June 2008 | Art & Soul
Endless Summer
The long, strange trip of the “first family of surfing”
By Eric Larson
At the height of World War II, with Nazi concentration camps running full tilt, Dorian Paskowitz — a Texas-born Jew whose family had relocated to San Diego (where the young Paskowitz spent his formative years surfing) — was on his way to becoming successful in what he thought were all the right ways.
He was a Stanford-educated doctor, practicing medicine in Hawaii. He was fit and handsome. Killer tan. Beautiful wife. It was, for all intents and purposes, the good life.
By 1956, though, the sage surfer inside of him, which he’d been suppressing beneath the smile and suits and flashy position as the president of Hawaii’s chapter of the American Medical Association, awoke — and took its mighty revenge. One marriage failed, then another. The panic attacks began. The insomnia set in. The hair fell out. The voice inside admonished him as a phony, a fake.
So, in ’57, sufficiently diminished in mind, body and spirit, “Doc” left the beach for the desert — the Israeli desert — where he lived “like Jesus” for a year, barely subsisting, trying to figure out what to do next.
While filmmaker Doug Pray’s Surfwise makes quick work of all this as background, it’s hard not to wonder what the hell happened to Doc out there in the desert — for it will inform the arc of his life up to the present.
That he decided surfing was going to play a prominent role in his existence is understandable enough, given his past. It is his obsessive concern with sex (my phrasing, as the now 80-something Doc is never so delicate) and achieving optimal health about which one wonders.
Where was I? Oh, yes. So, Doc begins his life of surfing and seduction. Framing his voracious carnal appetite as a “scientific-spiritual study of female sexuality,” he ventures out to couple with no fewer than one hundred women — and to rate them. His experiment is interrupted, though, when he meets Juliette and pronounces she will be the bearer of his seven sons. And that’s exactly what she does — plus an eighth son, and a girl thrown in for good measure.
As if the sheer mythological weight of the story so far isn’t enough, consider the next part, where for more than twenty years, the Paskowitz family — all 11 of them — drives around in a 24-foot motor home, surfs every day, eats whole grains and lives on next to nothing. It’s the kind of stripped down lifestyle most people dream about on coffee breaks, then tell themselves could never actually exist.
If the cynic inside of you thinks it all sounds too good to be true, watch on. The final third of the film — in which Pray conducts candid present-day interviews with Dorian, all nine children, Juliette, Dorian’s brother and sister and close friends — paints a more complicated picture. Doc, we learn, is almost universally despised by his children. We discover that for all its external dreaminess, the Paskowitz endless summer had an almost militaristic strictness to it. Perhaps most painfully, we are confronted with the same reality check the children receive when they discover what it means to have no education in America.
The family’s reunion in Hawaii after ten years of estrangement poses important questions we all can ask of ourselves: Can we have familial pleasure without familial pain? Is the shadow side of our family lives the necessary consequence of the sunny side? And, maybe most poignantly: When and how do we let go of the past?
Surfwise (93 minutes)
Directed by Doug Pray
Magpictures.com
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