The Search for Freedom Page #3

I'd put the snaps in every pair.

And we'd put them in my Volkswagen van,

and drive to an account

who would take

as many as we could supply.

I thought,

"All right, well, this sounds fun."

I can hang out at the beach.

I can keep surfing.

I have this little project,

do it for a year or two,

and then I'm going to go

to graduate school. That was my plan.

You know, when I was young,

climbing saved our lives.

We had nothing to do

with corporate America.

I mean, this is the '60s.

We just said no to a lot of that stuff.

We had a counterculture lifestyle

and made our own way.

We really were proud of the fact

that climbing had

no economic value in society.

That was great.

When we were doing big walls

in Yosemite and stuff,

hardly anything had been done.

So you didn't repeat routes.

I mean, why repeat a route

when you can go do a new route?

I think the curious common bond

that we all had

is a passion to do something

with no outside motivation.

It was more from the inside.

Because you weren't going

to get famous about it.

You weren't going to get paid for it,

no way, no how.

When you first started

coming into this place,

it was really intriguing about

the lifestyle and the characters.

It just seemed

like an array of characters.

You've got to remember,

it was in the early '70s.

There was a whole revolution of things

going on in mainstream society

of protesting wars, you know,

hippie generation and all that.

It seemed like everything

was an adventure around here.

Every step you were taking

had an inspiration of the unknown

and the excitement just to be here.

If you go back

in the history of bicycles,

over 100 years ago,

people rode nothing but unpaved roads.

So one could say,

"Well, off-road riding,

that started when bicycles started,"

which now everybody takes for granted.

But back in the '60s, '70s,

it was a radical proposition.

There was this whole place

where people would go to, this shrine,

where it was so close

to a major crazy city, San Francisco,

yet at the same time

you could get so far away.

The golden key was this thing

called a balloon tire bike,

and originally it was, you know,

found objects.

It was bikes that were found

in second-hand stores

and, you know, the Goodwill or dumps.

What happened here was

a mongrelized bike.

I mean, some people,

half the people would spit on it

and say, "This is a piece of junk.

Are you out of your mind?"

And the other half would say, "That's

what I want! I need that thing."

I was lucky enough

to have met a couple of the first

windsurfers in Hawaii in 1974.

I wasn't big enough or strong enough

to get the sail out of the water.

I was 11 years old,

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