Free Raising A Soul Surfer by Rick Bundschuh, Cheri Hamilton

was still as far from God as I knew how to be. I was going to college and I was surfing as much as I could. I was even entering contests. One contest, held in Baja, California, put me in the ranks of the best women surfers of the era. Too bad my beautiful prized board was stolen from where we were staying.
    My boyfriend and I rented a cute house just above a notorious part of San Diego, called Ocean Beach. OB, as the locals call it, was the surfer and hippie haven of San Diego. Drugs were everywhere, and parties raged all night. In spite of all this, or in denial of it, our plan was to get through college and get married when we were both 21.
    I took the first job available, at a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken, while Tony made surfboards in the garage. When I’d come home at night, our house was filled with stoned and starving surfers. I was a welcome sight, since I would always bring home leftover chicken or cream pies.
    There was a notice put up at our college offering a course on Transcendental Meditation, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guy the Beatles followed. I was interested, because it was supposed to help your mental faculties work better, or so the advertisement said. I had a hunger for knowledge, and I thought this would help my memory. Then I found that it cost $30—quite a sum at that time. It made me mad. I thought that it seemed religious in a way and should be free. (I learned later from my husband, Tom, that he took this course at the same time I was considering it, and he even got his special Hindu “god” name to chant—all for just 30 bucks!) So it was just a religious exercise to earn some brownie points, not the learning tool I thought it was supposed to be.
    Work and school were like blips on my radar screen compared to surfing. Southern California is ripe with incredible surf spots, so I was able to bloom where I was planted. While localism was widespread in those days and is still very much alive and well at just about every break in the world, as a girl, I had to battle and strategize and earn every wave I caught. Parties have never interested me, so I didn’t have a problem with going to bed early. That meant that I could get up before light and be at the beach for an early morning sunrise session before the waves got too crowded. The early morning dawn patrol became my routine for the next 30 years.
    I had invited my boyfriend to go skiing for his birthday, so we jumped into my little red Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and went up to ski the slopes of Big Bear, California. Before surfing dominated my life, I’d gone skiing with my family pretty often, so I knew what I was doing. My boyfriend, however, had never skied before. But he was cocky. I guess he figured his surfing prowess would serve him well on the slopes.
    It didn’t. I finally went off to ski by myself . . . to leave some part of his ego intact. To his credit, by noon he’d advanced farenough to venture onto the intermediate runs; and by the time we were heading home, he was even enthused about this new sport. Maybe too enthused.
    A month or so later, some friends of his suggested a ski trip to Mammoth, the central California snow paradise. I had a new job working at a health food restaurant called the Homestead, so I couldn’t go.
    A week passed, and Tony never came back. But a letter did. He’d gotten a job working the lifts and had a new life now as a “ski bum,” a new life that didn’t include me. I was left alone with an empty house and a few surfboards.
    I was heartbroken. I’m sure that all the customers at work couldn’t help but notice my dejected demeanor, especially that young guy fresh off his tour of duty who had moved out to Ocean Beach to surf between classes at Mesa College. His name was Tom Hamilton. And, yes, he did attend Mesa College at the same time that I took classes there; and he may even have dropped in on my waves at Sunset Cliffs, or maybe I dropped in on his!

CHAPTER
5
Hawaii Bound
    If I rise on