FAMILY SURF LOG 04

My earliest memories of surfing go back to the early 2000s, growing up in Santa Barbara County and places like Jalama Beach, El Capitan, and the beaches around Vandenberg Air Force Base.

I wasn't raised to be a surfer. My parents had other ideas for me. At the time, they were unconventional people searching for esoteric wisdom within an ever-changing circle of mainstream religious dropouts. Surfing wasn't part of the plan.

Nonetheless, surfing took hold of me. My parents' indifference toward, and sometimes outright condemnation of, surfing shaped the kind of surfer I am today. The surfing I grew up on didn't involve surf camps, surf clubs, or action photography. It was something I discovered on my own.

Let's talk about my first surfboard.

Surfboards in the 2000s looked somewhat similar to the boards we ride today, but the differences, although visually subtle, were pretty remarkable. My first surfboard was already old even back in the 2000s. It was a badly beaten-up OP surfboard that had been discarded by my neighbor. It had a three-fin, glass-on setup with a bump squash tail.

The surfboard came into my possession because my neighbor's son had gotten into some trouble that forced him to grow up fast, and he no longer had time for the board. When my mom found out that I intended to use it to learn how to surf, she was angry. She told me surfing would ruin my life and that I would end up getting into the same kind of trouble as my neighbor if I started surfing.

One day, my mom was headed to the beach just down the road, as she often did, with one of her church friends and their two children. I waited until she wasn't looking and stashed the board in the big blue conversion van we had at the time. Later that morning, I caught my first wave on that board wearing a pair of jorts and a long-sleeve shirt because I was so cold.

That first wave was love at first sight. It was magical, and it is still the same feeling I chase today.

Eventually, that battered, waterlogged surfboard ran its course. Around my tenth birthday, I was given a pair of fins, a tattered wetsuit, and a Morey bodyboard. I was just tickled pink, I’d never been able to surf and be warm at the same time before.

On that bodyboard, I remember riding the shorebreak at Jalama Beach and watching a surfer who kept pulling into closeout barrels. That was my first real introduction to the aggressive style of surfing that came out of the late '90s and early 2000s. I was fascinated by it. Over the years, I would ride a garden variety of borrowed, refurbished, and gifted surfcraft, always trying to capture some part of the magic and style of the surfing I was growing up around.

Eventually, my parents no longer wanted to live in California. Their personal views were becoming less and less compatible with the circles they had been running in, so they decided to move to the middle of nowhere in Tennessee.

Those years were few in number but seemed like an eternity to me.

I watched my parents move through various religious groups and struggle in ways that no kid should have to understand. In the meantime, I saved my money and ordered a blank, some fiberglass, and resin. I built my own surfboard in the barn next to the old-order Mennonite farmhouse my parents had bought.

The board was super zany: twin fins and a triple-wing swallowtail. I took that board everywhere I could, the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and even back to California during those years.

When I was old enough, I left Tennessee almost immediately and joined the Marines. I had hoped I'd get stationed back in California. Instead, I ended up in Hawaii, where I spent more than seven years surfing and continuing to grow into the surfer I had started becoming as a kid.

Looking back, the surfing I grew up on was real. It wasn't commercial. It wasn't something I was taught to participate in. It was something I found for myself. It was in my bones. It was everywhere around me as a kid in California, even when the people closest to me didn't understand why I loved it.

I have many more stories, and much is left out, but that's the meat and potatoes of it.

Surfing became something that carried me into adulthood. It gave me something that was mine.

The surfing I grew up on still keeps me grounded today.