BOOK REVIEW
A surfer who discovered life is more than a beach

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Rather, memoirs tend to be, like history, "one damn thing after another." If a theme emerges, the writer has shown some skill and attained some insight into his or her own life.

Fred Van Dyke, a surfing icon who taught for 30 years at Punahou School, achieves this in his autobiography "Once Upon Abundance, Coming of Age in California and Hawaii" (Anoai Press, paperback, $15.95). Though he is not a particularly gifted writer, the reader is pulled forward by the thread that runs from beginning to end.

It is the theme summarized by the title: Van Dyke, who divides his time now between Montana and Hawai'i, has had a life of incredible richness. The California he recalls from a rough-and-ready childhood spent camping, fishing, hiking and roaming the landscape on foot is unimaginable today. The Hawai'i he came to love after he moved here in 1955 is flat out gone. But it is good to read about and imagine these places.

The abundance of pre-freeway California — of space, clean air and water, of fish in the rivers and seals and otters in the sea — is truly a once-upon-a-time fairy tale. Van Dyke's sad visits to childhood haunts, chronicled in the book, are both a lament and a warning: Let's not lose any more of what we've got left of nature.

There is another theme, too: coming of age, both in boyhood and adulthood.

Anyone who picks up this book hoping to read about Van Dyke's glory days as a big-wave rider will be disappointed; he refers only obliquely to that period in the late '50s and '60s, noting that he was so focused on surfing that nothing else much mattered to him. In sharp contrast to the loving detail with which he describes his courtship of his present wife, Joan Marie, whom he married later in life, he barely mentions his first two marriages or his children. The entire middle of his life is just ... not there. One can intuit some regrets, and a sense that it was only after he matured that he completed his coming of age, when he began to put people first and surfing second.

Throughout the book, the sheer hardiness of this man is immensely impressive, and not a little intimidating. Growing up, he routinely walked tens of miles just to reach a fishing hole or see a girl he cared about. At one point, he lived on a sand dune in a shack made of driftwood and a discarded hatch cover from a boat. He surfed chilly California waters before wetsuits were widely used, literally turning blue and losing mobility in his limbs because of the cold. He learned to fish, dive, surf and swim by jumping in, shrugging off risk.

In a chapter called "Sharing Camp with Rattlesnakes," he writes matter-of-factly of the summer when his father solved the problem of where the family should live while their new home was being built by sending them to camp in a redwood forest in a tent atop a wooden platform. Few women today would have held out as long as his mother, Billie Van Dyke; it wasn't the rattlesnakes that was the last straw, it was the creaking oak tree that crashed down, just missing their campsite.

Van Dyke's perspective is a long one: Although he rode waves and partied with the children of affluence, the boomer generation, he was shaped by a time before that, when abundance was measured by a different standard. Here, he re-creates that time, shows us how it has affected him, in the process reminding us of what has been lost.