The Surfer Who Broke My Heart Open

I waited for the others outside the theater, a tremble in my chin and emotion brewing in my body. We had just watched SURFILMUSIC, a new documentary chronicling Jack Johnson's evolution from surfer to filmmaker to world-renowned musician. This was no epic drama or tear-jerker where the love interest dies in a sudden car crash. It was a movie about surfing, filmmaking, and music, just as the title describes. My friends and family were going to think I had lost it or was in a mid-life crisis.

It was neither. My tears were actually tears of resonance, longing, and loss.

The movie begins with Johnson’s early childhood in the late seventies and early eighties on Hawaii's North Shore. During that same timeframe, I was growing up in a place about as different from Hawaii as possible: Winnipeg, Manitoba. I took in the story unfolding on the screen—a life well lived, but more importantly, a simple life without pomp and circumstance despite Johnson’s eventual fame. I sat with my husband, teenage son, his best friend, and his parents, experiencing a moment of total resonance with the themes of Johnson’s life. That's part of what brought the tears. The experience that Johnson and his cohort of friends—including the now-famous Malloy brothers—shared is deeply similar to my own, yet it remains one my children do not know. Will not know. And neither will yours. The childhood and early adolescent experiences I had are now in the history books.

While I loved the story of Johnson’s life of surfing, creating music, hanging out with his high school and college friends, and screwing around making goofy home movies, I also felt a pang of deep sadness that my kids don’t know as deeply what it is to live a life of spontaneity and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. There was not a phone in sight. No kid scrolling while others sat at the dinner table talking. No shots of boys playing video games. Nope. These boys were out in the world together, taking photos with real cameras and learning to get better at surfing and making movies. It was an analog existence that involved creativity, mastering skills, taking chances, making mistakes, and being together for the whole process.

Another notable element of Johnson's early life was the long tether his parents allowed him. My husband and I work to give our kids a long leash to explore and figure themselves out, away from the weight of our oversight. We often feel in the minority in this parenting stance. It is interesting to offer our kids a wider range and run up against parents who feel completely uncomfortable with this approach. And let’s be clear, here: My husband and I aren’t “free-range” parents with no rules or boundaries. We just give our kids enough breathing room to keep a few secrets from us and have aspects of their lives that we aren’t following—metaphorically or literally, no constant texting and tracking.

I felt like I was watching someone else’s version of the essence of my own childhood. As a tween and teenager, I spent hours upon hours screwing around out of my parents' observational range. I made things: mixed tapes, friendship bracelets, dance routines with my girlfriends at sleepovers, scrapbooks—so many scrapbooks! I took photos and made albums. I wrote stories and bound the pages myself, making really crude “books.” I rode my bike all over town and went camping with my friends. I liked to sew and made utilitarian items like drawstring shoe bags. I actually sold them, because they were useful to adults during cold Winnipeg winters. With so much snow and such brutal temperatures, women and men alike wore boots to dinner parties, but once they arrived, they changed into heels and dress shoes. Thus, the shoe bags.

Time unfurled in my youth without anxiety and pressure. I spent my time learning new things, making things that weren’t as useful as the shoe bags but brought me joy. None of it was geared towards making the best version so that it would be Insta-worthy. None of my effort was focused on what others would think when I posted it online, trying to share an image portraying my life in perfect form. I wasn’t living to fit a mold or a stereotype. I was doing it because I wanted to, and it felt good. Nothing about what my friends and I did was performative. We just did it to make the moment fun.

As you can probably tell, I absolutely loved Johnson’s movie. I unexpectedly saw a version of my values and the life I want to model for my kids. The documentary captured the anthem of my beliefs and my life’s work. I had the sense that everything I hold dear—slower and simpler living, learning things, trying new things, making things, spending time with others in pleasurable activities—were all wrapped up in the narrative flashing across the big screen. I was watching the very themes and foundational beliefs celebrated in The Slow Weekender in someone else’s life, and that felt resonant—but also sad, because that way of living now feels like the exception rather than the norm.

I fear that my commentary on what the distraction of screens and social media has done to human life has gone stale. Same with the trend of over-parenting. But how can I talk about the value of developmental freedom and analog life demonstrated in this documentary without referencing the lack of parental hovering and absence of screens? I sat there in the small theater, my family and friends around me, my son just beside me, and felt a wash of nostalgia—the kind flavored with longing and loss. I wish this were still the norm for teens these days. I wish they had empty Saturday afternoons and used them to hang out, screw around, create something silly together, and then eat cheap delivery pizza using a Domino’s coupon from the kitchen junk drawer (if you are my age, you know exactly what I am talking about when I mention the paper coupons). I wish that more kids wanted to make things for the sheer fun of it, rather than watch—on tiny little screens—other people make things.

After the movie, when I asked my son and his friend what stood out to them, they both said something that made my heart sink further: “It was cool. One day I’d be happy if I got to surf and make music and be famous.” That was so not the point. But these kids don’t get the point. They didn't notice the labor of love in Chris Malloy’s hand-painted scrapbooks, pieced together on the road in the early '90s while his gaggle of friends made their very first documentary. They didn’t notice that Johnson and his buddies chased after everything they wanted, learning to make their own guitars—and then learning to play them. Goofing around with lyrics, then singing songs. Learning to make movies underwater and above water and on boats and on land. Learning because they had to, because it was the only way to do what they loved, even if it meant doing it the hard way, without the assurances or safety nets of cell phones, digital maps, tap to pay, or Google Translate. My son and his friend didn’t appreciate what I soaked up as we sat in that movie theater. I know it’s probably just their age and still-maturing lens; they are only juniors in high school. I wasn’t upset with them, just sad. Their answers were a sting where I already had a wound, a sting that brought tears: They don’t even know what they are missing.

Enjoy the slow- Heather