Tarp Roller's philosophy of life

HUGE Wave

Tarp Roller’s size 13 worn leather boot pushed on the door of the treatment center.  His leg swung out, propping open the door like a pine tree. His face was obscured by a stack of t-shirts and books with his nose poking out from his Pono cap (1). Sunglasses shielded the glare on the eye he’d lost in a knife attack years ago. At six foot five he had to dip his head through the door. 

The quarter back of the Cardinals championship 73’ team had tackled his childhood emotional Trauma. His self esteem was dented but beginning to push in a new direction. His comeback was underway.

No more dwelling on a childhood growing up mostly naked in a swamp in Louisiana as somehow not  good enough. He began to understand we are all the same, just many shades of the same cloth.

He found a way inside himself, picking apart the gordian knot twisted around his being, held together with karmic cycles of intergenerational trauma.

The light of knowing was all the knife he needed to cut the knot. And now his body needed waves. His strength of being and his presence had returned. He was no longer a fractionalized version of itself.

The inner path of sunyata and nada now guided him on the middle way.  

Powered by a lawn mower engine  under a thatched shed, it only ran three times a day when the planes came. The baggage carousel was not a busy place. 

In the quiet open air terminal I saw the back of a head with a blonde ponytail a foot above the three people in front of me. After collecting his long board and bag Tarp headed for the truck.

We stopped at El Tubo, a patio restaurant with brightly colored tables and decor of the ocean that served pancakes all day. A large mural on the wall pulled me into a giant wave. It transported me, standing up on a surfboard, looking back into the restaurant.

I was jolted back to the present when a waitress spilled a tray of water on me.

“My body aches for the water", Tarp said.

“But what does your soul need",  I asked?

Tarp pondered as we drove….

“Inner peace", he contemplated out loud.

 

At the bungalows, we unloaded the pickup I’d borrowed from the local Dentist who owned the place. Everywhere nature flourished. Pablo the caretaker's idenity stayed anonymous under his large straw sombrero while his  big hands worked in the dirt.

I grabbed a ripe Mango and found  a hammock on the porch of our bungalow. Tarp slid into another hammock stretching out his lanky frame and we fell into the trance of the Mexican Pacific coast at sunset.

 

A curved tail skittered across the tile floor, pointing its tail into space like an alien invader, it caught my eye as I peeled the Mango. 

The pointy tail was connected to a multi-legged body with          shrimp like pinchers that were set wide like a bull dozer at the front of the beast.

Suddenly a giant flip-flop sailed over me and landed close to the bug startling it into the open floor. Undetected, an Iguana in the flower bed darted to suck down the Scorpion with a flick of its tongue. I lay in the hammock pondering the irony of my comfort, thinking about what it felt like to be eaten alive.

 

I asked Tarp, “What do you think happens after we die?”

 

He pulled the t-shirt off his face in silence. 

 

“I think a lot we don’t know about happens.”, he replied. “If anything exists at all,—— a lot of what we think about now doesn’t exist. Nothing material would exist... I don’t think one could be unhappy.” he reflected.

 

I pulled a string attached to the wall to swing my hammock. 

 

"Why?" I asked.

 

“Because there would be no source of unhappiness”, he answered from a place deep inside himself that resonated with inner knowing.

 

The Iguana moved back to the flower bed, the Scorpion’s tail sticking out of its mouth. It blinked and seemed to grin as it digested the Scorpion.

 

"If nothing exists, What would we do?" I asked.

 

"Nothing that we do now", he said as he continued to think about his answer.

His seeming non-answer spoke volumes. Tarp grabbed a carrot and clarified his thought using the carrot as his  pointer.

“Time and space wouldn’t exist,… if it even exists now,” he said.

“Does this carrot really exist?", he queried an invisible audience. 

We’d instantly travel anywhere, and interact without words. The possibilities are limitless.” He smiled as he pulled the t-shirt back over his face.  

 

We spent the evening like this stacking questions on top of questions for hours, intermingled with possibilities, building a future without a destination, but with unlimited possibilities. Rocking in our hammocks until a slice of the moon rose giving the stars some rest as we slept.

It was a short walk to the beach before sunrise the next morning around a big rock out crop protruding into the surf, and onto a long quiet beach with huge swells in the distance just coming into view with the sunrise.

A  strong offshore wind carried cool mountain air to the ocean, throwing a cold spray across the top of the waves. Massive waves came into focus and dominated the beach. The crashing heightened the senses, and Tarp threw off his flip flops.

The sand became firmer hardening our reality, and fear. I wondered what I’d gotten into. 

A trio of surfers broke away wading into the shore wash and started to paddle out. The giant waves close to the shore broke quickly and churned into powerful walls of foam erasing any easy opportunity for a way out.

The off shore break peeled away slowly luring the surfers farther out. 

The outside break was a test of its own requiring perfect timing to paddle a hundred yards between sets and carried the surfer’s sideways in the strong current.

The surfers brought the ocean to life as they slid between breaking waves carefully picking a path to the calmer water. Bobbing heads and boards formed a line of indecision in the water.

 

I’m out there somewhere telling myself I don’t belong as I wait, remembering being seven years old standing on the high dive feeling closer to God than the water below. I felt trapped in a body not ready for the forces being exerted on it. I was never much of a surfer. I learned to surf growing up on the Texas coast where the waves are about the size of a toaster oven most of the time...These waves loomed as big as a building that wanted to crush me like an iceberg.

 

I had the joy of learning to fly for half a second as I descended on a surfboard out of control from the top of the wave. I paddled hard and pitched forward onto the face of a wave that wanted to see me dead. The nose of my board caught the water and I was tossed like a crash test dummy and buried by the ocean. 

The wave was a cruel deep blue, and double overhead. It jacked up without warning from the Pacific, it peeled forward pounding against the beach expressing what felt like rage.

In a last gasp of life, as some gnat of a surfer floated on a toothpick on its back, the wave convulsed, transforming from a mighty warrior as it smashed onto the shore, dissolving back into the ocean—but not before it put me through a few rounds in the spin cycle. I looked like I was trying to ride a buffalo being chased by Indians. 

The arrows found me. The water mixed with the early morning tropical air and turned the ocean a blue green effervescent—and the sun’s rays filtered through the wave while it rolled like a giant piece of liquid concrete pipe into the grainy sand of the Mexico beach. The gnat never had a chance. I was crushed by crazy countless tons of the wild Pacific Ocean over and over. The toothpick was destroyed, spit out unwanted by the ocean. 

I floated toward the surface, and the surfboard became my attacker, bashing me in the leg like someone hit a home run on my calf. Pain—sheer, immense pain. I couldn’t think. 

Instinct forced me forward. I swam towards the light and broke the surface, only to be pushed back against the sandy ocean floor by the next crushing wave. 

Keep trying, I told myself. I emerged in foam—half water, half air. I inhaled deeply, big mistake. I don't have gills.

My body was defeated, no longer able to support life. I'm not ready to die I thought.

At that instant a a giant hand reached into the water, grabbed my shorts and pulled me up.

1. Pono: Hawaiian concept of harmony and balance.