The Resurrection of Kem Nunn

Kem Nunn is driving too fast along a winding, fog-laced stretch of Highway 1 somewhere north of Trinidad. We are looking for a place called “Heart Attacks,” which is not hard to picture loomimg around the next bend on this rain-slick road between roiling sea and overhanging cliffs. Heart Attacks is the elusive destination of Nunn’s fourth novel, “The Dogs of Winter,” which Scribner’s published in February. Heart Attacks is not so much a spot on the map as it is defined by the coordinates of Nunn’s imagination. Also known in the book as Humaliwu, a Native American word meaning “the place where legends die,” it is where Yurok water demons hang out and where the white man’s testosterone explodes into thin air like a wave through a blowhole. * Here, amid the stench of whale carrion and deer carcasses draped in seaweed, Nunn’s modern-day heroes--a couple of middle-aged pilgrims searching for something they lost long ago--come a cropper amid the monster waves and the equally monstrous creatures who dwell on both sides of the mean high tide line. * Kem Nunn is the author of “Tapping the Source,” a 1984 novel about surfers that came and went like a crackling summer storm, marking the sensory memory in the way certain weather or music can. For people who lived the Southern California beach life and many who did not, the book conjured up the perilous playground of youth. “Tapping the Source” was not a bestseller. But it acquired a cult--surf shops were named after it--and a strong critical reception with its nomination for an American Book Award. It created a heavy burden of expectation that Nunn was not able to fulfill until, perhaps, now. * With “The Dogs of Winter,” Nunn has come back to the ocean that inspired his first novel. His story is again about surfers, but this time they are adults and the place is Northern California, in druidical headlands somewhere above Klamath “where the wilderness meets the sea.” Nunn is working on a larger canvas than he has in the past. Grand and hoary, at times malevolent, nature unfolds much as it does in the Old Testament. And there is more than a whiff of the primitive about Nunn’s characters, spiritual descendants of the hunters and adventurers whose destructive charisma has always held society in thrall.

“Surfers love big waves and outlaws,” says the narrator of Nunn’s new novel.

Nunn himself is a lifelong surfer, but it would be a stretch to cast him as one. Forty nine years old, balding and bearded, there is a lot more Grant Wood than David Hasselhoff in the long face of the man sitting next to me in the car. He has the look of a country preacher, says his good friend, novelist Robert Stone. With his undershirt peeking over the top button of his red plaid flannel shirt, it is also easy to picture a methodical New England dory man.

An hour into our drive, Nunn mentions that he likes to carry a gun--a 9-millimeter Glock--when he travels. “I like plinking at rocks,” he says. “You know, just target practice. And some of the places I go, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have your own protection.” He is talking about the forgotten country towns and no-name roadhouses where he tends to find many of his most memorable characters.

Beyond Orrick, as the fog-addled Christmas lights at Thompson’s “Trees of Mystery” tourist stop flash by, Nunn suddenly eases off the accelerator. “My insurance company just told me they are canceling my policy,” he says. “Too many speeding tickets.” He reassures me that his insurance is still good for a few more days and returns to cruising speed.

The great-grandson of a citrus farmer and the son of a Pomona plumber, Nunn was raised in strict fundamentalist Christian fashion as a Jehovah’s Witness. He began training for the ministry as a teenager, which secured him a draft deferment from the Vietnam War. But the road to the religious life was rocky. He fell in with bad company, got thrown out of high school and eventually left the church. He drifted to the coast, where he supported himself working in boatyards and running a janitorial service. On the side, he was painting and writing. In his late 20s he enrolled at UC Irvine as a studio arts major.

It wasn’t until he read “Dog Soldiers,” Stone’s hardboiled tale of Vietnam-era drug smuggling, that he thought he might have a future as a professional writer. “I thought, this is something I could do,” Nunn says, “tell a good, fast story that had something to say. That’s how I came to write ‘Tapping the Source.’ I was living in Huntington Beach at the time, and it struck me as a fascinating milieu for a book. It was the last undeveloped beach town, full of surf shops, head shops and biker bars.” Stone, whom Nunn had never met, turned up at Irvine during Nunn’s senior year as a visiting author-in-residence. “Meeting him, for me, was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences,” Nunn says. “He liked my work and introduced me to an agent.”

“Tapping the Source” is a coming-of-age story about a kid from the desert who sets out to find his sister’s killer. He ends up in Huntington Beach, only to be waylaid by the honky-tonk culture that harbors the secret of the murder. Critics compared Nunn to Raymond Chandler, James Cain and Ross MacDonald. The movie rights were snapped up. Despite all that, “Tapping the Source” was only a moderate commercial success, selling fewer than 10,000 copies. It was consigned to the beach book list by distributers who couldn’t figure out how to categorize this literary adventure story. The movie was never made.

Looking back on those days, Nunn says he probably didn’t help himself as much as he might have. Enrolled in a master of fine arts program at Columbia University when the book was sold to a publisher, he decided to head back west and transfer to UC Irvine’s graduate writing program, where he received his MFA. “Arguably, it would have been smarter for me to stay in New York and build more of a literary career for myself. It wasn’t that I felt out of place. I just wanted to come home and go surfing again.”

It was the beginning of what his longtime editor, Jane Rosenman, calls Nunn’s “East Coast problem.” “Up to now, at least, he hasn’t been able to get the literary establishment to pay attention to him,” says Rosenman. “It is partly due to the California setting of his books. But it’s also Kem. He hasn’t been active in the college scene. He’s not part of the circuit. And, you know, Mr. Chatterbox, he ain’t. He is a very strong presence in his own laconic way, very conscious of the enormously different background he came from. He went to college very late. He didn’t come by books through his family, except the Bible. That all can lead to a certain feeling of outsiderness.”

Rosenman recalled her first meeting with Nunn in New York. “Not only didn’t he look like a surfer, about the first thing he said to me when we went to lunch was that he had been brought up a Witness. Well, there I was a Jewish girl from New York, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. But, you know, it didn’t take long to realize I was talking to an original.”

The sale of movie rights to “Tapping the Source” did bring in enough money to allow Nunn to buy a house in Huntington Beach. (Today he lives alone in an old farmhouse in Tomales, north of San Francisco.) The book also led to screenwriting jobs. None of his work has been produced, but it’s provided him with a steady income while he’s continued to write fiction. His next two novels, “Unassigned Territory” and “Pomona Queen,” took aim at the new California from a vantage point just beyond its reach. But out there in the scabrous ground behind the shopping centers, where lost souls wandered among the junk yards and rabbit brush, pondering the imponderable, Nunn may have gotten too involved in his own ideas. Exploring religious and cultural alienation, his narratives lost compression, and some of his audience may have wandered away.

“ ‘Tapping the Source’ was on the edge of a genre,” Nunn says. “All the comparisons with Chandler, Cain and MacDonald clearly created expectations that weren’t met with ‘Unassigned Territory.’ Some people thought I’d gone nuts. After you have published a couple of times, people start looking for the breakthrough book. ‘Pomona Queen’ wasn’t that book.”

However, with “The Dogs of Winter,” a sharply focusd story about good and evil, Nunn may have produced a book with enough action and ideas to satisfy readers and himself. There is a lot going on in this supercharged tale of white man’s bravado and red man’s revenge against a menacing backdrop of crankster gangsters and sneaker waves, shape-shifters and great whites. There is witchcraft, insanity, savagery and, in the end, a peace that may indeed surpass understanding, at least a little. Like the novel’s lengendary surfer, who builds extra-long redwood “guns” to ride the big waves of the Pacific Northwest, Nunn has fashioned his own gun--a plot sturdy enough to carry a fair amount of intellectual cargo a long way toward shore. “I told my editor I wanted to write a Gnostic surf fable,” says Nunn, “without being entirely sure what I was talking about.”

Nunn’s fiction also teems with live influences, many of them drawn from the shoreline shantytown of old Huntington Beach, where wave-riders retained a certain outlaw aura. One of the standouts was Mickey “Da Cat” Dora who, according to a legend relayed by Nunn, performed feats of artistry in national competitions, then closed out his career by mooning the judges and walking off the beach at Malibu before they’d had a chance to declare him a winner.

Nunn says he’s been drawn to outlaws of one sort or another since he was a child growing up in a religion that frowned on conventional associations. “Kids who were Witnesses didn’t play sports or join the Boy Scouts. You were made to feel like an outsider, and the only other people like that were the thugs,” Nunn says. “I naturally hung around with them and got in a fair amount of trouble.”

Nunn was also strugglng to fulfill his family’s expectations that he become a lay preacher. He began ministering to down-and-out cases at a local residential hotel. He liked the people, and he had a genuine interest in religion that he cultivated by seeking out faculty members at a nearby divnity school.

Later those experiences would show up in “Unassigned Territory,” a novel about apprentice preacher Obadiah Wheeler and his crisis of faith. “Obadiah could accordingly spend one afternoon trying to get a handle on faith as eschatological existence and the next talking to Tex Hudnel, the inventor of Projection Prayer, a man who regularly conversed with God Himself in the closet of his room at the Pomona Hotel.”

Like Obadiah, Nunn couldn’t cope with the nightly uprising of adolescent hormones, and the strains of a double life proved too much for him.”During the day I was conducting Bible studies, and at night I was going to biker bars, drinking myself senseless. I was making myself insane.”

Nunn quit the ministry and hasn’t been a practicing Witness for many years, but the language of religion and the cadence of Scripture continue to run through his work. “I find the Bible quite primal,” he says. “It talks about people fornicating with one another’s wives, having other people killed, and yet it is profound and mysterious at the same time, like the story of Job.”

Here and there you can hear an echo of the Witnesses’ belief that the end is near. “It is the idea that these are the last days,” he says, “and you’d better be getting your s - - - together before it all comes down.”

*

“The Dogs of Winter” opens in Southern California with a 3 a.m. phone call to Jack Fletcher, a once-renowned surfing photographer who has fallen on hard times. Fletcher’s career unraveled after a botched photo assignment, and he now holds body and soul together gobbling pain pills and shooting weddings. For Fletcher, the phone call is more than a chance for a new beginning. In the world where he made his reputation, it is a crack at immortality. He’ll have an opportunity to photograph a couple of legends.

One is Drew Harmon, “the old lion, the holy ghost of professional surfing. The other was California’s premier mysto wave, the last secret spot. They said you had to cross Indian land to get there--a rocky point somewhere south of the Oregon border where Heart Attacks was the name given to an outside reef--capable, on the right swell, of generating rideable waves in excess of 30 feet. There were no roads in. They said you risked your ass just to reach it . . . . If there was poor visibility, due to fog or winds or heavy rains. . . you would never know whether you had reached it or not. If, on the one hand, one did find it, one risked one’s ass all over again. The reef lay among some of the deepest offshore canyons in the northern Pacific, naked to every hateful thing above and below the water. Nor were the homeboys keen on visitors. . . . “

Into this shadowy world steps Fletcher and a pair of extra surfers sent along by the surf magazine’s publisher. They are Sonny Martin and Robbie Jones, one of the more daft figures to arise from the Boschian hothouse of Nunn’s imagination. A spirited youngster who taunts Fletcher about his past failure, Jones is a head-shaven, born-again hotdogger whose natural bellicosity has been aggravated by a nasty reaction to a piece of jewelry attached to his privates.

As Fletcher surveys the ocean he has come to ride, it becomes quickly apparent that the word “surf” does not begin to do justice to the environment he is about to test himself in. “The amount of water involved was such that it was like watching a piece of the earth become liquid, as if in some cataclysm, or at the hour of creation.”

Before he wrote the book, Nunn spent time exploring the Northern California coastline, visiting big wave spots and getting to know the locals, including Native Amricans who took him to remote reservation settlements and a ceremony that white people do not often get to see. “I’d gotten interested in the area, and in surfing up here. I was curious about what caused people to want to surf in such an inhospitable environment,” Nunn says. “The water seems heavier and is definitiely colder. There are periodic shark attacks. And the Indians don’t always take kindly to white guys in wetsuits tramping around their beaches.”

I am not a surfer, but I have often been drawn to the landscapes of books. I’ve floated the Chattooga, the forbidding river of James Dickey’s “Deliverance,” trekked through some of the sandstone badlands of Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” and driven across miles of the Sonoran Desert, where Cormac McCarthy’s gang of scalp hunters prowled in “Blood Meridian.” In my imaginings, such places often present a glimpse of the biblical wilderness where the Hebrews wandered and where the Gospels say Jesus went to face down torment and temptation.

Nunn has surfed the waters off the Northern California coast. He says he has never seen a shark close by, but he has gotten in tight spots. “You’re all by yourself in what feels like the middle of the ocean. You’ve gotten caught in the impact zone and you’re being rolled by one wave after another. Your first impulse is to panic, to give up. But, of course, you can’t give in to that.”

But he says he has not surfed Heart Attacks, or the real-life version of it, the whereabouts of which Nunn is evasive. “Heart Attacks is where you find it,” he says, suggesting that his novel is less about a particular landscape of drizzle and doom than it is about the moral precipice that men of a certain age and temperament can come to.

“This is a book about middle age, about getting from one stage to another,” he says. “Jung called this stage in life ‘dead center,’ when youth and, in some ways, power are behind you.” But “The Dogs of Winter” is not about surviving the ordinary crises of middle age--a fling with the secretary or a rope-climbing accident at Outward Bound for grown-ups. Nunn may be preoccupied with masculine myths, but Robert Bly he is not. Nature and nurture don’t go together in his world. Outsiders who come searching for spiritual fulfillment can get a lot more than they bargained for.

Whether it is the Mojave Desert or the Pacific Coast, Nunn’s outdoors is no paradise. “Up-river” is his metaphor for true wilderness in “The Dogs of Winter.” It may have a somber beauty, but venom ferments in the souls of its inhabitants, and when someone pokes a stick at them, God help the innocent down river. “I love to hike and mountain bike and spend time in the mountains,” Nunn says. “But I have never regarded the wilderness as a particularly friendly place. You carry plenty of water, extra clothes, maybe a gun, depending on where you’re going.”

More than anything, the natural world of Nunn’s novel resembles the dark woods of Puritan times, where real and imagined dangers lurked under the heading “red devils.” Nunn says he read several firsthand accounts of Indian hostage-taking. Often expressed in religious language, these ordeals of captivity are likened to descents into hell, and their rescue is equated with salvation.

There is a strange ambivalence, though, around some of those stories that Nunn has picked up on in his own work. The people who survived captivity in the wilderness gave thanks to God for their deliverance. But some had found their own way out of the woods. They came home dressed in animal skins, speaking the language of their captors. They owed their survival less to providence than to some primeval affinity with the natural world, a gift that was easily mistaken for heresy or madness.

* On the morning of Nunn’s one full day on the northern coast, the sun is out and the fog is gone. Early January is a good time to see the dogs of winter, the big waves that the book is named after. Yet the sea is calm, and there’s not a trace of the enveloping gloom of Nunn’s novel. It is one of those days when Heart Attacks, wherever it was, might be as benign as Santa Monica Bay. At the dockside restaurant where we head for breakfast, a pack of harbor seals cavorts and kvetchs, extending the friendliest welcome they are capable of. “I’ve never seen it so nice up here,” Nunn says.

At breakfast we are joined by Nunn’s friend Larry Mathews, the administator of a local jobs program for Native Americans. Mathews is part Yurok. He was Nunn’s guide to the reservations and a model for Travis, one of the more sympathetic characters in the book. He is brawny, good natured and a rarity among local Indians, a surfer. Mathews demands to be filled in on the novelist’s latest doings, fishing for any romantic tidbits that might be spinning about in the turbulent backwash of Nunn’s recent divorce.

“Hey, man,” Nunn says, “I’m living alone in an empty house with a chair, a TV, a bed and a stove.”

“Hell, you’re in business,” Mathews says. “But what does a writer need a TV for?”

Mathews has brought bad news. Recent heavy rains have made travel impossible to the dark country upriver. We head out to see what we can, and Nunn and Mathews recount their experiences upriver at a jump dance, a ceremony Nunn re-creates toward the end of the book as a counterweight to the mayhem that precedes it.

“We went through hell getting there,” Mathews says, describing a series of encounters with bad roads, bugs, poison oak, pit bulls and armed natives who were not immediately convinced that Mathews is an Indian.

The jump dance, which lasts 10 days, was held, says Mathews, at the same fire pits that have been used for 10,000 years. “Before you go, you should ask your heart, ‘Am I clean enough in thought and spirit to be here?’ You dance to ward off all the negative things that are harmful to you. To get off drugs, maybe, or to get enough strength to keep your drawers on when you are around your neighbor’s wife. Or maybe you dance for your kids, so they will have enough strength to make it in the outside culture.

“It’s good, strong, old-time religion.”

With “The Dogs of Winter,” Nunn clearly is still poking around in the embers of his own faith. “Religion creates the narrative,” he says, “in which our actions have meaning.”

There is talk of sin and grace among the novel’s characters, and, as they are trespassing across Indian land at one point, Drew Harmon asks the born-again Robbie Jones whether he believes there is such a thing as unforgivable sin.

“Apostasy.”

“Nothing else? . . .”

“Everything,” Robbie Jones said, “can be forgiven, if one seeks forgiveness. Except the sin of apostasy, for speaking against the blood of the Christ.”

Nunn attaches another meaning to it. “Apostasy is knowing what the truth is and acting against it.”

Other novelists have described it as defying the natural law, a theme as old as Melville. It is the sort of big idea that connects Nunn’s tale of surfer hubris to the mainstream of American literature. But “The Dogs of Winter” is also about language, the premonitory and the profane. Nunn has a keen ear for the jabber of low-lifes and nincompoops. His riffs on the argot can be wickedly funny.

The surfers are eating breakfast and getting ready for their first morning of surfing when Fletcher goads Jones into a discussion of health food, pierced body parts and sanctification. “As Fletcher watched, Robbie turned off the blender and set about pouring a string of brownish liquid the consistency of spent tobacco juice into a large plastic cup. . . .”

“Didn’t know you were into health foods.”

“Body’s a temple of the Lord, bro.”

Fletcher rose painfully from his bag. . . . He set about dressing in the cold light. “Wonder what the Lord’s take on penis studs might be?” he asked.

“What I do,” Robbie told him, “I do to His glory.”

On the drive home, Nunn talks a bit about his next novel. It will be set in the desert again, he thinks, in some boarded-up backwater where dreamers scan the night skies for flying saucers, where stolen ordnance is stockpiled in abandoned mines and cashiered sergeants plot the overthrow. Nunn say he has been thinking lately about Timothy McVeigh, the prime suspect in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

“Surfers love big waves and outlaws,” Nunn chuckles, repeating the line from his book. Nunn’s outlaws are heirs to a grand tradition of indominable reprobates, like Melville’s Ahab and London’s Wolf Larsen. With their seductive blend of physical courage and erudtion, cruelty and sensitivity, they are American archetypes.

Nunn, though, is also a moralist, still witnessing in his own way. His judgement is stern, and his characters do not escape their fate. They get caught in “the impact zone.” Waves thunder down on them. Sharks appear.

Nunn recalls a quote from Ecclesiastes: “The fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.”

Nunn is not sure whether he got it right.

He did.