Waves

When I ask people around here what their favorite thing about the town is the answer is usually “The Waves”. Watching the ocean trying to steal back the land here is more than a pastime. Older men sit on the seawall benches deliberating the world and their place in it. I see them every morning. They look out to the ocean and carry on conversations that I will never understand. The Nazare way of speaking Portuguese is so fast that I fear I will never understand it.

When I asked Beto (one of the guys who works at the Centro-cultural) what his favorite thing about Nazare was he immediately said the waves. At first I thought he said wives and that he was a little dirty and a little intriguing. But, looking at him I knew he meant waves.

Are you a surfer? I asked.

Yes. He replied smiling.

That made more sense. Although, I kinda liked my first understanding better.

Carlos talked about how amazing the waves were when they came all the way up to the seawall. I heard him talk about them, but I didn’t really believe him. Only now can I understand that I doubted him.

Kootenay and I went for a walk on the seawall at midnight. The waves were enormous and they crawled toward the town. They had to be six meters high. Wow, I thought, this is what Carlos was talking about, then, K and turned around and headed back home.

When I first arrived in Nazare the waves kept me up at night. My family and I travelled through Thailand the winter that the big tsunami hit. We were just getting on the plane as the first bits of information were making their way to the news. When we landed in Hong Kong for a stopover, we were held up while they made sure that our destination, Bangkok, was not going to be affected by any aftershocks. Then, we made our way to Thailand and headed up north. We were quite sheltered by our non-existent Thai from the news. It was only when we headed back down south to Koh Samui that the extent of the devastation become apparent. On our return to the south we landed in the Bangkok airport. The average institutional airport that we left had been turned into what looked like a war zone command center. The institutional beige walls were now covered with missing posters and as you left your flight, embassies lined the hallways asking people to register with them so they could better estimate the missing. We were not directly affected by the wave but I was concerned about the morality of trying to enjoy a vacation in a country so wracked by tragedy.

The Thai people begged us to stay. Good for you. Good for Thailand. These words were used over and over by people talking to us. So we stayed. Loved the country, the people and the food, and returned home with a conflicted feeling about our time away.

Until I arrived in Nazare, I did not realize how deeply the trip had affected me.
My first two weeks here I spent listening to the waves at night with an anxiety that took me days to understand. After a week or so I started to love the sound of the waves at night. They lulled me to sleep.

And so I tucked into bed with the sound of the waves in the background thinking that I understood what Carlos had been talking about. That night walking Kootenay the waves seemed huge.

That all changed in the morning. K and I got up to do our morning walk. As we headed to the beach I noticed that there seemed to be more people than normal on the streets, and fewer cars than I was used to. By the time we were down the hill I could see that the night had changed the sea front of the town. There was sand and water covering the first two blocks. And the reason there were so few cars was that the street was covered with sand and receding water. Storefront windows had been broken and water flowed in and out at will.

And I, with my newfound comfort in the sound of waves had slept through it all.