Hound of the Sea by Garrett McNamara

Author:Garrett McNamara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

I STILL lived at my mom’s in Pūpū-kea. It was another Hicks Home, three bedrooms with a screened-in carport that doubled as a Japanese surfer hostel, with three or four bunk beds. From the front the house looked more presentable. It was blue with white trim, and a little front deck that opened onto a patch of green lawn. I couldn’t think of any reason to move. I crashed on the couches of various friends whenever I felt like it. During the winter months there might be a dozen surfers living in the garage and more in the house. We had bunks in the bedrooms and foldouts in the living room. Liam was also living there with his girlfriend, Brandee, whom he’d met in California and who had moved from Santa Cruz; and Brandee’s mom, who claimed to be looking for her own apartment but as far as we could tell had no intention of leaving. And my girlfriend had also moved in. At one point there must have been twenty people living there.

My mom was obviously no stranger to communal living. As long as people kept the kitchen table clear so she could paint, and the kitchen counter relatively clean, she didn’t mind. Then Barney Barron, Josh Loya, and Flea Virostko, buddies from Santa Cruz, started staying with us. They’d been staying next door at a pig hunter’s house, and the pig carcasses hanging in the garage had gotten a little too gnarly, local style. Liam and I were stoked to have them. I don’t think we charged them rent. So, all these surfers with their damp trunks and piles of slippers by the front door and boards stacked hither and thither, and the girlfriends and Liam’s girlfriend’s mother, each with their own special shampoo on the ledge in the shower, and the wet towels they left hither and thither and dishes in the sink, so many dishes in the sink.

Finally our once-upon-a-time hippie mom had had it. Every surfer who wasn’t paying rent, out! Every Japanese who didn’t have a bed, out! Girlfriends and their mothers, out! Liam and Garrett, grow up and get out! We thought she was joking about kicking us out. We laughed our asses off, we teased her about how she had raised us in a commune and we were just doing what we’d been raised to do, live with a bunch of more or less strangers in perfect harmony.

But she was serious.

Two weeks later we found ourselves a nice, remodeled house at Velzyland. While we were in the midst of moving, by which I mean we got the key from the landlord and dropped a bag of clothes inside the front door before we went out to surf an overhead day, Mom’s house burned down, two weeks to the day.

The fire department said it was due to faulty electrical wiring in the garage. Miraculously, no one was home at the time. But all of the boards belonging to the renters and our visiting

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