JUSTIN HOCKING:::VINTAGE 1920s CALYPSO

Hocking Relatives, Historically Regarded
(An excerpt from the memoir-in-progress The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir of Moby Dick, Surfing, and Redemption at Sea by Justin Hocking)

After earning an engineering degree in his home state of Illinois, my father, Roger Hocking, packed his belongings into his white 1961 bathtub Porsche and headed west. He landed in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a working-class ski town near Aspen and the home of the world’s largest outdoor hot springs pool. Finding work on a highway department survey crew, he was quickly promoted to supervisor, and took to wearing cowboy boots and smoking cigars on the job in hopes of winning respect from the older men on his crew. Weekends he spent skiing at Sunlight Ski Area, a quaint operation with only two glacially paced chairlifts. The rustic lodge smelled like grilled cheeseburgers and damp nylon and cherry-cola chapstick. Runs with names like Sun King and Ute were carved out from groves of aspen and pine. It was here that he met an attractive young nursing student from Missouri who spent her Thanksgiving break visiting family in Glenwood and skiing Sunlight. During an après-ski party at my father’s upstairs apartment in Four Mile Canyon, my mother had a bit too much to drink and pounded out a Russian-style dance, squatting down and stomping her heavy ski boots on the hardwood floor. My father found it charming and hilarious—especially after the downstairs neighbors came up to complain. He invited her on several ski dates, and then a couple weeks later drove the old Porsche back to Missouri for a cordial visit. My mother’s family took a shine to this handsome young man (my grandmother thought he looked like a young JFK with crooked teeth), so much so that he was invited back to Prairie Park for their annual Christmas party.
My grandmother always spent weeks preparing for her holiday parties, straining so hard to make everything perfect that she’d inevitably spend several days afterward in bed with a migraine. She hired an entire team of help to decorate, polish up the silver and china, serve drinks and hors d’ouevres, park cars. The expansive guest list included hundreds of people from as far away as Kansas City; so many RSVP’d that my grandmother decided to split the party up into three distinct shifts—mid-morning, afternoon and evening. The son of a traveling salesman, my father had never seen anything quite like it—the stately old mansion decked out in garlands and silver Christmas lights, the hired help dressed up in long-tailed tuxedos, the well-to-do guests coming and going in waves of perfume and pipe smoke, all of it like something from a Dickens novel.
My father was one of the few guests permitted to attend all three shifts. In his sharp sports coat and tie he mingled and charmed guests with his earthy sense of humor and hearty laugh, all the while managing to flirt secretly with my mother. After the two stole a quick kiss behind an antique Asian changing screen in the parlor, my father wandered into the library, where he found my grandfather speaking rather formally to a tall, handsome, bearded young man wearing a double breasted, royal-blue blazer with gold buttons—each button festooned with a gilded anchor. With his long chestnut hair and deeply tanned face he was the perfect picture of a sea captain, who stood out from the other pasty Midwesterners the way Herman Melville must have stood out among his own aristocratic east coast family. My father intuited that this was the eccentric brother my mother had told him about, home for the first time since his exile from Prairie Park. My father remembers the palpable sense of tension between my uncle and grandfather—the tenor of their conversation more like that between two opposing politicians than a father and son.
He waited until my grandfather left, then introduced himself to my uncle. John seemed a bit unnerved after speaking with his father, but at the same time relieved to talk with another man his age. Somewhat to my mother’s chagrin, they struck up a conversation that lasted the better part of the afternoon and evening party shifts.
Knowing them both as older men, their instantaneous friendship seems somewhat unlikely to me now. My father is a Republican, a retired civil engineer and avid golfer with an even-keeled emotional life; John is a liberal massage therapist and practicing shaman who’s prone to moodiness. But at the time they were both adventurous young men, ruggedly physical, handsome. There was an attraction, a mutual admiration that had subtle effects on them both, but particularly on my younger father. He already had a love for the sea—a love that survived in his Cornwall blood even through many generations of Hockings landlocked in Illinois. During engineering school he’d taken a semester off and rented a beach shack in Daytona, Florida, where he spent a few carefree months drinking beer with his buddies, surfing, meeting girls and living the good life in the sun. He loved life in the Colorado Rockies but sometimes missed the beach, and in John he found a vital link to the sea.
As for John, he needed a male ally in the family, as well as a little help with his trigonometry and geometry. He was proficient with nautical navigation, but required a better mathematical foundation to achieve full mastery. John proposed that in return for my father’s help, he’d teach him about sailing. Over the course of the next few days, they spent hours at my grandparent’s big solid pine table, a fire crackling in the hearth as my father taught John about angles, trig functions, cosigns and tangents, the pythagorem thereom and other mathematical foundations that had eluded him in college. John was grateful for my father’s patient tutelage and the male camaraderie that was sorely missing between him and my grandfather. For my father’s trouble, John created a series of meticulously crafted drawings that detailed every aspect of a sailboat—the boom, jib and foresail; the bowsprit; fore and aft, starboard and portside. And most exciting of all, John eventually extended an invitation to Bequia.
In 1970, a couple years after their wedding, my parents took three weeks off and headed south to the Caribbean. For the first time in his life my father grew out his beard, perhaps in anticipation of reuniting with my prodigiously bearded uncle. My dad’s hair was light brown, but his beard came in calico—a mess of swirling whiskers in various shades of carmel, black, tawny red and white.
My parents remember the trip as one of the happiest times of their relatively short marriage, if not their lives. They spent the first six days in port at Bequia, my father and John pouring over nautical charts while my mother and Aunt Anne swam and lounged in the sun. In the evenings they went ashore to an old sailor’s tavern called The Whaleboner—the archway over the entrance made from a massive set of sun-bleached whale jawbones; the open-air interior dominated by a bar counter fashioned from more whale bones and seven barstools made from cetacean vertebrae.
During the next several days, and despite rum-and-coca-cola hangovers, Johnny taught my father to snorkel and spearfish, activities that would become lifelong pursuits. Together they’d flip backwards into the warm water, then descend through spiral columns of bubbles to the technicolor reef, where they wove through schools of angel fish, trigger fish, parrot fish, trumpet fish, Morey eels, purple octopi and, once, a six-foot long tiger shark. On their second dive John caught a giant West Indian lobster with an 18’ tail. Its meat was rich and sweet and made for lunch, dinner, and lunch the next day. Several days later he speared a massive stingray with a 7-foot wingspan. The only way to hoist the three hundred pound creature on board was with the ship’s cable wench—John stood on its back like Jupiter or Jacques Cousteau while my father hoisted them on board. As a gift, John presented my father with the foot-long stinger.
Along with his prowess as a fisherman, Johnny could fix anything. After some engine trouble in Bequia, he disassembled the ship’s generator and remounted the points, using only basic tools and improvised parts. Even my mechanically inclined father was awestruck that he could do such a complicated job by himself, and on a rocking ship no less.
As favorable springtime winds picked up, they sailed out of Bequia for a couple weeks of island hopping. They speared all their own food, seasoning it with fresh-picked lime and sea salt and grilling it over open coals. Along with sailing instruction, John taught my father to play the jaw harp, a tiny musical instrument well-suited for life on a ship. My father took a shine to the harp’s bouncy twang; whereas my grandmother played her ukulele in the bathtub, from that point on my father always kept a jaw harp handy in his vehicle’s glove compartment or center consul. Using his knee to drive, he’d break into his favorite rendition of “Turkey in the Straw,” then wipe it off on his shirt and pass it over to me. By the ten or so I’d pretty well mastered it, as much as anyone can master the jaw harp, and to this day I keep one in my own glove box.
A few days in to their island-hopping excursion, they discovered a giant luxury liner that called The Antilles that had run aground a couple years prior. A massive anchor chain with four-foot-high links still hung from the partially submerged vessel into the sea. John had the girls drive the dingy right up to the ship, where he made a courageous leap onto the anchor chain, then scaled several stories up to the deck. For his part, my dad wasn’t sure he had the guts to jump. The swell was four or five feet, meaning the dingy rose and fell by a distance of almost ten feet every few seconds. Not to mention the lower part of the chain was coated in slick seaweed and algae. Balancing on the bucking prow, he ran his hand nervously over his Calico beard. He took a deep breath, made a successful leap, and despite his fear of heights climbed the fifty-foot chain up into the decaying ship.
The hold had been pretty well picked over by pirates, save for some old broken china and a handful of copper coins fused together from the heat of a fire. In what used to be a grand ballroom, little pink crabs clustered in the folds of moldy gold curtains. Johnny salvaged a couple old brass fire hose fixtures and eventually welded them into lamps, one of which lived in my childhood home for years.
After almost a month of Caribbean adventure, I imagine it must have been a bit of a disappointment to return to Colorado, so far from the ocean. But my father brought home plenty of treasure: newly purchased diving gear, the giant sting ray stinger, a jaw harp, and an enhanced love for the sea that would eventually lead him further west, to the Pacific.


* * * * *
Four or five years after I’d been born, my father went in on a $200 salvage-yard boat with his old friend Roy Rainey, an affable park ranger who wore thick military-issue glasses and lived with his wife Pat in a doublewide trailer down on the banks of the Roaring Fork River. (Coincidentally, Roy and Pat’s son eventually moved to Hood River, Oregon, to pursue his own obsession with wind surfing). The old beater looked more like a tugboat than a pleasure craft, although it did have a musty little sleeper cabin in the bow.
My dad and I spent almost every Saturday for an entire summer over at Rainey’s, trying to get our project lakeworthy. Every time we showed up to work, my father said “God Damn Rainey, this thing ever gonna be ready?”
“Shut up and start sanding,” Rainey would always say, grinning and handing him a beer. I was a little freaked out by the spider webs and mildewy smell in the cabin, but still found it all pretty exciting. One of my earliest memories is hanging out on the wooden deck while my father and Roy sanded away, drinking beers and playing Waylon Jennings and Willy Nelson on the in-cabin 8 track.
Early that fall they installed a massive 50 horsepower outboard engine, even though the boat was only sixteen feet long. We hauled it out to Rifle Gap, the same reservoir that the artist Christo draped with a 1000-foot wide, 300-foot high swatch of billowy orange fabric in the early 70’s, and that I was reminded of thirty years later, when wandering on my lunch break through Christo’s orange Gates installation in Central Park.
Roy and my dad got the boat launched while I took my usual spot up on the prow. After motoring slowly out past the marina, Rainey gunned the engine. Smoking and belching diesel fumes, the boat lurched forward, but with so much weight in the back the bow angled upwards at an impossible angle, like an overweight porpoise swimming up on its tail for an audience at Sea World, so high that neither Roy nor my father could see out the windshield. They laughed and hooted in disbelief, but I loved perching at such heights, like an old world sailor up in the crow’s nest, the wind in my hair, shouting down at my dad and Roy anytime an obstacle came in our path.
We hitched the boat up and laughed our way back to Rainey’s place. Roy’s wife came out on the deck to see what was happening. “Pat, it’s your lucky day,” my father said. “You just inherited half a boat.”

A year or so later my father bought his own boat, a brand new speed cruiser with a sunken, blue-cushioned lounging area in the bow. On summer weekends we towed it up to tree-lined Ruedi Reservoir. Reudi was at a much higher elevation than Rifle Gap, and reached via a windy mountain road that skirted the Frying Pan River. On a Sunday in August, we spent a usual day of speeding around in the sun. I rode in the front as always, and this new boat planed so close to the water that I could actually see my reflection, as well as the little hypnotic mandalas of sunlight that reflected off the lake, onto the fiberglass hull and back onto the water, like shimmery gold starfish leading our way.
On the way home my first stepmother Sherry and I decided to ride in the back of my dad’s pickup truck. As we rounded a hairpin turn, the trailer started bucking so hard that it busted the ball hitch and snapped the safety chains. Completely loose from its metal harness, the boat reared up toward Sherry and I, at first at the precarious angle of Rainey’s tugboat, and then higher, like a great white shark about to crush us in its massive jaws. It hovered over us ominously, ripping screams from Sherry’s throat, then banked sharply to the left across the oncoming lane of traffic. We watched in horror as it launched off a cliff, Dukes of Hazzard style, flipping upside down and crashing through an Aspen grove directly into the Frying Pan River. Just then a family in a station wagon came around the corner—had they been a few seconds earlier, they might have all been killed. My father slowed down and swung the truck around. We all clambered out, speechless as we peered down at the steaming wreckage, gasoline and motor oil rainbowing into the river, trailer wheels still spinning. I was the first to break the silence.
“Hey dad, does this mean we can get a new boat?”

We did get a series of new boats, leading up to a cabin cruiser that we kept at Lake Powell in Utah. Lake Powell is a manmade, labyrinthian body of water surrounded by 700-foot high sandstone cliffs. Later in my twenties I decided the whole thing was an environmental catastrophe after reading Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, in which one of the characters plots to blow up the controversial Glen Canyon Dam to restore the Colorado river and the surrounding land. But as a kid I was in love with the place and its endless meandering sandstone formations, Anasazi ruins and warm water that was perfect for waterskiing. My dad loved it too—he was totally at home behind the wheel of his cabin cruiser, wearing only a pair of OP chords, an ice cold PBR resting between his legs, whistling along to Dolly Parton songs as we snaked through narrow winding canyons, skimming along at top speeds across glassy cobalt water.

When I was five or six my father brought me to Los Angeles for the first time, where I spent several weeks with my aunt and uncle while my parents settled their divorce. Right off the plane, the first thing I wanted to see was the beach. More than Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm, I had a preternatural obsession with the ocean. We pulled into the parking lot at Long Beach; I exploded out the door and onto the sand, floored by the endless horizon and white breakers and the salty-sweet smell and all the palm trees. I wondered if the beach went on forever, and got it in my mind that I’d walk until I reached the end. My father followed behind, until the bottoms of my feet were about to burn up. Hoisting me up on his back, we bounced down to the water’s edge and waded into the ocean. I held on tight to his thick neck while we treaded out into the breakers, until a sizeable wave welled up and he said “here we go.” Instinctively I knew to take a deep breath, just before we dove beneath the wave into the brisk saltwater, then resurfaced into sunlight, only to do it all over again, ten or twenty times. I was a little freaked out by the ocean’s force, but I had absolute trust in my father. I wonder if it sparked something ancient in me, something in my blood going back to my ancestors in Cornwall, or further back than that, to our distant sea-dwelling ancestors. It was such a simple thing, a father and son playing in the ocean, but for me it was momentous and transcendent—a saltwater homecoming, a baptism into California life and a life at sea—and to this day the vivid memory wells up almost every time I wade out into the waves.
On the way back to the car we stopped at a dinghy little surf shop, where I got a whiff of what would become my all-time favorite smell—a wild bouquet of coconut scented surf wax, brand new rubber-soled flip flops, neoprene wetsuits and sun-cured resin. A bunch of older kids were trying to scrounge up enough money to buy some Sex Wax—which I was convinced must be something dirty and unspeakable. Next door we visited a touristy shell-shop, a place that smelled like the inside of a fish tank. My dad bought us a little replica fisherman’s net filled with a dried-out starfish, sugar-cone seashells, sand dollars and white coral, all of which I treated like religious relics.

On the sixteen-lane freeway to my uncle’s house, I looked out at all the freshly striped cement and sun-glinting cars and felt sure that unlike Colorado, this city was the place where real life happened. It felt like I’d crossed some threshold into the true adult world of the ocean and freeways and 80-degree weather, and now I could never truly go back.
I looked over at my father. “There’s no such thing as Santa Claus, is there?”
He laughed and mussed up my hair. “What made you think of that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. At the time, I really didn’t. But I understand now that being in LA—with all its palm trees and seasonless sunlight—made the idea of Santa Claus and the North Pole seem ridiculous. In LA even the idea of a snowflake seems ridiculous.
“But it’s true, right? There’s no Santa Claus?”
He thought about it for a while, then looked over and said “No, bud, there’s no Santa Claus, but don’t tell your mother I told you.”
He’d merely confirmed my suspicions, but still the news came a little hard. Looking out at the freeway felt bittersweet now. Bittersweet was an adult emotion and so I savored it as we zipped beneath giant green traffic signs. Santa Monica, Ventura Boulevard, Hollywood, Inland Empire, Corona.
“You like it here, don’t you?” my dad asked.
“It the most amazing place I’ve ever seen,” I said.
He looked ahead, taking the same kind of thoughtful pause as when he answered my Christmas question. “You think you’d like to live out here some day?”
I knew without a doubt that the answer was yes. What I didn’t know was just how seriously he was considering the move.

A year or so later, after the boom and bust of the oil shale industry in Colorado, the economy in Glenwood Springs went sour. My father had done very well in business, purchasing a private civil engineering firm and building it exponentially over the course of a decade. At just the right time he sold the company for a handsome profit. Looking to put some distance between himself and his two ex-wives, he chose San Diego, where the economic and actual climates were both much sunnier. But he also moved to be closer to the ocean, to relive some of his wild bachelor days on the Florida coast, as well as his Caribbean adventures with my Uncle John. He rented a condo just a block from the beach on La Jolla Shores, on a street called Calle Del Oro. He had the cabin cruiser towed out from Lake Powell to the San Diego Bay, and within a few months earned his scuba diving certification.
After finishing up sixth grade, I said a hard goodbye to my mother in Colorado and made the permanent move to California. My best friend Gabriel came along for the first few weeks. Being from the Colorado mountains, we had what most San Diego beach kids thought were some seriously dorky interests, mainly birdwatching. We also tried adhesive, thong-free flip flops, which proved mostly useless, sticking better to sand and dirt than our feet. We roamed around the beach sporting binoculars and bird books, looking for sea birds to mark off our lists—pelicans, cormorants, kites, terns, and Gabriel’s favorite—black skimmers. On the advice of a fellow birdwatcher 50 years our senior, we found a tree of roosting Black Crowned Night Herons near the Scripps aquarium, one of which took an enormous sloppy dump on Gabriel’s t-shirt. To make matters worse, I was in a post-breakdancing fashion phase, rocking a full-on mullet with a bleach blonde rat tail, sleeveless kamikaze-print t-shirts, tight jeans and big poofy high-tops—the kind of get up that would have won me admiring looks from my thirty year-old hipster comrades in millennial Williamsburg, but brought mainly ridicule from young California surfers.
In hopes of improving our beach culture status, I had my dad snip off my rat tail. A few days later he bought us both slick-bottomed Morey body boards, swim fins and a pair of black, white and neon-checkered Quicksilver board shorts for me. While my father was off at work in the city, Gabe and I spent entire days in the ocean. I caught on to the feeling of riding a wave, carving into the shoulder until it broke and then bouncing gleefully through the chop on my stomach. We made occasional trips back to the condo to eat microwave pizza pockets and watch MTV, but I was always restless to get back in the waves. And I knew that body boarding was only a means to an end: I had my sights set on surfing.
Gabriel flew home after a couple weeks; soon after my dad’s new girlfriend Carol and her three daughters moved into the little two bedroom condo with us. Carol’s two oldest daughters, Heather and Krissy, were in their early teens and the most exotically beautiful girls I’d ever seen. Unlike me, they had incredibly tan skin; they looked like they’d lived their whole lives at the beach, and had an easy time fitting in. Every night Carol had to go extract them from one beach bonfire or another, where they’d inevitably be hanging out with these beatific, stoned surfers with wetsuits peeled down to their tan waists. I went along with Carol one night, just in time to see one kiss Krissy on her cinnamon toned neck.
In early August I had to fly back to Colorado, where I counted the days until I could get back to the beach with my new family. When I did return, my father presented me with my first surfboard—a used, five-seven flourescent green thruster with angular purple graphics. There were spots on the deck that felt mushy and waterlogged, but I was nonetheless stoked. The irony was that just after getting my first board, our whole makeshift family had to move ten miles inland to Granite Hills—the only place in the county where we found a ranch house with enough acreage to accommodate Carol’s three horses. My first weekend back, my dad brought me back down to La Jolla, where I got bashed by the longboarder. After receiving such a blunt force trauma to my leg, I could hardly walk for several days and wasn’t about to go near the ocean anytime soon. But I was determined to stand up on a surfboard before my first day of school, and on the last weekend in August I got some short, blissful rides through the chop. Unlike when we lived in La Jolla, though, I no longer had the luxury of spending the entire day in the water. Being thirteen years old and carless made it hard to get down to the beach, so I adapted to life in Granite Hills. I started skateboarding.

Whereas I had some bad luck and struggles with surfing, skating came naturally. On weekends, my dad brought me to Del Mar Skate Ranch, the place where Tony Hawk grew up skating, and where I regularly spotted guys like Danny Way, Adrian Domain, Neil Blender and Steve Caballero. Del Mar is still considered one of the best parks in history, a wonderland of smooth concrete pools rimmed with blue and orange tile, ditches, reservoirs and half pipes. My friends and I would skate all day, Dead Kennedys blasting out the park’s outdoor sound system, carving lines in the kidney pool and flying out of the freestyle reservoir.
I didn’t grasp it then, but I was following in the footsteps of a long line of Californian surfers who for whatever reason—a lull in the surf, a flat tire or no wheels at all—needed something fun to do on land. No one knows exactly who the first person was to take the trucks and wheels off a rollerskate and affix them to a piece of wood. It was most likely on the west coast, where skateboarding evolved as something surfers did to pass the time when waves were bad. What no one expected was that skateboarding would develop the way it did, to the point that it began to drive the evolution of surfing. According to Nat Young in The History of Surfing, no one even considered trying a 360 turn on a surfboard until they saw it executed on a skateboard. And though skateboarding has gone through phases of mind-blowing technicality with moves that will never be replicated in the water, it’s arguable that surfing’s influence keeps it soulful. For some time in the 50’s and 60’s, skateboarding seemed to stray away from surfing into a kind of silly acrobatics; when roller-rink style contests centered around goofy limbos, handstands and balletic pirouettes. Fortunately, in the 70’s skaters/surfers from Venice Beach and Santa Monica brought a raw, outlaw surf style back to skateboarding. These were skaters like Shogo Kubo, Jay Adams, Peggy Oki and Tony Alva, otherwise known as the Z-Boys. On the heels of 1960’s legends like Herbie Fletcher, they originated skateboarding in empty swimming pools, and were among the first to shatter everyone’s perceptions by blasting frontside airs above the lip.
In the late 90’s the first generation Z-boys were brought back into the limelight by the Sundance-winning documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, but back when I was still a kid in the mid 80’s, the world had mostly forgotten about the original Z-boys. Tony Alva’s skateboard company was on the wane, and Jay Adams was in and out of prison for assault and drug charges. But the Zephyr company still had a pro model with his name on it. I knew because one was given to me by Aaron Scott, a third generation Z-boy.
The first time I saw Aaron he was seven feet in the air, smoothly rotating a perfect 360 off a jump ramp in an El Cajon schoolyard. One of my all-time favorite pro-skaters, Chistian Hosoi, was there, as well as George Wilson, the team manager for Z. With encouragement from Hosoi, Wilson put Aaron on the Z team that day; a week later he got a package in the mail filled with blank decks and the Jay Adams model, Z-boys stickers, patches and a heap of t-shirts.
Aaron and I were practically inseparable as kids; we skated together pretty much every day. With our fathers’ help, we built a jump ramp in front of his house, and spent entire weekends launching ourselves, spinning 360’s and kicking Judo airs to a rotating soundtrack of Beastie Boys, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Run DMC and Led Zeppelin. On weekends we’d tilt the ramp onto our skateboards and roll it down to my little sister’s elementary school, where there was more room to push, as well as wave-like blacktop banks perfect for carving. For a couple golden months we had access to an abandoned hotel pool down on Jamacha boulevard. We rode everything we could, even if it was just a flat parking lot where we could practice hang-ten nose-wheelie G-turns; we liked to skate fast and go big and do everything with an aggressive, low slung surf style. We had no idea at the time, but we’d inherited this style from native Hawaiian surfer/skateboarder Larry Bertlemann, who passed it down to Jay Adams, Peggy Oki and Tony Alva, who passed it down to George Wilson, who passed it down to Jimmy Acosta and Aaron “Fingers” Murray, who passed it down to us. This was around the time Del Mar Skate Ranch was bulldozed, leaving us to our own devices in the streets. Since we didn’t have bowls to ride, we figured out how to get vertical on an actual wall. At first we’d back the jump ramp up against the school house and arc big vertical turns before dropping five or six feet to the flat ground. Soon after we figured out how to bash wallrides without a ramp, leaving dirty black rainbows in our wake. Though I’d never even heard of Larry Bertelmann, AKA “Rubberman,” my all-time favorite trick was the backside Bertlemann, otherwise known as the Bert slide. I’d ride as fast as I could up the steep schoolyard banks, get low and push hard on my back foot to make the board slide sideways while I arched my back and looked over my lead shoulder, my urethane wheels howling across concrete. I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but I was replicating moves that were originated in Hawaiian waters, and that had evolved from thousands of years of surf tradition.
My dad was supportive of my new on-land obsession. Once he loaded me and ten of my friends up into his RV and drove us all the way to Phoenix for a contest. On several occasions he packed a bunch of us into his white Lincoln Continental and drove us across the border to the legendary Tijuana skatepark. He’d lay in a hammock and read John Grisham novels while we floated early-grab airs from bowl to bowl, dodging pools of fetid water and old discarded tires.
But even with my new skateboard fetish, we still spent plenty of time at the shore. Any chance we got we’d head down to Mission beach, where Aaron and I’d skate on the boardwalk next to the old rollercoaster and swim in the ocean when it got too hot. And perhaps to make up for the fact that he’d moved away from the beach, my dad bought a larger boat, a 34’ Carver cabin cruiser with two powerful Volvo engines that he kept in Mission Bay. One weekend he and his coworker Auggie Chang took me and my stepsisters out on a an abalone-diving excursion. We motored out through the bay, past barking sea lions perched on buoys and a Navy aircraft carrier with a crew larger than the entire population of Glenwood Springs. Before we’d been out much more than twenty minutes, a US coast guard cruiser approached us with sirens blazing. It was full of a bunch of crew-cutted jarheads, who informed us we were trespassing on U.S. Naval waters. But mostly they just ogled my bikini-clad stepsisters, and my dad was quick to call bullshit on their voyeuristic ruse.
Once we made it out to the open ocean, my dad stretched into his thick blue wetsuit and strapped a big diving knife to his leg. It was such a crazy mystery to watch him and Auggie disappear backwards into the blue. The ocean seemed immense and overwhelming to me then—as it still does now—and I was amazed that my father had the guts to dive in open water, risking the threat of sharks and other dangers of the deep. I was happy to lounge around on the deck, eating sandwiches and drinking sodas while my sisters sunbathed on the bow, all slathered in Coppertone suntan oil. I was a little worried, though, that something would happen to my father, that we’d all be stuck out there with no way to call for help.
I was relieved when they popped back up after an hour or so, both clutching red mesh bags full of barnacle-encrusted abalone. Later that night my dad pried out the abalone meat with a screwdriver and let us admire the insides of their pearly, metallic rainbow shells. Carol spent an hour tenderizing the meat with a framing hammer until finally it was ready to cook. She fried them up with butter and lemon juice, the whole house filling up with briney smell of the sea. None of us kids would even touch the tough abalone meat. That was just fine with my dad, who was proud of his catch and wolfed down several plate fulls, after which he lay down on the floor as usual. The house continued to smell like an aquarium for several days, and while my sisters complained, I secretly preferred it over the smell of Carol’s cigarette smoke.

Once I got my driver’s license, I’d drive down the Pacific Beach late at night, just to hang out on the sand and watch the waves. Sometimes Aaron and I’d borrow my father’s gear and go snorkeling around La Jolla cove, exploring a gaping sea cave and even braving a few narrow underwater tunnels. Just above the cave was a cliff-jumping spot called “thread the needle.” You had to time it perfectly a breaking wave, then make a treacherous, twenty foot leap into a roiling hole about as wide as a small hot tub. I still aspired to surf, but every time I tried I mostly just got pummeled by the waves or almost run over again in San Diego’s notoriously crowded lineups. This was the late 80’s, the era of the short board revolution, when no one, not even Aaron, bothered to suggest that it might be easier to learn on a long board instead of a 5’7” potato chip. Considering how long it took me to later learn on a buoyant longboard, it baffles me how anyone can really learn on a short board. And it pains me now to think about how much more time I could’ve spent surfing in San Diego, and how much better I’d be now if I’d surfed more at classic spots like Black’s Beach, Tourmaline and Bird Rock, Encinitas and San Onofre.
But apparently it wasn’t meant to be, at least not then. I eventually left San Diego for college in Colorado, largely because I wanted to snowboard—a pursuit I dedicated myself to for many years. The irony is that snowboarding eventually led me back to skateboarding, which in turn led me back to what I only touched the surface of in San Diego, but was the source of it all—surfing.

ALI JEPSON:::ALELA DIANE

The music you gave me inspired me to cook a homemade meal for my mother. Without a doubt, I have her to thank for being the first to open the door to the kitchen for me. Growing up it was fresh picked peaches in the summer, slow-braised brisket in the fall, oodles of powdered-sugar dusted cookies and citrus infused bars in the winter, and anything asparagus come spring. It wasn't too long before I started pushing my way into that sacred place and bumping elbows with her in the fight for counter-space. I can remember watching her hands multi-task their way through recipes with such ease and I smile now looking down at my own and finding them nearly indistinguishable from hers. I feel blessed that to this day we get to share space in the kitchen, combining our passions and feeding the hungry.

On a cold winter night in late January I invited my mama to dinner, and we ate to the melodic melodies of Alela Diane. The meal consisted of:

Baby Greens
with mandarin orange, candied hazelnuts, goat cheese, and balsamic

Winter Pear and Gorgonzola Risotto
kale, mushroom, pear, sage, lemon, and gorgonzola

Buttered Toast with Trio of Homemade Jams
blueberry poppy seed, blackberry earl grey, and strawberry pinot-noir
Beverage: Hop Trick, Deschutes Brewery
Soundtack: Pirate's Gospel, Alela Diane




Winter Pear and Gorgonzola Risotto
aka “Oh! my Mama’s” Risotto

7 cups vegetable stock
2 cups dry white wine
¾ lb. kale of your choice
¾ cup sliced mushrooms
2 tablespoons tamari
3 tablespoons olive oil (preferably extra-virgin)
1 tablespoon butter
½ cup diced onion
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups arborio rice or medium-grain white rice
4 tablespoons chopped fresh sage or 4 teaspoons dried rubbed sage
zest of half a lemon
2/3 cup crumbled Gorgonzola cheese (about 4 ounces)
2 unpeeled ripened pears, halved, cored, diced
salt and pepper
fresh Italian parsley, for garnish

Bring vegetable stock and white wine to simmer in heavy small saucepan over medium heat. Reduce heat to low; keep mixture warm. Meanwhile, cut stems and center ribs from kale and discard. Roughly chop kale.

Heat two tablespoons oil in medium saucepan over heat. Add mushrooms, kale, and tamari. Sauté 3-4 minutes until mushrooms are tender and kale is bright green.

Heat remaining tablespoon of oil and butter in a heavy medium saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, and rice and sauté until rice is translucent, about 3 minutes. Add all but 1 cup of the broth mixture to rice. Simmer uncovered 15 minutes, stirring often. Mix in sage. Cook until rice is tender but still firm to bite and risotto is creamy, adding remaining broth mixture 1/4 cupful at a time if risotto is dry, about 5 minutes longer. Mix in mushrooms and kale. Add lemon zest, Gorgonzola and pear. Cook until cheese melts and pear is heated through, about 1 minute. Season with salt and generous amount of black pepper. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve warm.

BANJO:::OTIS REDDING LIVE

A.M. O'MALLEY:::SILJE NES

I walk my mutt pup, Abra, most mornings in a meandering oval around the lovely Columbia Park, the park is one of my favorite parts of Portland. When we moved in across the street from it, this summer, I did some research on the history of the park. As is the case with most city history it's incepetion shows a little character, a little rancor and a little good intention.

In 1891, just before its consolidation with the City of Portland, the City of Albina bought a tract of land which was going to be Albina's first park. According to G.H. Hoch, who worked for Portland Parks & Recreation for 33 years, both Portland and Albina had high opinions of themselves and wouldn't allow the other city to have any advantage over the other. Albina's leaders watched the development of Washington Park and realized that they had no city park. They raised money and finally bought 30 acres of wooded land on Lombard Street, which is now known as Columbia Park.
Later, the two cities joined forces and Albinans watched Washington Park be improved and beautified while their park stayed the same. Hoch, who joined the City as a gardener for Washington Park, later took over much of the design work for Columbia Park. He patterned the park after a famous park in Berlin, Germany.
-courtesy of Portland Parks and Recreation

I've been listening to Silje Nes, my echo project music, nonstop the last few weeks. The other morning, as I walked Abra, the song Bright Night Morning started playing over and over in my head. The fog was low that morning and the ethereal norwegian songstress’s words carried with me, she sings initially as though she's still in a dreamstate, with this otherly vibe permeating the proceedings underscored by a steady, hypnotic drumbeat. Suddenly it's as though a soft light is switched on, as the vocals become clearer.

I was inspired to take these:

KEEGAN WENKMAN:::MIKA MIKO

just got back into town. spent a marvelous week in the yucatan. contributions will begin appearing in the coming days.