Wood is Good

History was a favorite subject of mine during my school years. I found it fun and fascinating to learn about what happened in the past and how the ripples of certain events over time can shape our lives today. Applying this train of thought to my love of surfing, I became intrigued with the old, solid wood planks that our surfing pioneers rode back in the early decades of the twentieth century.
What was it like to ride those dangerously heavy logs? If you wiped out and your board hit you hard, it could possibly kill you. Hell, the damned things had no fins. If you banged rails with others while paddling for a wave on a square-railed kook box, you could lose a finger. It happened to some guys. You most assuredly had to be in good shape to even carry a 10-foot timber tanker to the beach, let alone handle one in the surf.  As Dale Velzy succinctly put it, “Wimps just didn’t do it.”  I figured any good student of history could gain a better understanding and appreciation for what transpired in the past by experiencing it for themselves, so I set out to find and ride at least a 1930’s era surfboard.
Easier said than done, that is.  These days, the only boards of that early period are in hands-off museums of private collectors or long since destroyed. So I decided to build one myself. Armed with some choice 10-foot cuts of redwood and balsa wood from Frost Lumber, I glued up a nice “blank” and spent two months using my grandfather’s vintage drawknife and wood planers to fashion a look-a-like copy of a Pacific System Homes Waikiki model plank, the rage of 1937. (Pacific System Homes out of Los Angeles, made ready-cut homes back then and built surfboards as a sideline business, the very first mass-market surfboard manufacturer.) I had previously met Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison, who had shaped four wood boards a day for Pacific Systems and took home $100 a month for his efforts. It was cool to follow in his planer strokes. I opted to have it fiberglassed, not varnished, like the original boards, just for the durability factor and the glassers seemed surprised when I said I was going to ride it, not hang it on a wall.
The day I brought it out to Ocean Beach for a christening was pretty amazing. People were staring and gawking at me like I had stepped out of a time machine. It drew passersby to me like moths to a flame. It also brought out their recollections from their pasts, even if they weren’t surfers; a fascinating effect and I was digging it. When I paddled out and stroked into my first wave, it was like getting my first-ever glide on a surfboard. I was hooting and grinning as the massive squaretail found its trim speed and accelerated like a lumbering, runaway train and I was along for the thrill ride. No wonder the early surfers got so stoked. Just that sensation of speeding along on a wave, no matter what the equipment, was and is a blast.
     It was a great learning experience and I sampled a number of different surf spots over time and the board always became a focal point of discussion and reminiscing about “the good old days gone past” with the folks on hand. One day, I took it up to Malibu and got the wave of the hour at first point, a real streaker. When I lugged it back up the beach afterwards, the lifeguard took a startled look and said, “That’s what you were riding on that wave? You just set surfing back 40 years!” (Actually 70 years, but who’s counting.)
Ultimately, I gained a more personal admiration and respect for those old-timers and their wooden planks that I never could have gotten from reading a book or hearing stories about “way back when.” Score me an “A” on that grade.
The fun of the process of building the wooden board then motivated me to try my hand again utilizing dried trunks of native Agave, or Century Plant. Similar to balsa in some respects, being fairly light and relatively easy to cut and shape, the cool factor was notched way up since these plants grow around our coastal surf zones and make for a beautiful, mottled coloring when shaped. Donna Frye told me one of my finished boards looked like “puppy fur,” because of the shades of tan, white and gray. I took a 7’7” Agave-wood short board to Tavarua one year and experienced a familiar scenario when chief Druku and the other native Fijians got their first look at it. They all gathered around wanting to inspect it closely and touch it.  They had never seen a board made of this type of naturally grown material with its distinctive, earthy colorings. Although the misconception is that Agave is a cactus, it is actually related to the lily and amaryllis families and has its own genus. I was riding a lily; no wonder the Fijians were stoked. This time it wasn’t about nostalgia, it was just an appreciation of a beautiful “wood carving.”
So, being the continuing student of life that I am, I learned another new lesson. In the experience of building and riding surfboards, for so many different reasons, wood is good.