Chapter 32

January 1-8, 2000

Florida

Later that day, they headed for the airport in Camden, again in the borrowed van, this time with Crystal's surfboard, after rescuing it from the Clark garage. There were still some other things of hers in Ryan and Linda's attic, and some might make the trek back to Arizona in the minivan in a few weeks.

Several hours later -- and following a couple phone calls to work out the meeting -- they met Michelle at the Orlando airport. They were very jammed into the minivan, but they survived as Crystal, who knew the way, drove them over through Melbourne and then south toward Sebastian Inlet on A1A. Crystal had called ahead weeks before to let her friends know that she was coming, bringing some people with her and planning on camping out back.

Finally they turned off the highway into the shell-paved parking lot of a small building stacked high with surfboards; a small house was behind and to one side. Under an awning, a large, heavy-set bald man sat drinking coffee with a tall, slender, fiftyish blonde. As Crystal drove in, they got up to see who had arrived.

Crystal just about exploded out of the driver's seat and ran up to her friends. "Buddha! Giselle! God, it's good to see you again!" There was some hugging and pounding of backs going on -- it was three years since she'd been there. Once it died down a little, Crystal, still exuberant and bubbly, said, "Buddha, I'd like you to meet my mom and dad!"

Buddha turned, looked at Al, and his jaw dropped. He tried to say something, but no words would come out. Finally, he took a deep breath, and managed, "Al! Holy shit! I don't believe it!"

They fell into each other's arms, pounding each other on the back. "Crystal," Buddha managed to babble. "How the fuck ... I mean ... I thought your name was Chladek, not Buck!"

"It's a long story," Al grinned, hardly less exhilarated than Buddha to see his old friend. "It has its good and bad times, but I only discovered last summer that Crystal is the daughter I never knew I had."

"Well, my God. I never thought I'd see the day. What in hell have you been doing with yourself since, oh hell, it must be thirty years?"

"It's another long story," Al grinned. "I run rafts down the Grand Canyon. Crystal is one of my trip leaders. Michelle and Scooter here are also boatmen, and I understand you know your last guest."

Buddha looked around, got another big grin when he saw Myleigh, and said, "Surfer Girl! My God, it must be three years, too!"

"It's Doctor Surfer Girl now," Myleigh grinned. "I teach at Marienthal College in Kansas City."

"That was always your dream, wasn't it? My God, I'm happy for you!"

The surf that afternoon was nothing much, and the day was winding down anyway, so they all gathered in chairs under the awning and got down to some serious catching up.

"Al and I were great surfing buddies back when we were kids," Buddha explained. We're both from California, originally, and we just about grew up on Malibu."

"And on a bunch of other beaches up and down the coast," Al agreed. "We started at Malibu before we were old enough to drive, but when I got my driver's license, we had this old VW bug that we'd load up with our surfboards, and we went all the hell and gone up and down the coast, looking for a good break. Man, that was a long time ago."

"Longer than I like to admit," Buddha agreed. "The surfing bug bit us both pretty bad, but I have to say that looking back on it, it bit me even harder than it did him. I had pretty good grades in high school. Well, Vietnam was going on then, and I didn't want to go in the Army, so I went to college, Hawaii and Santa Barbara, mostly because there was good surf. Al, well, he didn't want to go to college, so he joined the Army."

"We sorta drifted apart after I went into the Army," Al added. "Oh, there was a few letters back and forth, nothing much, and when I got back home, Buddha was in Hawaii, so we missed each other and never did manage to get back together. I decided to go bumming around, wound up in the Canyon and never left, and we just didn't cross paths. I know three or four times when I went back to LA over the winter, I'd ask about Buddha, and he was never around, and after a few years I just didn't ask any more."

"Well, I wasn't," Buddha said. "Most of that must have been when I was working on my bachelor's and my master's. After I finished up college, there just weren't any jobs in my field, so I decided to go surfing and see the country a little, and for some reason I decided to check out the surfing scene in Florida, what there was of it. I had a few bucks, nothing much, but I discovered this old place. It was an abandoned shop that had sold seashells, and had this tumbledown little house. I drove past it four or five times before one day I decided to stop and take a look. What really caught my eye was the fact that there was a pretty good break right out there across A1A, not big but a nice shape. When I got to thinking about it, I realized that it had been a pretty good break every time I went past the place. Over the years, I was to learn that there's a pretty good break out there maybe half the time, less in the summer and more in the winter. Once in a while it gets up shoulder high, and once every few years a hurricane offshore kicks up some really nice waves and it's gangbusters. Anyway, this was right after my dad died, and I had a few bucks from his estate, nothing to write home about, but the place was cheap, and I thought I might be able to get something going. Now the east coast surfing scene isn't what it is in California and Hawaii -- never was, never will be -- but I got the idea in my head that I could be a big fish in a small pond down here. So, I put up a mortgage, bought the place, and set up shop. Got some lines of boards in, not a lot, Gastons and Webers and like that, mostly companies you haven't heard of for years."

"This was all back in the longboard days, right?" Al asked.

"Shortboards were starting to come in, then," Buddha explained. "And really, on the smaller stuff we have here they're a good deal. Anyway, things got started real slow. There was this big shop up in Melbourne that everybody thought had the market cornered in this area, and they did, pretty much. The problem was that they catered more to showoffs and posers, rather than real surfers. You know, the kid from up north who wants a couple T-shirts to show off how cool he is, but never gets out on a surfboard. They had a lot of that and still do, but they were getting most of the business, too. Well, I sort of hung on, and when I was just about out of money, I discovered that the local Community College needed someone to teach lit, and on occasion other things. I had my doctorate in English lit, like Surfer Girl over there," he said, nodding to Myleigh, "So I went to work for them part-time. I still teach up there, but never more than a class or two a semester. I'm kind of the utility infielder for them, I've taught several different lit courses, English, English as a second language, French, Spanish, comparative oriental religions, surfing, you name it. For a while there, I did some substitute teaching in the local schools, too. You know, just what I could do to make ends meet, while I was trying to fix up the house and the store in my spare time. It was kind of a hippy life, still is, but I've been happy with it."

"Found your spot, huh?" Scooter asked.

"Well, sort of," Buddha nodded. "I didn't really realize it at first, and the second winter things were getting close, but by then I'd started to get a little reputation among the hard cores as being more interested in surfing than T-shirts. Well, I had this kid in my French class, Robbie Halstead. He was a real hardcore, still comes around. Back then, he was working in the surf shop in Melbourne, but hanging out here in his spare time. One day, this gal who only spoke French came into the shop up there in Melbourne. He didn't have a lot of French at the time, a little bit, but he was the only one who had any at all. He figured out she wanted to try surfing, so he sent her to me. And, that was how I met Giselle."

"I really only wanted to try it out," Giselle said. "One afternoon, perhaps. I had come down from Montreal for a week because I was sick of winter up there. It was very difficult, not knowing any English, so it was nice to meet a man who spoke good French. European French, not Canadien, but it was close enough."

"I have to say I was pretty impressed," Buddha grinned. "Not only was Giselle about the best thing I'd ever seen in what passed for a bikini back then, she picked up surfing like no one I've ever seen, before or since. She was there the next day, then the next, and, well, one thing led to another. About six weeks later, I happened to ask her when she had to get back to work, just out of curiosity, you know, and she said she had to be back to work a month before."

"I did not want to leave," Giselle said. "It was very cold still in Montreal, and Buddha was very nice, so I just stayed."

"Up till then, we'd only talked in French," Buddha said. "But when I realized she meant it, we switched over to English, and she picked it up pretty well. Having Giselle around eventually took a lot of the bite out of the financial issue, partly because she could watch the shop while I was out teaching, partly because she could instruct, too, and later, after her English got good enough, she could work elsewhere part time as well."

"It took a while for my license as a nurse to get transferred, and my English did need to be better to be able to use it," Giselle added. "Like Buddha, I have rarely worked full time as a nurse, but there is always a call for someone to work part time or as a substitute. All the moving around gets tiresome, so the last several years, I have worked mornings three days a week in a doctor's office. He does nothing but obstetrics and gynecology, so it has been rather easier, and I still get plenty of time to spend at the shop, surfing, and with Buddha."

"We're never going to get rich," Buddha said. "Well, we had our chance and we missed it, but we're just as happy with the way we live."

"What's this, Buddha?" Al asked.

"Long story," Buddha replied. "You have to remember that when I bought the shop, it was right out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, there's the nature preserve on the one side of us, and there were a couple of houses down the other direction, and not a lot else, so I bought cheap. Well, since then, real estate down here has gone nuts. The couple of houses to the one side of us got bought up long ago, and there's that big row of luxury condos there now. A few years ago, we had an offer of over a million for the property as a tear down, so this guy could put in more condos and seal more beach off from outsiders. We didn't want to give up the life we had, there was no way we could have moved anywhere else with a break this good, and besides fencing people off from the sea pisses me off so we turned him down. Well anyway, this guy decided he wanted this eyesore of ours out of the way so he could build more condos, so he tried to get our taxes jacked up, considering the relative value of the land, and I had a hell of a fight about that for a while. Then, well I guess he paid off a couple people in the county, and they got the idea they'd use eminent domain to push me out for the sake of economic development."

"And, keeping people who did not own the condos from enjoying the beach," Giselle added.

"Right," Buddha agreed. "I didn't know what to do, and I knew it was going to cost me more money for lawyers than I could ever manage myself to fight it. So, I was lying there in bed one night, thinking about it, and I got to wondering why he wasn't making a move on the nature preserve. So the next morning, I got up and called the Nature Conservancy, which owns the preserve, and, well, they got a couple interesting laws on their side and a bunch of lawyers of their own. It took a little while to work out the details, but in the end, we sold the whole works to the Nature Conservancy for one dollar and a free life lease for us and our kids."