Shambles
/ˈʃamblz/
Informal
a state of total disorder
Part I
There are no driveways in Ireland. A little road that runs to the house is called a lane. I’m parked on the only lane around. It’s long and goes straight downhill from a road that runs the foothills of a mountain. Frozen brambles border the sides and a strip of frozen grass runs down the middle. The midwinter the sun never shines on the farmer’s lane. I’m allowed to park here in the shadow of the mountain because of avocados.
I made friends with the farmer’s wife ten years ago, looking for surf. I drove down this lane and came to a farmer climbing from his tractor, swearing. But when heard me say “hi”, he stopped.
“American!” He pegged me for Boston. He gets giddy when I say New York. He has family in the Bronx. “Only Americans say hi,” he says. “Tell you what, if you give my wife a gift that she accepts, you can park here,” he explained, “until the good lord takes me or a wave down there takes you.”
“Should I knock on the door?” The house was a cement block bungalow. Not much bigger than the ancient stone house next to it.
“Jaysus no to feck,” he says. “Leave it on that windowsill. She’ll not leave the house. If she takes it in, you can park. If no, then no you can feck off back to New York,” he cocked his head to the west.
I had what I always have with me; two wetsuits, two surfboards, a pair of swim fins (for rescue and bodysurfing), winter booties, a pair of gloves, the clothes I had on me, two towels, twenty euros cash and some loose change, and two avocados. The avocados were to go with the rice and beans, but I had left the rice and beans sitting on the counter by the sink at my future wife’s parent’s house, two hundred miles away.
I put the two avocados on the windowsill and walked away. When I looked back the avocados were gone.
“Only two things she likes in this world and that’s one,” the farmer said. “Park, but make sure to close the feckin’ gates.”
The farmer is always climbing down from his tractor when I show up, a string of swearing coming from him, but he hasn’t talked to me since that first day. I’ve never seen his wife. Just avocados that are there and then not there.
The locals don’t drive down the farmer’s lane. They ram their vans in the hedges on the foothill road and pray a speeding country car or tractor won’t smash it.
Maybe they don’t know that it just takes two ripe avocados to make friends with the farmer’s wife. It saves a half mile of walking – and the vehicle is safe. The farmer’s wife in the lonesome west and I have a commonality, a good avocado. Maybe the curse of being a local here is that no shops sell avocados.
The farmer is climbing out of his tractor, like always. I leave the avocados on the windowsill like always and walk away. The wife is hidden in the house, and, like always, she takes the avocados off the sill without a sound.
Everything like always, and then it’s not.
I hear my name, vowels howled from far away. Someone is calling my name while running down the hill. I recognize the voice and I can see him running down the frosty lane shadowed by the mountain. I see him clearly like I’m looking through expensive binoculars, kinda like the way when you can barely hear a song but you know it so well your brain fills the lacking in volume and clarity.
The farmer is startled into a fighting position next to his tractor by the running man. He juts his chin out and glances at me. His glance was a contract. A contract that I would fight side by side with him against the coming attack.
The farmer’s wife, I imagine, is scuttling back into some corner, out of sight of any window, thinking probably that the avocado deliveries were all some trick.
Shambles stops carefully, uphill from the farmer. He’s out of breath. He puts his hands on his knees. The farmer narrows his stance and his shoulders relax.
At one word per breath Shambles says, “Have. You. Got. By. Any. Chance. Spare. Fins?” The farmer watches me give Shambles two triangles of rubber, XXL to fit over the booties.
With one fin swinging in each hand Shambles jogs back up the long, frosty lane. The farmer watches Shambles go. Each exhaled puff of frosty steam hangs in the still cold air like an old cartoon of a train.
Part II
Shambles jogs. I could go on without him and be the first one out. The wave that screams down below is not a big wave. The smaller ones are head high and the biggest ones are not quite double overhead. It rears up and screams down on a slab of exposed rock. Wipeouts will roll you up the rock that it breaks on. It’s a fantasy. I’ve seen a stand up surfer get close to riding this wave, but if I say who they’ll murder me, their name in itself would be a clue to its location. It’s too hollow. Too shallow. I wait.
Boogs rule this wave. Boogs rule all the barrelling waves in Ireland. Boogs get intimate with the most beautiful waves, the ones bent and violent and that catch the light, the ones that boom and scream and spit and shake the ground like displeased gods.
The farmer watches me. He watches me, barefoot, standing on my boots, tugging on a wetsuit under a towel. He watches me lose balance as I pull on my booties and struggle while I tuck my gloves in. There is no indication whether he thinks men in rubber suits getting strange kicks from the wave that screams at the end of his field is a good thing or not.
He watches. Again, the vowels in my name come falling down the mountain like an early morning prayer beaten with footfalls. The farmer spreads his feet to a battle stance, again, as if this didn’t just happen minutes ago.
“Wetsuit. You wouldn’t have a spare suit?” Shambles and his words both tumble down the mountain.
“I do,” I say. Words don’t tumble up mountains. Shambles stops and puts his hand to his ear. I put my thumb up. Shambles smiles. The smile tumbles down the mountain too. Gravity makes everything good.
I’ve never seen the farmer smile, he shakes his head as he looks away. Maybe his smile hides like his wife hides. Maybe he finds the humour in Shambles forgetting to bring his rubber fins and his rubber suit to the wave that screams on the best and coldest day of the year, but there is no indication of either.
Shambles is an Irish Bodyboard Champ. He’s been competing since he was fifteen. It was on the national team way back when that the older guys gave him his nickname. A sham in this part of Ireland means a person, a term of endearment. Shambles was a sham like any other sham. But a couple missed team flights, lost passports, and one romantic adventure in Equator involving the Chief of Police and his daughter and his name was rounded out to Shambles.
The story goes she bribed her own father to take the cuffs off and let him go. Him being arrested for public nudity.
Shambles studied Physics and Chemistry of Advanced Materials in Trinity College Dublin. He finished his degree, but the stress of study and city life of Dublin broke him and he was hospitalized for depression.
While in the hospital, he got a call from a friend. “New waves,” the friend said. “Some big, some not that big. Wide open tubes.” Shambles checked himself out of the hospital and entered a “tribal” phase of his life. It was the opposite of the academic, the urban. The opposite to competitive bodyboarding with the national team.
“I became a tube bum and a banjo player,” he says about his time after university. “And, that was the first time my friends saved me by getting me into the ocean.”
In Ireland there is no tribe of bodyboarders. The stand up and the prone are in one clan. They are relaxed, gentlemanly, serious watermen. Guys like Tom Lowe, Fergal Smith, The Skaj Brothers, the Gillespe Brothers. They were a tribe the whole surfing world took notice of.
“I surfed with my friends,” Shambles told me. “It was the best of times.”
Part III
Shambles was glad it was him that found his sister after her suicide. He did CPR until the medics came. He consoled the sister’s daughter.
Grief is a storm.
Shambles, running down that frosty hill for the third time, is out of that storm. Again the footfalls tumbled down the hill.
The farmer looked at me.
“Do you think he has everything?” I ask the farmer.
The farmer shakes his head.
When he catches up, we start slurping our way through the frosty sheep fields. We throw our boards over barbed wire fences and awkwardly vault ourselves after them. We drop down and go ‘round a bend in a small cliff just as a set hits. It’s the kind of wave that burns into your brain.
The sun peaks over the mountain just enough to light up the wave.
I caught some smaller ones.
Stand up surfers, even the best and bravest, cannot really ride these set waves. But the boogs…
The boogs can scoop and stabilize. The boogs get all the set waves. The boogs get all the set waves here because logic demands they do. A head high set comes and the surfers do their best with it. The boogs ignore the small ones, knowing that when a proper wave comes along that the surfers will scatter like roaches in the sudden light.
Shambles paddles out. Waits for a big one, takes off deep and rides it perfectly. But kicks out blinking, his hands searching his face. The spit blew his contact lenses out of his eyeballs. Rendered near blind he paddles back out.
Part IV
I wear contact lenses too. I’m badly near-sighted just like Shambles. Without my contacts or glasses the world turns to fuzzy, coloured shapes. Surfing without my lenses is nearly impossible. I can’t see sets, much less see the lines and warbles of an approaching swell well enough to choose a good wave. If I lost my lenses I would have to go in.
But not Shambles.
“Just tell me which ones are good,” he says.
I do and he gets five amazing waves in fifteen minutes. Without his vision, with me calling him into waves, he has to trust me and trust himself and trust each wave that screams.
He’s giggling. Take his vision away and he’s having more fun. He’s giggling as if the reef is made of pillows, like the worry of consequences were spit out of him like contacts.
I know he understands the consequences. After his sister, after the grief storm he lived through, Shambles rode heavy waves with new abandon. After the grief storm, Shambles was there for the biggest, and scariest waves in Ireland, including Mullaghmore. His friends, me included, pulled him out of his grief and into crazy, big waves. He’s the best surfer in the world because he’s ridden a million giant, sparkling tubes. Mike Stewart sponsored him. He went bigger still.
One time when the swell was picking up. A friend of ours calls Shambles to see if we should drive north or south.
“What happened? – You broke your finger?” the friend says.
“Femur?” he said, “Oh.”
Fate, God or Luck kept broken shards of bone from slicing his artery. After they pinned his leg back together, the same friends that saved him from depression, and again from grief, brought him good food and hope and told him a year-long recovery is nothing and he would be back to riding tubes before he knew it. The tribe told him that pain comes in many forms. The tribe held his hand and told him that you can forget your suit and fins. You can suffer the storms and meltdowns and tragedy and pain.
You can be blind.
Your friends will be there for you with a plate of food, or a ride, or some fins, or a spare suit. They will tell you which waves to go on because they know what you can ride out of and what you can’t.
