As twilight settles in the following evening, I wander the main road, which is paved but lacks painted lines. Downtown Cabarete is a cluster of tightly packed shops insulated from the nearby sea by the hotels and cafés that claim every last inch of profitable beachside real estate. Even the waves can’t compete with the roaring motoconchos that wheeze and snore like overfed hogs. Shopkeepers here hustle, lowering prices at each hint of buyer indecision, competing with a backdrop of colorful ads and billboards strung above the street. Here, one can see the other side of Cabarete – not the surf town where overpriced mojitos have taken hold but the third-world barrio where development, such as the past year’s addition of round-the-clock power, is as slow and visible as a slug’s progress.
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But it’s not without charm, I realize as I catch the eye of a woman at a brightly painted fruit stall. I trace the mangoes awash with red as bright as bougainvillea. But instead, I trade a pittance of pesos for some bananas. I turn to leave but hear her clucking. She reaches for my hand and gives me the reddest mango, telling me that it’d be a sin not to eat it when it smells of such ripeness.
Back at camp, the mood ripples with “surf stoke.” A natural buzz, stoke follows a killer surf session or precedes possibly dream-worthy conditions. It can also be the reward for a ride well-earned. As those around me crack open Heinekens, adding tallies to bar tabs, I hear about the waves they caught earlier.
Barnaby still seems buoyant. Earlier that morning, she bounced into Swell, her blond pixie cut still dripping from a stand-up paddling session. The waves had body-checked her several times, sending her airborne from the 16-foot longboard. But she rose again and again, determined to master the task.
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“And now I love it,” she beams.
Over a Dominican home-style meal of beans and rice, chicken heavy with cumin and pepper, and fried yucca patties studded with coriander seeds, Barnaby shares her story. After flipping several homes before the unpacking ever began, she sought the sanctuary of an island paradise, family in tow.
A free-spirited kiter, Barnaby quickly concluded that Cabarete was what she had been searching for, despite its daily hurdles. “Nobody will argue whether life is nicer here or in the mainland, be it the U.K. or U.S.,” she says, acknowledging the perks of a clean ocean, generous coastline and starry sky unfettered by the haze of big-city lights. “But we will argue if life here is easier or more difficult.”
She pauses to pour another round of chardonnay. “The consensus seems to be that it is more difficult.”
There’s a certain pride in the statement that I don’t understand until I meet Eric Hertsens, the Belgian-born founder of EH Kiteboarding. Windsurfing lured Hertsens to Cabarete – the original Caribbean hot spot for the sport – in 1982. Trading a steady job for time on the water, he subsisted on fish and coconuts. Tourism began to trickle in when the neighboring town of Sosúa started to overflow with Dominican visitors. In 1990, Cabarete hosted a windsurfing World Cup, becoming a name in that sport’s community, and soon as many as 300 sails a day turned the blue canvas into a Seurat-like masterpiece confettied with color. Each night during the tourism explosion, Hertsens knew to follow the trail of drunks asleep on the beach to locate the party.
Hertsens fills out the rough details others have only hinted at. He tells of run-ins with police during his early years and why, on local politics, he stays as neutral as Switzerland.
He asks if I have a Cabarete tattoo and then lifts a pant leg, revealing a patch of skin burned smooth from the exhaust pipe of a motoconcho.
Some of the things grounding Hertsens here are harder to label good or bad. “Freedom,” he cites as the reason he feels most at home in a town that hasn’t shed its grit. “There are no police here, no rules, no government.” With little structure in place in the D.R., risk can favor the daring or take everything from an entrepreneur who missteps once.
“You’re on your own,” he says of a lifestyle that seems to attract only independent people, the kind who would have been lured to the Wild West – if the Wild West had a killer surf break.
Later, while walking the beach, I consider Hertsens’ words, realizing I don’t know what it would feel like to make the expat leap. But I can easily picture my fear, my weakness in overanalyzing a moment ripe with possibility – listening to doubt and clinging to the known.
Cabarete wouldn’t exist had it not been for those early windsurfers, those ready to strike out on their own and forge the next expat frontier. Here, those ready to accept the challenge define what this town will become.
Sometimes you just have to jump.
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