MY MOTHER, MY HERO

JO ANN ZERFAS WAS A ONE-OF-A-KIND WOMAN
WHO PASSED AWAY FAR TOO EARLY, AT 53,
OF A BRAIN ANEURYSM. SHE WAS AN AWE SOME
PARENT, A FIERCELY LOVING SPIRIT, AND THE
SINGLE BIGGEST INFLUENCE ON MY LIFE.

My mom had a great imagination, and she encouraged me to use mine, too; she read me all kinds of fantastical books, like Lord of the Rings and Dune. In general, she was a heavy cultivator of dreaming. And I believe that all the things I’ve done in my life—the houses I’ve built, the waves I’ve ridden, becoming a husband and a father—have been a result of being able to imagine them first. That’s her legacy.

She had an iron core of ethics and morals. One thing she instilled in me when I was young was that you can be anything you want to be and do anything you want to do—as long as you’re not hurting anyone else. She used to sing the song that went, “Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody’s mother.”

 When I was 10, she took me out of school, and we went across Europe and through Afghanistan and India. I had my 11th birthday in Kabul. I remember being told that they didn’t understand the concept of birthdays. Instead they would ask, “How many moons are you?” Mom wanted to expose me to other places in the world. Mission accomplished. How many 11-year-olds do you know who’ve been to the Khyber Pass in winter?

She was a relentless worker. Unbelievable energy. Her nickname was Jetty, as in “jet airplane,” because she was always on the move. She would literally work 16 hours a day, no problem, and she’d keep that up 7 days a week.

She was a sentimental person. Family was everything. We always celebrated birthdays and holidays. I think the first time I didn’t come home for Christmas, I was in my thirties. You were home for the holidays. That’s just the way it was.

Kauai was her place. She came and never left. She had found where she wanted to be. She appreciated the beauty of nature and the ocean.

No matter how dilapidated the house was—and I’m talking outhouses and cold showers—Mom kept everything meticulously clean. Our clothes were always clean. You could eat off the floor in our house. I don’t know how there were enough hours in the day for her to do everything that she did.

In the late ’70s, she started a helicopter touring company on Kauai called Papillon. She’d been taken on a flight by Red Johnson, a retired air force pilot who lived on the island, and after that the two of them collaborated—he did the flights, and she created the infrastructure. Her organizational skills made her a natural for business. And she loved it. She just immersed herself. It was the first time in her life she had the opportunity to explore a career—she was 20 when I was born, so she’d started her family young. She had such a passion for helicopters. Papillon eventually grew into the largest helicopter touring company in the state of Hawaii.

You wouldn’t play Scrabble with my mom. She was supersmart, and she’d read the dictionary, like, three times. You didn’t play word games against her, and you didn’t argue with her. Mom would have made a great litigator.

She wasn’t scared of anybody. Nobody. I don’t care if you’re 10 feet tall and the meanest guy on the planet. Mom would walk right up into your face if you did something wrong to her or her family. She’d come all guns blazing. I remember one time in Kauai when two guys had a fight in our driveway. They were some gnarly characters. Mom came down and was just livid, and they cursed at her and made threats. Later that day the elder of the area made them come back to the house and apologize. Because she was above reproach.

She was just a really loving person. People used to come to Mom all the time. She was always counseling people—men and women. As a parent, she was supercool. She was open to trying to understand the difficulties of being a kid and the frustrations of being a teenager. No matter what, she was always positive.

Her favorite thing was to look for seashells. She absolutely loved that. I spent a lot of time with her picking up shells on the beach while I was growing up. She’d display them in jars, bowls, cases—it was an epic collection.

We sprinkled her ashes over the Na Pali Coast of Kauai. It was a nine-helicopter procession. She’d died suddenly, but even so, she’d left specific instructions as to exactly how she wanted things to be and that all of her organs were to be donated. That was Mom, helping people and organized to the end, down to dotting the last i.