Mike Davis Stories
Mike Davis Story
FOREWORD:
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
L.P. Hartley 1895-1972
I’ve careened through life, eyes on the horizon, ear to palms and cheek to the breeze, having never taken the time for even a perfunctory glance over my shoulder, much less considered a visit of visa to such an inaccessible and primitive world. A sentiment, no doubt, borne a long time ago from having learned that you are only ever as good as your ‘Next’: wave, board, thought, achievement or whatever; forcing one’s eyes dead-ahead in order to at least see what’s about to smack you up-side the head and be somewhere ‘in the moment’ in this multi-directional, multidimensional state of convergent trajectories we’re hurtling through.
As a surfer: I was a hot dogger and test pilot who pushed every turn and cutback to the board and fin’s limits. Riding a wave wasn’t as much as a passive game of tag as a thrilling and daring dance, right on the ragged edge of adhesion but not out on the flats but beneath a collapsing Broadway awning. I am the direct result of being on the hearth at the foundry when those first down-railed tools carved the future of surfing in stone.
Truth be known: My life has never been about me – I am but the living, breathing manifestation of everyone and everything that’s ever touched me. So, this rough chronology isn’t about me as much as the events and people whose contact shaped me: Some by gently molding, others by trying to beat me into some kind of quivering submission, forged as it were, to make me tough and resilient and finally those who’ve sought, fostered and nurtured what’d always been there. In short: My view of your world – But don’t worry. Having never overstayed my welcome anywhere, I’m not interested in staking a claim. Like my Native American hunter/gatherer forebears, I’m just passing through with as little trespass and fuss as humanly possible and hopefully leaving every campsite a little bit cleaner, the world a bit more harmonious, and fairer than I found it. This wondrous life has been an especially beautiful gift because I was so fortunate to have spent so much of it surfing.
What’s so interesting about me then? You may well ask. Could it be the fifty-thousand or so boards with my name on them? Perhaps it’s my sixty years of surfing? My numerous innovations and inventions? Nine novels? The hundreds of thousands of words I’ve sold over the years? The organizations over which I’ve presided? Maybe. But I’d really rather be remembered for the high-achieving, responsible citizens and loving nurturing parents I’ve guided through their teens to go on and produce more of the same – It’s been my quest to be the kind of ‘Guide’ that I’d been so fortunate to have been blessed with at their age. You see, I never skipped out on a job or responsibility of any sort to go surfing – Ever! I always had time up my sleeve at work so that I could go when I needed to. That’s how much I loved surfing. And yet to anyone who has ever known me, I was known more for bailing out on a surf contest to really go surfing. It was my fate to be where the action was, especially on those epic once in a lifetime events. I couldn’t have planned any of it any better if I’d tried.
Lifelong friend, Nat Young, whom I’ve always tested my novel’s first drafts on, has always suggested telling my own story – Demurring because I’d always figured, Whatever’s happened to anonymous me, must have happened to everybody else – In spades! and besides, I’ve always been surrounded by the ‘Real’ giants. Why should anything that’s happened to me, warrant the killing of a tree or two? Hell, it’s all I’ve ever known! But there comes a time when the growing number of empty spots in the lineup remind me that I might leave documenting my precious memories and especially the tributes to the men who’ve scaled the peaks to greatness, too late. It’d be a great shame if they just disintegrated into confused and wispy tendrils to evanesce, lost forever beyond the hazy event horizon of my time as easily and quietly as they had coalesced into my life story.
Before that bellying-up to that final turnstile would seem the appropriate moment to sit down and put the pieces that are the very anonymous puzzle of Mike Davis together. A quick glance around my jungle-house home reveals hundreds of worthless keepsakes: Touchstones with the power to make me smile, be in awe or laugh at the merest glance; perhaps relive an event from beyond this living realm. The fact that I have any documentation at all of my life and career built on avoiding the shit-fights that were part and parcel of surf photographers or surf journalists amazes me no end. We were Santa Barbara guys after all, and surfing wasn’t as much a commercial consideration that had to be documented – As a passion. It was always about surfing: a pure and beautiful act – Organic and completely serendipitous. Unlike my novels where there is a plan of sorts, my leaf in a storm drain life just whisked me along with it when: like a any tempest-tossed flotsam and jetsam, I’m cast back onto terra firma, where; and to my everlasting surprise; the anticipated hard-landing is cushioned by the water surging beneath me and I’ve actually managed it with some kind of style and aplomb, mustache still attached and laughing.
As you will see: Water will be my savior again and again and again. And now that I’m racing towards seventy-three, many of my cherished buds: those touchstones who’ve always been my sole conduit to those rare Checkpoint Charlie border crossings to the past are going or gone and that particular portal shut-down, boarded-up and razor-wired – Absent on all but the oldest charts and maps – Another passing – Another dead end. Life, after all, is a one-way street with no sign-posted, ordered, or numbered ‘Off-Ramps’ So there’s no going back – Ever. The best I can hope for is to find a few of those postcards from another age and piece together a life that’s been one comical adventure after another. Thankfully, there are those who’ve taken the time to sift through the rubble and ashes and managed to salvage a few photos and clippings; and for that, I’m eternally grateful because I’ve certainly never taken the time or bothered.
First and foremost: I am a big brother: An honor and responsibility bestowed upon me by my Gramps at eighteen months old when he whispered, “You’re the big guy now. She is your responsibility,” and laid her, tiny as a squeaking puppy, in my arms. From that moment onward: My sole duty in life was to ensure the safety, welfare, and happiness of my baby sister, Linda, and be her entertainment So, very early in the piece, I became the clown, endeavoring to make her smile or maybe even laugh. Any squeals or tears and I’d cop a whipping. Eighteen months later we were joined by Carolyn. Being the caring big brother carried through into every facet of my life, which made me a good husband and father, a caring and fair employer, and a trusted friend. Gramps also taught me, “Big men build things – Little men tear’em down.” I took him literally enough to apply that wisdom to everything – Especially bridges – both physical and metaphorical – So, I have yet to burn a bridge and have lived by the immutable virtues of ‘Honesty, Integrity, and loyalty’.
Fortunately, I was blessed with an insatiable curiosity and a mind ordered by an unerring natural logic and a good memory to guide me through this journey. Things just naturally made sense to me and the markings on the printed page especially so – So much so that I learned to read at a very young age and I read quickly. I devoured books. When I started a new school, I’d take my textbooks home and read them cover to cover like a novel in a week or so and usually only refer to them now and again to verify an accurate date before an exam. (Except for math books – But Everybody hates maths! don’t they?) I haunted libraries in search of the answers to the inevitable questions posed by the textbooks enough to agree with Winston Churchill’s ‘History is written by the victor’ but savvy enough, even at that age, to question the ethics of rampant, exploitive colonialism because of my Sioux heritage.
There’s no doubt that my father’s numerous career transfers on his corporate ascent thrust me; a sickly and puny, orange- headed refugee, into nine different schools in my first eight years of formal schooling and seldom at the beginning of the term, influenced my view of the parochial even separatist/elitist cliques with their critical and suspicious eye on whomever they deem as new, different, even foreign and the subsequent feelings of alienation, not belonging or plain rejection by them, poignant and very real. It’s as if this incendiary-haired newbie spontaneously igniting the barely concealed fog of warm and fuming contempt smoldering since time immemorial for anyone or anything, new or different into a conflagration of sorts. And always the midget outsider who’d constantly had to prove himself with humor, intellect or my fists – Too often with my fists – I’d either rise to the occasion or succumb to the morass. The only time anyone knew was invited, turned out to be a veiled recruitment to bolster numbers in order to bully someone else. In 1955, Gramps taught this eight-year-old how to defend myself and end a fight. No fancy dancing around – “Let them attack and when any one of several ‘knock-out‘ points, presents itself – Keep your eyes open and hit it and look for the next one. A bully never expects you to stop, prop, and bop.” I could never have started a fight because I didn’t know what to do if someone wasn’t already swinging or why I’d even want to. In the end: I was the happy, floppy Labrador puppy that shape-shifts into an attack Pitbull when cornered and it has served me well.
Because I’d moved around so much, I’ve never understood the concept of ‘Mine’. Having always been the outsider, I had this refugee or foreign or citizen of the world consciousness and it puzzled me for a long time. My life epiphany came while studying coral in junior high school, suddenly seeing our individual existence as but that of an atom in an ever-changing state flux and the only successful course to the plot, if indeed we could, was that towards an absolute truth – That which would benefit all and omit none because omission of care to any living thing diminishes and thusly affects the whole. If nothing else, I would be a positive spark. I made it my ‘Golden Rule’ to make things work. In a nutshell: It’s about fair play and harmony. It has become my quest. Like my lifelong buddy George Greenough: I’d ‘be’ a positively charged atom and play Johnny Appleseed and share whatever I’d learned or developed with anyone who asked. What good is knowledge then, if it is not known? My philosophy. You need only look at the successes that have blossomed in my wake to know that I’ve always been that laughing red mustache who stopped, listened, and explained things, but only when asked. ‘You should,‘ was not in my vocabulary. because I’d also learned that ‘Those who offer the most – More often than not – Have the least to offer.’ Consequently: I’ve never offered or been much of a self-promoter and came to distrust those who were, always questioning their motive. Even to this day, living on one of the most crowded point-surfs in the world, I remain untainted by localism: That murky resentment, bred of years of selfishness more akin to the world’s propensity for terrorism. No different to all of the accumulated racial intolerance or religious hatreds that seem to fester where men seize and fence ‘their’ patch and subsequently dare anyone to trespass against them and have the temerity to call this ‘Civilized,’ and it doesn’t belong in surfing. You can’t imagine how this rankles any First Nation, Native or Aboriginal who has no concept of property or land ownership and considers him or herself to be but a humble part of this sacred land which can no more be owned than the air, rain or sunshine! A lot has to do with your point of view. You see: I don’t know the same things you don’t know – My Gramma Lil was Lakota Sioux – Her mother, my great-grandmother was a Sioux warrior that had more than one soldier’s scalp on her belt. “You will have feelings. Listen to them and learn to trust them,” she told me once adding, “Once you know these things – You cannot un-know them.” I am sensitive and feel things and after my DNA test, I am beginning to understand what ethnicity and genetic memory means.
All that moving around and my final immigration to Australia in 1970 should certainly indicate that I’ve never had the advantage of family, cousins, extended family, or church – Only the lifelong surfing friendships borne of the early ’60s to pave or smooth my path through life. Thankfully, my adopted surfing family in Australia welcomed me with open arms and set a place at their table for me, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
Having been the older brother of two sisters and grown up in a world full of girls – I just love ’em. And for everyone who has broken my heart, she’s but released me into the arms of another kind heart that’s deemed it wonderful to ride shotgun and be my navigator, on this marvelous adventure when I would have been quite happy to abdicate the wheel and just let them drive. I’ve dedicated my life to my girls and they always made sure I was where I needed to be when it was cranking. I did my chores like every other family man but always managed that optimum surf session when the conditions were perfect.
Married twice, widowed once, I’m Dad to two, Grampa to three more and Mike to my stepdaughter; they have spoiled me beyond belief. I’ve always held the female of our specie in the highest regard and they’ve made my life wonderful. The role of vigilant and protective guardian of all girls and women has sometimes hurled me between them and very real harm – A real man holds his ground at all costs. It is a matter of honor. I am especially proud of three-time Australian Champion, Annie Fane, and my other champion and World Champion surf and sailboard team girls, arguably the most successful of their era. All I can say is, “YOU GO, GIRLS!”
In short: I’m just a surfer/designer-shaper/award-winning author who loves what he does. I’ve surfed big waves, shaped world champion surfboards, sailboards, and longboards for movie and rock stars, built and tuned police pursuit vehicles, fended off and crippled knife-wielding gang-bangers with my bare fists, looked straight into the muzzles of loaded and cocked guns from both sides of the law on multiple occasions, dodged Molotov Cocktails thrown with intent, modified the World Record holding hydroplane, dined with Prime Ministers, shaken my tail feathers with the most stunning women in the world and authored 11 books.
If nothing else, life has taught me two things: 1: Intellect isn’t just knowing the solution – It’s also knowing where to look for the ‘How’ to achieve the solution. And it isn’t a solution until you’ve exhausted all possible avenues to disprove it. 2: Even if you’re the smartest kid in the class – You’ll never know it until much, much later – If ever. And even then it’s only because you’ve made fewer mistakes than everyone else or the things you’ve built are still current. I am by nature: Curious, resourceful, thoughtful, methodical, and thorough; but more importantly – Loyal and dead-honest. That too is a matter of honor. I’ve just never, ever wanted to win enough to lie or cheat because ‘I’ would know that ‘I’ didn’t a win. Win, lose, or draw – It‘s always been about the Loving of the game. Play on! Screw the final siren – Screw the scoreboard – I just want to keep playing.
Some will remember me as a quiet and sickly infant. Others will recall the precocious and gregarious toddler, referred to as ‘Precocious’ often enough to regard it as if it were something you didn’t want to come down with.
Some will remember me as the diminutive, wise-cracking, redheaded kid with his comical Will Rogersesque ‘Ride that tangent to its ridiculously absurd conclusion’ running-commentaries on whatever was happening, who lived for baseball and fishing in the mid-west in the fifties and never seen me since.
Some will have known me as a young surfer in Santa Barbara, where I moved in late 1961 from the midwest.
Few, however, will have ever known me as a scholar or writer because it would certainly never have come up in any conversation I’ve been part and party to living in Australia or anywhere else; and yet it is probably the most important part of what makes me up – In fact: makes everything I’ve ever managed to achieve possible. Seeing the world as just a series of problems and solutions and basic understanding of the fundamental laws of physics; certainly makes the world a lot less daunting and overwhelming place. It’s the psychos and sociopaths that are hard to fathom.
Most will know me through my long surfing, surfboard and sailboard building career which has always had me in a constant state of amazement. Few will know any more about me other than my being a Santa Barbara guy. I always deflected by answering their questions with a question about them. Surf shop owner, Mark Loveridge called me on it at dinner one evening. “Practicing, Mark,” I chuckled, drawing him close, “I’m practicing to be a guru. I’m finally going to get rich. I’m going to sit on top of a mountain and charge people a lot of money to answer their question – With a irrelevant question,” and winked conspiratorially. I was more interested in how they’d spent theirs. I learned a lot about people and life because I cared enough to ask and subsequently reveled in their experiences.
If life is a journey undertaken from beginning to end; measuring any kind of success or validity cannot surely take place until the end, when all of the votes are in. Likened to any instrument of measuring: Incremental contrasts can only be expressed or noted in opposites. A white yardstick is just a white stick without those vividly contrasting black numerals and calibrations – So too are the negative events in the continuing stream of positive consciousness in which we exist. The high points are just so much higher when you consider the depths of the lows on the minus side of the life scale. There have been times when I have been off-the-scale superlatively happy – So too you may also assume that I’ve been equally aggrieved, hurt to the point of despair and returned. At least now, I’ve finally learned to identify those On the make by the maimed and scarred victims floating face-down in their wake. So, if you are a racist, bigot, bully or a greedy, cheating, chizzling grifter or anyone who has ever acted as such – You may want to stop and walk briskly away now before I spot you.
Despite being born in the American heartland in 1947, my life really began when we moved to California in 1961 where I fell hopelessly in love with surfing. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that makes me yearn for it. In turn, it built me up from a sickly, sixty-pound weakling and made me strong and bolstered my immune system and introduced me to the characters that would most influence my life and the way I’d conduct it. Surfing is the one thing that most influenced my life. Individuals pitting their pitiful little selves against the elements – Just for the sake of doing it. Man against nature: No boundaries – No time limit or innings – No winning or losing. Just sheer joyous thrills. What could be more ‘In the moment’, zen or noble than a joyous intimate communing with nature? And while you have to be fit and strong to do it – If you are not smart, there is no way you will ever do it well, especially outside your home break. Without a rudimentary understanding of the physics of what is transpiring – You have very little chance of success on the small days and no chance at all on the big days. Just knowing when to wait and when, and then where to go is a fundamental bit of knowledge that can only come with experience – Strong in the wrong place at the wrong time could still cost you your life. Surfing is a game with no boundaries or limitations except that of your imagination and full-time is when you’re just too tired to catch another wave. There’ve been times that I’ve been so thrashed, I had very real doubts that I could swim that last fifty-yards to the beach and safety – Times when I just took my bearings, put my head down and plowed on. And even when I’d pantingly collect my board and looked back out – Wondering if maybe I shouldn’t paddle out for ‘Just one more.’ That’s what surfing is. It was never the fear of drowning or getting eaten – It was more the fear of not being enough or found wanting.
A hopeless romantic: I probably should have been an academic, or a CanAm race car engine builder or an author as I’d
been groomed and trained for them all. But the real men: the supermen I admired most, rode waves – As well as designing and building the craft to ride them. I was powerless to resist the siren’s call and subsequently surrendered my fate to the swell and tides and followed my heart instead of my head and let surfing make the big career calls. If I was any good – I’d do well. Resistance at any point would have been an exercise in futility. Surfing is character building and has introduced me to wonderful and colorful people from all over the world. Having men like John Eichert, George Greenough, Stu Fredericks, Bob Cooper and Renny Yater as daily fixtures in my life from age thirteen has been the cornerstone of my life as well as my surfing career.
My first wife, Christine made the decision for Mike Davis Designs in 1973 because she wanted me to build boards and surf for a living and happily spend the rest of the time with her and our children. It worked for me because now I was finally free to shape the boards with all of the design feature ideas and tweaks that’d been accruing in my head like so many nagging questions – No more trying to convince the boss or toning or watering-down or compromising of the concepts by the ‘writers of the checks’ to appease those anachronistic customers resistant to change, who insisted that those little details couldn’t possibly make that much difference. At the risk of sounding proud: All of which, I note with pride, still grace every modern surfboard to this day. Feel that Tucked under-edge? It is the difference between a good board and a great board. I conceived it, named it and introduced it in 1973 and it’s been ‘stock standard’ on every performance surfboard ever since. I saw things differently and came up with different tweaks – Solutions to age old problems that remain current today. It wasn’t an accident or luck. It was just the methodical application of the laws of physics and the fundamentals from Lindsay Lord’s The Architecture of Planing Hulls. Let us not forget that water is H2O – Two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen; and that Hydrogen is a highly excitable element; densest at 4 ̊ and most importantly: Water is 784 times denser than air. With this If you can see it or feel it – It’ll make a very noticeable difference in how anything travels through or on water philosophy as a premise I became the largest surfboard manufacturer in Australia. My goal wasn’t to be the biggest or best or make a lot of money: I just wanted to develop the most advanced boards in the world and spend joyous hours testing them in all conditions.
Looking back, most of my best friends have been surfers – Many, arguably the best in the world and over the years we’ve shared some epic days – Going wave for wave in radiabolical tubes urging – Hooting, cajoling each other to go more radical and nudge the new impossibility higher yet again. Most of them are still ripping, but a growing number now have two dates following their names – Nothing remains of those days but very special and cherished memories.
With the advantage of a good many years hindsight, I see where surfing not only shaped my life but became the buffer zone and finally separation point between my cruel, bigoted and overbearing father and I – He couldn’t swim a lick and was petrified of the water – And I was as comfortable in it as out of it. But it wasn’t until I saw an interview with Australian Olympic Gold Medalist Cathy Freeman; where she tearfully discussed coming to terms with her ‘Aboriginality’ in the 1990’s; that I had one of those major, mind-boggling, myth-shattering, life-altering epiphanies! That was it! I suddenly realized what it was that’d always confounded me. Despite my ginger coloring and Christian up-bringing, I’ve always considered myself to be but the most minute, meager part of the world in which I live, and the thought; that the same God that’d created me, the universe and everything in it and beyond, had created all of this just for me – my tribe, my government, religion, or even specie, seemed and still seems pretty GODDAMNED presumptuous – Not to mention arrogant! It seems to me that, somehow man’s forgotten or misinterpreted his real role: That man is the only one of The Creator’s creatures who has the capability to make a positive difference to life on this planet – And he chooses – Yes, CHOOSES, not to – Deciding instead that it’s far more important to get: rich, powerful, famous, loved, hated, laid or killed instead. In that enlightened, glowing moment, I understood my connection to this planet and true purpose in life and the best way to live up to that instruction was to: Write: Creating characters who ‘Would’ live up to that challenge.
To those who’ve molded and nurtured me; my survival and successes are but a testament of your love by healing the wounds inflicted by those who’d tried and failed to beat my spirit out of me. Your nurturing and mentoring has made me, by nature: caring, kind, observant, logical, methodical and fair. Because of your influence: I don’t make many mistakes – Fact is: The only real mistakes I’ve ever made; were when I caved in and let somebody talk me into something by trusting their judgment or assumed that they were as honest and honorable as I. In a perfect world I wouldn’t have had to be as vigilant of our ‘clever’ ape peers. Anything important to enough to require careful consideration – I get right.
There are of course, circumstances and events that cannot be foreseen or predicted: Freak or tragic events, robberies, health issues that don’t qualify as mistakes – Shit just happens sometimes. Who’d’ve thunk it? Given the same set of circumstances, I would do the exact same things again, and hope I don’t coincide with a crashing meteorite or something equally as uncommon the next time around.
The other influences in my early life came from what I read and continue to read. And as my earliest years were spent fighting to stay alive because of a badly compromised immune system; I was reading everything from labels on jars to encyclopedias (cover to cover) and attempting the classics beginning at age four. I developed a particular affection for the homespun humor and philosophy of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Will ‘I never met a man I didn’t like’ Rogers, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck by the time I started junior high school. I was profoundly affected by Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. HIPSHOT PERCUSSION was one of my favorite cartoon cowboy characters and another who made some pretty insightful observations, the most memorable being: Hipshot’d just pointed out that prey animal’s eyes were on the sides of their heads to better detect predators and that the predators eyes were on the front – For more focus on spotting and killing their prey; to a young cowboy. “Our eyes are in the front,” The young cowboy replied, considering his reflection in a pool, before pondering, “What does that make us?” What indeed?
In my travels I’ve happened onto places that’ve spoken to me – Places that have permeated my very being, as surely as I could hear you if you were sitting right here with me – And left me with knowledge that couldn’t have been acquired in any other way. Places in big old-growth forests of the American north-west, the deserts of the south-west and the plains of the mid-west, as well as places in Mexico, Bali, a Shinto Shrine in Japan and Australia – Burial Sites, Sacred, Holy places. I was not looking for them – I found myself there and just felt them fill and enrich me.
For the most part: My personal life seems more like a sit-com to me, and from my youngest years I was convinced that my mother was Lucille Ball and Gramps was my straight-man, feeding me lines that begged a giggle. I’ve learned to laugh when it’s raining shit or planning and plotting elaborate practical jokes; some of which took days or even weeks to come to fruition and others that’ve happened spontaneously or ridiculously randomly and I wouldn’t have missed any one of them for anything.
I have been taken to task time and time again for wasting my intelligence and energies on anything less than saving the world and felt genuinely hurt by their judgment call on my life as a surfer. It wasn’t until, legendary Hawaiian surfer, Paul Strauch Jr. told me over coffee a few years ago, ‘We imbue a bit of ourselves into everything and everyone we touch. As a surfboard shaper, you understand this more than most.’ Even as he uttered those words; I felt a kind of warm glow emanating deep in my heart and sweet memory after sweet memory of friends in need from my past flickered on the other side of my eyes and tickled the corners of my smile. It was the missing, sweetly hormonic chord that released me from the ‘Could I have done more? Could I have made a bigger difference doing something else?’ that plagues any man worth his salt in his later years. I was exactly where I was supposed to be, shoulder to the wheel with some of the finest men and women I’ve ever known as they’ve travelled their final miles in this consciousness. No maps of where they’ve gone to – Only the entry and exit holes in the fabric of our existence to mark the trajectory of their ever having been. Being anywhere else would have diminished my humanity.
So there you have it – This orange-haired, part-Sioux, who’s fought his way onto and off-of nine schoolyards in his first eight years of school, only to flee the country of his birth with a broken heart, on a quest of the world’s best point surfs and the boards to ride them is pausing; albeit only momentarily, to reflect. My first glance back into the swirling mists of time rouses that long sleeping dog and reminds me of Virginia Beach’s venerable Butch Maloney’s, “Hell, I was walking into places with a hard-on in 1964; that I wouldn’t drive by now with a gun!”
It’s hasn’t all been surfing and gorgeous girls: Had it not been for the for advent of the new miracle-drugs; I’d’ve had two dates following my name before I reached double digits. And there’ve been times when I’ve been completely blindsided; because it quite simply, never occurred to me that anyone would just be that mean, immoral and evil – That anyone would go to such lengths or measures to hinder, hurt, rob or even destroy somebody else or even why. I can’t even begin to fathom what motivates anyone to do such things. As the eldest child of a simple farming family – All I’ve ever known since I was born is to love, nurture and care for those in my care, animals, pets and later my baby sisters Linda and Carolyn or those who’re in need of support. Altruist is hardwired into my motherboard and the only way I’ve ever known how to be. If you take the time to look; those around me have always prospered. Why? You may well ask. It wasn’t by chance, I can assure you. If it was important to them to succeed – It became important to me that they did as well and it’s always been the source of great satisfaction. What I still find disappointing; is the fact that so few of the ‘What’s in it of me’ brigade ever bother to reciprocate by helping others. It doesn’t take much and a little goes a long way. It’s not something that I worry about particularly, but it is concerning, that there’re so many, many more takers out there than givers – Sometimes ‘The buck really does stop there’ and the world is all the poorer for it. But before I can slip into sadness, I am reminded of the Law of Plenty: You need only share a bit of what you have to with those in need to have more than you will ever require. Just pay it forward, show some goodwill and trust, be a part of someone else’s success – Their gain is not your loss – Harmony begets prosperity which inspires harmony and more prosperity. Count your blessings and quit dwelling on what you haven’t got. That catalogue will always be bigger than your ‘Have’ list. It’s that simple. You might even view true joy and success for the first time. I treat everyone I encounter as if they were the Jesus Christ himself. And yes, I have been surprised at just how quickly some of them have been to prove me wrong but I have known quite a few who have been rain-makers.
That makes me a good friend, you see. The only thing I’ve ever sought in any relationship is friendship. And although I’ve had more than one friendship end as a negative experience when I’ve caught them: lying, cheating or stealing from me. I’ve just ‘called’ them on it and walked away – For good – Friends do not do that to each other or any body else. I’ve never sought retribution. I’d already wasted too much time in bad company. A lesson is a lesson, none the less – Chalk that one up to experience and refer to Gramps’ Rule # 1: Stay away from those kindsa places.
My Lakota Sioux Gramma Lil taught me Rule #2: “You’ll have feelings, listen to them and learn to trust ‘em.” There’ve been many times in the last seventy-two years when I’ve shuddered that chilling, butt-puckering ‘Something’s not right’ frisson – Freezing instinctively – Every sense on red-alert. And every time, those feelings have preceded some real and imminent danger and saved me or my charges from: A rogue boar hog in the yard as a toddler on the farm baby-sitting my baby sister, a marauding timber wolf in Colorado in 1955 baby-sitting both of my little sisters two-hundred yards from our house. I’ve been buzzed, bumped and rubbed innumerable times by big sharks in California, Hawaii and the wilds of Australia to say nothing of snakes, mountain lions, catastrophic weather or trouble. Someone or something somewhere is definitely looking after me.
Someone will stumble upon this tiny fragment of my personal memory chip one day and gasp, “NO WAY!” So great are the changes I’ve seen in my own personal lifetime. I hope you can follow the snippets I’ve been able to record before they do a ‘Monet’ and evanesce into the ethers in the rear-view mirror of my life. They were extremely exciting and innovative times to be a surfer/designer/shaper – A time when we began surfing on the very surface of the water instead of plowing through it – A time when we looked at a wave and rode what wasn’t there: The Draw – That beyond-vertical top-third of the wave where the water gets so hard and so steep the only thing in the water is the tip of the fin and that, only sporadically, in the race to beat the lip to the bottom just to set up the Barry Kanaiaupuni ‘Water ski’ redirection. And redirect we did. Those first hugely late drops and subsequent gouges blasted us into the unknown – Which turned out to be: Exactly the right place to be as we squirted around the impact zone back up into the canopy for another equally late drive. We’d found a bizarre kind of crazy order and power in the chaos in an activity that was, at the time, considered ‘The Extreme Sport’ in the world of extreme sports, which ultimately set me off on my mission to generate and carry the speed and maneuverability required to not only make the wave but ‘Climb all over it like ugly on a monkey’ and run all over the best point and reef break waves in the world.
In the end, I’m just that masked, muffed and stuffed guy, alone and chuckling aloud in a dark, dusty room, ruminating on the absurdity or meaning of life, alternately hogging or massaging foam into functional surfing pieces of my life for my friends. I never wanted to be a surfing champion with all of the phony back-slapping, limelight, competitive bitching and scrutiny and that’s exactly what I got. I have always been a hotdogger who saw the wave as my spontaneous, un- choreographed dancing partner where I’d leap into those critical sections with calculated aggression feigning this way and that way to dodge whatever she’s thrown at me and laugh joyously if I squirted clear unscathed or rued my audacity for not showing enough respect if she kicked my butt – Either way she made me deliriously happy. It’s what surfing is. Whether you are riding a longboard, short-board, surf-ski, boogie board or mat – Good surfing is good surfing: But most of all it’s about thrilling fun and taking the time to cherish a moment that will never be, anywhere, in any number of worlds imaginable again – Totally unique and the memory of it is yours and yours alone. I’ve always been patient in the water knowing my wave will come to me and it always does. That’s just the way it is. I am always thankful to just be out there.
With all these considerations in mind, you already know more about me than most of my family and whether you’ve known me as Mike Davis, Mike, Michael, Pecker, Dad, Kato, Uncle Mike, MD or ‘Who the fuck was that?’(I may even be that missing link you weren’t even looking for.) Sit-down, buckle-up and hang-on, Sunshine. Cue the: Look What They Done To My Song, Ma theme song – Here are the missing pieces of the very anonymous Mike Davis puzzle: The real, uncut, unexpurgated and unedited version.
I am Mike Davis and this is my story.
You can read more of Mike’s Stories and books at.
