Down from the Spin Ghar Mountains

I once had a good friend. Some people hated him. Others loved him. We did a bit of traveling together. Not all over the world, mind you, but a few out of the way places in the early 1970s—Pakistan and Afghanistan, just before the Russians bombed the shit out of the Afghans, wiping out all the luminous greenery in the valleys and turning the countryside into a dust bowl.

Miklos Sandor Dora III was cool, but he was a real scammer. Some of the stories are so amazing that many people think they are bullshit—except everyone who knew Miki knows they are true. Those who met him immediately saw he was a character. He had an entirely different style from any other individual most people had ever interacted with. All the facets that made up his personality were totally understandable if you knew his background.

I can say that he was a loyal friend, always making simple, credible sense whenever we talked out of earshot of interested parties. When other people were around, however, he spoke the “Miki mumble.” It was a language all his own, invented to say nothing, but everything. I witnessed it in practice on numerous occasions in many parts of the world, and never tired of listening to him unload on a suspect. It worked best with police officers and airline employees, or anyone else in a position of authority. 

Miki and I loved hanging out with the local nomadic people during our time in Afghanistan. The mountain tribes who live in that part of the world mostly don’t recognize the established national borders. Pashtunistan is a country that has since vanished. If you look on a map these days, you’ll see Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan but not Pashtunistan. 

We heard a great story about Prince Raci of Pashtunistan. He was invited to Kabul for a royal ceremony and managed to court one of the wives in the Afghan king’s harem. All hell broke loose when he was caught, and he was imprisoned in the jail in the capital. When word got out to his clansmen they stormed the prison, pulled down a portion of the old stone wall, and took Raci home. 

Miki and I extended our stay from a few weeks to a month, and saw the countryside. The thing that sticks out in my mind from that adventure was the underground city between Pakistan and Afghanistan. With our trusty guide, we drove from Peshawar up through the Khyber Pass to Charsadda on the route to Kabul. At the border, we left the car and disappeared down an ancient staircase. Most of the town was built below ground. It had shops, cafes, and a huge market selling every type of exotic good, including performing bears on chains, giant hookahs, and all manner of spices, fruits, and vegetables. By following the crowd, we came back up the steps into Afghanistan. I still have some mementos from that trip and they’re as good as the day I bought them—hand-woven prayer rugs tightly laced with vibrant colors, and a roll of black-and-white woodblock prints of Tibetan religious stories.

Miki and I contemplated traveling overland to Europe, but it was easier to go back to Karachi and fly to Paris. When we arrived, we split up and Miki went to Germany to pick up a Kombi van, while I caught the train to Biarritz. As I had partially financed our trip to Pakistan, I was starting to get low on funds and needed a place to stay.

Jean-Marie Lartigau is one of the finest surfers France ever produced, a seven-time French champion. He’d come to Australia in 1971 and stayed with my first wife and I in our old farmhouse in Byron Bay. While there, he gave me the address of his mum, Annie, in Biarritz, in case I ever needed anything in Europe. Since Jean-Marie was in Australia and his brother François was traveling all over the world surfing, she seemed like my best option when I arrived in France.

After wandering around aimlessly trying to make sense of the street signs, I was pointed to her house. Annie lived behind the Biarritz police station, within walking distance of the train and the beach. When I knocked on the door of her apartment, she welcomed me with open arms and invited me to stay with her. I explained that I was not flush with funds, so a deal was struck: I would paint the inside of her house for room and board until Miki arrived from Germany.

As it was autumn, the weather was getting colder and the storms were getting more consistent. I spent less time surfing and more time painting or getting a lift to the Barland surfboard factory in Bayonne. An Aussie named Richard Harvey was living in the Basque Country at the time. In addition to being a talented goofyfoot, he was also a very good surfboard shaper. We both built sleek guns of balsawood, cutting the boards into three pieces lengthwise, then using a router to chamber the sections to cut down the weight. I called my board “French Girl” and made the sticker myself. I took her to Hawaii where I rode some really big surf, then took her to Australia where I don’t think I ever rode her again.

During that autumn, Annie Lartigau became a close friend. She would arrive home from the market just as I was getting back from my first surf, and we would have breakfast. Then I would start work, either painting or prepping, and she would sit and tell me of her life in Africa—about living in Niger, Senegal, and Chad with her military husband. He was a doctor serving as a colonel in the Special Forces, involved in parachute jumping with the Red Berets. 

Eventually Miki came by, of course after I had finished painting, and I moved with him to the Hôtel du Fronton right on the square in Bidart. I was just learning how to hit a tennis ball, but Miki was nearly a professional. He was also incredible at golf and any other ball sport you can think of. 

After becoming frustrated with giving me lessons on a public tennis court in Guéthary, he came up with a scam to make the game more interesting for both of us. He thought about where we were and figured out how to exploit the situation. His dream was for us to be able to play tennis at the exclusive Chantaco Tennis Club in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Getting past the front desk was easy. Miki explained that we were visiting Americans, members of the Bel Air Racquet Club in Los Angeles. He was the resident pro with a desire to give his friend some instruction in the subtleties of the game, he said. The guy at the desk was completely bamboozled by the infamous Miki mumble. 

We changed and went onto the court. Two mediocre players were hitting next to us. I was playing at my normal, shitty level, and while retrieving a ball, Miki mentioned to one of the players nearby that he needed a real game of some serious competition. He was tired of giving lessons. He then suggested that we play the other guys. Just to make it interesting, he said it would be 100 francs per game. The Frenchmen had seen how badly I played but had not witnessed Miki’s skills, since he was deliberately playing down. 

They were nibbling the bait but had not yet swallowed it, so Miki flattered them by complimenting their form. Then he casually said that the standard of tennis was, overall, pretty poor in France compared to America. That, of course, did it. The national insult hooked them.

After the first few sets, we were down many more francs than either of us had between us. Miki pretended he was frustrated, venting that he really needed a good game, that it was just luck that they were winning. He challenged the best guy on the opposing team to a game of singles, this time for 1,000 francs a game. He then wiped the floor with the Frenchman. We ate out for weeks on that game.

On another trip to France one summer in the 70s, Miki continually left highlighted newspaper clippings of the London Stock Exchange report in my pocket. He was advising me to buy gold bullion and keep it in a vault in Switzerland. Even with the limited sponsorship funds I had at that time, I’d be a wealthy man if I had taken his advice. He did the same with silver, just as the stock price was increasing every day. Another lost opportunity on my part.

Miki continually left highlighted newspaper clippings of the London Stock Exchange report in my pocket. He was advising me to buy gold bullion and keep it in a vault in Switzerland. I’d be a wealthy man if I had taken his advice.

When I first moved to Byron Bay in the late 60s, I didn’t have a phone at my house so Miki used to call the local pub to reach me. He would speak for ten minutes to whoever happened to be in the bar at the Great Northern Hotel, and then ask them if they wouldn’t mind driving up to my house, a couple of miles out of town, to tell me that he needed to speak to me.

The first time he did this, I thought it was an emergency and went tearing back down the hill. Miki was still on hold, and all he wanted to know was how the waves had been in Byron. This was months before he told me that his telephone would let him call anywhere in the world without charge. Whatever system he had, it was absolutely free and he used it for years.

Once, in the mid 70s, Miki and one of his girlfriends were staying on our farm on the North Coast of New South Wales, and we had a bit of a problem. They were sleeping in my first wife’s bedroom and, after they left, my wife went to get her passport and found it had vanished from her bedside table. Miki’s girl and my ex were similar in appearance: cute, short blondes with straight, shoulder-length hair.

Miki was a master forger. He had a perfect setup for working on documents in his apartment in Brentwood—a draftsman’s board with powerful lights. This was before credit cards and computers took over the world. He could make perfect airline tickets back when they were still written by hand. He had a girlfriend who worked for Pan Am, and she procured the blank stock. I flew to Paris on one of Miki’s tickets.

I never met Miki’s stepfather, Gard Chapin, or any of his other surfing forefathers, such as Bob Simmons or the great George Freeth. I was too young to hang out with any of the old guard of surfing, aside from Tom Blake. The relatively younger crew of Californians from the 1960s—Wally Froiseth, Jack O’Neill, John Severson, John Kelly, and Dale Velzy—were not what I would call close friends. I only had limited contact with these legends.

From what Miki told me, all of these surfers first and foremost stuck to their core values, even though some of them, like O’Neill and Severson, were involved in the commercial end of surfing. Miki told me stories about growing up with Gard, and watching Tom Blake live  on the beach at San Onofre. Accord-ing to him, they were all cut from the same cloth: selfish, feisty individuals. They were outcasts of society—rebellious, bohemian, independent, never with the same woman for any length of time. The common thread was that they were all totally addicted to riding waves. Miki was not suggesting that every old surfer he knew was like this, just that the key players seemed to have a shared sentiment to their lives. 

This is the real background of surfing’s forefathers. They were not lily-white yes-men. For the most part, they lived in their cars at the beach, catching food in the ocean, experimenting with the design of the boards they made, exploring new breaks, and having fun riding the waves they found. Around every point there was another discovery. This same scenario played out all over the world, in every country where surfing took root. There are still some old surfers who are totally committed to the surfing lifestyle and are living the dream on remote outposts.

Miki was, above all, a product of his environment. It’s just that his environment was the 1950s. When America discovered surfing for the second time in the early 60s, everything changed. He played along with the charade, of course. Just like Tom Blake, he did stunt work for the movies. Miki’s dark good looks meant he was paid pretty well for doubling as Frankie Avalon in Beach Blanket Bingo and other films. He hated the bullshit, but loved grousing about it and exploiting it at the same time. 

Unfortunately, the explosion of surf music and movies, and attention from the mainstream, ultimately turned his world upside down. He was forced to witness his beloved Malibu transform right in front of him. He could no longer live in his car at the beach all summer. “I feel hordes of kooks creeping up on me,” he once told me. He resisted with all the stealth and cunning he could muster, but told me that surfing contests were the nail in the coffin. Once, during a contest at Malibu in the 60s, he took off on a wave from the point and pulled down his trunks, then surfed right past the judges, bent over and giving everyone on the beach the moon. Miki believed that “the essence of surfing had been turned over to a sea of imbeciles.” 

Some people have surmised that Miki must have smuggled drugs to support his lifestyle. He told me he would never be so crude: dope was big and bulky and not worth the effort compared with gemstones.

As an example of his mindset, here is a quote from his treatise, “The Aquatic Ape.” “Fabricated surfing,” he contended, “has degenerated into such a mockery of hypocrisy that it is almost impossible to recognize anything of merit. Now only the misled and misinformed determine social ostentation. The meridian that makes surfing stand alone from anything else on earth must be preserved, no matter how minute.” 

It took him years to write the piece, and he worked with the aid of a thesaurus just to keep everyone guessing about the meaning of some words. I agreed with him that the rise of professional surfing would change everything. It would never be the rebellious activity that had once captured the hearts and souls of a few thousand bohemians in small pockets across the world.

During his extensive travels, Miki came to love Jeffreys Bay in South Africa more than anywhere else. Before his cancer had a debilitating effect on his physicality, he spent much of his time riding the waves there and living on the point. When his King Charles Spaniel died in a house fire at Jeffreys, Miki was devastated. He used to refer to the dog, Scooter Boy, as his illegitimate son. Scooter was quite possibly the most well-traveled dog in the world. Before the indignities of modern airport security, Miki used to smuggle that dog on and off planes in a big black trench coat. Scooter Boy had been trained in Europe, where it is still commonplace for people to fly with their dogs. Not many animals understood how to use airline toilets.

With all his international travel, Miki developed an eye for diamonds. He knew where he could buy stones cheaply in Africa and then sell them for a handsome profit in Europe or the States. Some people have surmised that Miki must have smuggled drugs to support his lifestyle. He told me he would never be so crude: dope was big and bulky and not worth the effort compared to gemstones.

—Excerpted from the memoir Church of the Open Sky by Nat Young. Available from Penguin Random House.

[Feature image: Easy riders (from left to right): Miki Dora, Nat Young, and Malibu chronicler/Big Wednesday co-writer, Denny Aaberg, on the spoor in California, mid 1970s. Photo by Jean Aaberg.]