This week, Isaac and I have spent long hours digging and hauling dirt behind our house, sifting drainage rock out of our riverbed soil to fill the bottom of the trench and then refilling that trench with nice filtered dirt and compost so that we can plant there. We excavated the ugly pathway that goes from our kitchen to our backyard and laid a new walkway with pretty sandstone pavers. Between the two of us, we have probably spent 40 back-breaking hours on this project and for the last two days I have been spending a lot of time with a heating pad applied to my strained muscles trying to recover.
While working (and sitting), I have been thinking a lot about the movie I saw last Monday called Surfwise. The film chronicles the life and times of a man named Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz. Doc, a visionary, raises a family of 9 children in an astonishingly unconventional way. He eschews the material world and lives only for his central passions: surfing, sex, and family. His mantra is simple — Live Clean and Surf Clean. His kids grow up free of material wants and needs; traveling from beach to beach in their 24 foot camper home, with the occasional traveling doctor job thrown in to keep them fed. Doc is so committed to this simple lifestyle that he actually turns down an inheritance of $50,000. This money would ruin his life, he says simply.
The family portraits are idyllic; strong, healthy children beaming for the camera, lit by the backdrop of the gleaming ocean. As the children grow and achieve excellence in the craft that they have been learning since toddlerhood, the family gains notoriety and recognition. Media portrayals show them at their best, winning surfing competitions, playing on the beach, and posing for happy family portraits. Each evening, they join hands, creating a ritual “circle” which Doc insists can never be broken. This is the light.
The unavoidable dark side of the story is that Doc has a temper and he controls his family to the point of abuse. Doc has extreme ideas. He believes for example, that he should look at what primates do to learn about what he should do. After seeing a gorilla in the zoo refuse to eat the peel of an apple, he makes a rule that his family will no longer eat apple peels. When he observes that a mother gorilla nurses her baby at the breast for 2 years, he requires nothing less of the mother of his children. These are just a few examples of his demands. Doc is indeed a dictator (one of his children even describes him as Fidel).
His beautiful wife Juliette is a puzzle. Over the course of about 10 years, she was pregnant or breastfeeding without one day off. She gave birth to 8 sons and 1 daughter. She tried to keep them safe while her husband surfed and taught them to surf. She prepared food according to his strict dietary requirements. She kept their camper clean, sweeping obsessively and decorating with flowers. She shares these facts of her life with no regret or blame (or even preference!). We hear little of what she wanted or needed in life. She loves opera and was a singer of some acclaim, but she gave up everything for love and family. I found myself frustrated by her seeming inability to claim any desires of her own.
The Paskowitz kids, now in their 30s and 40s, are fascinating. Each one talks about their role in the family dynamic. These children led such an extraordinary life. They were tied only to each other and the experience of surfing. Theirs was an insular world, completely controlled by the will of their father. It seems that adulthood and the breakup of their “circle” left each of them a little lost in their own way. With incredible poignancy, they describe the purity of their upbringing and the inevitable traumas that they faced. The conflict that they feel regarding their father/childhood is akin to what we all feel when we grow up and experience world outside of our family of origin – both longing for and resenting the simplicity and powerlessness of childhood.
The story is riveting, the characters, unforgettable. The Paskowitz family is extraordinary, but the dynamics involved are universal and familiar. The yearning for this “perfect” world that they once believed in is palpable as is the anger each feels when it all falls apart. My only complaint is that it wasn’t enough. I wanted to know more about them. This could have easily been a mini-series.
The hours and dollars that have been poured into our pathway this week have given me reason to consider Doc’s vision. We give so much of ourselves to our material world, our things. We feel we are creating something of value – not just monetary, but also emotional. A comfortable home for our family and our friends. A place where we can feel safe and secure. But is this a reasonable justification? Will we look back and feel that we have spent our time well? Sometimes I wonder.