While my paddle muscles weaken, my fingers are getting stronger. That’s because these days I write about surfing more than I participate in it. Especially this year where most waking hours are consumed with my first coffee table tome, “Windansea: Life. Death. Resurrection.”
Doing more work, but making less money than ever, I was forced back into the labor force. There, I found few employers willing to hire someone with no experience, at an age where buying unripe bananas is unwise. As I wrote, and edited, rewrote and re-edited, searched oceans of photos, dealt with proofreaders, copy editors and layout artists, the few shekels I had saved quickly vanish.
It was around that time I received a call from my longtime friend and onetime surfing buddy Bruce King. Bruce, who was once the president of the Swami’s Surfing Association, is the owner of a small avocado grove in the country.
He had called to ask if I needed work. I replied that I did and was soon on his property, painting his newly built barn, pulling weeds and digging and filling holes. It all sounded mindless and so was a welcome relief from a year of rearranging the dictionary into a 50,000-word surf story.
After only hours on the job, I realized how wrong I was, and how wrong much of the world is, in the assumption that people who theorize about life are somehow superior to those who actually live it. There are no erasers in a world of earth, concrete and steel where mistakes require more than hitting the delete button.
Bruce King, who has built and designed everything from fine custom homes to his own brand of surfboards, Soul Rider Surfboards, understands how things function in the real world. Trees require just so much water, weeds require removal and barns are not raised by putting nice words together.
There is a wisdom in a world that exists closer to the earth than that of writers, lawyers and politicians. And yet, those of us who practice the aforementioned professions and live in a theoretical world attempt to determine the destiny of those who plant our trees and build our houses and roads.
Forty-three percent of the U.S. Congress are attorneys. Where are the builders, the farmers, the ranchers, the paycheck to paycheck moms and dads, the factory workers and those who make up this diverse country?
Who in the seats of power have ever built a house from the ground up? Who among them have searched through the cushions for laundry money? Who of them understand that there are laws (like gravity) that govern our every move, and are older, wiser, fairer and yet less forgiving than those they write to tame us?
I doubt Bruce King will ever be president over a body larger than that of the Swami’s Surfing Association. Even if he could, he wouldn’t want to. But he has taught me that there are those whose ideas the world needs to function properly.
Perhaps those in work boots might guide us better than those in wingtips and high heels. I will continue to write, but hopefully from the perspective of those who have been there, not those, like me, who imagine they have.
Dear beloved friend and popular surfer Reyes Gonzalez passed away on Aug. 22 this year. He will be missed in the lineup.
