This article was originally published in the August 2005 issue of Surfer's Journal; it was the last and best in a series of 10,000-word full-spectrum profiles I did for the magazine. "Best" not so much because of my writing, but because Fred's incredible life and times—and the man himself, every thoughtful, funny, insecure inch of him—was such a goldmine of material. Fred was 75 and I was 45 when we did the interviews for this article, and looking back I can say with confidence that it was Fred, more than any other person, who put surfing into a perspective that still, almost 13 years later, makes the most sense to me. He knew so well what surfing could and could not do, understood in detail the benefits and costs of life spent chasing waves. Fred was in most respects the gentlest of souls, but he was vicious when it came to stripping away bullshit, in himself, or others, or the sport that had largely defined him. John Severson emailed after the Journal profile was published, to scold me for being too hard on Fred. Fred emailed me after the article came out to say he loved it, and wanted to buy me dinner during his next visit to San Francisco. Two months later we had a great meal at a new place on Valencia Street. That was the last time I ever saw him.

I visited Fred Van Dyke in Hawaii last January for a lot of reasons. He tells great stories about surfing Santa Cruz in the pre-wetsuit era. He rode Waimea the first day it was surfed, and more or less created the Duke contest. Van Dyke told a 

 reporter in 1965 that most big-wave riders were “latent homosexuals,” which is still surfing’s funniest quote—made even better by the fact that Van Dyke has spent 40 years trying to explain that he didn’t mean it 

 way. I’d fly to Hawaii just to get Fred to wrestle with that one again.

But mostly I went to Hawaii because I watched two slightly different versions of the 2001 documentary 

. I saw the PBS-aired version where Van Dyke and another half-dozen senior surfers with twinkly eyes and big smiles talk about riding waves into their 60s, 70s, even 80s. And I saw a working print where Van Dyke suddenly begins to cry, calls himself a “macho tough surfer” in a disparaging voice, then says he’s “scared shitless” about growing older and dying. That scene didn’t make the final cut. I wanted to see what Van Dyke thought about that, and what he thought about becoming an older surfer. Everything, surfing included, is more complicated for me at 45 than 25. How about 30 years from now? Fred, what’s it like?

Seventy-two, Van Dyke tells me with a sigh, was easy. Seventy-five is hard. It 

 hard. He was in poor health for much of 2003 and 2004, and the effects linger in his eyes, his build, his skin, his posture. Four years ago he posed for a 

 magazine article, bare-chested and biceps flaring, surfboard cocked against a fat-free hip, and the slightly agog caption read, “In his 70s—yes, his 70s!” Van Dyke at 71 looked like a super-fit man of 50. At 75 he looks 75.

We’re sitting in the living room of Van Dyke’s airy one-story house in Lanikai, a palmy cul-de-sac neighborhood in Kailua, adjacent to a near-waveless bay on the east side of Oahu. It’s a comfortable room, with white throw rugs, a few semi-abstract art pieces, bright tropical flowers in a glass vase. I ask Van Dyke who got the house looking so good, him or his wife Joan, already knowing the answer, and he doesn’t even glance around. “It’s all Joan,” he answers. “Or 99% Joan.”

Van Dyke’s soft voice has also changed over the past few years, becoming slower and thicker, although his conversational stamina is fine. He begins with an overview. Surfing, he says, was his real career,—more so than the 32 years he spent as a primary and secondary school teacher. He pulls a dismissive face when talking about the various “living legend” surf events that he occasionally attends, but “living legend” nonetheless rolls comfortably from his mouth, and he plainly enjoys being included with Greg Noll, Ricky Grigg, Buzzy Trent, Peter Cole, George Downing, and the rest of the Eisenhower-age surfers from California and Hawaii who more or less invented big-wave riding. (The preface to Van Dyke’s 1989 book, 

30 Years of Riding the World’s Biggest Waves

” takes the “legend” motif a lot further, as Santa Cruz writer James Hall first compares Van Dyke to Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh and Jack Dempsey, then says he has the intellectual traits of an “ancient philosopher.) Scenes from big-wave surfing’s Genesis story are right there on Van Dyke’s living room wall, which is covered with oversized wood-framed photographs from the glory days, including a 1959 color shot of him at the bottom of a heaving Waimea wall, arms extended, fists clenched, determination stamped on his features, and looking like a cross between Charles Atlas and Montgomery Clift.

But if surfing made Fred Van Dyke, it nearly unmade him as well, turning him into a bad husband, a so-so father, and an unreliable worker. The sport owned him for a long time, he says. Now it doesn’t, but even so he keeps some distance. He’s healthy enough these days to surf, and has two boards hanging from the rafters of his garage, but he rarely gets in the water, and hasn’t been hardcore about it for years. I ask when he last went surfing, and he first says “a long time ago,” then pauses and says it’s been a few months, then changes his mind again and says he went week before last. He shakes his head, frustrated, as he often is these days at his balky memory. “Surfing was my life for so many years,” he says, dismissing the question of when he last got in the water and moving to the bigger point, “now I’ve just found other things.”

The “other things” predate as well as postdate Van Dyke’s hardcore surfing years. He was born in San Francisco in the summer of 1929, four months before Black Tuesday and the start of the Depression. His dentist father made ends meet by extracting teeth for goods and services—a dozen eggs, a live chicken, carpentry work. But the family had to scramble at times, along with everybody else. After their landlord put a limit on gas for the heater, the Van Dyke’s loaded up their ’26 Buick, ferried across the bay to Sausalito, and motored over the summit to Stinson Beach, where Fred and younger brother Gene helped collect a month’s worth of firewood. Support towers for the Golden Gate Bridge were standing like two enormous Art Deco sentries in the mouth of the bay, but the span itself wouldn’t be finished for another year.

The Van Dyke’s lived in the Sunset District, one block from the beach, not far from Golden Gate Park. Across town, WPA-backed artists were covering Russian Hill’s Coit Tower with floor-to-ceiling murals of trustworthy farm workers, civic leaders, and industrialists. Labor leader Harry Bridges had just organized the city’s longshoremen into America’s toughest union. San Francisco’s progressive politics must have filtered west through Van Dyke’s neighborhood -- he is, to the best of my knowledge, the only big-wave surfer to identify himself as a socialist -- but his schoolboy years were more Norman Rockwell than Upton Sinclair, filled with homemade kites, street football, and endless games of kick the can. On weekends he’d take a streetcar to the rocky promontory at Land’s End and fish for striped bass. Sometimes he and Gene would walk with their father down to the beach where, if it was warm enough and the ocean was calm enough, they were allowed to wade into the shorebreak.

Three big events marked Van Dyke’s teenage years. Just after his 15th birthday, in the final months of World War II, when San Francisco’s beachfront was lined with barbed wire to slow down the expected Japanese invasion, he lost his virginity to a 21-year-old mother whose husband was fighting in the South Pacific. Van Dyke was deeply in love, but his mother, after finding out the two were sleeping together, pulled the woman aside and threatened not only to tell her husband, but also to file corruption charges if she ever saw Fred again. The experience sent Van Dyke into his first depression.

Four years later, when Van Dyke was 19, his younger sister Gretchen had her right leg amputated at the hip after a dirt-filled scrape received during a softball game turned gangrenous; she was near death for a month, and hospitalized for nearly six months. (Gretchen later moved to Southern California, had three children, and was a regular at San Onofre, where she was able to surf balanced on one leg. She died from cancer at 33, almost certainly as a result of the full-body X-rays she’d been given following her operation, in hopes of stopping the gangrene from spreading. Today, just a mention of Gretchen’s name brings Van Dyke to tears.)

Between his first love and his sister losing her leg, Van Dyke won All-City honors as an offensive/defensive guard for Lincoln High and received a football scholarship to Fresno State. During a preseason game, following a tackle, an opposing halfback ran by and planted a cleat in Van Dyke’s lower back, rupturing his left kidney—an injury that required four hours of surgery and a two-month hospital stay. His football career was over, his scholarship revoked, and the school year shot. In spring, he began running on the beach to get back into shape, and one morning, jogging past Fleishacker Pool at the south end of Ocean Beach, he saw a drowning man in the surf zone—a place San Franciscans all understood to be filled with sharks, riptides, and ship-destroying waves. Ocean swimming was banned by city ordinance, but enforcement wasn’t necessary: nobody ventured beyond the shorebreak. Before Van Dyke could shout for help, the man suddenly turned and launched into an unbroken wave, folded his arms to his sides, rode to the beach, casually straightened up, removed a pair of green rubber flippers, and began walking up the sand. Van Dyke, astounded, ran up and introduced himself. Cliff Kamaka was a Chinese-Hawaiian lifeguard and former state swimming champion who had landed in San Francisco after his Mormon pilgrimage to Salt Lake City—the following day he taught Van Dyke how to bodysurf. “It was so smooth, like a featherbed,” Van Dyke later wrote, describing his first ride. “Then the soup engulfed me on the inside double-break. I bounded off the bottom and surfaced screaming with joy.”

He bodysurfed for two years (as did younger siblings Gretchen, Gene and Peter), then board-surfed for the first time at Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz on his 21st birthday. He and Gene quickly became Santa Cruz regulars, along with the Wild Hook Gang and the few other local surfers. They’d manhandle their 90-pound redwood planks from Cliff Drive to the waterline, then carefully paddle out wearing Goodwill-bought woolen shirts as a pitiable defense against the chilled air and water. A wipeout usually sent a surfer back to the beach, purple-lipped and shivering, his water-drenched woolen shirt now doing nothing but holding in the cold. First one in was responsible for lighting a tire-fire for warmth. They smoked cigarettes endlessly, drank jug wine, ate abalone pulled off the nearby rocks, and slept in the backs of their cars. Van Dyke loved the right-breaking waves lined up like nesting dolls along the wind-protected southern edge of Pleasure Point. But Steamer Lane, on the other side of town, was his favorite. He approached the Lane almost like a mountaineer: base-camping in the gentle surf at Cowells, then moving slowly up the point toward the thick, shifty, waves at Middle Peak, which were regarded by most locals as too dangerous to surf. Van Dyke says he got the best ride of his life on a late fall evening at the Lane, after sundown, with a full yellow moon throwing a trail across the sheet-glass waters of Monterey Bay. After Van Dyke and a bodysurfing friend both caught a six-footer and began angling toward the municipal pier in the distance, a sea lion suddenly began riding alongside, then a huge king salmon jumped into the air just ahead of Van Dyke’s board. “It was the perfect moment,” he told me. “The purest high of my life.”

Van Dyke had meanwhile earned a teaching credential from San Francisco State, taken a $3,500 a year job as teacher-coach at Boulder Creek High School, a few miles northeast of Santa Cruz, and moved to a house at Pleasure Point. He surfed after class and on weekends, and to this day claims he prefers the waves at Santa Cruz to anywhere else in the world. But bigger surf had already become an obsession, and while it got 15 feet or more at the Lane, it was just too cold to really make much progress on the big days. Van Dyke didn’t worry about it too much, but it was frustrating at times.

Then in the teacher’s lounge one morning, in late 1954, halfway through his second year at Boulder Creek High, Van Dyke was approached by the school superintendent -- an officious small town educator who insisted on being addressed as “Doctor,” and didn’t approve of Van Dyke’s surfing. With a tight smile he folded back the front page of that day’s 

, handed it over and said, “You think you have waves in Santa Cruz?” Van Dyke took the paper and stared at a photograph showing three surfers streaking across a big, glassy wave at Makaha. He looked up meaning to defend the Santa Cruz surf, but instead handed the paper back and spontaneously announced his resignation, effective after the spring term. He bought a one-way ticket to Honolulu and left that August.

Older surfers have literally and figuratively ruled the sport for a thousand years. Hawaii’s kings and queens paddled their magnificent 

 boards out to the best reefs, with the wave-riding peasantry banished by decree to lesser breaks. “We have seen some of the highest chiefs in the island,” British missionary William Ellis wrote in 1831, “between fifty and sixty years of age, balancing themselves on their narrow board, or splashing about in the foam, with as much satisfaction as youths of sixteen.” Disease and Christian-mandated industriousness all but wiped adults from the lineup during the latter half of the 19th century, but older surfers returned during the sport’s revival in the early 1900s. “Judges of the Supreme Court, ex-Governors, and the greater portion of the prominent businessmen, are [all] surfboard enthusiasts,” Outrigger Canoe Club founder Alexander Hume Ford wrote in a 1909 

 article. Ford meant to demonstrate that white people—

 white people at that—were now riding waves as often and with as much skill as the “dark-skinned Hawaiian,” and he was obviously talking about surfers in their 30s, 40s, 50s—even older.

The demographic pendulum swung again during the 1950s. Hawaii would always have the big surf, the history, and the spiritual primacy, but California—especially Southern California, with its millions of beach-happy suburbanites, it’s proximity to Hollywood, and its easy access to the latest board-making materials—was fast becoming the sport’s industrial and cultural hub. The original Hobie Surfboards factory/retail shop had just opened in Orange County’s Dana Point. Bodysurfer and former parking meter salesman Jack O’Neill was selling wetsuit vests out of his San Francisco surf shop. The book version of 

 was in the making, and after that would come 

 the movie, followed by the inaugural West Coast Surfing Championships, the Surfer Stomp, and 

 magazine. It was all happening in California, and driven by an endless procession of disposable-income-spending teenagers.

Duke Kahanamoku, broad-shouldered and deliberate, the very picture of middle-aged athletic elegance, had for decades been the sport’s figurehead; the new era belonged to surfers like bleach-blond teenage half-pint Dewey Weber, who gunned his bright red board across First Point Malibu like he was speed-shifting down Van Nuys Boulevard. Older surfers were meanwhile there but not there, neither respected nor disrespected, just outnumbered and for the most part ignored. (The older-surfer stigma came later a few years later, in the mid-‘60s, and it wasn’t so much a stigma as a few pithy, well-placed quotes. Tom Wolfe in his 

 essay wrote about the surfer’s “horror age of 25,” and a time in the near future when older surfers would be “stroked out on the beach like beached white whales.”)

Fred Van Dyke landed in Honolulu during the summer of 1955. At 26, he was old enough to have missed the rock-and-roll-fueled youth culture launch—old enough, in fact, by the day’s standards, to be thought of as early middle-aged. A few weeks earlier he’d been interviewed in Palo Alto by the visiting president of Oahu’s private and moderately exclusive Punahou School, who gave the athletic, sun-darkened teacher a narrow look and asked if he was a surfer. Van Dyke shook his head and lied, saying “I’ve tried it, but it’s not a serious part of my life,” and got a job teaching 7th-grade math and science. New forces were in play. Van Dyke had married three years earlier, and his wife had given birth to a severely retarded daughter, who was soon given up to foster care. The experience badly damaged the marriage, and Van Dyke hoped that the move to Hawaii would help. t It didn’t, and the couple soon divorced.

By this time Van Dyke had been surfing for five years. He was fit and tremendously determined, but not possessed of any great natural talent. Gene Van Dyke was the best surfer in the family, closely followed by Peter, seven years Fred’s junior, who was a powerful all-arounder with a flamboyant drop-knee cutback. “Fred was sort of tense out there,” Ricky Grigg told me over the phone when I asked about Van Dyke’s surfing ability, “like he was ready to get wiped out pretty much all the time.” Peter Cole said the same thing, that Fred “was kind of stiff.” Cole was a nationally ranked middle-distance swimmer at Stanford when he met Van Dyke at Steamer Lane in ’53. Five years later he also left for Hawaii on a big-wave mission and moved into Van Dyke’s Waikiki house, as did Grigg—a fellow Stanford alum and future Duke Invitational winner. Cole and Van Dyke lived together for three years; Grigg roomed with them for a year, as did Buzzy Trent, another expat California big-wave rider.

“Fred has short muscles, and couldn’t paddle or swim as fast as a lot of us,” Cole continued. “There were times when we’d wipe out on the same wave, more or less at the same time, and I’d make it to the surface five or 10 seconds before Fred.” (Van Dyke himself never seemed to think much of his surfing ability. “I was becoming adept at riding Steamer Lane, it being my favorite spot,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir 

. “I took off on the shoulder of a twelve-foot wave, made it to the bottom, turned and wiped out.” Ricky Grigg, the most cocksure big-wave surfer of the era – no mean accomplishment in a field that includes Buzzy Trent and Greg Noll -- couldn’t write that sentence about himself if you put a gun to his head.)

Van Dyke rode big Makaha early during his first winter in Hawaii, and the experience was so powerful that the guiding principle of his life for the next 20 years was to be there, every time, without fail, when the surf came up. He obsessed over how it felt to transition into the flats after a huge drop, his board knifing through the water, the pressure radiating up through the deck of his board into his feet and legs. He daydreamed about the view from the lineup, watching an incoming set wave inflate as it rolled over the outer reefs, the trades putting a stipple of white along the apex, the cataract of water spilling over into the trough, the cloud-splitting roar of whitewater. A mildly sadistic Catholic school education had turned Van Dyke into a lifelong agnostic, but he had moments in the water, in huge surf, when he felt spiritually connected to the ocean, the planet, the universe. One such moment came in late 1957, when Greg Noll broke a long-standing North Shore taboo and led a group of surfers, Van Dyke included, into the lineup at Waimea Bay. Van Dyke’s final wave that morning was a giant, and he recalls that as he hit the trough and looked up, “time just froze…and I could see everything, the water droplets, the sunlight bouncing off the wave face, the little ripples and chops—all of it. It lasted just a second, but it was total perfection.” Van Dyke has a beatific look on his face as he tells the story, which not surprisingly ends with another round of big-wave abuse: “Then I ate it and just got completely destroyed.”

 and a lot of other first-generation surf movies. The 1960 debut issue of 

 has two classic Van Dyke black-and-white photos: a doomed late takeoff at Waimea, and the follow-up shot of him standing bare-chested off Kam Highway, a look of macho disgust on his face, each arm holding a splintered half of his just-broken Brewer gun.

The rest of his life during that period, Van Dyke says, was more or less spent marking time between big wave events. He moved to the North Shore in 1959, and the following year he got married for the second time, to a Punahou art teacher. He’d switched departments—from math and science to English—and had become one of Punahoe’s most popular teachers, partly because he was an easy grader, but also because he was patient and easygoing, and an excellent listener. His student roster of famous surfers includes Jeff Hakman, Gerry Lopez, Fred Hemmings, James Jones, and Brock Little. He moonlighted by writing articles for 

In 1965, Honolulu-based promoter Kimo McVay hired Van Dyke to organize the inaugural Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, the first big surf contest held on the North Shore. The Makaha International—with its 500 entrants, 20-man heats, lumbering multi-day schedule, and an antiquated scoring system that valued wave total and length of ride over performance—was at the time Hawaii’s premier surf event. Van Dyke and McVay looked closely at the Makaha contest and designed their event to be it’s opposite in nearly every way. Van Dyke handpicked 24 competitors, and sent off red-velvet, gold-embossed invitations. CBS Sports agreed to produce a one-hour Duke contest special, and each surfer was given a $50 appearance fee and a comped room at the plush Surfrider Hotel in Waikiki. (There were grumbles from some of the competitors about being lodged on the wrong side of the island, but McVay, not unreasonably, thought it best to keep the show under one tent.) The contest was a huge success. Sunset was a triple-overhead and thumping, and the whole thing took less than eight hours, start to finish. 17-year-old Jeff Hakman was a unanimous and popular winner, the TV show was a hit, and contest director Van Dyke got credit for putting together what 

 called “a marvel of organization and planning.”

Meanwhile, the reporters and journalists who occasionally flew in from New York and Los Angeles to cover the North Shore big-wave beat had discovered Van Dyke and his talent for the knockout quote. Not to take anything away from his big-wave pioneering work in the ‘50s, or his Duke contest directing skills, but the better part of Van Dyke’s legacy is found in the pages of 

. Other surfers talked about big-wave thrills and danger. Van Dyke did too, but he also got into the fear and the psychosis, and did so with a grimly articulate flair. “After a while,” Peter Cole later recalled, “the reporters just ran past the rest of us to get to Fred.”

The solid-gold irony here is that it was Van Dyke’s overwhelming discomfort in big waves that allowed him to become the voice of big-wave surfing. By putting in more water time than anybody else, and by sticking to a fanatical training and diet program, he managed to convince himself that he belonged out there when the surf got huge. (The advantage was real enough, given that big-wave surfers in general, as younger brother Peter Van Dyke once pointed out, lived on “cake, Kool-Aid, ice cream, candy, and a pack of cigarettes a day.”) But the fear never left him, and Van Dyke would sit down with a reporter and get right to the guts of it—describing how he’d lay in bed when the surf came up during the night, teeth grinding, bowels loosening, sweating through the sheets as the white noise off the reefs just a few hundred yards from his open window grew louder and louder. Paddling out was trial by fire every time. “The best part of big-wave surfing,” he often said, “is walking up the beach when it’s over.”

Assuming that everyone in the lineup was as scared as he was, Van Dyke would then theorize about the unspoken motivation of the big-wave rider. It’s a way to release hostility, he said, or to gain recognition, or to prove your manhood. It’s a death wish. It’s a response to unresolved family issues. “Is the surfer looking for a safe mother substitute?” Van Dyke wonders in a 

 cover story. “Look Mommy. Look at the ride I just got. Look how much better it was than Brother’s.” Each notion was aimed at big-wave surfers in general, but clearly, Van Dyke was looking inward. He was the first surfer to talk publicly about being in analysis—in a 1965 

 interview, Van Dykes confessed that he’d recently seen his psychiatrist where he’d “apologized for being a surfer” and he finally said his motivation for riding big surf all came down to “not feeling loved.”

Van Dyke’s public exploration into big-wave fear and analysis peaked in a 1965 issue of 

. “Surfing should be fun,” he began. “It’s not fun. It’s absolute terror. Big-wave riders are scared people. They have to go out there to prove that they’re not afraid, to prove their masculinity. Surfing’s not masculine” he said, winding up for the seven-word quote that has since attached itself like a string of cans to his name: “Most big-wave riders are latent homosexuals.”

 article was published he was vilified, even bodily threatened, by his big-wave colleagues. He backpedaled . . . sort of. Look, it’s 

, he explained. Big-wave surfers weren’t sleeping with each other, they were just stuck in their boys club big-wave world, interested only in what their male friends thought, and totally unconcerned with women…except for sex, of course. What Van Dyke meant to say, in other words, wasn't that big-wave surfers were homosexual (nobody ever paid attention to the “latent” part), but that they refused to grow up. Furthermore, it wasn’t just the big-wave guys, but surfers in general.

And what did the future hold for these abiding beachside juveniles? Here 

 turned to Dr. Harvey Powelson, head of the UC Berkeley Department of Psychiatry, who carried on for a while in fairly typical academese about the surfer’s problems with intimacy, his lack of commitment, his failed search for meaning—the usual arrested development stuff—before concluding that “nothing’s sadder than a 50-year-old surfer.”

Funny things turn up when you do research on older surfers. There’s a Doonesbury cartoon where surfer-turned-nanny Zonker Harris gets a call from Ol’ Surfer Dude, his former mentor, who tells Zonker that there’s “some mad spray off Malibu,” and asks if he wants to fly out for a surf. “Good thought, Master,” Zonker replies. “Except I’m in Connecticut and you’re 87.” Then there’s a short essay from last year by surf journalist Chris Cote: “I felt my age creeping up on me during the middle of my session,” he writes in the opening paragraph. “I felt all its problems slink into my knees and back. I started surfing slower, my turns started getting weak.” Cote is the editor for the grom-targeted 

. He’s 27, the poor fermenting old thing.

Surfing, in a lot of ways, is a good sport to grow old in. Water is the most forgiving of all playing fields, and basic surfing maneuvers (aerials excepted) are low-impact, almost to the point of 

-impact. Surfing doesn’t have an equivalent to tennis elbow. Furthermore, the complexities of wind, tide, and swell, along with all the tics and quirks of any given break, mean that an older surfer’s knowledge can to some degree (don’t need the commas) substitute for dwindling strength, slower reactions, stiffening muscles, and a longer post-surf recovery time. Finally, surfing itself—the actual wave-riding part—is measured out in such tiny little time-packets, usually just a few seconds per ride, that it’s an almost impossible thing to fill up on. Tom Curren, Kelly Slater, and other older pros go through periods of burnout. Not so for the rest of us, older surfers included (older surfers in 

, in a lot of cases), who surf through the decades feeling as if we never get enough. Not even 

. Hunger feeds longevity. I couldn’t even guess how many tens of thousands of waves Dorian Paskowitz has ridden over the course of his 72-year (

 surfing career, but when we talked last summer he was still trying to figure out how to bump up his wave-riding time. “Get a bigger board, I think. Because two waves, three waves, that’s pretty much all I’m good for now, plus I can barely get to my feet. I catch it, get to my knees, then the thing knocks me over just about every time—and I don’t give a fuck, I just love it so much.”


But a case can just as easily be made that surfing isn’t at all kind to its seniors. The wave-hunger that feeds longevity also feeds selfishness: Darwinian law begins to take over once there are more than a dozen surfers in the water, (delete em-dash)and in a crowded lineup it’s the rare gentleman who cuts any slack to someone older, slower, weaker. Even legend status only goes so far. Gerry Lopez has his choice of waves on the rare occasion when he paddles out at Pipeline, but I’m told that Lance Carson can’t get one to himself at Malibu, and Ricky Grigg grew so tired of riding scraps on the North Shore, his home for more than 30 years, that he finally gave up and moved to Oahu’s East Side, where he gets to ride as many crappy, windblown three-footers as he can catch. And while the surf media has broadened its target demographic (data here is sketchy, but I’d guess the surfer’s average age has jumped from 18 or 19 in 1970 to somewhere near 30 today), more often than not the older surfer is presented as a grayer, balder, thicker-waisted version of the 22-year-old surfer. 

 recently put 83-year-old Rabbit Kekai on the Hot Seat, cocked his baseball hat off to the side, called him “the world’s oldest grom,” and introduced him by saying he’s “proof positive that while surfers may grow older, they never grow up.”

The hardest thing about becoming an older surfer often has less to do with physical deterioration, crowded lineups, and a faintly ridiculous surf media, and more do with all the balancing, weighting, apportioning and bargaining that goes into adult life. Part of it is a straightforward time-allotment problem, where surfing has to vie for hours with career and family. Part of it, for some of us, is coming to terms with the idea that the sport just doesn’t mean as much as it once did, that the fires are burning lower—a pretty small problem, as far as problems go, but tricky nonetheless if you’ve gone around for 20 years or more, proudly and primarily identifying yourself as a surfer. Marc Theodore, my best friend since high school and one of South Bay’s finest goofyfooters, told me in a slightly defeated voice at age 31 that he was pretty sure he’d “never love anything the way I used to love surfing.” Which didn’t mean he’d fallen 

 of love with surfing, but that it was now a lesser thing, and had to be acknowledged as such. And then what? You either work out a new relationship with the sport (as Marc did), or become an ex-surfer.

Or the third option: remain a full-timer and take your chances. I first saw the Mickey Dora segment in 

, in 1990, and the part I remember best was his grinning rap about “my whole life is escape,” and how “all the shit goes over my back…the screaming parents, the teachers, police, priests, politicians.” Dora, 55 at the time, was staking his claim as an uncompromised and fully committed late-middle-aged surfer, and it was thrilling for those of us in our late 20s or 30s, still doing it hardcore. But watching 

 today, I’m more struck at how non-socialized Dora looks: eating by himself in a Baja cantina, or walking alone with his dog on the beach at Shipwrecks, looking not so much like the fabled anti-hero, but more like the sad graying surfer as described all those years ago by Doctor Powelson in 

. “I don’t expect anybody to live my life,” Dora says in a Surfers voice-over, honest enough to acknowledge the downside. “Why should they? It’s pretty lonely.”

Fred Van Dyke lived for 28 years in a beachfront house in front of Pupekea on the North Shore, and at some point in the early ‘70s he put a sign on his front porch that read “Old Surf Star’s Home.” He remembers sitting on the porch and talking with neighbor Jose Angel, another big-wave-riding schoolteacher, about how much time they had left at places like Sunset and Waimea. “We figured we could do it until 70,” Fred Van Dyke tells me in his quiet voice. “All of us did.” We then go down the list and talk about how many of his big-wave friends from the ‘50s and ‘60s actually stuck with it: Peter Cole did, and became big-wave surfing’s model senior, riding Waimea until he was 65, and still riding Sunset today at 74. Ricky Grigg hung in there for a long time as well, but not with anything like Cole’s devotion. Everyone else gave it up. Buzzy Trent, Greg Noll and Kimo Hollinger quit 30 or more years ago—Trent and Noll of their own accord, Hollinger after a near-death experience in the Waimea shorebreak. Jose Angel died in a free-diving accident in 1976 that his daughter said was probably a suicide, in response to his aging. (Why did Cole hang in when the others all dropped off? “Skill-wise,” he told me, “you’re just going in reverse after a certain point. So it all comes down to if you can or can’t accept that each year you become more of a kook. I don’t really have a problem with that.”)

Van Dyke himself found a kind of tortured middle ground between Cole and guys like Trent and Noll, keeping his place in the lineup, but not very happy about it. In his 1968 

 article, right about the time his second marriage began to falter and his big-wave drive began to implode, he asks himself, “Where does it end? How many times do I have to prove myself out there?” It wasn’t so much an answerable question as the beginning of a long midlife crisis. On a visit to the Bay Area that same year he learned that the woman to whom he’d lost his virginity back in 1944, “the love of my life for decades,” had killed herself, and he drove brokenhearted to the hills above Santa Cruz and dropped a giant hit of acid. The following year, at age 40, he ran his first and only marathon, which he hated. In 1972 he took a sabbatical from his job at Punahou, resigned his post as Duke contest director, kissed his wife and three adopted children goodbye, and spent three months walking 1,300 miles from Wyoming’s Grand Tetons to the California/Oregon border. The following year he was divorced. Not long afterwards he turned and paddled for a Waimea set wave, with everyone in the water screaming at him to go, then put the brakes on just before getting to his feet, “totally overcome with fear,” and paddled to the beach knowing his days in 20-foot surf were finished.

He remained a gentle sort of oddity. Fitness continued to be an obsession: he ran and swam daily, did endless push-ups and leg-lifts, and rounded out his low-fat diet with brimming tablespoons of wheat germ, bone meal, brewer’s yeast, or whatever health-food-store supplementary fad was in vogue. Peter Cole remembers driving south on the H2 freeway, during morning rush hour, and looking over to see Van Dyke one lane over, wearing a gas mask as protection against car exhaust. At Punahou he allowed his students to decorate the classroom walls with paintings of daisies and peace signs. (He continued to be one of the school’s most popular teachers, and former students will still pick him out in a crowd, run up and introduce themselves, sometimes hug him, and briefly fill him in on their lives to date while Van Dyke smiles and listens closely, like he always did in class. That said, he was never invested heart and soul in his work like most other teachers, and in 1985 he took an early retirement.)

It’s strange to talk with Van Dyke about this period of his life. He’s wrestled with himself for long enough, and with enough success, that he can revisit difficult times almost without flinching. He’s learned how to find and savor the high points. That said, his early-middle adult years all seem to come back through a filter of self-recrimination. “The bottom line is I never really wanted to get married, and I never wanted to have children. I enjoyed teaching, but I could have lived without it. Owning a surfboard was the only responsibility I did want. Just…be a big-wave hero. And I thought I was such a big shit at the time.” He gives a contemptuous little laugh, shaking his head. “But I never was.”

We’ve returned from a late afternoon walk along the beach, and are once again seated in his living room. Storm clouds are pinned to the lava-ribbed hills to the north, and the breeze coming through the screen door smells like rain and plumeria. Van Dyke idly strokes a beat-up orange cat curled on his lap, and I’m wondering if I’ve ever met his match, in the surf world at least, for earnestness. There’s been no banter and very little small talk this afternoon. He’s made just one joke: when I looked around and asked how a junior high school teacher could possibly afford a beautiful home in Kailua and a second house in Montana, he nodded for a moment then quietly answered, “I sell drugs.” Then he blows it by saying, no, he doesn’t really sell drugs. He’s unfailingly pleasant and easy to talk with, but light moments are few and far between.

Given Van Dyke’s congenital insecurity and his love of drama, it’s no wild leap to suggest that he all but demanded a savior and redeemer, someone to pull him out of what 

 described as “the Surfer Syndrome…a case of arrested development.” It’s no leap at all, in fact. Van Dyke himself, in 

, goes rapturous when describing the moment he first saw Joan Marie Florence, the new Punahou English teacher, who had just entered the gymnasium pool to give a synchronized swimming lesson:

My peripheral vision was obstructed in a sun-splashed miasma of reflected rainbows. I focused and this blonde lady surfaced. The girls surfaced on the other side of the pool and looked back at Joan. I saw her walk across the water on bare feet. She didn’t sink. I knew! I knew for sure this was my dream woman. I left without introducing myself, walked into a coconut tree, and had a difficult time finding my car keys. I was in love, love at first sight.

Joan was 23 and living with another man. Fred was 43 and twice divorced. Their courtship was long and sometimes difficult, but by the time they married, in 1985, Van Dyke had long since downshifted to small-wave recreational surfer. “When I first kissed Joan,” he wrote in 

, “I knew that surfing would take a back seat. I’d done it. I didn’t need to do it anymore.”

No longer a big-wave rider, but still an obsessive. Joan Marie is on the cover of 

, and the back cover of the follow-up book, 

. Van Dyke unblushingly calls her his “fairy princess,” and describes their relationship as an ongoing “storybook romance.” He says, “Joan is the fulfillment of everything I’ve ever wanted.”

Van Dyke has told me all of this before I meet Joan, and I snap to attention when she unexpectedly walks through the back door of their house. An animated woman of 55 with wavy blonde hair and a swooping voice, she all but changes the room’s atmosphere as she joins the conversation and begins to underscore points with vigorous New Age references to past lives, guided imagery, Chinese energy healing, Dr. Phil, and Deepak Chopra. Her husband meanwhile fades into the background, still stroking the cat, vaguely smiling—a quiet but content spectator in his own living room.

But if Van Dyke has traded one obsession for another, he’s plainly traded up. He gets to be himself around Joan in a way he never was in the surf world., For over 40 years, he’s told the story about how, during his second year in college, when he was out surfing alone at Steamer Lane, he’d met a talking seal who gave Van Dyke advice where to line up, and then reminisced told him about his days at the San Francisco Aquarium,. When Van Dyke told his brother and another surfing friend about the talking seal they of course burst out laughing. Years later, when he told the story to Joan, she said it was “wonderful.” When I ask Joan about what she finds most attractive about her husband, her voice softened as she talked about his thoughtfulness and generosity. “If he sees a bumblebee in the water, he scoops it up and puts it on land,” she shrugged, raised her eyebrows, and made an imploring palms-up gesture, “how can you not love that?” For his part, Van Dyke told me that since meeting Joan he’s learned how to relax, he’s far less critical of others, and that he’s “incomparably happier” than he was during his big-wave days.

Ricky Grigg told me the same thing: “Fred’s just so glad to be over there in Lanikai with Joan, working in the garden and listening to the birds sing.” Grigg and Peter Cole both speak warmly of their old roommate, and recall the big-wave agonies he suffered with a touch of sympathy. “It was really hard for him,” Grigg continued, his voice still rough after a near-fatal bout with throat cancer in 2003. “And I’ve always said that he had more courage than any of us, because he went out there with more fear in his heart than any of us. But what he never really understood was that Peter and I didn’t feel the way he did about big waves. We weren’t out there just to prove ourselves. It wasn’t such a big psychological thing. We liked the recognition, sure, and we were scared sometimes, definitely. But Peter and I really just loved being out there. Big surf is the most incredibly beautiful thing in the world.”

At Van Dyke’s suggestion, Joan took an early retirement from Punahou, and for the past eight years they’ve divided their time between Hawaii and their second home in Bozeman, Montana. (Laniakai has been their Hawaiian home since 1997, when Van Dyke sold his house at Pupekea.) In 2002, when Van Dyke’s began having balance and cognitive problems, it was Joan who set a course into the roiling vastness of American health care, tacking back and forth between mainstream and alternative treatments. There was no final diagnosis for Van Dyke’s condition, except that it was = brain-related,. By late 2003 he could barely climb a flight of stairs and was, as he put it to me, “about to check out.” In early 2004, he and Joan flew to a clinic in New Orleans, where Van Dyke spent two months doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy, laying for 90 minutes at a time in a pressurized and oxygenated acrylic chamber, with the aim of increasing blood flow to injured areas of his brain. In one conversation I had with Van Dyke he said the 40 hyperbaric treatments were “worthless”; another time he said they “made a huge difference.” It seems to depend on his mood. His health did improve in 2004, but one year after the hyperbaric treatments he’s still 15 pounds lighter than the 165 lb. benchmark that had been virtually unmovable his entire adult life. His eyes have receded a bit into their sockets, and his upper spine has bowed slightly, dropping his still-handsome head an inch or two closer to his chest. The 20-year age difference between Fred and Joan, merely noticeable in the past, is now conspicuous. He easily recalls events from the past and is very much aware of what’s happening in the world (bitter words for George Bush and the Iraq war), but his memory for smaller things, dates especially, at times seems almost completely gone.

Van Dyke’s father lived to be 89, and his mother lived to be 86. Van Dyke himself is confident that he’ll make it to 90, but says he thinks about death all the time. It’s an issue between him and Joan who, in addition to her varied and sundry New Age beliefs, is also bedrock Catholic and has no doubt that we’re all just passing through, on our way to and from other lives. “She says that being afraid of dying is really just a way of being afraid of living,” Van Dyke tells me, adding with a touch of skepticism, “maybe there’s some truth to that.” Ten years ago he called himself an atheist. Now he wavers slightly, wanting to believe in the afterlife, but for the most part holding on to the wholly terrifying idea that this is it: one life, and a terminating death.

Because of that, Van Dyke tells me he tries to live entirely in the present. But in fact he spends a lot of time doing what nearly all sentient old people do: reviewing and sifting the years of a lifetime, framing and editing, looking for order, rhythm, meaning, definition. He’s right to call himself an honest, truth-telling person, but honesty and truth will sometimes run hard against this reviewing/defining process. He tells me, for example, that he’s a “loner, and always has been,” but I think he just likes the way that sounds, that it appeals to his sense of cool, and that what he 

 means is that he’s okay spending a few hours by himself. Lifelong friend Peter Cole laughs when I bring up Van Dyke’s “loner” remark. “He loves to think that about himself. Fred’s not a loner. He loves to talk, and loves to be around people.”

These are slow days for Van Dyke. It’s been 20 years since he left Punahou, and up until 2002 he spent much of his time writing, which he calls “the second love of my life, after Joan.” He’s published four books, including the comically mistitled 

, in which Van Dyke reviews his big-wave career with characteristic 

ease, and writes things like “checking Waimea in the early morning always smelled like death.” His typing and handwriting skills have deteriorated since his illness, which he says blocks the flow of ideas; he finished a book-length manuscript recently but claims it’s no good, and doesn’t know what he’ll write about next.

Surfing these days is no more than a low background hum in Van Dyke’s life. Occasionally he’ll pick up a surf magazine or video, but the surf industry as a whole turns him off. His interest in surf contests ranges from nonexistent to something close to hostile. (His meet director job for the Duke contest went sour pretty quickly after the event’s 1965 debut, and during one of our phone conversation he called the whole idea of surfing competition “totally ridiculous.”) But surfing in general sits well with him—maybe even better than he knows. I wouldn’t gainsay Van Dyke when he talks about surfing-related costs in his life: the marriage woes, the compromised career, the big-wave night-sweats, the therapy sessions that often focused on what Van Dyke has called his “sick addiction” to surfing. I would never say that hardcore surfing is anything 

 an indulgent and frequently selfish pursuit. But at the same time, I wonder if Van Dyke hasn’t consciously or unconsciously promoted surfing a bit too aggressively as the cause for problems that might well have existed no matter what direction his life had taken.

Or look at it another way: Van Dyke comes off as an essentially content person (he clocks eight deep and drug-free hours of sleep a night, a high-score mark among all seniors I know), and surfing played a huge part in shaping his life. So how corrosive could it have been, really? So many of Van Dyke’s admirable morals and values were at the very least enhanced, if not created outright, by surfing: his high regard for nature, the way he holds experience and freedom over money, property, and rank. Could you go so far as to suggest that surfing itself contained the seedpod of enlightenment that eventually allowed Van Dyke to put love before recreation? Hmmm. No, probably not. But the transition was made, Van Dyke at last advanced to full adulthood, and even if the sport wasn’t noble enough to self-destruct on his behalf, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that his surfing life was symptomatic of a problem, not the problem itself.

Fred Van Dyke now has two favorite ocean-related activities. The first begins with a flight to San Francisco, where he rents a car and drives north along the coast on Highway One, sometimes all the way to the Oregon border, stopping often to get out to watch the waves sweep across the reefs and points. His wave judgment is as good as ever, he says, and he’ll focus on a place in the lineup, wait for a set wave, mind-surf it for as long as it holds shape, then shift his eyes back to the lineup and pick out another one. Hawaii has been home for 50 years now, but he’s always preferred northern California, and still hopes to someday move back.

The other thing Van Dyke likes to do is put on his trunks, take a pair of fins from the garage, and swim along the beach near his house. “Swimming in the ocean,” he told me near the end of my visit, “was always my real joy anyway.”

, I came to the part where Cliff Kamaka, the Hawaiian-born Mormon lifeguard and bodysurfer, teaches young Fred Van Dyke how to ride waves. I’d already taken note of Van Dyke’s first ride: how he’d hit the shorebreak, gotten walloped, and came up screaming with pleasure—the birth of a surfer. Reading the passage again, I stopped where Van Dyke and Kamaka push through the surf and reach the flat water beyond the waves. Kamaka turns and rides one in, leaving Van Dyke out alone, at which point the 18-year-old future big-wave legend, instead of looking around for a set wave, just stares out across the glassy water. “It was peaceful and quiet,” he recalled, “and I could see the sky reflected on the surface of the ocean.” As a child he’d dreamed of what it was like out beyond the surf. Now, out there at last, “it was even better than I fantasized.”

Van Dyke turned, rode that first wave, and for 30 years came back to the water almost daily, loading then overloading the experience with meaning, dragging along fear and ambition and self-worth as he paddled out, then returning to shore with the adventures of a lifetime, as well as a kind of hairshirt identity— the muscle-flexing waterman who secretly couldn’t wait to get his feet back in the sand. But no regrets, he says, and I believe him. I’ll bet he replays all the great rides and terrible wipeouts while swimming through the calm blue-green shallows off Lanikai. And I’ll bet that at the end of a swim he lets the memories go, turns over to face the sky, and asks what his younger self never could have asked, that the water do nothing more than support his weight.

"WINTERLAND," FRED VAN DYKE PROFILE BY MATT WARSHAW (2005)

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