Toddy M.

Photograph by Jer Thorp

The first time I saw Toddy M. he was naked.

The ride down had been rough, the four-wheel-drive Pajero fording streams and bouncing over badly divoted, washed-out dirt road. At the beginning, near the airstrip, there had been ranches: large, sprawling, barren holdings that seemed to peter out into jungle or swamp, the lazy, ragged cattle wandering over the road and slowing our already sluggish progress, dumb eyes gazing back at us, too stupid or too surprised to move. My driver leaned on his horn, shouted in Bahasa and finally opened the door, hopped down into the dirt and ran toward the indifferent beasts, swatting their asses with a broken-off windshield wiper he kept for this purpose.

After a while it was only jungle, closely spaced trunks hung with vines and strangler tree branches, the canopy closing above us for stretches so that you couldn't see where one tree's foliage ended and another's began. We slowed to a crawl, first-gear grinding over the deep holes, the entire vehicle descending more than once into brooks and streams that rose nearly to the windows and left the floor of the car soaked with brown water. Upon emerging from one of these crossings, I found a beautiful little emerald-green frog with purple eyes and a bright red neck submerged in these centimeters of catchment, desperately pistoning its legs, trying to gain purchase on the plastic interior. I opened the door and was about to gather him up with my hand when the driver, noticing what I was doing, shouted at me to stop.

He pointed to his own neck, then the frog. "Poison."

He reached behind and came up with a halved detergent jug with the capped side down and proffered it. I carefully scooped up the frog with a few ounces of water and poured him onto the road.

We emerged from the dense flora, came around a bend as the road grew smoother, swung downhill toward the Indian Ocean and saw this naked foreign man surfing the inside of a perfect right-hand point break. He was moving left to right in front of me, gliding down the face of a powerful, beautifully formed cylinder of water. He stood more upright on the yellow surfboard than I would have imagined possible, his stance surprisingly sturdy-looking in spite of, or perhaps because of, his nudity. As the wave began to break behind him—at first in a smooth white curtain drawing closed in his wake and then in sections starting to collapse as he approached the shore—he crouched a little bit, vanished into a sheet of white water and then emerged out the other side of the tube before carving up and out of the wave and falling back into the water for an instant. It was a dazzling show, and I looked at my driver, expecting him to be as impressed as I was, but he stayed focused on the road.

Toddy had apparently seen us making our way down from the headlands, and by the time the road had straightened to run parallel to the ocean, he was out of the water. But he was nowhere to be seen when we pulled up to a white concrete house built in a narrow, flat-bottomed gully between the ocean and a spit where some shallow cliffs protruded from the jungled hills.

I was out of the car and had opened the tailgate of the Pajero when I saw Toddy come around the side of the house, still nude. He had brown hair, just beginning to thin as it receded around a prominent widow's peak, gray-blue eyes, a narrow, long nose and thin lips, which he tended to tuck in so that they were hidden, as if he was contemplative. Now I could see that he had several tattoos on arms and chest: a wave, a yin-and-yang sign, a backward swastika and a Hawaiian hang-loose thumb and pinky. His chest...