Durian Point

The chief of the village was drunk when he took me to the tomb of the Queen of Nias Island. High on a hill above the coconut palms was the fantastic monument with finely carved dragons writhing around its pillars. It was from the balcony of the Queen’s tomb that I first saw the wave wrapping into a small bay. I asked the chief about it, but he quickly changed the subject. He just wanted me to play a song. “Rock Star!” he slurred.

“What should I play?” I said.

“Elvis” said the chief.

I really didn’t know any Elvis songs. In fact, I still don’t know a complete song from start to finish from anyone, just riffs and pieces from lots of songs, but definitely no Elvis…so we settled on Led Zeppelin. This seemed to make him happy, and when we returned to the subject of the wave, he explained that because he was the chief, that he got to name the wave, and it was called, “ROCK STAR!”

I’ve always hated that name for the wave, and adamantly refuse to call it that, so I call it by the name of the village, which is Hilifalawo, or sometimes Durian Point, because I like that better. Durian, which is the king of all fruit, when it ripens, emits an odor so pungent, that it attracts the ghosts of blues singers from the exact opposite side of the globe – deep in the American South. By the time the odor reaches that side of the globe, the smell is just faint enough to be sweet; some people even describe it as sexual. The lonely ghosts of blues musicians Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Blind Willie McTell, Lightning Hopkins, and Lead Belly have all made the ghost pilgrimage to the tiny village called Hilifalawo, home of a wave shrouded in mystery and tragedy – obscure and mythical as the ghosts that wander through the village, drawn to the smell of their last sexual encounters on earth.

At sunset, the drunken chief and I walked through the village in order to find a papaya stem (makes a great pipe), and a better view of the wave. An old man sputtered something to me in Nias language. This is quite different from standard Indonesian. I asked the boy who was following us and serving as a translator what the old man said.

“He says that you wear your pants too low.” said the boy.

The chief only laughed and shouted, “Rock Star!” with a rolling ‘r’.

At that moment, a faint voice drifted into our midst. It was blues music mixed with the sound of snorting pigs, bleating goats and pounding surf. This was music in a language that I recognized that carried the same loneliness that I felt. I took a hit from my papaya pipe and closed my eyes to follow the sound to the front of a tiny bungalow that looked like all the others along the road except for the enormous pile of durian skin outside. Durian is spiked and has an ominous look, like a medieval torture device.

We pushed open the door and there in the shadows sat the ghost of Bukka White who paused in the middle of singing when he heard us come in. He shot us a look then continued his singing. It was a warning about women. There was pure and beautiful agony in his words. He explained that when you give your woman everything she wants at one time, she’ll leave you. Materialistic jealousy, envy and drunkenness were other things his song warned against. The unmistakable smell of ripe durian was overpowering as Bukka continued to explain that true bluesmen were not concerned with money. It was the love for music and travelling that completed their souls. Getting paid just enough to “go big” for one night and then move on to the next town was their goal.

His scratchy voice vibrated off my skin and I realized that the wave I was chasing, and the paintings I recently finished, were my blues song. My lyrics were what I was willing to cast aside to arrive at this moment. I began to realize that few people really care about some lethal wave on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They may seem amused at the time of the story, but will never fully understand how riding a wave can affect your life.

The presence of Bukka White faded with the ending of his song, and as I scanned the room I noticed a window onto the ocean. A wave peaked quickly and snapped out of view, which stole my attention. I rushed forward to watch its progress and my heart started to pulse. The wave zipped along, gaining speed as it warped and peeled through three different sections, squaring off at the end as if to take a bow, and then rudely spitting at the audience. Hidden from the road’s view and cut off on both ends by a series of bridges that were nothing but rotten planks and slippery steel, this village wave was a true secret spot. An hour away is the famous Lagundri Bay, which long ago sold out to the whims of international travelers seeking to digest their piece of surfing’s mythical Mecca. The beauty of this secret was that it was shrouded in a tall tale based on a real two-fold tragedy.

The Feud

In 1998 a feud between neighbouring villages was born out of a classic plot between a young virgin girl from Teluk Dalam and her involvement with the son of a prominent durian farmer from Hilifalawo. The durian farmer was a drunkard, but was rich for the standards of the village. He had delusional expectations for his son to attend university somewhere in Jakarta, which seemed like another planet to his son, who was content with the simplest pleasures in life and wanted nothing more than to settle down in the village and build a life with his young girlfriend Yusnidar. She was the daughter of a Teluk Dalam fisherman, poor as the day is long, but extremely beautiful in a plain, lazy-eyed, gap-toothed, unique sort of way.

The durian farmer loathed Yusnidar, because when he became drunk (every evening) Yusnidar transformed into his estranged wife. She had long ago run off with his former durian agent in Jakarta. The farmer’s delusions would cause him to verbally abuse Yusnidar because he truly saw all of the best qualities of his wife in her, and he hated himself for having driven her away. His own expectations to reclaim his wife were pinned on his son, who had no interest at all in attending university on planet Jakarta, where Muslims bombed Christians and Christians sold out to big businesses to bring western decadence that fueled the Muslim hate.
For his son’s 20th birthday party, the farmer organized a banquet where three pigs would be slaughtered for the occasion. The parents of Yusnidar would attend, along with about 100 people from the neighbouring villages. At the height of the celebration, which coincided with the height of the farmer’s drunkenness, a song by bluesman Robert Johnson limped from the battered speakers, “I’ve got a kind-hearted woman, she studies evil all the time!”.

Indonesians are fond of their karaoke, and the farmer began to call attention to himself by singing along to one of his favorite blues songs of all time. He could really identify with the painful falsetto crescendos of Johnson’s voice, and he felt his own voice was quite the match. His painful rage began to bubble as he spotted Yusnidar and reminders of his tragedy magnified when he saw the way Yusnidar looked at his son. It was a look of total devotion that seemed to make a mockery of his own sad loss. He began to direct the song to his son’s love interest, which drew a crowd of smirking villagers, who knew from experience and rumor what was going down. Virginity is a commodity in the animistic society of Nias, and a high price is paid in the form of a dowry even in this modern age. As the farmer’s voice became louder and more overpowering than the whole commotion of the banquet, he decided to freestyle some lyrics of his own. These lyrics were about as offensive as you can get, severely questioning the validity of Yusnidar’s virginity.

A look of utter shock first crept into Yusnidar’s face and then onto her proud, poor-fisherman father’s, followed by the oldest brother, and her cousin (who had a secret crush on Yusnidar and was considering hiring a local witchdoctor to inflict a painful death on the farmer’s son). Virtually the whole village of Teluk Dalam was swept into the fire of rage by the pathetic, blundering lyrics and pseudo-Elvis gyrations of the foolish durian farmer from Hilifalawo.

In a society where two generations prior the people were hunting each other’s heads, cooking and eating each other’s flesh to gain strength, and praying to animal spirits was normal, this very public attack against Yusnidar’s honour quickly escalated into a William Wallace-style war. Depending on whom you asked, arms were severed, skulls were mashed like watermelons, and fires were strategically set to the soundtrack of steady blues music. After the skirmishes at the banquet, travel and commerce between the two villages became impossible. Teluk Dalam (a large village near the port) and Hilifalawo (a much smaller village, but in control of all the durian fruit trade) were inconsolable.

Simple business transactions became covert revenge operations. Travel and communications via minibus and motorbike along the tattered jungle roads became less and less safe.

A few weeks later the chaos seemed to settle. The son of the durian farmer made his way cautiously into Teluk Dalam, with an apology speech prepared and a pocketful of money with the intention of paying the dowry for his love, Yusnidar. When he arrived at the bungalow of Yusnidar’s father, who had yet to return from his daily fishing trip, Yusnidar’s oldest brother and jealous cousin were sitting playing cards and drinking asoka (local rice vodka). His greeting of “Ya’ahowu” received nothing but a bloodshot stare and a jealous glare. The durian farmer’s son decided to wait for Yusnidar’s father on the beach as it was nearing dark. As he sat on the sand and watched the octopus hunters pick through the reef, he could make out the outline of his love’s father’s boat bobbing through the shorebreak. It reminded him of the countless times he would rush down to help the old man drag his outrigger canoe back up the beach and under the mango tree. The young man was not a fisherman, but loved to hear the old man’s stories, and he loved the sight of a boat full of shiny fish. As he approached the old man and his canoe, he noticed the scowl on the man’s face and was taken aback.
“I can do it myself!” the old man sputtered. He watched the old man’s rippled and gnarled arms straining under the tension of pulling a canoe full of water and fish. It was all he could do to hold back from helping as the veins and tendons struggled pathetically. He began to follow the old man up under the tree and started into his well-practiced speech. The old man snapped at him again.

“Save your breath!”

It was hard to hold his tongue, considering how much time and respect he had paid this man over the three years that he had courted Yusnidar.

The farmer’s son realized the futility of his efforts and decided to change his approach. He would try reasoning with Yusnidar’s mother. He could see his love and her agile, protective mother (who would never leave them completely alone) across the road hanging laundry.

The sight of Yusnidar, in the purple-orange sunset light refracting off the white laundry fluttering in the breeze, sent him in a trance of love. She had never looked more beautiful to him than at that moment.

Had he not been so caught up with the sight of her, he would have noticed Yusnidar’s brother and jealous cousin crouching behind some palm trees – one with a gasoline can and the other with a torn fishing net. As he reached the trees he was met with the sound of metal colliding with skull.

When he awoke, the farmer’s son could smell gasoline and taste the metallic tinge of blood in his mouth. He could feel something gouging into the delicate skin between his lips and nose, but he could not remove the torn fishing net, which he was now tangled in.

Everything slowed down as he heard the click of the lighter, and saw the look of helpless horror on Yusnidar’s face. The heat raced over him in a breeze and the smell of his own flesh burning overcame him.

The Tragedy

July 2002 – I had a connection with her. I felt it. But at that moment, with the time delay on the phone and the realization that my girlfriend had caught me cheating, my head was spinning.

“I fuckin’ hate you!” she screamed (muffled with static)
What could I say? Halfway around the world on an island in the Indian Ocean I couldn’t do a damn thing except watch the waves pound the reef, and trust in my intuition that I was doing the right thing. We had both hurt each other so many times so, in a way, her finding those pictures on my laptop was a necessary evil. Something to get off my chest. There is no denying photographic proof of Indonesian conquests complete with accidental self-portraits in the hotel mirror behind a young “model” in various sexual positions.

Needless to say, I was up for anything (expecting the worst at home) when the drunk American Tim virtually offered me a map to a secret wave a few hours to the north. He began to describe 17-second righthand barrels, ten-dollar ounces of weed, civil war so harsh that weeks before he had spoken with a village girl who watched with her own eyes as soldiers chopped her father and brother into pieces, starting with the arms and legs. There were people fighting for independence to control a province that holds close to 85% of the region’s cash-yielding natural resources (oil, natural gas, ganja, durian), a province still torn by a feud between two families over the tragic end of a durian farmer’s son, and the soiled reputation of a young virgin beauty named Yusnidar.

This sounded like my kind of risk. My mind was swimming and scheming and plotting, but mostly I just wanted to figure out a way to stay right there in Indonesia for the whole season, and then the next…

What did I need to go back to? A girl who hated me? My job serving coffee, and surfing closed out west-facing beachbreaks overcrowded with mtvspringbreakextremexgame-generation San Diego kids?
Early the next morning I sat with Big Mike watching clean 6ft bombs pump into Lagundri Bay. We were sharing a few papaya stem bongs when we spotted “LA Tim”, my new friend from the night before, silently pushing a motor bike under the losmen so as not to wake anyone who might follow him to his secret wave. We began stirring him up, saying that we were bringing six French bodyboarders, two chicks and a handful of photographers to his new spot. He gave us a maniac smile, behind a middle finger, and sped off down the road.

Little did we realize it would be the last we would ever see of him.

It was the amount of blood that was most shocking to the local people of Hilifalawo. It flowed past Tim’s desperate fingers, down his leg and onto the sand, and then into the reef. Absurd amounts of blood – a small lagoon of blood mixed in pools between the rocks. The children of the village wondered silently if all bule (foreigners) bleed this much. An argument broke out between the villagers. Half of them wanted to take him to the local witch doctor, who would prepare a salve of mud and leaves to clog the wound, the other half wanted to take Tim to the modern doctor Ima Restu, who worked in Teluk Dalam (40 minutes away if the bridge wasn’t washed out.) No one wanted to drive Tim’s motorbike into Teluk Dalam because the embers of the feud between the villages were a wisp of wind away from igniting again. Despite Tim’s desperate pleas for medical attention and his aversion to seeing a witch doctor, his life expired before a decision could be made. His last words were whispered because Tim could feel the cold chill running through his body.

“Tell my mother I love her!” he gasped.

But the local villager who was holding his hand heard his final words to be,

“Tell Yusnidar I love her.” He believed it to be the restless ghost of the durian farmer’s son, which only furthered the belief that the village of Hilifalawo is overrun with lonely ghosts and the wave is a cursed and dangerous entity.
A shockwave rippled through Lagundri Bay. The news of a fellow surfer bleeding to death travels like a gasoline fire through a tight-knit United Nations of exotic surfing characters. Tall tales were speculated on just what caused the laceration on Tim’s inner thigh, which had severed his femoral artery. Was it his fin, the reef, the nose of his board? Was the wave too dangerous to surf? Too shallow? The rumors gained momentum, and curiosity got the best of me, which is how I found myself alone in the room with a view of the lethal wave, the smell of durians and the echo of Bukka White, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly.

I entered the line-up cautiously, unable to get the mental picture of Tim’s bleeding to flee from my mind. My first few waves were a blur, but the amount of time spent inside the tube mixed with the uncertainty of what would happen after falling off, combined to make it a truly exhilarating experience.

July 2005 – The village wave is not so secret any longer. Not crowded, just not secret – still a bit tricky to find – and the road to get there sucks. To surf the wave is still a unique experience, and I swear if you find yourself surfing there alone, just close your eyes and you can hear the sound of blues music rustling through the palm trees, and if the wind is offshore you can smell the sexual odor of the durian. It’s an emotional experience – one that can leave you wondering if westerners were ever actually meant to be traveling in this remote village on a cursed, fatalistic, headhunting, war-torn island in the Indian Ocean.

First published in The Surfer’s Path Issue 81, December, 2010