves, one of the Ticos notices. I'm not in great position to catch my fifth wave. He has better position but pulls up short and yells something. At first I think he's calling me off his wave, and by the time I realize that he is yelling "Go! Go! Go!," encouraging me to catch my fifth wave, I've missed my chance. At least I understand pura vida now.

Tamarindo clearly has a friendlier lineup than Southern California's shorebreaks, where locals cut you out of waves if they feel like you don't deserve them. Surfers fight tooth and nail for California waves just as they do for SoCal real estate. It is SoCal real estate. You can't blame them for being territorial. Territory is everything there. Unlike their northern neighbors, the Costa Ricans are more accomodating, but I stay out of the lineup. My confidence isn't there yet. I don't want a wave badly enough to push myself in or to test how "pura" their "vida" really is.

But this is all context without setting: it isn't an accurate picture of what's happening around me. When I look back to shore, a line of rocks juts into the ocean on my right, where the waves seem to be breaking best at low tide. Why do the best waves break right into the rocks? There's always that critical element to the ocean: fun has its risks. Near the rocks the shoulder-high waves hold their shape particularly well with this onshore wind, which creates the kind of deep, hollow barrels that surfers live to ride, and one Costa Rican surfer is doing that as I sit on my board just beyond the impact point and watch him ride. Let's call him King Dreadlock.

He is probably thirty years old, heavy dreadlocks full of sun and saltwater, a short, wiry, tan amphibian of a man who claws through the water--at one with the shortboard beneath him. (By comparison, I look like a waterlogged hamster floating on driftwood). There are plenty of fine surfers around him, but he's the most aggressive: he paddles intently as the mound of water starts to take shape, still aiming his board offshore, until the mound begins to build into a looming wall edged with white spray. He's efficient. He reaches the impact zone before any other surfer. A few are behind him. Maybe they could have caught the wave if they'd paddled harder--the spray is flying off the top of the wave now, creating rainbows against the dark ocean's body--but they respect his position, and the dreadlocked wonder, with a few swift pumps of his arm and an agile pop-up, is down the face of the wave in an instant. I'm thirty yards behind him now as he disappears behind the crest of the wave--it's bigger than I thought--but then I see the tip of his board upon the top of the wave and next come the dreadlocks, followed by broad, tan shoulders, then the tail of his board, and finally the whipping water near his leash, and all of these intricate moving parts ticking like the mad hands of an alien keeping alien time against the face of Tamarindo and the trees inland. King Dreadlock disappears down the wave again and then flies into the picture all at once, this time not tail-whipping but sensing the end of his ride and launching himself off the wave and away from his surfboard, howling in ecstasy at his best ride of the day before he plunges below the surface.

It's performance art. Call it art or performance, but call it a living, too: Jackson Pollack slashes his way through a canvas; Jack Kerouac tapes the scroll of his novel together in the basement; Bruce Lee rips a penny out of your hand before you can close it; the attorney turns the tide in a trial with the sentient question; the student's eyes shine because the teachers explains with passion and clarity; yes, all these things require that same spark of passion and enthusiasm that flew as spray from the young surfer's board the second that he saw a wave that he knew how to ride better than anyone else in the water. Amen. Amen. Amen.