The Search for Freedom Page #2

And then skateboarding urbanized

and came back and influenced surfing.

So there's all kinds

of cultural cross-pollination.

The clothing industry caught hold

in the early '70s,

and this thing went ballistic.

If you were to ask me back

then if we were going to have

the largest surf-skate-snow

industry company ever,

I'd tell you, no, not a chance, no way.

It's really not about any one person,

never has been.

I always call myself just a humble

board short maker so here we are.

Let's talk a little bit about you.

OK.

I lived in a little house in Newport.

We had no money.

I had a Volkswagen van. That was

our biggest asset in the company.

At least we could drive around

and make things happen.

I had no business being in business.

I had no idea how to start something.

I thought my business experience would

be to just go to work for somebody

and get a paycheck and learn.

So we really had to make it up

as we went along,

just driving around town all day long

finding fabric, Velcro, snaps.

We'd get about 24 pairs

out of production every day.

I'd put the snaps in every pair.

And we'd put them in my Volkswagen van,

and drive to an account

who would take

as many as we could supply.

I thought,

"All right, well, this sounds fun."

I can hang out at the beach.

I can keep surfing.

I have this little project,

do it for a year or two,

and then I'm going to go

to graduate school. That was my plan.

You know, when I was young,

climbing saved our lives.

We had nothing to do

with corporate America.

I mean, this is the '60s.

We just said no to a lot of that stuff.

We had a counterculture lifestyle

and made our own way.

We really were proud of the fact

that climbing had

no economic value in society.

That was great.

When we were doing big walls

in Yosemite and stuff,

hardly anything had been done.

So you didn't repeat routes.

I mean, why repeat a route

when you can go do a new route?

I think the curious common bond

that we all had

is a passion to do something

with no outside motivation.

It was more from the inside.

Because you weren't going

to get famous about it.

You weren't going to get paid for it,

no way, no how.

When you first started

coming into this place,

it was really intriguing about

the lifestyle and the characters.

It just seemed

like an array of characters.

You've got to remember,

it was in the early '70s.

There was a whole revolution of things

going on in mainstream society

of protesting wars, you know,

hippie generation and all that.

It seemed like everything

was an adventure around here.

Every step you were taking

had an inspiration of the unknown

and the excitement just to be here.

If you go back

in the history of bicycles,

over 100 years ago,

people rode nothing but unpaved roads.

So one could say,

"Well, off-road riding,

that started when bicycles started,"

which now everybody takes for granted.

But back in the '60s, '70s,

it was a radical proposition.

There was this whole place

where people would go to, this shrine,

where it was so close

to a major crazy city, San Francisco,

yet at the same time

you could get so far away.

The golden key was this thing

called a balloon tire bike,

and originally it was, you know,

found objects.

It was bikes that were found

in second-hand stores

and, you know, the Goodwill or dumps.

What happened here was

a mongrelized bike.

I mean, some people,

half the people would spit on it

and say, "This is a piece of junk.

Are you out of your mind?"

And the other half would say, "That's

what I want! I need that thing."

I was lucky enough

to have met a couple of the first

windsurfers in Hawaii in 1974.

I wasn't big enough or strong enough

to get the sail out of the water.

I was 11 years old,

weighed, like, 72lbs.

I graduated from high school in 1981,

and that's the year

the sport turned pro.

So I deferred admissions to university.

I said, OK, I'll see what being

a pro windsurfer might be,

because there weren't any at that point.

When you first started skating,

especially in the '80s,

or even the '70s,

skaters were outcasts. It wasn't cool.

When I was in high school,

I got ridiculed for skating.

There were only

two other skaters in my school.

We just kept our head down, did our work

and bolted as soon as the bell rang.

I got into it in its early days

from before we had bindings,

before it was allowed at ski resorts.

The vibe in the early days was like,

"You can never make a living

doing that."

There was no such thing as a snowboard

industry or a pro snowboarder.

I left school and the whole thing.

Left at 16 to come up here.

I did not feel like I was smart.

That was some of the side effects

of being in a situation

where you're being given

an A, B, C, D, or F.

And you convince yourself that you're

not as good as, you're less than.

But at the same time, I realized

something very curious for myself,

that I had a very strong connection

to nature.

Basically, rock climbing

became a way of life.

Now, who would have thought?

I was a youth.

What I recognize is you're willing

to almost do anything

to just know who you are

and where you're at.

And with youthful enthusiasm,

they're willing to try it

just for the adventure of it,

for the initiation

into something that...

Who knows what it is?

It might be a gang. I don't know.

And I tell them that you had to do

something to get in here,

even to get locked up.

Now you know where you're at.

What are you going to do about it?

What I got to experience as a kid

on a 20-day backpacking trip,

hiking to the top of peaks and things,

is that somehow your imagination

will catch something,

and you might get that miracle of life

that is "anything's possible."

All right, gentlemen.

- Have fun.

- Good luck riding!

I fell in love with skateboarding

and surfing early on.

Just getting to the beach

was a huge adventure.

Oftentimes, it was hitchhike

45 minutes away, hide in the bushes,

sleep on the beach

so you're there in the morning.

I was seeking out

the optimal places to surf and skate,

and had those adventurous ethos

from the beginning.

Going into these places,

you fill your backpack with everything

you think you might need,

and you walk into the wilderness.

And to go out there and really walk

through these mountains,

one wrong call

could have dire consequences.

It's super important

to be really present-moment.

And it is a process

getting into the flow,

to, like, really, really

get into the flow.

I'm really firing on all cylinders,

and reading, like, every little nuance

that the mountains are doing.

And when I come back

from time in the mountains,

whether it's a day or a week

or a month, I respect life,

but I feel like

it's really important to live life.

Every day, I'm involved in a pathway

that's a critical pathway.

Someone's life depends on the decisions

and the actions that I take.

And I saw myself

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