The Women In Tofino: Random Excerpts from a diary gone Awry

These are taken from my time in Tofino, mostly from around late November, early December, 2007


Opportunities are occasional and strictly business: Efficient, five minute operations. If surfing was twenty four hours a day, this place would be so easy, but I keep running out of ways to pretend I don’t secretly hate myself. It’s like the Ocean, I suppose. Someday’s you’re out there fighting it with all your heart. Some days you sit in Jay’s van soaking wet and shivering, reading the fine print on the Les Schwab five year tire warranty pamphlet while prancing medieval villainesses cast you machine gun glares from the secular comfort of their self satisfied, neoprene coated yogurt and granola nourished utopias. The first rule of Crumb-assed girls in wetsuits with Huskies is: You do not talk about Crumb-assed girls in wetsuits with Huskies!

On certain small swell days at Cox bay, the waves only form up way over at the right hand side near the black rocks. Today most of the bay had flattened out, so I, Jay, Peter Devries, and about ten other surfers had crowded up around the only rideable peak that was forming, twenty feet out from the cliffs. We were close enough that you could hear the waves schlupping up against the rocks as they bent around the black barnacled bulge where eagle sized gulls mocked us while we bobbed in the slow rollers.
From the neck up; The girls, when wearing the black, hooded wetsuits tend to look like Death from Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’. From the Neck down they look like Angelfood Mcspade (The Horny tragic Negress heroine from various early Robert Crumb comics. As weirdly as my emotions are mixed, the combination nonetheless, in theory at least, is appetizing.

…There are hundreds of them in this town alone. Some of them listen to Django Reinhardt and hail from the Yukon. Others, more Vaginal, let the Sea Bears lap up against their hungry genitals for hours at a time.
They eat Pammican until they’re drunk, and take turns punching their pussies at night in dimly lit gambling shanties loosely assembled from pieces of cedar driftwood at Tonquin Beach on Wednesday nights.
They stretch neoprene over their swollen breasts until steaming nipples punch through the artificial fibres and duel with clenched fists and knives between their teeth.
They all have long, ragged seaweed hair , and their average height is up near seven feet tall, and prance barefoot over barnacles.
They are mum, silent, and wordless because they don’t talk, and have nothing to say. Sometimes they sing, but only when the Moon is out, and the sea urchins are copulating.
They hunt abalone in stormswell for kicks.
They let deer trample them. For kicks.
Their Huskies don’t bark, but their sad eyes are ice blue. That growling animal’s rippling maw is the closest I’ll ever get. Not everything out here has eyes, but everything has a mouth. Everything has a mouth. Some of it eats me, but I don’t get cooked.

…All the nice people are gone from this place. What remains are the Germans. They look like extras from the final scenes in ‘Saving Private Ryan. They have military haircuts and they all go for them.
Last night, in the corner, two of them were sitting at a table in the corner, wrapping copper wire around a pencil. They are polite, though they keep to themselves. They keep an old servant lady with rhombus shaped buttocks in tow.
Last Night I woke up with hunger pangs, and went down for a snack. Sure enough, four German men were all sitting n a circle in the dining area having a silent circle jerk. I went back to bed hungry, and didn’t really fall asleep before morning.

At Some Point after Bethanny went on her way:

The crumbling ladies of the night, scribbled carelessly on the storm windows in water soluble crayon are dripping down through the wet granite seams of this town’s bedrock and with it my fingers slosh and liquefy.
I’m drying out like a piece of apricot lost to the chasm between the bed and the wall. Statically charged and attracting waterbears, dustmites, pollen and exfoliated skin cells. Detritus alone waiting to be swept away or sucked on.
Every night it drips away and I’m left to a romantic despair, to commit a dozen little suicides for each of my storm battered tendrils. There’s a hundred of us spread out over this beach, but you won’t hear us calling. Waiting for the sun to come and dry us out, if that golden thing ever arrives. Tuberculosis. Sloshing when these bad words and this bad mooncome to pass many happy and painless deaths from now, and the crevices on my face are etched a little deeper by the salt and the driving sea, I’ll discover my rootlessness and invest wisely in the basalt Quarries of Nova Scotia.
The Morons keep crawling up the beach into the fire. Desperate, and blind, they heed no warning and obey no special logic. The liquids in my flesh drain out painlessly and new ones are absorbed.
I’ll fashion a catheter from driftwood and imitate my golden years on this bed of kelp, while dancing European tourist girls ooh and ahh at the small size of Mr. dithers, my whithered willy. My life is peppered by mistakes repeated. Swinging fists and Mocking expressions. Bolivia and the CIA.