The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (33 page)

Toward the end of the summer of 2009, I take a personal writing retreat at a friend’s cabin up in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. For several days my work circles around Andy Kessler and memories of our Montauk surf trips. Three years since I’ve seen him, and after spending so many days writing about him, I realize how much I miss his company. Once I’m back in cell-phone range on the drive back to Portland, I give him a ring. It’s good to hear his voice, even on his voicemail. I leave a long message, tell him what I’ve been up to, ask him to call me back when he has a chance.

Two days later, Dawn calls.

“I’ve got some hard news,” she says.

My first thought is that she’s been offered a position back in New York or L.A., that she’ll be leaving Portland after only a month. But this turns out not to be the case; just a few days later she lands a good job back in the fashion industry.

Her news is about Andy Kessler.

“I don’t know how to say this,” Dawn whispers. “Apparently what happened is that he got stung by a wasp out at Montauk and went into anaphylactic shock. They tried to get him to the hospital but it was already too late.”

It takes a few seconds for this to register.

What the fuck?
is my first—and best—and most Kessler-like response to such an absurd series of events, leading to the death of someone who’d already conquered such formidable demons, a person whose life was oriented around helping other people, encouraging kids to skate, taking it easy out in the ocean.

It happened on a Monday, so Dawn and I wait most of the week for word of funeral arrangements. I get in touch with Sadie’s fiancé, who sounds totally stunned, especially since he happened to be on his way out to visit Andy that same day. Sadie’s on a surf trip in Mexico at the time, but she cuts the trip short and flies home to help organize the memorial. She takes it especially hard; Andy was a kind of father figure to her—a healthy version of the biological father she lost. Having lost his own family and looking up to Andy as a kind of wily uncle figure, Kyle Grodin takes it equally hard.

We get the final word on Wednesday or Thursday: there’s a paddle-out memorial planned at Montauk on Friday and a memorial party at the Autumn Bowl on Saturday night. But this late in the week, I can’t find plane tickets for much less than a grand. Lisa Mae and I are just about to buy tickets for a surf trip to Costa Rica, and on my nonprofit director’s salary, I really can’t afford both. I feel guilty about this, and concerned that I need to go pay my proper respects. But while skating Burnside with my friend Bryce—another of Andy’s longtime skate compatriots—I try to listen for Andy’s opinion on the matter.

“Are you kidding me?”
I can hear him saying.
“Go to Costa Rica, man, that’s what I’d do. Forget a funeral—go surfing.”

Having just started a new job, Dawn can’t fly back either, so we decide to organize our own memorial service down at her favorite surf spot, Pacific City.

A paddle-out is a traditional Hawaiian ceremony, a way to pay tribute to the deceased, to release the person’s spirit to the eternal sea. It usually involves five or more people, who paddle out well beyond the break, join hands in a floating circle, and say a prayer before casting leis into the ocean.

Since it’s just Dawn and me, we paddle out and sit parallel on our boards, facing the sea. We say our good-byes here, and I recall out loud how the first time I met him, Andy said, “Welcome to town.
Now get out of my town
.”

Back on the beach, Dawn and I fly Andy’s minikite, the one he’d given me back when I visited him on the sailboat. At Pacific City, you can pull your car right up to the sand, so we make a bed in the back of my truck, and when Lisa Mae and some friends show up to meet us, we hang out back there, strumming ukuleles and telling stories about Andy, like the time he said I needed to learn more than three chords.

“So have you learned more chords?” Dawn asks.

“Oh, definitely. Now I know at least four.”

On the way home, we stop by the Lincoln City Skatepark—in my opinion the hands-down best skatepark in the world. The writer Jocko Weyland claims Lincoln City and other similar Oregon parks as master pieces that rival any sculpture by Richard Serra or James Turrell, even surpassing sculpture, “because they combine aestheticism with athletic functionality.”

I roll around in my favorite bowl, named the Cradle for its insane central feature: a seventeen-foot-high full-pipe capsule, like a cereal bowl turned up on its edge, allowing competent skaters to roll completely upside down. Dawn snaps some photos while I hurl myself into the Cradle, getting partially inverted. But mostly I just cruise around and have fun, feeling like somehow Andy has a hand in the session, because, like him, I don’t care so much about doing tricks anymore. I just want to go fast, stay loose and low, taking long flowing runs, pretending I’m on a surfboard, the same way I pretend I’m on a skateboard when I surf.

In the smaller section next to the Cradle a young red headed kid takes runs while his grandmother watches. I roll over and take a few turns with him, and because I’m feeling outgoing, sentimental—and because I know it’s what Andy would do—I introduce myself to him and his grandmother.

He tells me his name’s Wolf. He’s all excited because the previous weekend he took seventh place at an amateur contest right here at Lincoln City.

“I won this shirt, and this hat!” he says, showing off his new items, clearly stoked.

I drop in and do a backside Bertelmann slide on a steep concrete bank. I do this because it’s my favorite move of all time—an explosive, arched-back slash that was originated in the ocean by Hawaiian surfer Larry Bertelmann—and also because I’d seen Wolf attempting it earlier.

Seeing that I’ve got it down pretty well, he asks my advice and then tries again, but slides out and barrel-rolls down the bank. Sprawled out on the flatbottom, he breaks out laughing. I fetch his board for him, and with my encouragement he attempts it again and again, five or six times, until he finally nails it, and Dawn and I and his grandmother all cheer for him.

Back at home, alone on the internet, I check out photos from the big paddle-out in Montauk. More than two hundred people showed up. Sadie and Kyle both tell me how huge the circle was, so big that you could barely see across to the mourners on the opposite side. Kessler’s friend, Harry Jumanji, paddled into the center, where he told everyone how he was only seven days sober off heroin, and how he’d been there when it all happened, that Andy brought him out for the weekend to get him away from the city, to help him kick. In a
New York Times
article about Andy’s death, Jumanji is quoted as saying, “He saved my life. I wish I could’ve saved his.”

In another
Times
piece, my friend Bret Johnston writes, “Kessler’s great and lasting contribution to skateboarding was recognizing its transformative and transcendent qualities, the myriad ways in which a highly individualized endeavor invited, not precluded, community.”

Even more showed up for the Autumn Bowl party the following night, everyone from the New York City skate community, all Andy’s surf buddies, his recovery community, and his immediate family. From what I hear, everyone took runs on Andy’s skateboard; someone posts online that she’d never seen so many grown men cry. Later that night, our friends Buddy and Rick showed their documentary
Deathbowl to Downtown
—a film that traces the history of skateboarding in New York City, with Kessler as a prominent figure, the undisputed godfather of East Coast skateboarding. In one scene, the forty-five-year-old Andy bombs a steep hill in Riverside Park that, as kids back in the seventies, they called Suicide Hill. Wearing nothing but shorts and a dirty T-shirt, he screams past the camera, weaves in between a jogger and a woman with a stroller, then slides out and takes a nasty slam. Resilient as ever, he gets right back up with a devious grin and does it again, rides it all the way out this time, hanging on—speed wobbles and all—to the very end.

After the feature, Buddy and Rick showed an extra fifteen minutes of unedited Kessler footage, during which everyone chanted
Kessler! Kessler!
, the whole warehouse echoing with his name, with his all-embracing influence, with his radical, ineffable energy.

It’s the first time in three years that I wish I was back in Brooklyn—that I’d been there to witness this, to pay tribute at Montauk and take a spin on Andy’s old deck—and I realize maybe for the first time what I had back in New York, that however much it took from me in terms of money and sanity, what it gave me in friendship and experience is irreplaceable, and I feel an over powering sense of gratitude for the city that both ruined and saved my life—and for Andy, who was always there on the saving end, the surfing end.

The feeling resurfaces in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy batters Rockaway—the entire boardwalk stripped to its bones, houses flooded or destroyed by fire, several lives lost. During the fifteen-foot storm surge, a surfer named Dylan Smith rescued six people using his surfboard and an improvised rope bridge. In the terrible aftermath, a grassroots organization called Shore Soup formed to serve over fifty thousand hot meals to those left stranded by the storm, to neighbors helping each other sweep raw sewage from their living room floors and rip out ruined sheetrock, to volunteers who drove in from every borough to lend a hand.

Rockaway: a neighborhood that, like Andy Kessler, is tough as nails on the outside, pure aloha on the inside.

At the end of
Moby-Dick
, Ishmael, the sole survivor of Ahab’s madness, is rescued by another whaling boat, the
Rachel
. The epic eight-hundred-page novel ends with the following line: “
It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan
.” After Andy passes away, I learn something that I hadn’t known: that he, like Kyle Grodin, was adopted. That he was, in some sense, an orphan himself. So once again I’m struck by the image of Ishmael the orphan, floating on his coffin life buoy, having survived the darkest work imaginable—having been reborn from death to new life in the wake of catastrophe.

It’s the central image that first sparked my obsession with
Moby-Dick
.

And now, as ever, it both haunts and sustains me.

The author wishes to thank the following:

Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and Signal Fire, for writing residencies that helped make this book possible.

My teachers: John Calderazzo, Steven Schwartz, Leslie Becker, Deanna Ludwin, Rosemary Whitaker, Bruce Rhonda, and Barry Lopez.

My family, for their stories, memories, and support: Roger and Nat Hocking, Harrel Lawrence, Jerry McMahan, John and Ann Lawrence, Sara and Lindsay Lawrence, Stephanie Zehren-Thomas, Kristen and Taylor Zehren, and the entire McMahan clan.

For their friendship and encouragement: Krista Miller, Mark and Kasia Roth, Gabriel Liston, Danielle Donohue, L.A. Zar, Nicole Georges, Beth Burns, A.M. O’Malley, John Scognamiglio, Michael and Katherine Burnett, Chloe Eudaly and everyone at Reading Frenzy, Dan and Bean Gilsdorf, David Heatley, Danny O’Connell, Raphael Maestra, the Sharzer family, Erica Simpson, Dan Hack, Dawn Andreas, Jeff Knutson, Jered Bogli, MaryKay West, Pollyanne Birge, and the entire IPRC Board of Directors and volunteer crew, Kevin Sampsell, Heidi Mager and the entire staff of Powell’s Books, B. Frayn Masters, Cheryl Strayed, Steve Church, Sophie Beck, Matt Roberts and everyone at the
Normal School
, Lisa Dusenberry and everyone at the
Rumpus
, Hannah Fries at
Orion
, Trevor Spangle, Vendela Vida, Jocko Weyland, Chris Coyle, Suzie House, Tony Farmer, Paul Jacobson, Natalie Kaire, Andreas Trolf, Lori D, Patrick Devine, Candi Sari, Amy Harwood, Andy and Allison Weiss, John and Jess Skibo, Joseph Robertson, Michael Heald, Remy Jewell, Lisa Pate, Marianne Tanner, Arthur Bradford, Jon Raymond, the Liston family, Richard Nash, Vanessa Veselka, Rachel Bennett, Sharon Donat, Chris Johanson, and Lucy Bellwood.

For early reads and feedback: Matt McGowan, David Shields, Junot Díaz, Bret Anthony Johnston, Barry Sanders, Molly Padulo, Michael D’Alessandro, A.M. O’Malley, Polly Bresnick, Joseph Ahearne, Ron Nugent, Ben Moorad, Anne Rasmussen, Courtenay Haymeister, Ishai Goldstein, Liz Moyer, Gabriel Liston, and Jason Glover.

For believing in this book: Matt McGowan, Steve Woodward, Fiona McCrae, Marisa Atkinson, Katie Dublinski, Michael Taeckens, and everyone at Graywolf.

Special thanks to Ishai Goldstein and Steve Woodward.

Finally, and most of all, to my partner in surfing and in life, Lisa Mae Osborn.

A portion of the author’s proceeds from this book will be donated to the Surfrider Foundation.

JUSTIN HOCKING was raised in Colorado and California and has been avidly involved in surfing and skateboarding for over twenty years. He created and contributed to the anthology
Life and Limb: Skateboarders Write from the Deep End;
his work has also appeared in the
Rumpus, Open City, Thrasher, Orion, the Normal School
, the
Portland Review
, and
Portland Noir
. He is a cofounder, with A.M. O’Malley, of the yearlong Certificate Program in Creative Writing at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), and also teaches in the Wilderness Writing MFA program at Eastern Oregon University. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

The text of
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld
is set in Minion Pro, an original typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.