Free Raising A Soul Surfer by Rick Bundschuh, Cheri Hamilton Page B

to think this over,” and then walked out of the interrogation room, leaving me alone with the tiny plants. I was annoyed and angry about getting hassled—angry that they wanted me to blame my landlord just so they could get a bigger bust. Angry that they’d dragged me down here for these two little alleged pot plants.
    I guess I was so incensed that I decided the easiest thing to do was eat the evidence. Which is exactly what I did! You should have seen the looks on their faces when they returned.
    Needless to say, they were unhappy with me. It earned me a night in jail.
    Looking back, I bet I would have been more cooperative in the first place if they’d just told me that my landlord had skippedtown with all the rent he’d been collecting for several months.
    The real bummer was that the jail they took me to was in Bishop, California, which was an hour’s drive away. When they booted me onto the street the following day, I had no way to get back to my car parked at the police station in Mammoth. I thought about hitchhiking, but instead started calling a few friends I knew back in Mammoth to ask for a ride. I finally reached Chris, one of the surf crew, and one of the guys I knew through Tony, my ex-boyfriend.
    Feeling free and having a need to de-stress, I left the police station and headed down the remote mountain road to meet up with Chris. I grew wary when a Chevy van, traveling in the opposite direction, slowed down and the driver asked me if I needed a ride. I said, “No, thanks,” so he drove on; but then, looking behind me, I saw him make a U-turn back toward me. Alarm bells went off! At that moment, Chris, looking a bit like a hippie, came along to pick me up in his brown Volkswagen camper van. In retrospect, I could see God’s hand of protection on my life.
    As we drove back to Mammoth, Chris and I talked about Hawaii and how much fun it would be to surf there. Spring was coming, the snow was melting—and with it my job. I didn’t have a place to live, thanks to bank robbers and an embezzling bonsai-pot grower for a landlord. It seemed to be the perfect time to make a radical change in plans. Chris asked me if he could tag along.
    Instead of going to Oahu, where all the famous surf breaks are, Chris suggested that we go to the island of Kauai. I had never heard of it. He had friends who lived there and would put us up, and from what he’d heard, the waves were uncrowded.
    I agreed. Kauai it was! We sold our cars, packed our surfboards and were off to the islands and my destiny, the place where I was meant to be.

    All this time, Tom was settling into college classes in San Diego. The G.I. bill paid for his education and housing costs. He condensed his classes together into two days so he would have plenty of open time to surf.
    When Tom was first discharged from the Navy, he’d gone home to New Jersey. But he quickly scraped up enough cash by hustling at local pool halls (and polishing his reputation as the “Trickster”) to return to San Diego, where the surf was more to his liking.
    Surfing was undergoing an emerging revolution during this time. Long, heavy surfboards had given way to shorter, lighter and more maneuverable ones. The day of “hanging ten” (hanging all 10 toes off the front of a long board) was fading out. On a short board a surfer plants his feet and uses his core body weight to turn and carve the open face of the wave, staying just ahead of the whitewater foam.
    Then the surf leash came along. Previously, if a surfer wiped out, he or she would have to swim after his (her) surfboard, usually all the way to the beach. One would think this idea of a leash on the board would make all surfers shout hallelujah and save countless wasted time swimming after boards in cold water, or crab-crawling over sharp reefs. But a bunch of surfers who considered themselves hardcore looked down on anyone who paddled out with a leash, calling them kooks. In fact, the early leashes were called “kook