Week one of the Mexican Odyssey is complete, and now it is time to be entertained by some new blood -- Craig our ER doctor friend has busted out of the States to get his surf on! As soon as you add Craig's mellow and unflappable personality to the mix it makes things a lot more carefree and fun. Billy and I get along fine, but he has a tendency to go on and on and on about the waves and what specific move he did at what exact spot of the wave.




There is only so much banal surf conversation that you can take, even in the midst of a surf trip extravaganza where the best waves of your life beckon within reach. Considering the fact that during the trip I have been tackling Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an 800-page novel with thick prose that begged for focus, it is a bit tedious to keep hearing: "dude! Did you see that? Oh my frickin' God! That wave was so sick! This guy comes up under the lip, and just smacks it backside so hard that spray flew like twenty feet in the frickin' air!" Especially when I am chilling in the hammock, immersed in a novel that takes me back to wartime Europe in the 1940's, with the trade breezes blowing through my hair and the pleasant sound of crashing surf making a light crescendo, it is an unnerving interruption to hear the high-pitched, frantic desciptions of a wave that I have seen thousands of duplicates.

Tonight, with Dr. Craig in the mix, a wild partier with no reservations whatsoever, we should have a bit more action than just pass out in the humid air in the hopes of recharging for the morning onslaught of waves. Our trio consists of The Doc, Billy the Kid and the Human Seagull, as I am often referred to as. We are a boisterous bunch of Americans at the Playa Zicatela dance club. We meet two expatriates that invite us to eat some barbeque deep sea tuna with their Mexican wives. These guys talk like they are from Huntington Beach but sport extensive tattooing. The craziest of the two ex-pats has the temerity to sport the word: OAXACA in gigantic twelve inch letters straight across his chest and extending down into his absurd and unhealthful looking potbelly.




ER Harris