Raising A Soul Surfer Read online

  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 famil
y 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!

  CHAPTER

  5

  Hawaii Bound

  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

  I spent a night in jail for eating evidence. Allegedly, it was a very, very small pot plant. Not a leaf, but a seedling. Oddly enough, it wasn’t even mine, nor was I actually in trouble over it; it was just the final straw in a series of misadventures. But if I hadn’t been thrown in jail; if I hadn’t destroyed that miniscule piece of evidence that wasn’t even against me; and if I hadn’t been mad and maybe just a little crazy, I might never have decided to leave California for Hawaii.

  Going back in time to Ocean Beach, my boyfriend had abandoned me and moved to Mammoth with his friends. Broken-hearted, I struggled to pay the rent as I worked at the Homestead health food restaurant, the very same restaurant my future husband frequented. But it would be far too simple a story for me to have noticed him then. I was too focused on everyday life, either at work or in the water, even though he often surfed the same spots I did.

  It was a very lonely time for me. I felt as if I were not tethered to anything. And because I was young and maybe a bit naïve, I imagined that if I went up to Mammoth, I could patch things up with my ex-boyfriend—even though he had told me in his letter that we were over.

  I moved out of my cottage and drove my little Karman Ghia up to Mammoth Mountain. Tony’s friends had put a wall between us, so I ended up renting a room in a house from a guy who was managing it for the owners. I soon found a job punching lift tickets. You could say that things were a bit strained. There were plenty of people my age, many of them surfers when not on the slopes; and while I was busy with work, I still managed to get in my fair share of skiing. In the end, the challenge of becoming a good skier overrode the relationship woes that had brought me to the mountain.

  There was a couple that rented the room next to me. I hardly ever saw them, and I never talked to them; but I’d hear them arguing at night or just making a racket. Their schedule was unpredictable; they came and went at weird hours, sometimes disappearing for days on end. Unlike the typical friendly folks in this small mountain town, they were extremely private.

  One day, I ran into my fellow boarder as he rushed out of his door to use the bathroom. He nodded quickly at me, never saying a word. His hand was wrapped in a rough bandage with blood seeping through.

  Later that afternoon, as I was coming home from work, police had surrounded the house. They had his girlfriend, but she wasn’t in custody, because he was the one they wanted. It turns out that he was a bank robber and had been shot through the hand during his last hold-up. They had finally tracked him back here, the house where I lived, through the license plates on his stolen RV!

  The sheriff interrogated me. “Did you know him? What was he doing here?” I explained that my housemates had been a total mystery to me. This situation now made a whole lot more sense to me.

  The next day, I was asked to come down to the police station, and I assumed it was to make a statement about my former housemate, the bank robber. But I was whisked into an interrogation room and grilled about the alleged pot plants the police had found on the landlord’s porch.

  “What pot plants?” I asked, because I truly had no idea that the landlord was growing pot. That’s when they brought out these two plants no bigger than my thumbnail.

  The officers started to increase the pressure. They wanted me to tell them that my landlord was part of a drug ring and that he was growing marijuana. I’d never seen any sign that he was dealing drugs, and I wasn’t about to get him in trouble for something that I had no knowledge of.

  After turning the screws without results, one of the officers said (just like in a bad police drama), “We’ll give you some time to think this over,” and then walked out of the interrogation room, leaving me alone with the tiny plants. I was annoyed and angry about getting hassled—angry that they wanted me to blame my landlord just so they could get a bigger bust. Angry that they’d dragged me down here for these two little alleged pot plants.

  I guess I was so incensed that I decided the easiest thing to do was eat the evidence. Which is exactly what I did! You should have seen the looks on their faces when they returned.

  Needless to say, they were unhappy with me. It earned me a night in jail.

  Looking back, I bet I would have been more cooperative in the first place if they’d just told me that my landlord had skipped town with all the rent he’d been collecting for several months.

  The real bummer was that the jail they took me to was in Bishop, California, which was an hour’s drive away. When they booted me onto the street the following day, I had no way to get back to my car parked at the police station in Mammoth. I thought about hitchhiking, but instead started calling a few friends I knew back in Mammoth to ask for a ride. I finally reached Chris, one of the surf crew, and one of the guys I knew through Tony, my ex-boyfriend.

  Feeling free and having a need to de-stress, I left the police station and headed down the remote mountain road to meet up with Chris. I grew wary when a Chevy van, traveling in the opposite direction, slowed down and the driver asked me if I needed a ride. I said, “No, thanks,” so he drove on; but then, looking behind me, I saw him make a U-turn back toward me. Alarm bells went off! At that moment, Chris, looking a bit like a hippie, came along to pick me up in his brown Volkswagen camper van. In retrospect, I could see God’s hand of protection on my life.

  As we drove back to Mammoth, Chris and I talked about Hawaii and how much fun it would be to surf there. Spring was coming, the snow was melting—and with it my job. I didn’t have a place to live, thanks to bank robbers and an embezzling bonsai-pot grower for a landlord. It seemed to be the perfect time to make a radical change in plans. Chris asked me if he could tag along.

  Instead of going to Oahu, where all the famous surf breaks are, Chris suggested that we go to the island of Kauai. I had never heard of it. He had friends who lived there and would put us up, and from what he’d heard, the waves were uncrowded.

  I agreed. Kauai it was! We sold our cars, packed our surfboards and were off to the islands and my destiny, the place where I was meant to be.

  All this time, Tom was settling into college classes in San Diego. The G.I. bill paid for his education and housing costs. He condensed his classes together into two days so he would have plenty of open time to surf.

  When Tom was first discharged from the Navy, he’d gone home to New Jersey. But he quickly scraped up enough cash by hustling at local pool halls (and polishing his reputation as the “Trickster”) to return to San
Diego, where the surf was more to his liking.

  Surfing was undergoing an emerging revolution during this time. Long, heavy surfboards had given way to shorter, lighter and more maneuverable ones. The day of “hanging ten” (hanging all 10 toes off the front of a long board) was fading out. On a short board a surfer plants his feet and uses his core body weight to turn and carve the open face of the wave, staying just ahead of the whitewater foam.

  Then the surf leash came along. Previously, if a surfer wiped out, he or she would have to swim after his (her) surfboard, usually all the way to the beach. One would think this idea of a leash on the board would make all surfers shout hallelujah and save countless wasted time swimming after boards in cold water, or crab-crawling over sharp reefs. But a bunch of surfers who considered themselves hardcore looked down on anyone who paddled out with a leash, calling them kooks. In fact, the early leashes were called “kook cords.” Even I refused to use a leash, as I was a very strong swimmer. But the kooks with leashes were getting a lot more waves, while hard-core guys were swimming after their boards. Eventually, almost every surfer went out and bought a leash.

  Tom, like me, had been harboring the idea of going to Hawaii. He loved the surf in California, but he longed to find even more challenging waves—such as the ones he always saw in surf movies or magazines. The words of his Hawaiian shipmate, Rob, kept echoing in his ears. After only a year of school, on Christmas break, he took all of his savings and bought a round-trip ticket to Honolulu.

  He knew enough to get out of town, as Honolulu was called, and head for the countryside of the island. He was on the prowl for the bigger, more powerful waves. And they could only be found on the North Shore, where the surf breaks had familiar names that Tom had read about in the surf magazines filled with pictures of powerful pounding waves: Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay.