Raising A Soul Surfer (9 page)

Soon my sister got a boyfriend, and I was surfing by myself. Abandoned, I started hitchhiking with my surfboard to the beach. At 16, I got my driver’s license, and my dad bought me a car, so I didn’t have to hitchhike anymore. He probably saved my life!

After I got a car, I would surf Sunset Cliffs every day at Abs. I surfed it for a solid six years. On occasion, I would go north up to the Cardiff area and surf Pipes. In high school, I made friends who surfed, and we would all pitch in for gas to go surfing. My friend, Pam Falgren, from high school tennis, also surfed. And she always made everything extra fun.

Not only were my parents teachers, but they were also history buffs. It was popular in the sixties to put murals on your walls, so we had the Greek Parthenon painted on our living room walls and marble furniture that looked like it came from Greece. Our specialty home deco was a statue in the living room of Venus de Milo almost two feet tall. This is one of the most famous sculptures of ancient Greece. How many kids grow up with that in their living room? I now see it as God preparing my eyes for what the future would hold.

After the shark attack, we had a week of interviews at a friend’s house up in Kalihiwai Ridge. As soon as I walked into the living room, I was confronted with the Venus de Milo statue again! It was too close to home. No one else noticed it until I pointed it out. But it reminded me that I had grown up with that statue.

Later, when Bethany and I attended the ESPY Awards in Hollywood and stayed at the Morovian Hotel on Sunset Blvd, I noticed that our hotel room contained old antique items that were for sale, and our room had a magazine with the Venus de Milo statue featured on the cover. It was a bit strange to have this recurring theme.

Bethany eventually made it to Paris and got a photo in the Louvre Museum of the real thing!

There was a time when I was in love with Jesus. It was in those halcyon days when my parents would drop us off at Vacation Bible School. The church was known as Emmanuel Baptist Church, and it was one of the early hot zones of what people now call “The Jesus Movement.”

Whatever label you give it, back then Emmanuel was an interesting intersection of imaginative and welcoming youth ministry that made a group of surfers, hippie types and kids on the edge of culture feel loved while sharing with them the message of Christ in a way they understood.

Even as a child, I had a hunger for truth. Both my parents were educators, so I guess it was natural that I would enjoy learning. But this was a deeper sort of learning, not just rules of grammar or memorization of facts. I resonated with the simple message of the love of God. So, at the end of summer, I entered elementary school in love with Jesus. I felt a peace in knowing that He was God and that He loved me. I knew that He would hear me if I called out to Him.

But I was alone in my faith. After that beautiful summer at Emmanuel, there was no one close to me to encourage me on my spiritual journey, no one to teach me or introduce me to the
principles of Christ or a better understanding of God. Except for the short-lived Sunday School excursion, my faith was isolated.

And then it began to wilt.

I was wheeling around town when I decided to stop by the local thrift store to look for castaway treasure. I picked up a book for a dime that told a true story about a sickly kid who was nursed back to health and won a swimming championship. The author wasn’t trying to preach Christianity; it wasn’t even a Christian book, nor was the book about God at all. The author simply stated that health was built up by cooperating with the God-ordained complexity of the human body via good nutrition.

It planted the seed of the idea that maybe we aren’t just accidents of nature, that someone designed us for a purpose, that maybe there could possibly, perhaps, be something—Someone—beyond us, namely, God. I realized that this open door to the possible existence of God meant that I wasn’t an atheist anymore, but an agnostic.

I know this isn’t much of a step, but if C. S. Lewis was right, at least it was going in the right direction. As funny as it might sound, I was quite proud to be an agnostic. It made me feel much more intellectual and tolerant than being an atheist. The position of “maybe” is far less totalitarian than “impossible.” As a teenager in the sixties, without a moral compass, I was bombarded with “opportunities” that demanded much more wisdom than I had the skill to navigate.

The drug culture had swept in and overwhelmed many in the surf culture. Looking back now, it seems incredible that as particular as we were about keeping our physical health in prime condition, most of my friends didn’t view pot use as a problem. I am sad to say that far too many incredible and gifted surfers were swept away from the ocean and the sport they loved.

But I was young, and I pretty much went along with whatever my group was doing, which usually meant playing around with drugs (mostly pot) whenever there was a lull in the surfing activity. And being one of the few girls in the company of a lot of boys, it was inevitable that I’d get involved with them at a very young age.

I started going out with one of them—Tony was his name—when I was 16. He was an exceptional surfer and board maker. Immediately after graduating high school, I moved in with him and started college.

Even then, God was calling me to remember Him. I just wasn’t that interested in listening. I know that a good number of surfers were coming to faith in Christ during this time, including the popular artist Rick Griffin, whose (now) Christian-tinged work was everywhere in
Surfer
magazine. Somehow none of this caught my attention even though I read
Surfer
avidly.

And then there was my friend Pamela. Pam became a Christian during our senior year, and our relationship changed. She’d been my close friend and tennis partner, but now all she wanted to do was talk about God and Jesus. Looking back, I see how patient and gentle she was, even though I was somewhat derisive of her enthusiasm and beliefs. I know now the heartache she must have felt for me. She was so excited about what the Lord had done in her life; but any time she tried to share it with me, I flat-out told her I wasn’t interested in hanging out with “Jesus people” and going to Bible studies. I didn’t think I needed to make any changes in my life, and besides, I thought it was just a phase she was going through; it wouldn’t last. And my life was much too exciting to bother with the question of God. Pam and I headed in opposite directions.

On a positive side note, Pam had not stopped praying for me, had not stopped wondering whether I’d given my life to the Lord.
At one point, not too long ago, she searched around for me on the Internet, hoping to reunite and possibly share the Good News with me again. She didn’t find me, but Bethany’s name kept coming up in the searches. She’d heard of Bethany Hamilton, yet she had no idea that I was Bethany’s mother until she picked up a copy of Bethany’s book. You can imagine her joy and surprise! She’d found me; and wonder of wonders! I was a believer and had a family that was totally passionate about God.

In September 2008, she wrote me a letter. Not long after that, I called her. We’ve kept in touch since then. What a beautiful thing is friendship made complete with fellowship and prayer. It has been such a blessing to realize that every spiritual seed that someone plants is God’s responsibility; and though Pamela was unaware that the seeds she had planted when we were teenagers were taking root in my life, God knew.

But back then, I was still as far from God as I knew how to be. I was going to college and I was surfing as much as I could. I was even entering contests. One contest, held in Baja, California, put me in the ranks of the best women surfers of the era. Too bad my beautiful prized board was stolen from where we were staying.

My boyfriend and I rented a cute house just above a notorious part of San Diego, called Ocean Beach. OB, as the locals call it, was the surfer and hippie haven of San Diego. Drugs were everywhere, and parties raged all night. In spite of all this, or in denial of it, our plan was to get through college and get married when we were both 21.

I took the first job available, at a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken, while Tony made surfboards in the garage. When I’d come home at night, our house was filled with stoned and starving surfers. I was a welcome sight, since I would always bring home leftover chicken or cream pies.

There was a notice put up at our college offering a course on Transcendental Meditation, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guy the Beatles followed. I was interested, because it was supposed to help your mental faculties work better, or so the advertisement said. I had a hunger for knowledge, and I thought this would help my memory. Then I found that it cost $30—quite a sum at that time. It made me mad. I thought that it seemed religious in a way and should be free. (I learned later from my husband, Tom, that he took this course at the same time I was considering it, and he even got his special Hindu “god” name to chant—all for just 30 bucks!) So it was just a religious exercise to earn some brownie points, not the learning tool I thought it was supposed to be.

Work and school were like blips on my radar screen compared to surfing. Southern California is ripe with incredible surf spots, so I was able to bloom where I was planted. While localism was widespread in those days and is still very much alive and well at just about every break in the world, as a girl, I had to battle and strategize and earn every wave I caught. Parties have never interested me, so I didn’t have a problem with going to bed early. That meant that I could get up before light and be at the beach for an early morning sunrise session before the waves got too crowded. The early morning dawn patrol became my routine for the next 30 years.

I had invited my boyfriend to go skiing for his birthday, so we jumped into my little red Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and went up to ski the slopes of Big Bear, California. Before surfing dominated my life, I’d gone skiing with my family pretty often, so I knew what I was doing. My boyfriend, however, had never skied before. But he was cocky. I guess he figured his surfing prowess would serve him well on the slopes.

It didn’t. I finally went off to ski by myself . . . to leave some part of his ego intact. To his credit, by noon he’d advanced far
enough to venture onto the intermediate runs; and by the time we were heading home, he was even enthused about this new sport. Maybe too enthused.

A month or so later, some friends of his suggested a ski trip to Mammoth, the central California snow paradise. I had a new job working at a health food restaurant called the Homestead, so I couldn’t go.

A week passed, and Tony never came back. But a letter did. He’d gotten a job working the lifts and had a new life now as a “ski bum,” a new life that didn’t include me. I was left alone with an empty house and a few surfboards.

I was heartbroken. I’m sure that all the customers at work couldn’t help but notice my dejected demeanor, especially that young guy fresh off his tour of duty who had moved out to Ocean Beach to surf between classes at Mesa College. His name was Tom Hamilton. And, yes, he did attend Mesa College at the same time that I took classes there; and he may even have dropped in on my waves at Sunset Cliffs, or maybe I dropped in on his!

If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the
far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast
.
PSALM 139:9-10,
NIV