Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
I don’t see my best friend enough.
Geoff Barker and I met as teenagers, college freshmen, and aspiring Marine Corps officers. In the thirty-five years since, we’ve been college roommates, vagabonds living in a station wagon, anglers (more him than me) and hunters (more me than him), surfers and SCUBA divers. At times, we’ve dodged mortality brought close by the hands of our collective idiocy. More importantly, we’ve stood up for one another at our weddings, become fathers and godfathers, been there for births and baptisms, and watched our kids start to build their own list of experiences at head-spinning speed.
I miss the days when we had exchanges like,
“What do you want to do tomorrow?”
“I was thinking we should skip class, pack the car, and drive around Australia.”
But we’re busy, you know? There are emails to send. Zoom calls to join.
Geoff is an investment banker. I am a writer. Though very different professions, both require a certain sharklike propensity to keep moving forward, weaving through the gloom to find the next meal. Now we mostly see each other when one of our children has done something for which a best friend and godfather should show up.
Like much of the nation, we often conflate how frenetically we go through life with how meaningful our lives are. “How are you?” we ask one another. “Busy!” comes the answer. In American English, this is meant to signal a full life, preparation for a divine accounting in which some imaginary manager will ensure we’ve spent our time increasing shareholder value or synchronizing leveraged efficiencies. It’s a construct I’ve begun to question pretty aggressively. It’s impossible not to while surfing.
We were doing just that in April, assembled in San Diego to watch Geoff’s son, my godson, follow his father’s footsteps as a Marine Lieutenant, soon to begin his adult life, as Geoff and I did, at Quantico, Virginia. We surfed Southern California’s cold water for two days, then we both headed home; I to North Carolina, Geoff to Colorado. En route, the airline destroyed his surfboard. It was a serendipitous calamity that recently brought him to my house for no reason other than to surf and meet a surfboard shaper I know, another retired Marine, named Clint Runyon.
Clint handmakes every board he sells. It’s a time-consuming process, but in the end, every customer he takes on has a bespoke surfboard, tuned to his or her needs. More importantly, in the way of true artisans, Clint has guided a customer to a place they might not have known they needed to be, an aim shared by a gundog trainer I know. Sometimes, Clint guides a potential customer to a yard sale or pawn shop instead of his shop. That judgment matters because artisanal work is an investment of time, capital, and emotion. Sitting in his shop, I could not help but think of friends who own custom shotguns that cost more than my truck or of a custom bamboo fly rod builder I know. I thought of use-worn knives and tackle and jackets; all the heirloom-quality items that speak to those of us who live lives afield.
As part of Clint’s process, he likes to see a potential client surf. So, at dawn on a Friday morning, Geoff, Clint, and I found ourselves bobbing in an empty surf break, a solitude likely owing to the general paucity of surf during a North Carolina summer. Surfers may be the only North Carolinians who look forward to hurricane season.
Surfing is an exquisite waste of time, especially in essentially flat water. No deliverables are produced. No key performance indicators are met. No one circles back or caveats off the director’s point, and no thought leaders hold space to break paradigms. But I am glad we persisted because Clint’s boards will find the essence of any rideable wave, and even in surf reported as “really poor,” there were the same smiles, and hoots, and laughs found in the break when it’s firing.
With good people sharing the waves around you, reality happens in the form of real conversations, real encouragement, and real joy at someone else’s excitement. And though at the end, there was nothing tangible to take home other than what we came with, no limit of mallards or “grip and grin” photo of a brookie, I left the water feeling relaxed and recharged. I came away with new skills courtesy of Clint’s gentle coaching. I left behind some things I needed to unload, rafts of stress and frustration washing out into the Atlantic as I walked back up the beach.
Geoff was shopping and might have concluded a deal based on a phone call and a test ride. I wasn’t looking at all, as I have plenty of surfboards from yard sales and pawn shops. But Clint gave us time and knowledge and experience, which are about all any of us truly have. How someone spends it, shares it, and gives it away are the truest measures of who they are, much of how I evaluate potential new friends, a deal Geoff and I each concluded with Clint that day, along with handshakes over the custom surfboards we will both be surfing this fall.
I don’t see my best friend enough. Likely, you don’t see yours enough either. Maybe don’t wait for a reason. And in the moments in between, there’s likely someone else out there worth knowing. That email will be there when you get out of the water.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal