Soul Surfer (based on a true story)

Roots (pt 2 of the book)

A lot of who I am comes from my parents. They're incredible people who've always worked very hard to reach there goals. I know a lot of teenagers think their aliens from another planet, but I actually think mine are pretty cool.

They not only support me in everything I want to do, but they also really inspire me to be a great surfer and even more important, a greater human being.

My dad was the ultimate surfer nut. Picture this (when I do, it cracks me up!): its the dead of winter in ocean city, new jersey. Icicles are hanging from the edges of buildings, and the snow is swirling around the sidewalks, rapidly burying the curbs and making huge mounds against the buildings.

Everyone us bundled against the cold and scraping the ice off their car windows. Along comes my dad, Tom Hamilton, this skinny 17 year old, trudging through the snowbanks with a surfboard on his head and his beaver tail hat (à LA Davy Crockett!) Flapping behind him.

Dressed in a primitive thick, black diving wetsuit, he would grease his armpits with thick Vaseline to ward off wetsuit rash. And looking like the creature from the black lagoon, he would head out -blizzard and all- to his favorite ocean city surf spot, 10th street.

There he'd meet up with his best buddy, monk, and the two of them would cross a deserted beach, frosted white, to surf the icy gray Atlantic in conditions so severe that their eyebrows would often freeze solid. Tom and monk started surfing together as little kids, around the age of 13 and 14, in the summer of 1962. Within a few years, both boys were dedicated fanatics who took there sport seriously year rounded.

"In the winter we would do anything we could think of to keep warm," my dad has told me. "There were no leashes on surfboards, so if you fell off during the winter months the swim to the beach was brutally cold. We came up with the idea to pour hot water down our wetsuits before going surfing to give us a little edge in the cold. We would be steaming like teakettles all the way to the beach."

I always wandered how my dad knew he was born to be a surfer. When I ask him, he says it was more like destiny took him by the hand and led him to the waves. His parents, George and Mary Hamilton, moved with there 4 kids around new jersey a few times before settling in ocean city. While George set up his dental practice, Mary made sure that my dad and his two brothers and sisters were deeply involved in the sport of swimming.

One day, my grandpa, "Dr. George," brought home a surfboard for my dad. It was a factory -produced pop out model (as opposed to a normal shape hand snapped surfboard) that was on sale at, of all the places, a hardware store. One try and dad was hooked. Soon he and Monk were part of a regular surf scene on the jersey shore. If grandpa had only known the daily ritual he created! 😂😂😂😂

Moving On:

In 1968 my dad graduated from ocean city high school. As a graduation gift, my grandparents sent him to Manhattan Beach, California so he could spend the summer surfing. This was the best gift he could ever imagine. There he prowled up and down the coast tasting firsthand the waves he had only heard about in magazines. But there was a war on.

Student deferments were ending, and 18 year old boys everywhere were being drafted and shipped off to the jungles of Vietnam. My dad, hoping that he could find a way to stay around and surf a bit more, joined the reserves but found his unit quickly activated. So, hoping to stick close to water, he enlisted in the navy.

In 1970 he was sent to Vietnam, and his job was to blast the ships big guns in support of troop movements. That powerful noise would damage his hearing for life. And though it was not exactly the place that a surfer kid imagined himself winding up, this too proved to be fate.

On his ship, dad met a young sailor named Robby from Hawaii. Since they both loved surfing, they immediately bonded. Dad was awestruck by the incredible surfing tales Robby would spin. "When this thing is over," Robby kept telling him, "you come to hawaii".

During Christmas of 1971, dad made his first visit to the islands. It was love at first sight. Who could resist the warm tropical trade winds, the transparent, inviting water, the powerful winter waves and the casual, relaxed lifestyle? "One day. . . " He told Robby -making a wish on the waves. Because at that time, since he had completed his services, California was home. He settled in San Diego, enrolled in Mesa Junior College, and, of course, spent all of his free time surfing along the reef-lined sunset cliff area.

But it wasn't easy to keep his mind on his studies. His thoughts were someplace far away; he was consumed with getting back to Hawaii. And two semesters, with my grandparents insist he had lost his mind, dad quit school, took the little savings he had from his part time job, a backpack, and a surfboard, and caught a one way flight to Hawaii.

He ended up on the island kaui. From the airport, dad hitchhiked to the north Shore, catching a ride in the back of a old red pick up truck filled with buckets of pig slop. The jungles outside Hanalei town had been taken over by a strange breed of hippie surfers. Some, like future world Champion Margo Oberg and her husband, Steve, had actually built comfortable and substantial tree houses out of scrap wood and plastic tarp.

Others lived in a more gritty existence in mildewing tents or rough makeshift shelters. The place was called Taylors Camp ⛺,  because the land these squatters lived on was owned by a relative of actress Elizabeth Taylor.

My dad was new to Hawaii, and admittedly pretty clueless. Anxious to get settled and get surfing, he selected a nice ditch to call home. He built a wooden platform for his tent and went surfing everyday at Pauaeaka,  Tunnels, or at the huge point waves 🌊 wrapping into Hanalei Bay.

But early in rainy season he learned his first lesson: the ditch was really a dormant riverbed, and when he returned from surfing he found that his "home" And all his belongings had been washed away!

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