Home on the farm...Surfers journal

The above video comes by way of Citizen of Humanity’s Just Like You program, a yearlong philanthropic video series profiling luminaries such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rickson Gracie, Vogue Italia’s editor-in-chief, Franca Sozzani, and somehow Dan Malloy. "I am a surfer and an aspiring farmer," says Dan. “The people that I know that work with their hands and work on handcrafted things at ranches and farms are really the people I respect the most."

For more from Lompoc's happy salt of the earth, dig into "A Semis Search for Now-ness" in the TSJ Archives. Here's a little sample:

I stepped out of the airplane and onto the hot tarmac.

It took almost three hours to clear our boards and camera equipment at the shipping company. By the time we were finished, we had a stack of official papers that were as thick as a bible. They had been signed, stamped, resigned, triple checked, and finally cleared with a 20-dollar handshake. Thomas organized a bus to make the long drive to Arugum Bay, which would take us all the way from Colombo to the southeast tip. About six hours into our drive, streetlights and houses became sparse and our driver looked a bit worried. He told us that there were bandidos out in the boonies and that he was afraid.

We weren’t in the mood for being held up, so we found a place to crash. The next morning, we drove another six hours on a half-paved, pothole-infested road. We caught our first glimpse of monkeys, water buffalo, and wild elephants, and soon enough, we were approaching our designation. When we finally saw the ocean, we instantly lost our composure. Whitewash was visible in the distance as we passed through the small town of Pottuvil. We all sat on one side of the bus, faces pressed to the windows, yelping, “Look at that one!” We weren’t looking a proper wave, but none of us seemed to notice—our imagination had turned a terrible little roller into a perfect peeling right. We found a place to stay and grabbed our biggest boards. On our way to sure, we got more than a few amused looks from the villagers. The sun blasted our pale skin and the sand singed our haole feet. Equal parts excited and in pain, we hollered and yelped as we frantically hunkered our logs through the fishing village and down to the beach. I’m pretty sure locals had also never seen surfboards that big and they had definitely never witnessed people so excited to surf the worst wave in town.

The waves broke just off the tip of a sandy point and then dissipated into deep water. Alex and I jumped straight in, knee paddling from the bottom of the bay, while Thomas and Belen ran past the fishing boats and up the point. We spent the next two hours gliding the travel tension out of our systems. It was amazing how much better my 11’3” Skip flowed through the water than it did through airport security. For the first time since our journey had begun, the big green beast was at home and carrying me.