It was far from crisp that morning, while a few heavy clouds hung in the sky, the Southern Brazilian sun began to make it’s way up above the horizon, mounting the day like a knight looking down from a warhorse. The waves were unsurprisingly small, semi-powerful for their size; peaking at shoulder high, and found shallow water just thirty feet off shore. I paddled out, and to my delight, quickly caught a flurry of racy little breakers, which when added with a bit of imagination, were quite exhilarating. The sun was at high noon by the time I left Praia Da Silveira in Garopaba, Santa Catarina, Brazil.
I did not leave the water without a treasure from the warm Atlantic. That gift being the unwanted sea itself, trapped inside my ear canal. You see, the bones in my ear canal have long since began their primal adaptation from years of exposure to cold water, warping and growing to try and protect the ear drum within. Many California surfers suffer the same fate brought forth from continuous crisp Northern Pacific morning sessions without a hood or earplugs, leading them to the mercy of the drill. The ear doctor must surgically remove the bone growth, and in the ripe age of medical advance that is found in 2015, the drill is put to the canal, and the skull and it’s malformations are put at bay, for a few years at least. I have been long aware of my need for the Surfer’s Ear surgery, but a bit a fear, and the procrastination of being bound to land for one month, has kept me from the operating room.
Which leads to constant post surf, forty-five degree violent heads shakes. People may think I’m insane, but it’s proved to be the only way to get the water free. Like being semi-blind, and finally the darkness is raised from the eyes, the liberating feeling of water trickling down my ear lobe and neck with clear hearing, is one of the best feelings I have ever had in this life, in this body. This day on this Southern-Brazilian beach would be different. The ocean would not come out.
As much as I shook, jumped and pounded, the salty sea would not leave my ear canal. A day passed, and after a visit to the local Otolaryngologist, who tried to suck the water out with a screeching tube like apparatus, I was left half deaf. I began to ponder what it would be like to be deaf, would I be able to appease the girl of my dreams, while living in a muffled auditory cloud? I remembered the people communicating in sign language at the hospital in Florianopolis. The ringing came at night, and soon I was back to another ear specialist, looking at him with cautious North American eyes, full of judgement, skeptical of his third-world prognosis. After some sort of Brazilian ear treatment, he deemed my ear infected, and sent me to the local pharmacy to get a shot in my ass-cheek.
Whilst having to walk beside my friend on the left in order to be able to hear out of my unclogged, uninfected right ear, I began to question my ten-day surf trip to Chile. In just four days, I was to leave the Brazilian Carnaval, and throw myself in the central Chilean world class surf, escaping the five day hedonistic, drunken, ecstasy fueled craze coming to Balneário Camboriú, the city where I currently reside.
Luckily I have a Chilean friend, one who I met at an airport in Buenos Aires in Spring 2009. Although we have yet to hangout outside that airport bar, she will still give me advice around Chile. What does one do when a surf trip is in question? Go to the desert. The Atacama Desert, the driest place on the planet earth. And so it was, a ticket bought to Calama, Chile, a surfboard left in Brazil, and the search began down the worldwide highway of images displaying dunes, stars, and flamingoes. I could create a Burning Man like experience, without the festival. A clean slate of abstract desert psychedelic scenery, opening doors of worlds, planets, other dimensions, I could step beyond this unknown path I travel down, and find my way home.
The words of an intergalactic traveler 