Waterpeople Podcast
Stories about the aquatic experiences that shape us.
Listen with Lauren L. Hill and Dave Rastovich as they talk story with some of the most adept waterfolk on the planet.
Waterpeople is a gathering place for our global ocean community to dive into the themes of watery lives lived well: ecology, adventure, community, activism, science, egalitarianism, inclusivity, meaningful play, a sense of humour. And, surfing, of course.
Waterpeople Podcast
John Peck: Rebirth
What does it mean to live a life of service? Pipeline pioneer John Peck was devout to many things over this 81 years, and exploring this question was amongst them.
In 2015, we hosted John for what was a precursor to this podcast - a storytelling evening in our local community hall. He was captivating - virtually no one moved for hours, as Dave's questions and John's stories interwove with improvisational tunes from The Babe Rainbow. Sipping chai and sitting on cushions in concentric circles, it felt like a gathering from a bygone era.
In honour of John's metamorphosis, we share this snippet from that evening - an audio recording that was only re-discovered after his passing - thanks twice to Nathan Oldfield.
We trace John Peck’s path from pioneering Pipeline to a life of service, music, and sobriety, and reflect on why elders’ stories matter to surf culture. The ocean rebirths us; our job is to carry that clarity home and be useful.
On John Peck in the Encyclopedia of Surfing:
"Peck placed fourth in the juniors division of the 1960 Makaha International, and returned the following year to finish third, but was virtually unknown in the surf world until New Year's Day, 1963, when he and California switchfooter Butch Van Artsdalen put on a fantastic display at Pipeline, with Peck spontaneously inventing a low-crouch stance, his right hand grabbing the rail of his board, that allowed him to ride high and tight to the curl. That summer, Peck's thrilling Pipeline rides were the highlight of three surf movies—Angry Sea, Gun Ho!, and Walk on the Wet Side—and earned the 18-year-old the first-ever SURFER foldout cover.
Peck had meanwhile set out on a lengthy course of alcohol and drug abuse, including a seven-year LSD phase beginning in 1965. He was involved in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a Laguna Beach consciousness-raising group...".
He gave up drugs and drinking in 1984, four years later began surfing again, and in the mid-'90s was reintroduced to the nostalgia-hungry surfing world" via Cyrus Sutton's Riding Waves. Peck died in 2025, of cancer, age 81."
We will never forget the joy, wisdom, stoke and epic one liners John brought into our world.
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Listen with Lauren L. Hill & Dave Rastovich
Sound + Video Engineer: Ben J Alexander
Theme song: Shannon Sol Carroll
Additional music by Kai Mcgilvray + Ben J Alexander
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What when I was walking around, I didn't need to eat or breathe or do anything. I was just a cosmic phantom of light, rainbow flying around, and somehow still had a body on the earth. People would when they would encounter me, it would scare them. Somebody who didn't need to to breathe and have a heartbeat and just a walking drug zombie, so to speak. It was frightening to them and I couldn't do any communicating with them. I was no help. People would try to throw me in jail and said I committed treason against the U.S. by causing the Hip Rebution. How about that for a joke? Sure. Yeah. Right. A spontaneous combustion of consciousness, maybe. Okay? But not me. No, I was not the master.
SPEAKER_02:Welcome to Water People, a podcast about the aquatic experiences that shape who we become back on land. I'm your host, Lauren Hill, joined by my partner Dave Rastovich. Here we get to talk story with some of the most interesting and adept water folk on the planet. We acknowledge the Bunjalong Nation, the traditional custodians of the land and waters where we work and play, who have cared for this sea country for tens of thousands of years. Respect and gratitude to all First Nations people, including elders, past, present, and emerging. This season is supported by Patagonia, whose purpose-driven mission is to use business to save our home planet. Today we're in conversation with the venerated elder John Peck. Dave, I was thinking to write something about John, but can you intro us?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, John Peck, one of the originals in the surfing timeline and modern surfing anyway, he was a very talented surfer in the 60s of his young, you know, probably early 20s sort of age group of people who were filling the space that was left in Hawaii and California in lineups, you know. So people who'd been surfing Sunset Beach, Palmalu, all those sort of incredible waves along the North Shore for a very long time before industrialism, colonialism came there. But in the next wave of surfers that came to those breaks, people like John Peck, Greg Knoll, Mickey Munoz, and plenty of locals too, who were riding pipos deeper than a lot of those guys. That was a very interesting time because people like John were looking at pipeline, for example, and there was no one out there, and they were trying to figure out how do you ride a wave like that on these huge, clunky longboards, essentially, that were made for like Malibu riding at Malibu and slopey little slow California waves. So he cracked the code one day at Pipeline. It was New Year's Day, and he tells the story. So I won't go over it here, but essentially the way he figured out how to slide down the face and successfully ride pipeline on his backhand is still the way we all do it today, which is jamming your arm in the wall, grabbing the outside rail, and steering yourself along to make the the wave. So John was that guy, and he was on the first posters and issues of Surfer magazine and became this celebrated guy.
SPEAKER_02:It's probably rare that we trace like a particular wave writing adaptation back to a particular person. Like that probably hasn't happened a lot.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So he though also was an extreme character. So around that time, there's another surf film that is out where he's captured on film surfing Honolulu Bay really well, but he's he's so cocky and like just full tilt that he's smoking a cigarette while he's doing that out in the lineup. And there's there's a film with that in it. So if someone can find that and tell each other where to find it, I would be interested. So that's interesting just to see that he was a pretty extreme character who then went on to dive deeply into psychedelics and into esoteric interests like yoga and meditation.
SPEAKER_02:He was part of the great hippie boom in the US, young people really questioning the way their parents had chosen to do life in sort of domestic, suburban everything better through science kind of living. And people were going back to the land, or so the story goes, and also getting super experimental.
SPEAKER_01:And surfing was wrapped up in that cultural, romanticized yeah. So his proximity in Southern California to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which is a group out of Laguna, who were basically running hash and acid around the world through surfboards and their surfing network and boats, because you know lots of surfers had boats and were traveling the Pacific. And John was really wrapped up in that whole movement. And he was probably one of those people that were right on that edge of it all, where others would look and go, Whoa, okay, Peck is really pushing things there with how much acid you could take, how much yoga you could do, how much meditation you could partake in, how much fasting, and all of these things. He was such an extreme character who was willing to push all of those interests to their end point. So, you know, like fasting every Saturday, taking acid every Sunday, going out at Sunset Beach trying to figure out how to ride the wave or pipeline or all these other waves. So a very extreme character who then went down the dark sort of path of alcoholism and addiction for a while there, and then came out of it. And when he came out of it, he probably had a decade or two of being clean and sober and a complete yogi, and that's where I met him. So I met John probably early 2000s, and I was passing through Southern California with some friends. We were playing music and surfing, and we happened to stay at Garth, Murphy, and Uva, their house, the Derby House in Encinitas, which is like this living museum of art and music, and people like Um Hendricks and Morrison and Beatles, all these kind of radically f incredible influential artists had passed through that house. So we were staying there too. And John was the caretaker at the time. He was looking after the Derby house. We arrived and had perhaps a couple days there, and the next day happened to be a Tuesday. At that time in my life, I was a couple years into fasting and being silent every Tuesday, every week. And when that day came along, I told John the day before that I was going to be fasting tomorrow and silent, and he was just stoked. He was like, right on, brother Dave. Great! He was really lit up by the fact that I was willing to do that so often. So the next day I'm silent. I think we went for a surf, we came back to the house, and then he and I started playing music, and he had this beautiful guitar tuning with this crazy resonant guitar that he would play, and I had some different instruments that were kind of drony and psychedelic. We sat down and silently played music in that house for about eight hours. And the funny thing was, all of our friends who were with us would like they sat down at the start and after half an hour or so got itchy feet and left the house, went, got some lunch, came back. John and I are sitting there in this trance playing. Then they went surfing, came back. John and I were sitting there in this trance playing, and then the sun went down, everyone went, had dinner, came back, and there we were still seated together, hadn't spoken a word, and just were in this blissed out musical state. And for me, that experience was really special because he was someone who had so much history in the surfing timeline, but who was also so interested in those subtle realms and those sort of more esoteric areas of life. And previously, in my experience, surfing and that world were very separated. But he was someone who embodied both, and I really appreciated that. And he really appreciated that in me because I was like, you know, 21, 22 years old. And the night ended, we sat up and or sorry, we stood up and smiled at each other, went to bed the next morning. I woke up so excited, like, I can't wait to ask John how that was for him, because that was just crazy for me. And the sun came up, we woke up and we spoke about it, and we just had a link forevermore after that. And so I would always seek him out when going through California and or Hawaii even. And then I would learn of his impact on other people, and you know, he he always did this thing where he was really into being of service. He wanted to be useful in the world. He wanted to use his awareness of his body through yoga and his spirit through meditation and music and everything. He wanted to use what he was experiencing as this kind of psychonaut, cosmonaut who was out on the furthest edges of being a human and reporting back to the rest of us here on earth how to navigate life and those realms, those subtle realms. And so he would always offer his uh service of giving you kind of like a massage relaxation squeeze around your shoulders and your neck and light up your Christmas tree. Lighting up your Christmas tree. He he would give you that opportunity to lay down and deeply relax, and he would help your spine out and help your neck, and then he would get his little rope thing and pull on your head, which was very scary.
SPEAKER_02:Wrap it around, was it the front? It's like the back the back of your neck. I remember laying down and being like, I don't really know this person, and I feel like I'm in a very vulnerable position right now.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, but it it was um he would give you traction, basically, it was gentle traction.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But he would say it would light up your Christmas tree, and often it would. You'd maybe a couple little pops of air would come out of knuckles in your spine or whatever, but you would you'd deeply relax, and that for him was the feeling of being useful for other humans. And I really loved that. And he was just unwavering at that point in his life with his focus on that. He wouldn't compromise.
SPEAKER_02:Can you trace how John came to be in our local little community hall and where this recording came from, where the idea came from, and uh and how we captured this audio? Yeah. Because it was before Water People existed. And but it was part of seeds that were sown, I feel like, right at the very beginning of our relationship. Do you remember when you came to Florida and we I feel like there was a sense that we knew we had work to do together around stories and elders specifically were noticing what was happening in the surf media, and it was kind of the same rehashing of the same stories, but we're we were traveling together and meeting all of these super wild, vibrant people living in really creative ways, and John Peck was one of them, of course. And I remember sitting on the deck of my mom's beach shack in Florida and thinking about how do we pull these stories together and share them with our community.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, where can they exist? And at the time it was such a youth-centric sort of reflection back to our surfing organism, you know, like if you were a a magazine editor or a surf company, you're pretty much just focusing on 14 to 20, whatever it was, and that always quote, you know, that's the market and all that sort of jargon. But what it meant was that we just had a lack of depth in our storytelling, it felt like, and the one thing that would be told of yesteryear's heroes was always the same sort of stories, like you said. But here we were travelling and meeting these people who just had the most fascinating stories. Yeah. And so John was certainly one of those people. And I really felt like our community in the Northern Rivers region has a lot of people that are interested in those sort of esoteric or subtle realms of life, the sort of causal realm, not the effect realm. So, like, how do you feel before you start to do things in your life? And so that takes the you know the shape of yoga classes and intentional communities. There's a lot of like intentional communities in the hills here where people are focusing on that. So I felt like there would be an audience, there'd be people here who would really appreciate some stories from John and perhaps even want to ride some of his boards. And so, you know, remember we were just talking about bringing him down here and having a farm? I have no idea, but it would have been a day to go.
SPEAKER_02:It would have been 2015, I'd say.
SPEAKER_01:Sounds great.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so yeah, ten years ago.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And he was super into it because he'd passed through here before, and he was again, he would just be like, Yeah, whatever's useful and helpful in the world, brother Dave. And so we got him down here and he was living on the farm here for a little while with us, and just through going surfing and being in our area and seeing how people responded to him, because you know, like visually, he's just a sad. He's like a full yogi, long beard, stick thin, but rubbery and flexible, constantly like sun-gazing and staring up into the heavens and just a presence, you know, and so I knew I could just see people's heads turning around here, like, who is that wizard with the Yeti? Who is that guy walking around with Dave? And so we came up with the idea of filling our little community hall down the road here with friends and interested people who would want to sit down and listen to some talk story with John. And at the time I was playing a bit of music with the Babe Rainbow fellas and Alioski and Coolbrees and Angus, and we were really interested in sitting down, having John talk story, and then have a breather, and we would play some music to let those pretty wild stories sink in. And we'd play music for a couple minutes, and then I would prod John with another question, and we'd get another story, and we would do that. And so we did that thinking, oh yeah, it'll be like, you know, 45 minutes to an hour perhaps that that we'll do this, and people will be able to sit still and be interested. And the whole hall was completely filled, and the talk ended up going for three hours, and no one even stood up to go to the toilet. It was just like people were glued to their spot on the floor in the hall.
SPEAKER_02:I remember Colbrees playing the sitar and that the resonant sound in the timber community hall was just it was really captivating.
SPEAKER_01:And like you said, this is before we had an a a bit more of an act. Um we didn't have a proper recording gear or anything, and I think really the only audio recording of that is from Nathan Oldfield. Thankfully, Nathan was there taking pictures and recorded somehow. So the audio is what it is.
SPEAKER_02:It is what it is, and it's only a snippet of the night because I think Nathan's camera died, and then we meant to release this many years ago, um, but it was lost in the ether of the internet for quite some time. I couldn't find the link when I went back after hearing of John's passing, but Nathan managed to find it. So we're stoked to be able to share a little moment of that night and and John's really interesting words with you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, super fun, and it really makes me feel like I would urge people to find their version of John Peck in their world and sit down with them whenever you can and have a cupper and listen to their stories. Let them be heard and seen as people who have walked the path longer than us and might have some things to share that are really valuable and and even if you felt compelled to perhaps record them and share them with your community because look at us now. John just left his body and it seemed like he'd prepared his whole life to die, much like Ramdas said, he'd been preparing his whole life for death. And so there's probably very little sadness around John leaving his body, probably more of a celebration than you'd think actually, and he, you know, would just be shedding his earth suit and in the next ride, the next wave that he's riding, and it just makes me grateful that we have this little snippet to share with people, and yeah, I would I really just recommend that people do that in their own way in their own communities because it's really enriching and fulfilling and it feels really good for us too.
SPEAKER_02:And you never know when the opportunity might not be there any longer. Life is so rare, so precious. We've had a number of uh former water people guests pass away in this last year: Jack McCoy, Lane Davy, and then John. And uh yeah, I'm so grateful to have shared moments getting to talk a story and sit with them and have those stories recorded to be able to ripple on even after their bodies have left the planet.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It's precious. Oh man, there are so many John Peck stories too right now in my head. I'm like, oh, I want to tell the one about how he broke out of jail and disassembled the bricks of the building, and then he broke out again, but he stayed in his prison cell just to prove that he could escape anytime he wanted to. Or the time where he left the planet and he didn't come back for five days, and then he cracked the code on how to surf sunset. Or like, or the fact that anytime there was a good swell anywhere between Santa Cruz and Scorpion Bay in Mexico, John Peck would appear, and for decades everyone was like, Oh my god, that guy's a wizard, best day of the year, and there he is again, he just appears. It's just endless, it's endless, and it just makes me smile and laugh, and it makes me want to know about those kind of people in our timeline of surfing. Like, where are they? Who are they? I'm sure every region has a person like that, and make sure that their story is continued because they're just fascinating, and he certainly prompted me to take an interest in all things in life, but especially where surfing fits into it. And he was a great proponent of yes, be joyful, be a surfer, and be useful in your world. And that's in Cyrus' great short film when he says, Heal yourself, heal your family, heal your country, heal the world, and don't forget to go surfing. And that's just beautiful.
SPEAKER_00:Any of you musicians out here, you know where that happens. When you get in the way, it doesn't come through like when you're out of the way. You know, when you let yourself flow, it flows really well. I just hit a few wrong notes. See.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for coming. Thanks, John, for coming across the other side of the Pacific.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, Dave, for inviting me. And all of you for being here present. In Hawaii, we call the family or Hana. When I come home, Hana means work. And how many people are a hundred percent comfortable with the word work? Well, that's perfectly normally human. Somebody explained to me once what the word work meant. You know, and I wondered, like, oh Hannah family, you know, family is the most wonderful thing in the world, and you are our family here right now, completely. We're all we have. A presence here. Holy. And somebody explained to me, you know, I noticed you're uncomfortable with the word work. And I said, well, a little bit, you know. And I said, well, let me explain to you what work really means. And she said, work, John, is letting God manifest love through you. If you're not letting God manifest love through you, you're not working. So get to work. And then all of a sudden I felt really, you know, different about it. Like, I thought it was like uh, she said, don't bother. If it if it isn't love, if it isn't God's love flowing through you, don't bother. You're not doing yourself or anybody else any good. So I I learned to pay attention to what I call my higher power, what should I call God. Do my best to let that energy flow through, and that's why I stopped playing when I find myself trying to play a few notes on my own. You know, it sounds so pretty when I'm letting God flow through me. And when I try to do it on my own, something goes software and strange. So it's really nice for me to be able to understand what is me for me and what is God working through me because I need, I'm a God junkie. I gotta have God flowing through me 24-7. Because I gotta feel better, better, better. You relate with that? Anybody here need to feel better all the time? I think so. By nature. So um, I'm gonna get off the stage here and pass it to some other people sharing here. Thank you for letting me share the little bit of the shared, and we'll share some more, I'm sure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So John and I met probably 10 years or so ago, I think, in uh Southern California in the oldest house in the town of Encinitas, which probably a few of us have been to Southern California, you know where that is.
SPEAKER_00:Owned by the lady who told me that about work, exactly.
SPEAKER_01:Uber. And that's uh, you know, a real beacon of a spot you've got uh Swamis, the the site where Yoga Nanda brought yoga from India, brought it to the west, brought it to California, right there where one of surfing's real cultural hubs exist, and you know, who happened to be passing through and in those areas at the time were a lot of our culture's elders, our surfing elders. One of them is is a local around here, Rusty Miller. A lot of us are know Rusty, and uh Rusty tells stories of surfing at tsunamis and looking up and seeing uh perhaps Yoga Gananda sitting on the hill there watching them surf, and you know, that's a real um real powerful spot in surfing culture's timeline. And that's where John and I met. And I've heard of John before that through one of the millions of stories about John that circulate the surfing world, you know, pioneering pipeline in the 60s with the approach that is still being used to this day. In the 60s, John was there at the forefront of the movement to decode and surf pretty much the gnarliest waves in the world. You know, still to this day, Pipe is the most feared by most of us and has uh taken many, many lives and delivered them elsewhere and delivered a lot of injuries and uh extreme moments. You know, and that was right where John pioneered that style of taking off and writing pipelines somehow on enormous logs from yesteryear. And I feel like that's a really great start to night, which is really just you know, sharing stories, talking story, that kind of Hawaiian idea of talk story, just creating the moment like cultures have for so many thousands of years where we would sit around the fire and listen to some of our elders share their stories and help us through their example. And and I feel like those rides of John's at Pipeline are like real physical examples of the path that he has blazed, you know, he's blaz many different paths in this life.
SPEAKER_00:Anybody got a clue? Let me know it.
SPEAKER_01:But could you share like what was what was happening on the North Shore leading up to that moment of you know, that was captured on on film? You know, I'm sure there's many, many things that were happening at that time, but in your experience, what what was happening? How did it feel to be delivered to that point where you kind of got spat out onto the shoulder at a pipe and had successfully rode a wave there before anyone had done that?
SPEAKER_00:Actually, technically there was a few crazy people like uh that tried to they used to body surf uh a rock a little south of the air called Banzai Rock. That uh uh a guy from La Holiday used to body surf it, and they called him Tiny Brain for obvious reasons. Okay. But nobody tried to uh surf it with a board until because it was just too inside out and the reef was too shallow and gnarly. And the year before, uh actually the Butch Ben Hustelen and I uh got the privilege of riding pipeline in really good quality uh on a good West Swell, New Year's Day in 1963. Uh the year before, Phil Edwards and uh Dave Willingham and Mike Henson wrote it smaller. Actually, we weren't the first guys to ride the pipeline. That's a misnomer somebody's you know on a board. Phil Edwards actually paddled out there first on his own. But it was a little overhead, it wasn't it was double plus overhead. Pipeline becomes a whole nother critter when it starts getting up to double overhead and bigger. So nobody was crazy enough except Butch and I that morning, New Year's Day, until that point. And the only reason I think we did it is the night before was the heaviest drinking party on the North Shore at Bud Brown's house, uh, where Dewey Weber and and uh you might know some of these names, famous surfers, Dewey Weber, Mike Henson, and Mike Diffendurfer, and Buddy Boy Keoghi, and uh uh a bunch of crazy North Shore surfers, and got together and and we were drinking straight in black and white scotch drinking contests, and that was nuts. We overdosed completely, and he he died, I died, and we were brought back to life somehow. And the next morning I I I he was already out surfing, somebody pushed him out in the water, you know, buddy of his cameras, and the pipeline was breaking perfect. They woke me up and said, Hey, Butch is already surfing the pipeline, and Butch and I surfed together a whole lot before that. He learned how to surf at Wind in the Sea, which is uh can be a really, really humble big island style wave. And I pretty much learned how to surf high-quality performance stuff at a la Moana, and a la moana bowl, when it gets really big, is a lot like the pipeline. So we both had some experience with that kind of wave, and um uh we just got lucky. I I went over the falls and didn't kill myself on the first try on the big wave, and realized there's no way I can get into this wave unless I just do the side slide, you know, under the lip side slide technique, you know. Be right in the spot and let the wave start pitching and just push, get it pushing me down with its lip already thrown, you know, slide-sliding down into it. Or I'm just gonna get thrown over the falls trying to drop in. So I I got lucky and slide-slid down into one, and they got it on a film, and Brown's uh dentist, uh guy named Don James, caught it on still and made a poster out of it, and that poster just just got really famous. And uh it was just a survival experience, is what it was. And then a little bit after we started getting the hang of it, uh, you know, uh just we're it was we were able to surf it, you know. I I just actually purple in that that first good wave, I started a purple and side sliding down into it. The only way I could keep from falling out was grabbing the wave with my arm and and holding the rail and pushing the rail in the wave, and they came to call that the pig dog maneuver and uh what we learned at all on a bowl when it would be pitching. Um it was a survival technique, you know, nothing good surfing about it. Keep from getting killed. And uh once I got into it, I slid up by the nose and got barreled, and uh it was it was a little easier once I once I got spit out of the first one, it kind of started being kind to me, and I caught the feel of it, and and we actually sobered up in the water that morning is what it was. I I think. And and um I got 31 years without a drink nowadays, right now today. And uh that's important to me for me to have a clear consciousness because I spent a lot of years chasing the feel-good and in a lot of places where it ended up feeling worse, you know. And uh nowadays I I um I'm a God junkie. God makes me feel better than all the best combinations did, you know. And if they didn't, if it's I would go back to something, I would try something else. So I'm gonna pass it on for that one, you know. It's kind of the the in on that one. I uh you know just a brief thing. I actually like to surf a lot of other places. The North Shore my home to me in 1960 onward. I got to surf the North Shore by myself. You know, I remember riding Sunset Beach and Hane Kea, which is an incredible, incredible wave. And Halle himself, there'd be nobody around even seeing me riding. Nobody's taking pictures much except Bud Brown once in a while. So there's a little little view on my early days at the at the North Shore. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:What was it like then when the influx happened? What were you do what was your day-to-day?
SPEAKER_00:It was a bummer. You know what that's like, you know. People lived around here in Byron Bay when it was, you know, still kind of the country more than it is now. But it's about getting you I it was a bummer until I got used to uh sharing with people uh and they got more courteous. And um there's a good evolution, it's family evolution, you know. Today I'm really comfortable sly surfing in pretty crowded ways sometimes in California and Hawaii when it gets uh pretty good out at Hanalaya can get kind of grouted sometimes. What was your question? How do this track really didn't really matter? I'm just kind of um overwhelmed. I'm a really uh a loner kind of guy a lot. I don't spend a lot of time with a lot of people, and I'm not used to being so-called a point of attention where a bunch of people are looking at me to see what I'm gonna do, you know. I try to be invisible more than a point of focus, is what I spend most of my time doing, low profile. He asked me the other day, what does surfing mean to you? You know, what's what's the essence of the most important thing about surfing to you? What does it really mean to you? And I thought about that for a while, and and I went, you know, uh there was in the first surfer magazine, there was a page, the last page in the first surfer magazine that ever came out, John Sieberson put it out. He didn't know if he's gonna make any more or anything, and then it got annual, and then it got biannual, and then it got monthly, and that was the start of surf magazines. And the first one, the last page was a picture of a perfect wave in Santa Barbara with a single guy paddling out and offshore winds and flawless and really pristine looking, that pristine purity that we we all have our own idea of. And it the caption under it said, part of the world, the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day and the perfect wave and be alone with this with the surf and his thoughts. And that's kind of it right there. It's like when you get in the tube by yourself, it's like nothing else in the universe exists. You get reborn, you know, and uh it's that solitude time with nature that's really important. And and then you can carry that back to your family, and you can share that bliss and that love of that naturalness, you know, that you got out in nature. And to me, it's it's worth sharing. The important thing is sharing what I get from my higher power uh in nature and and in meditation and in whatever my higher power wants to do with me. It's like uh uh I've wanted to get out of the way as much as I can. In your biography, you write, I remember reading Yeah, I've been writing one because somebody insisted I write a book for him.
SPEAKER_01:There's a moment where you say that you kept you came back to surfing and there were some shadow times in your life and you weren't surfing and kept on coming back to surfing. And is that why? Is it that that that's the essence of your return when shadow or very challenging times come?
SPEAKER_00:Why did it come back to surfing or yeah, and how did that help? How did how did that happen? And what was that about? Yeah, I I um got so bombed at at the world and people and ruining, you know, like surfing got so popular so fast, and people who didn't know anything about surfing using surfing and using surfers to promote their look and felt ugly and didn't feel good to me trips uh to do so. I'd bombed out, you know. I was a progressive, crazier alcoholic addict. And um I it got too much trouble to carry a surfboard around. I'd I'd stash one at surf spots, you know, and and sometimes people would steal them. A lot of stealing started going on in those times, you know. I took way too much psychedelics and got off of alcohol for a while and started smoking a lot of hashesh to come down off the psychedelics. And uh I was taken, actually taking LSD before it was illegal, and I that's why I first, well, it was like I was asking God what's going on, and I thought it was the LSD that made God talk to me, but actually I found out later it was actually actually just my sincere hearted desire that God chose to answer me and and talk to me. And um, after I met God, it's like things were really different. I I just left it all behind. I took everything I owned. There was a guy who reminded me the other day here, uh, who came up to me and he said on the North Shore. Wayne Lynch came up to me on the North Shore when I had a tree house and a surfboard, and and it was like when I really cast surfing off, was that point where he saw me do it. He said, uh, where there was a big storm came up, and and I was I needed to let go of everything, and I just threw everything I owned. All I was a Muslim bathing, so I had to keep that on to keep them getting thrown in jail for nude. And I I took my blanket and my holy books and my my my um surfboard, and that's all I owned, pretty much, and uh a hash pipe, and I threw it all in the ocean in a storm. And and it all went out in the rip at Sunset Beach. And um so I walked around the island and came back, and and um I just I found that I was taking a lot of psychedelics and I found that the whole universe is comprised of electromagnetic waves of energy, and I could actually, you know, uh ride those waves of energy, those cosmic waves of energy, and I was like, you know, going off the planet body and all, and and people actually saw me do it, and you know, like the silver surfer. So that that comic book came out about that time, the silver surfer, and I was the silver surfer. According to them, I was just surfing all over the universe without a surfboard. You know, I I found that people didn't understand what was happening at all, and I would lose touch with people, and I'm a human being. And I I found I discovered God made it very clear to me that I'm here on earth to be of service, and that's why he's giving me life. And so I'm here to be on serv of service to other people in whatever way he wants to be of service. Unless I'm acceptable to human beings, you know, when when I was walking around, I didn't need to eat or breathe or do anything, I was just a cosmic phantom of light, rainbow flying around, and somehow still had a body on the earth. People would, when they would encounter me, it would scare them. You know, my my reality that you know that somebody didn't need to to breathe and have a heartbeat and and was just a walking drug zombie, so to speak, uh, was frightening to them and and their bodies, I could there was no communication. I couldn't do any communicating with them, I was of no help. I was just a fright. And people would try to throw me in jail and accuse me of causing revolutions, the hippie revolution, federal indictments, treason. They said I committed treason against the U.S. by causing the hippie revolution. How about that for a joke? Like, sure, yeah, right. Me? Uh-huh. No. Uh spontaneous combustion of consciousness, maybe. Okay. But not me. No, I was not the mastermind. Just because there was a father-creative voice that used to talk out loud, really loud, sometimes in front of other people, and federal agents were there one time when he talked really loud, so they thought I was the leader because people would look at me because God talked at me. And I don't know. God will talk to any of you. God talks to all of you all every day. It talks to you through your children. You do you listen to God talk today? I'm getting tripped out here to talking to imagine. But you know, like Yeah, it's it's it's like uh I returned to wave surfing because every time I would get too far, I would not go out in the ocean and let a wave hydraulically massage my body and give me this new life that it was releasing its life that it got from the sun into the wind, into the water, into the wave, into me. And when the wave is breaking, it's uh it's it's expiring. It's it's ending its life and it's it's releasing that energy. And when I my body, when that energy passes through my body, it re-rebirths me.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks for spending some of yours listening with us today. Our editor this season is the multi-talented Ben Jake Alexander. The soundtrack was composed by Shannon Sol Carroll. We'll be continuing today's conversation on Instagram, where we're at Water People Podcast. And you can subscribe to our very infrequent newsletter to get book recommendations for questions or pondering behind the scenes glimpses into recording the podcast, and more via our website, the waterpeoplepodcast.com.
