Raising A Soul Surfer (12 page)

Taylor got fed up with the grasping state when they told him to pay taxes on the land they were trying to condemn; so in 1969, Taylor invited a bunch of hippies to camp out on his property free of charge.

Located near Tunnels Beach, Taylor Camp became a magnet for peaceniks who built lean-tos and bamboo tree houses out of found materials. They formed a primitive communal society, with few rules and even fewer clothing requirements, at the extreme edge of paradise.

Elizabeth Tayor’s son joined Taylor Camp. On a visit to Kauai, her son presented her with a puka shell necklace. This touched off the puka necklace craze when she was photographed later while wearing the gift.

Taylor Camp was razed by the state in 1977, but it still looms large in the North Shore legends.

I spent my days scouring the North Shore looking for surf. Kauai’s natural beauty captivates you at every turn. From the end of the road on the north side, to the end of the road on the west coast, God’s creation rings loud and clear. We parked wherever we could, usually near surf breaks or free showers. But after a summer of close quarters, I decided to go back to California. As far as I was concerned, Chris was only a friend, and I was feeling claustrophobic.

I thank God every day for His divine hand during this point of my journey, even though I was far from Him. There were few
things constant in my life except for surfing, and it would serve no good purpose to itemize the foolish choices I made. Suffice it to say, I spent the next few years bouncing around from Kauai to California to Oahu to Maui and then back to Kauai, usually showing up with a bit of cash, a few belongings and an agenda for surfing adventures.

Along the way, I collected my fair share of heartbreak, wounds, regrets and guilt. These emotions I stuffed down into the recesses of my soul. But they wouldn’t heal, and later bubbled up and burned like acid. The proverbial hole in my heart kept getting bigger. While a lot of my friends dealt with their purposelessness by diving headlong into alcohol or drugs, I found that surfing took away the emptiness for a while.

In a way, surfing became my drug of choice. I lived for the rush of adrenaline when I flew across the waves. I lived for the challenge of ever-bigger surf. And I forgot my troubles in my exhaustion at the end of the day in a paradise filled with rainbows.

By the time I ended up back on Kauai, I was once again living in the back of a station wagon—not with Chris, but with another guy, in a very similar kind of relationship.

While all this was going on with me, Tom was getting to be a well-known surfer in Kauai’s North Shore lineup. But unlike me, he was flying solo. In fact, with all the young male surfers migrating to Hawaii, the guy/girl ratio of our age group (under 35) was so skewed that many lonely guys referred to Kauai as “Monk Island.”

Tom had landed a great job as a banquet waiter at a large resort called the Kauai Surf, a hotel that still stands, now a Marriot. The only problem was that he was living on the North Shore,
and the hotel was all the way into town, quite a distance, particularly with a car like Tom’s VW van that wasn’t always working.

I first noticed Tom as he pulled up into the dirt parking lot at Pine Trees. Actually, I noticed his car first, a clean-looking VW camper van. My interest in cars came from my dad’s after-hours job at a dealership when he would come home from work with a new car almost every night.

The car made me take a second look at the handsome surfer boy.

Tom knew my “boyfriend,” and we all went surfing together that day. The first thing I noticed was that Tom was goofy footed (right foot forward on the board). All the guys that I had ever had a crush on were goofy footers, so I thought to myself,
Uh oh, what might this mean
?

I also took notice that he could surf quite well, especially in big waves.

My living conditions had finally upgraded to a house instead of a station wagon, and I could actually cook an honest-to-goodness meal. As a result, we started inviting Tom over for breakfast from time to time after a morning surf session. (He still says I can cook up a “mean breakfast.”)

I was strongly attracted to him from day one, but Tom assumed that I was romantically linked to my friend.

It was complicated.

By this time, I was ready to get out of the relationship. Maybe part of me knew that I was just drifting and going through the motions. I had been threatening to break off the relationship for quite a while, but my companion always seemed to finagle me to stay a little longer.

Though we now lived in a house, I had to get out on my own. I moved out and rented a room. I got a job. It was exhilarating!

Then Tom asked me out.

I was expectant and hopeful; I was flattered and excited. My interest in him had grown over the months as our acquaintance deepened. When he found out I’d called it quits with the other guy, he was ready to step in.

It was a whirlwind romance . . . or maybe it was just the cup of psychedelic mushrooms we shared that first night, but we moved in together after our first date. Unlike anything else I’d known before, it was pretty obvious that this relationship was going to be a serious one.

Something odd happened within me, which I can’t quite explain: I decided that I wanted to be in a proper relationship with Tom when he proposed to me. Something inside me was yearning to find propriety, so I told Tom that I wanted to rent my own place. I moved into a house with a surfer friend name Loli.

I got more than I bargained for.

Loli was a brand-new, on-fire Christian, and she was excited about her newfound faith. She was up every morning at 5:00
A.M
., reading her Bible; I only know this because I was up at 5:00
A.M
. every morning heading out to find surf. She invited me to church, but I always brushed her off. I couldn’t, however, stop her words and her example from watering the spiritual seeds planted in my heart at Emmanuel Vacation Bible School so long ago.

Tom proposed to me on my birthday, which was Valentine’s Day. I burst into tears right there in the restaurant. We married on August 25, 1979, with a very fun, laid-back, island-style wedding, complete with ukuleles, volleyball, homemade
lilikoi
juice, a homemade wedding dress and an Aloha shirt I made from white satin for Tom. Our banquet feast was potluck with imu-style (baked in an underground oven) turkey.

The day was perfect and beautiful and 100 percent ours. But if a swell had come in, we probably would have postponed the whole thing to go surfing!

We were married in a ceremony right on the beach in Hanalei, by a chain-smoking Catholic priest. For the longest time, Tom’s mom insisted that we were not really married because the vows were not spoken in a sanctified church building. (We assured her that the priest told us that beach weddings were okay in Hawaii.) I remember that Loli read from 1 Corinthians 13, the Bible’s love chapter. I’d never heard it before, and I was surprised that words so beautiful were in the Bible.

Many people head to Hawaii for their honeymoon, but we went to New Jersey. We stayed with Tom’s folks in the house where Tom grew up, which was not my dream honeymoon suite.

When we returned to Kauai, we spent six weeks in Moloaa in a beautiful house near the beach, house-sitting for friends. This became the real honeymoon, but it almost became a very short marriage. While lighting the gas pilot, Tom was blown across the kitchen with his hair in flames!

When the honeymoon was over, we moved into our new home: a VW van.

It’s okay to roll your eyes (I can’t see you). I wanted to be your typical new bride who can hardly wait to color coordinate her new nest and try out recipes on her husband. But the truth was that I really wanted to surf.

We both worked at the same hotel, and we were on the same schedule. We were saving money by living in the van; and when we had days off, we would cruise the North Shore looking for uncrowded waves. The problem was that our
hale
on wheels—our van—kept breaking down. Every time the mechanic, Ross, would fix it, something else would go wrong. It was as if the thing was cursed!

Looking back on it now, I think that maybe the van was actually blessed. I don’t know if God would actually go so far as to mess with the mechanics of a Volkswagen van, but I think He did! What felt like a real pain for Tom and me led us to Christ.

Three unlikely characters, all surfers, were instrumental in drawing both Tom and me to the place where God wanted us. The three of them shared a house in Wailua on the east side of Kauai.

One of the guys, nicknamed “Creature” because of his car, “The Creature Mobile” (an old clunker he’d covered with plastic figurines held on by super-glue), had the wild distinction of being tossed in the loony bin for one drug-addled adventure. In his confused mind, he became so convinced that he was John the Baptist that he marched into a church service and took over the microphone, trying to get disciples. (He jokes around that he got no disciples at the church service, but he made lots of them in the mental ward.)

Creature had first migrated to Santa Cruz, California, where he quickly became a fixture in the local surf community. At that time, he had become friends with Michel Junod, one of the three roommates, and a highly respected (to this day) surfboard shaper and surfer, and on occasion, successful competitor. The two of them eventually drifted to Oahu’s North Shore where they spent several seasons riding the massive tubes of the Banzai Pipeline and other daredevil big-wave spots before moving into a place together on Kauai.

The third roommate was Mark Nakatsukasa, a reed-thin wanderer who had traveled in his VW bus through Mexico and Central America, questing for perfect, undiscovered waves.
This adventure refined his car repair skills. Whenever our van broke down (all of the time), we would sit around on the lawn exchanging surf stories with Mark as he worked on our bus. We all shared the same free-spirited view of life. What Tom and I didn’t know was that Mark was going through a turbulent internal revolution.

The carefree Mark we thought we knew was a façade. He was secretly wrestling with a deep emptiness he’d tried to fill with waves, adventure and drugs. Nothing kept away the oppressive despair that weighed down on him day after day; and not one of us knew that he was quietly contemplating suicide.