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Surfing by Osmosis

One thing I need to make clear straightaway: there’s no such thing as an official record in my family. Sorry, folks, but there’s no paper trail of documents or school records to track our comings and goings. No travel itinerary or gas receipts to help retrace our steps. We moved from here to there, up and back, around and around, without writing anything down or thinking there was any reason to remember any of the details.

Not the best way to start in on this memoir-writing business, but I want to tell it straight. You see, the deal in my family was to focus on the present. We didn’t care so much about where we’d been or where we were going, only where we were and what we were doing, just then. We lived in the moment, long before the phrase became something you’d see on a bumper sticker.

We rode whatever wave we were on at the time. (Hey, that’d look sweet on a bumper sticker, too!)

My father always jokes that we have a good collective memory, only it’s no joke. There are eleven of us, and I’m afraid no single one of us remembers everything; some of us don’t remember shit—but at least one of us remembers a little something about almost everything, and there are enough bits and snatches of memory among us to tell a couple good stories. That’s always been our thing; poll the family, and you’ll eventually find someone who gets it right; put together enough of our bits and snatches and you’ll get at least a fuzzy version of a clear picture. The trick comes in knowing who to believe and who’s completely full of shit.

My earliest memories are of my parents—and as memories go they’re all positive and pleasant and perfect. I was a happy baby. This is what I’ve been told, but it’s also what I remember. Whatever early memories I’ve held on to are pumped with feelings of warmth and well-being. I remember thinking my father could do no wrong. He was so big, so strong, so handsome … he filled the room with his presence, his personality. First time I ever heard the Greek legend of Zeus, it made me think of my father. My older brothers all had a similar take. Like me, as little kids they remember feeling completely safe and taken care of by my father—and a little bit in awe of him. The man cast a kick-ass shadow. (Still does!) My mother, too, but my father was the dominant personality in our little lives. He ran the show—and, once we were a little older, we also got that it was definitely a show. The more we surfed and bounced around the planet, the more I got that he liked being the center of attention; he liked what our family came to represent to surfers and beachgoers, the free-spirited, anything goes–type mind-set that attached to our lifestyle.

For my younger siblings—meaning the ones born after me—I’m guessing their experiences were different. By the time they came along, there were a bunch of older, rambunctious brothers on the scene, and we might have been the more dominant personalities in their lives; we might have set the tone of their childhoods. But for the oldest, including me, it was definitely my father. He was like Superman, to us. He was our Zeus, our God. Whatever he said, we listened. Whatever he did, we wanted to do. We moved to his rhythms.

First house I remember living in was in Hawaii, on the southeastern side of Oahu, in a place called Koko Head. I was about three or four years old—which meant there were just five or six of us kids. Don’t remember much about the house, apart from pictures and family stories, but I do remember it was in a neighborhood of tract houses that all looked the same. Even the people who spilled from those houses looked the same—dark-skinned, dark-haired Hawaiians all, except for us. Weren’t a whole lot of Mexican Jews in the tract houses of Koko Head, I guess.

I also remember that our Koko Head house was tiny, just a couple rooms, and that it sat on a beautiful hill, and that my paternal grandparents came to stay with us there for a stretch, and that when they did we were crowded on top of crowded. Also, it’s where I first went to school—barefoot, which was more of a Hawaii thing than a Paskowitz thing. A lot of the kids went to school barefoot in those days. It’s like shoes and sneakers were optional, which in our family worked out great because we probably couldn’t afford them anyway; we had too many damn feet.

There was another house in Hawaii, before Koko Head, this one on the western side of Honolulu County, in a little place called Makaha. The bay behind that house is a world-famous surf spot. That’s where we were living when I was born, and the house came to us on the back of one of my father’s stories. For all I know, this one might have even been true. The way my father always told it, he’d been living on the Big Island of Hawaii. He’d given up medicine to become a fish photographer. This was part of his plan to pare down his existence and live more honestly, more purposefully. Somehow, in his head, this translated as having nothing to do with money—or, at least, as little to do with money as was practical, or possible. Wasn’t exactly the best idea in the world, to try to carve a bare-bones living by taking pictures of fish, but my father couldn’t always separate his pie-in-the-sky ideas from his workable schemes; this one might have fallen somewhere in between. My oldest brother, David, had already been born, and it’s possible the next in line, Jonathan, had also arrived. My mother was pregnant—although this wasn’t any kind of telling marker. My mother was always pregnant. She used to tell people she was pregnant or nursing for more than ten years straight, without letup, and if you look at our birth certificates and do the math you’ll see she’s about five years short. There were about fourteen years between my oldest brother, David, and my youngest brother, Joshua, so it was almost fifteen years, really, if you count from the time she was pregnant with David to when she was finished nursing Joshua.

(In all that time, we must have sucked all the calcium right out of her, but she never lost a step; she had as much energy as any of us.)

Anyway, my father got it in his head to quit being a doctor. He liked that he understood about the human body and was in a position to help people, but he didn’t like all the hassle and paperwork that came with it, so he bought a used camera and tried to make a living taking pictures of fish. After a while, he got the idea to take pictures of people. One idea followed from the other.

“What’s the greatest photograph in the world?” he used to ask us, whenever he told this story. Even though we’d heard the answer a dozen times, we’d still stumble over the question. It was like an old vaudeville routine. We all knew our parts, and my father played the lead.

“What’s the greatest photograph in the world?” he’d ask again—sometimes clapping his hands together, like he was about to share some ancient piece of wisdom. “I’ll tell you. It’s one that you’re in. A picture of yourself, that’s what people want. After that, the second-greatest picture in the world is a picture of a fish, and if you can find a way to put the person and the fish in the same picture … well, then maybe you’ve got something.”

So this was his big idea, his grand plan to support his young family, and after trying it out on the Big Island for a year or so he realized he’d probably have better success on Oahu, where there’d be more people to photograph. Maybe not more fish, but more people. So he and my mother threw their few possessions (and their few kids!) together and made their way to Oahu, where my father soon talked his way into an extended stay in a small hotel on the beach, probably in exchange for some photographs and free medical advice. Like I wrote earlier, he was big into bartering, my old man. It’s like he was living in the Wild, Wild West, swapping and trading for everything. Bottom line: if he was living in a hotel room on the beach with his wife and small children, you can bet he wasn’t paying for it.

They couldn’t stay in that hotel room forever, of course. My father had to find a way to get established, to provide for his family, so he started asking around. One thing about my father, he was great with people. He could talk his way into or out of pretty much anything, and here he fell in with a local Chinese man who had some sort of connection to Henry J. Kaiser, the great shipbuilder and steel magnate, who had settled in Honolulu and become a real estate developer. The connection to Kaiser was always a little vague to us kids, but my father set it out like an important part of the story, and maybe it was. In later years, my father claimed he’d even met old man Kaiser a time or two, although the circumstances of those meetings were never entirely clear—and never quite the same, from one story to the next. My father remembers that they were friends. Who knows, maybe they were. My guess is they were more like acquaintances—and by “acquaintances” I might mean they shook hands, once or twice. Either way, Kaiser had built a new development on the western side of the island, in Makaha, and my father learned from his new Chinese friend that they were having trouble selling the houses. This part checks out. Back then, Makaha was fairly remote and only the true die-hard surfers were willing to live that far from town, but the true die-hard surfers didn’t have any money. My father must have seen all these empty houses as an opportunity, because he put it out that he would very much like to see this development and possibly consider buying a home there.

Only problem was that my father was like every other surfer in Makaha Bay; he had no money and not a whole lot of prospects. This would become the running theme of his life—of all of our lives. Same goes for almost any other die-hard surfer, then as now. Surf long enough, hard enough, and there won’t be a whole lot of time left for mundane, workaday realities like earning a living or building a savings account. Spend too much time worrying work or long-term security and you’ll cut into your time in the water.

Either way, you’re screwed.

Back then, all Doc had were his medical degree and his used camera, so he and his new friend got to talking. My father told him his story. He told him about his plans to step away from medicine and become a photographer. He told him of his time in Israel, and his determination to live a simple, healthy life. He told him of his plans to have eight sons, and announced proudly that he was well on his way. He told him of his love of surfing. And he didn’t just talk about himself, my father. He pumped his friend for details on his story, his worldview, his passions … and he listened with great interest, another one of my father’s great gifts.

After a few days, the Chinese man took such a liking to my father he told him he’d like to sell him one of his houses in Makaha. It turned out he’d invested in Kaiser’s development and all he had to show for it were some empty houses. He figured he would do well to help this interesting young doctor and his family get established on Oahu. He probably also figured it would be easier to sell his other houses if he could show people some nice, young families living in the neighborhood, so he turned to my father and said, “What can you afford as a down payment?”

My father gave this some serious thought. He said, “Well, what’s the smallest amount you’d take?”

Now it was the other guy’s turn for some serious thought. He was a businessman, after all. And yet there must have been something in my father’s tale of dreams and woe that sparked something in his new friend, because it got this guy thinking he wanted to help my father out, even if it would be a losing proposition on paper. He finally said, “Whatever you think is fair. Whatever you can afford.”

This was my father’s favorite part of the story to tell. Usually, he dressed it up by reaching into his pocket, the way he said he’d done when he was sitting with his friend. In most versions of the story, they were sitting in the lobby of the hotel where my parents were staying and my father reached into his pocket and came out with a dime. That’s it, just one dime. It was all he had on him, ten lousy cents.

With great fanfare and showmanship, he slapped the dime on the table between them and said, “That’s all I have.”

The great kicker to the story was the Chinese gentleman saying, “I’ll take it.”

Probably, the truth was a whole lot less dramatic. My father didn’t end up buying the house, but my family did end up living there, with that one dime as a deposit. There’d be another few “last dime” stories that would become part of our family history, and I’ll share them as I move along with my story, but I like this one for the way it shows my father as a bold, adventurous, likable young man, willing to abandon his worldly possessions (and even his profession) for a half-baked ideal—namely, that he could find a way to get by on a good heart and the best intentions. I always thought it was kind of amazing, kind of remarkable, the way he could get others to throw in with him. Like his surfer pals, who made a place for him as one of their own. Like the lifeguards on the beaches of Tel Aviv, who took to surfing like they’d been born to it. Like the Chinese guy, who put my parents into their first house.

Like my mother, most of all.

Just to be clear, my mother was a strong-willed, talented, fiercely proud Mexican-American woman. Still is. A lot of folks we met over the years seemed to think she’d taken a kind of backseat to my father in the way we were raised, the choices we made as a family, but that wasn’t at all the case. Yeah, my father was the dominant personality, the front person, but my mother was with him all the way. We might have moved to his rhythms, his whims, but she accepted them as her own. That’s how much she loved my dad, I always believed. So much that she was willing to drink whatever batch of Kool-Aid he was pouring at the time. If he believed in a thing wholeheartedly, then she did as well, even if it cut against whatever ideas about family and parenting she might have come to on her own. And it’s not like she ever resented my father for having to set aside her dreams for his. It wasn’t like that, with them. She was so crazy in love with him that nothing else mattered.

We filled that first house, before long. And the one after that. (And the one after that.) I was born in 1963, fourth in line after David, Jonathan, and Abraham, and I was quickly followed by Moses and Adam. Basically, we kind of burst onto the scene one after the other. We were our own little population explosion. We all slept in one big room—the living room, I think—almost like a litter of puppies. My parents threw a bunch of mats down on the floor and that was it. If we were tired, we’d just drop off to sleep, wherever we happened to be. In the morning, we’d stow the mats and clear the room for whatever else was going on.

During the day, we went to the beach. All day, every day. My father would surf. Maybe David and Jonathan were starting to find their way on a board at four or five or six. The rest of us just splashed around in the shorebreak, learning to swim, getting comfortable in the water. We were like tadpoles—just a bunch of brown, big-bellied boys. In later years, we’d be leaned out and wiry, but when we lived in Makaha and in Koko Head we were like fat little calves, all plump and happy. One of the highlights of those days for me was going to the market with my mother. She shopped at a place where they gave free samples of poi. They had a bunch of tiny tasting spoons and you were only supposed to take a small amount, but I’d really get into that poi bowl and eat my fill. My brothers, too.

Eventually, my father gave up on photography and went back to being a doctor. It went against what he’d decided was his nature, but he had no choice, really. There were too many mouths to feed, too many bills to pay, so he moved from one hospital to another, one clinic to another. He worked in a local VD clinic for a while, and then for another while in the state medical office. He’d stay at one place long enough to figure out what he didn’t like about it, and then he’d go off looking for another gig. The one thing he wouldn’t do was work in private practice. He didn’t want to be tied down like that. He’d rather fix the dings in his buddy’s surfboards, or hang out on the set of Gunsmoke, where he worked for a stretch as a doctor for the cast and crew. That’s where he met the actor James Arness, who my father quickly added to his growing collection of pals and acquaintances.

I keep a picture in my head of the first five or six of us, standing in front of the Koko Head house. If it’s a real picture, I haven’t seen it in years, but it’s just as likely one of those freeze-frame snapshots we all carry of some special moment or memory; we set up the shot so we can look back at how we were. In the picture, we’re all wearing these crappy, hand-me-down, Salvation Army–type clothes. Even David, the oldest, wore hand-me-downs—so our hand-me-downs were already hand-me-downs. By the time they were handed down to me or Moses or whoever was the youngest at the time, they were pretty threadbare and hideous, but we never wasted anything. Probably, my father was making enough money to buy us new clothes, but he didn’t like the idea of buying new clothes, so we went to the thrift store, came out looking like well-fed ragamuffins.

There were a lot of other kids in our Koko Head neighborhood, but this didn’t really mean all that much. We had a kind of pack mentality, us Paskowitz kids. We moved about the neighborhood together. There were so many of us, we were self-sufficient. We didn’t need any of those other kids; we had each other; we brothers were constant companions—running through the neighborhood, playing on the beach, making our share of little-kid trouble. And we had a blast. That’s the one great takeaway from our time on Oahu—how much we all laughed, all the time. Don’t remember what the hell we were laughing about, but we all remember laughing—uncontrollably, at times. Really, we enjoyed the crap out of each other. (I supposed we beat the crap out of each other, too, but it was never anything more than good-natured roughhousing.) As we got older, we paired off in little sub-sets, by age, and had our own mini-adventures. David and Jonathan were a great twosome. Abraham and I hung out a lot together. Eventually, Moses and Adam were best buddies. And then we’d mix it up from there.

If I went to school while we were living in that Koko Head house, that means David, Jonathan, and Abraham all went ahead of me, which bumps into a line we’d hear from my mother later on, when we were living in the camper. Whenever we’d meet someone new, they’d want to know about us kids and school. That was always the first question we’d get, when folks came to know us; they’d want to know how we managed to avoid the truant officer. My mother always said that if you don’t put your kids in the system they’ll never know about your kids. The “they” in my mother’s mind were the government, the authorities, the man. My parents never had a whole lot of faith in authority, but for a brief time back in Koko Head they sent us to the local school, same as everyone else. After a couple years, I guess they decided we were no better off in school than we would have been on the beach, so they changed things up and went at it a different way.

I don’t believe this change happened all at once. There wasn’t one day when my parents decided we’d no longer be going to school. My father didn’t clap his hands, like he did when he told one of his stories, and announce any kind of big, sudden change. We just sort of stopped going, gradually. Maybe we’d all ditch school as a family one day, if the surf was up and the sun was out, and maybe the next day would check in just as good so we’d skip school again. School just wasn’t important, just then. Don’t think it was ever any kind of big deal to my folks. We would learn on our own—not in a traditional homeschooling sort of way, but in a scattershot, spontaneous sort of way. We’d learn what we needed to know, and if something grabbed our interest we’d learn a little bit more about that one thing. Or not.

Soon, by the time I was five or six, our days seemed to have more to do with going to the beach and being at the beach than with anything else. Eventually, our days at the beach were all about surfing, but that took a while to set in. Like I said, David and Jonathan took to it first. The rest of us were at the baby beaches, just getting used to the water, and we took to it one by one. Wasn’t anything my father ever forced. If you ask him about it now, he’ll say he wanted us to come to surfing on our own, when we were good and ready, each of us in our own way, but that always sounds to me like a pile of crap. The way I remember it, it’s more like he was off doing his thing, surfing, hanging with his surf buddies, and we were hanging back with my mother, doing our thing, and after a while those separate things just kind of bumped into each other—and by that I mean he probably looked up one day and noticed one or another of us itching to paddle out and he got to thinking, What the hell …

Don’t think he ever put any more thought into it than that.

*   *   *

My first specific memory of surfing didn’t happen until we’d moved to California, to a little house in a remote part of San Marcos. It would be our last house for a while. I went back to school for a short stretch in San Marcos, together with my older brothers, I guess because my parents wanted to give the California schools a chance to screw us up like the Hawaii schools had screwed us up. Only here, too, we went in a half-assed, halfhearted way. One day, might have even been a school day, we drove down to Tourmaline Beach in San Diego, which had always been one of my father’s favorite surf spots, going back to when he was a kid, lifeguarding just down the beach from Tourmaline Canyon. Even now, more than forty years later, we still surf that beach. It’s where we’ve run our family surf camp, since 1972, but this was a couple years before that. I was about six years old, and for some reason I was sitting still on the beach long enough to watch my father in the water. For a good long time, I watched him. Oh, I’d seen him surf before. I’d seen him out there and thought he was absolutely bigger than life, strong as a mule, fearless on top of fearless. But this was the first time I really watched him surf. The first time I considered what he was doing out there, against what my older brothers were doing, what the other surfers were doing. Don’t know that I’d go so far as to say I was studying my father as he rode those big waves, but I was certainly checking him out. Taking notes.

You learn to surf by osmosis. By hanging on the beach, hanging with other surfers. And this was me, starting to pay attention. Starting to soak in what it meant to be up on a board, dancing across the waves.

Here’s what I noticed, that day on the beach. My father was a throwback kind of surfer. Old-school. Even at six years old, I could see there was something different about the way he rode. He was doing these ancient maneuvers that even in 1969 were seriously dated. The way he turned, he did an exaggerated drop-knee turn, which looked a whole lot different from the way other surfers carved their turns. But my father had grown up on such big, heavy boards that was what he knew. He’d put his foot back and his knee would almost touch the deck of the board, almost like one of those Olympic ski jumpers trying to stick a big-ass landing. From that position, he’d basically stall—meaning he’d lean back in such a way that the front end would pop out of the water, slowing his momentum—and then bring the board around, almost in a pivot. It might have been state-of-the-art in the 1930s, but by the time I was a kid it looked weird and old-fashioned.

And it wasn’t just because he rode his big old wooden boards that my father surfed this way. In the years since he’d started surfing, boards had gotten shorter and lighter. There was more shape to them. They were made of foam and fiberglass, instead of wood. They were much more maneuverable. You could do things on these newer, shorter, lighter boards that my father and his old Mission Beach lifeguard pals could never have imagined. But my father rode those new boards in his antique, old-fashioned way. It was in his bones. He didn’t mean to, but he couldn’t help himself. Stingers, swallowtails … whatever was new at the time, he’d be out there on one ripping it—really, really ripping it—but I’d catch him trying to carve a more graceful turn and underneath it you could still see the clunky, drop-knee pivot. It was what he knew, and it stuck to him, and this was the first time I really noticed he had his own style out there on the waves.

So there I was sitting off by myself, watching my father do his thing, and I caught myself thinking I wanted to be out there, doing my version of the same thing. I’d been on a belly board before. I’d paddled around on the inside with my brothers, but I’d never gone out past the break. It had never occurred to me, until just that moment, and as I watched my father—so strong, so big, so full of life—I wanted to be just like him.

When he finally came in, I went right up to him and said, “I want to surf.”

So he paddled me out, right then and there. It’s like he didn’t want to give me a chance to think too hard about it, to talk myself out of it. He just threw me on his board and I lay out on my belly, while he knelt behind me and paddled out. It’s a lot harder than it looks, paddling out on your knees with a kid in tow, but my father had no trouble with it. He was big and lean and muscular. He even paddled in an old-school way, supertraditional, with both hands reaching for the water at the same time, like a two-sided stroke.

I wish I could remember what we talked about, as we paddled out, if we even talked at all. I’m sure we did. We must have. I do remember that I wasn’t afraid. I felt completely safe in my father’s care, completely without worry. The waves were high, even for Tourmaline, and we had to get past some giant sets that knocked us around pretty good, but I was completely without fear. I was with my father, on a great adventure. Nothing bad could happen.

Soon as we got out there, my father turned us around and grabbed a wave and rode it back to shore. I stayed on my belly, up front. God, it was fast! In my little-kid head, it felt like we were going a hundred miles an hour. I gripped the rails tight. It was exhilarating. Years later, first time I ever heard that word, “exhilarating,” I thought back to this moment with my father, and this first-ever wave.

We went right back out, of course. Wasn’t even a question. And this time I wanted to ride in standing up. I said, “I want to ride like you, Dad. I want to stand.”

He said, “We’ll see about that, Israel. We’ll see.”

And we did. If that first ride was exhilarating, this second one was the absolute shit—another term I did not yet grasp. But it fit. Hell, yeah, it fit. My dad held my hand and helped to stand me up and as I did I had a quick case of nerves. For a tiny, quick-shot moment I fixed on the idea that I would slip and fall and maybe hit my head on the rail, but as soon as I got up and found my balance and felt certain in my father’s grip those nerves were gone. I was washed over by that same sense of security from the first ride on my belly. I felt like nothing could go wrong. Like nothing could ever go wrong. And with it came this giant adrenaline rush of pure excitement. Still felt like we were going a hundred miles an hour. Maybe even a million miles an hour. Couldn’t think of a bigger number or a faster speed. But on top of that it was such a giant thrill.

I didn’t want it to end.

And there was also this: as I rode, I realized I was standing in the goofy position. I knew my dad rode goofy—meaning right foot forward—and I’d been wondering if I would ride goofy, too. I’d stand on a board on the beach, and I’d try it every which way, trying to figure it out. The thing is, you can’t really know until you’re up on a board which way is more comfortable. And so, as I stood up, I had no real idea what my stance would be, but I set myself right foot forward, just like him. Instinctively. It’s like being left-handed or right-handed, only it doesn’t match up. You can be right-handed and ride goofy, or you can be right-handed and ride regular—left foot forward. It just comes naturally, and whatever your stance that first time you get up on a board, that tends to be your stance forever. Like it or not, plan on it or not, you’re stuck with it. And here I was, riding like my dad. Moving like my dad. Imagining myself like my dad.

Cool.

That one ride standing up was enough. I was hooked, stoked, gone … whatever words express how absolutely sold I was on the sport of surfing, that’s what I was. But that was it for me, that first time. Just those two rides—one on my belly and one on foot. After that, I started to feel cold, shivering cold. My father could see that I was almost shaking. He said, “That’s enough for today, Israel. There’ll be more waves tomorrow.”

*   *   *

My father had a thing about working past his fears, which he told us in the form of a story. Over and over, he told us this story. Never the same way twice. But always with dramatic pauses and prompts and questions built in, so he could make double sure we’d been listening the last bunch of times.

The story went like this: As a young man, in the early 1960s, he was surfing the point at Makaha, where you could find some of the hairiest, gnarliest, bitchin’est waves on the island. One of our Makaha neighbors was a great big-wave surfer named Buzzy Trent. My father had seen Buzzy surf these giant, killer waves, up to twenty feet. Waves like that scared the crap out of my old man, who preferred to ride waves about half that height. That was his comfort zone. Maybe he could psych himself up to try a twelve-footer, maybe fourteen-, but twenty feet was way out of his reach.

For some reason, Buzzy kept trying to help him ride bigger and bigger waves, but something in my father kept holding him back. At the same time, there was another something that told him he had to try. Something that told him if he stayed in his comfort zone he’d become soft. So he started working on his stamina, by running the hills around our house. He worked on his wind, by skin-diving and learning to hold his breath for a minute and more. He worked on his approach, by studying the big-wave surfers and trying to mimic their technique.

Finally, one winter day, the northern swells reached to our little point and my father decided he was ready. And as he made to paddle out he realized he’d worked on his endurance, his wind, his approach, but he still hadn’t tackled his fears. In fact, the closer he came to trying to ride these monsters, the more terrified he became, and he realized this was one part of his conditioning he couldn’t control. He also realized that if he couldn’t control his fears, he could at least get to where his fears couldn’t control him. But this was no easy thing; didn’t exactly work the way he told it to. Each day, the waves would get a little bigger, and he’d grow a little more fearful. It was an impossible equation. He’d see his pals getting more and more juiced about the tides and the weather, and then he’d see these same pals getting slapped around and wonder how the hell he was going to ride that kind of surf. These guys weren’t just his friends, they were his heroes, and my father started to think that if big-wave legends like Buzzy Trent and Bud Morrissey were struggling he’d be a fool to even attempt those giant sets. He hung back, and he hated himself for hanging back, so he pushed himself to paddle out.

It was one of those one-step-forward/two-steps-back-type deals, because once my father was past the break, on the outside, he couldn’t imagine riding one of those giant waves back to shore. He’d psych himself up for it; then he’d psych himself right back down. Up close, the waves were even more terrifying than they’d been at a distance. So what did he do? Basically, he froze, but as he did he realized something about himself, something important, and it was at this point in the story that he always asked us kids if we knew what that something was. We’d always wait for him to answer his own question. He’d say, “I am who I am. I don’t have anything to prove.”

And so he never surfed those twenty-foot waves. Not then, not later. Not if he could avoid them. The lesson, for him, was to take your own measure. To know the difference between being soft and being reasonable. To know your own limits.

Only I never thought this was a lesson he wanted for his sons, because the story came with a punch line—and the punch line came, he said, from an old World War II movie, where an officer finds a lowly paratrooper shivering in fear before attempting a jump. The officer can’t understand why this young man keeps jumping, since by this point he has completed a great many practice jumps and still appears to be paralyzed by fear.

“Why do you keep jumping if you’re so scared?” the officer asks the paratrooper.

“Because, sir,” the paratrooper replies. “I love to be around men who aren’t scared.”

That young paratrooper was like my father, who loved to be around men who weren’t scared. Men like Buzzy Trent and Bud Morrissey and all the other great big-wave surfers of the day—the fearless giants of the sport who went looking to surf the giant waves, typically twenty feet and taller. That’s why he pushed himself past those killer sets, to at least think about attempting to surf a giant well, to soak in the fearlessness of his friends. It’s not like he was out of his element, my old man, or in over his head as a surfer. No way. He could keep up with a lot of these guys, when the waves were in reach, but when things got a little hairy he pulled back. He drew off their fearlessness, but only to a point. And looking back, I can’t shake thinking my father was raising us to be like those balls-to-the-wall surfers in Makaha Bay. It’s like he was breeding this band of tiny surf warriors. Like we could somehow stand in for him when it came time to surf those giants. Like we could become those men without fear.

Anyway, that was my take. My brothers might have seen it another way. And my father, he’d wonder what the hell I was talking about. But why else would my old man make us march around our house each morning to the blare of Chairman Mao’s wake-up call? This went on for a long stretch. My father had this scratchy old record he’d play at full volume, and he had us march to Chinese military music and do calisthenics and all these bizarre drills. And he had us do them in all seriousness. He’d line us up and put us through our paces, while the music blared on and on. It almost had a Captain America, cartoony feel to it; I’d hear the horns of Chairman Mao’s march and think we were in a cartoon all our own. But we couldn’t smile or goof around or not take it seriously because then we’d have to go at it again.

He was big into rituals, my father. They framed our days. They made us stronger, he always said. He’d start each day with his morning prayers, and when we were old enough we’d join him. When he sang the Shema blessing on Friday nights he’d have us stand and sing along, like we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance at school. He’d say the evening prayers at the end of the day, too.

At night, we’d have to be home by sundown. That was our dinner bell. Even when we were living in the camper, spending all our time on the beach and in the cliffs along the coast, we’d know that when the sun started sinking low and dipping past the horizon we’d better hustle on home. We’d eat as a family, and every night my father would ask us what we did that day, what we learned, what we enjoyed. He’d start with the oldest and work his way down, and I was filled with dread as David, Jonathan, and then Abraham took their turns. Either I’d have no idea what I was going to say or I worried I wouldn’t be able to find the words or that one of my brothers would steal what I was going to say, because of course a lot of what happened to me each day happened to my older brothers as well. It was a whole lot of worry, every night, so I usually ended up stammering and never quite making my point or even uttering a full sentence.

My brothers used to tease me and for a while my nickname was Wha Wha Wha, because that was the sound I made when I was fumbling. I don’t think the nickname bothered me; I just heard it like an inside joke. But it fit: I stuttered as a kid. I shrank from any kind of public speaking, so most of my contributions to my father’s evening ritual started out with, “Wha Wha Wha.” When I finally spit out something intelligible—it could have been something I learned about surfing, or about people, or about how maybe the mussels we’d used for bait that day when we were out fishing weren’t as good as when we’d used the live baby crab—I’d hang back and wait for my father’s approval. If I managed to say something smart or insightful or helpful to the other brothers, he’d reward me with a big smile or a clap of his hands or a pat on the head. That’d be like getting an A. If I could only shrug and mumble, “Wha Wha Wha,” he’d leave me to sit and fidget for a minute or so before moving on to Moses. That’d be like getting an F.

Soon, even our diets were regimented. My mother used to feed us this dreadful morning gruel for breakfast, made from millet, raw wheat, corn, and who knows what the hell else. We were always told it was made with seven different grains, but I don’t think there’s a single one of us (my mother included!) who could name them. The stuff would congeal the moment my mother dished it out. If you were hungry, it tasted okay; if you weren’t hungry, it was awful. We were sometimes allowed to sweeten it with a bit of honey and a pinch of raisins, which didn’t help it go down that much easier.

They used to feed us this super-ultraorganic healthy bread, from a local bakery. It was kind of nasty, actually. They’d cut us these big, thick slices and stand over us to make sure we ate them. Sometimes, my mother would bake her own bread—and I hate to say it, but it was also nasty. It’s not that my mom couldn’t bake; it’s that she couldn’t put anything good into whatever she was baking.

Throughout the day, whatever we ate was carefully monitored. We couldn’t eat anything that had been processed or refined or manufactured in any way. We couldn’t have any butter. We couldn’t have any sugar—not even brown sugar. And our portions seemed to get smaller and smaller as we got bigger and bigger.

Our portions shrank because my father believed we should be thin and lean. (In later years, when there were more and more of us, and less and less work for my father, portions were small for an entirely different reason, but by then we were used to it.) We never complained about the small portions, because there was only so much of this stuff we could take, but after a while the big bellies the oldest four or five of us had carried as little kids began to melt away. After a while my parents had us looking like the leanest, fittest, healthiest kids on the beach—which we were, I guess.

Telling it now, a lot of their ideas on diet and fitness leaned a little on the wrong side of crazy, but my brothers and I were so full of energy and confidence … it had to have at least something to do with the way we were being raised. We were strong, fearless, healthy beyond measure—and by the time the oldest of us were teenagers, we started to feel invincible.

In some way, our energy and confidence spilled over into how we surfed, just as how we surfed spilled back over into how we lived. It was all tied together. Like I wrote earlier, we mostly learned to surf by hanging around and watching other surfers. By thinking about surfing, all day long, and soaking in the mood and movements of others. Even when I was way little, I understood the cycle of the waves. I got that they came in sets and that in between the sets there’d be lulls and gaps and that this was when you were supposed to paddle out. Nobody had to explain this to me; you watch something for so long, you figure it out. By the time I was six or seven and starting to ride myself, I’d seen so many people surf I could identify them from a couple hundred yards away. I could tell by their stance, their style, their foot placement. How they held their hands. And by the paddle, too. They might have one foot in the air, or they might paddle with two hands at once, like my father. So I watched all these surfers, all these waves, over and over and over, and eventually I carried a picture of myself in my head, of the way I wanted to surf. It’s like I was holding a mirror to the scene on the beach and finding myself in the reflection.

My father had some particular ideas about surfing, and he passed these on to us as well. Not so much in terms of style or approach, but more in terms of philosophy. As kids, we were taught not to waste anything. This applied to the food we ate, the clothes we wore … all the way down to the waves we chose to ride. A lot of times, you’ll see surfers hanging on the outside, sitting on their boards, waiting and waiting on the perfect wave, but that wasn’t the Paskowitz way. My father’s idea was to catch every wave you can, and to ride it all the way in, as far as you can. It was the same as telling me not just to eat the center of the watermelon but to eat the whole thing, right down to the rind. He’d say, “Ride that wave as long as you can, Israel. If you ride it in longer, you’ll be a better surfer than the other guy. He’ll just ride in the sweet spot and then kick out at first chance. He’ll be done, and you’ll still be surfing.”

This made sense to me, as a kid. Still does. To this day, when I’m out surfing for a couple hours I’ll grab every wave that comes my way. It’s different when you’re competing, when you’ve got a certain amount of time to do your thing for the judges. When you’re competing, you have to pick your spots, but when you’re just playing, you have to surf. A lot of folks don’t get this. Serious, kick-ass surfers—some of them just don’t get this. They’ll see me point for a nothing-special wave, and they’ll call out to me. They’ll say, “Hey, Izzy, there’s a much bigger set coming.”

But in my head I’m gone. In my head I know there’s no such thing as a better wave than the one I’m on.