Builders of the North

“Are you going back up north?”

“Well, I hear there’s waves up there no man’s ever seen.”

—Matt and Leroy

Big Wednesday (1978)

As a kid, I wanted to be Leroy, headed north. I was 12 years old when my parents put me on a plane to visit my sister, Heather, in Northern California. She was a junior at U.C. Berkeley and living in a co-op in the hills. She picked me up and we took the BART back to her place. Her roommates were full on Bohemians and their home was a large wooden house on a shady hillside. Inside, the rooms were damp and smelled like a health-food store.

The night I arrived, the Grateful Dead played a show (this was just before Jerry died). A guy who looked like Abbie Hoffman picked us up and drove us in his white Cadillac down the peninsula to Shoreline Amphitheater. My parents had taken my sisters and I to a Dead concert when we were kids, but this time I was old enough to take it all in: the customized vehicles, the free-spirited babes, the music.

The next day we drove out through old growth redwoods to the Marin coastline to surf. The beach was vast and cold and empty. We had a fire, rode some waves. Heather was my idol growing up—her high-school boyfriend gave me my first skateboard. She was always making me mix tapes. Early on it was The Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel. Later Gregory Isaacs and Alpha Blondie. When I got my first wetsuit, she told me to get an all black one. She was a big part of making me who I am now.

As a 12-year-old from Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area became a romanticized frontier. I went home deeply under its spell. Some day, I knew I would live there. In the meantime, my friends and I searched out every small corner of nature in our suburban neighborhood. We built tree houses and forts in the alleys behind our houses. We camped in hidden spots tucked into the coastline and listened to the tapes my sister made me.

My fascination with Canada began one night while I was having dinner with Danny Hess and Erin Kunkel at their house in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco. Danny had just returned from north of the border. Like a good boy, he was cagey about where exactly he’d been. Still, he planted the seed of a Canadian dreamland—pointbreaks, wolves, bears, cedar trees, rain, friendly people. Shortly afterward, my friend Lloyd Kahn was visiting and told me about a group of builders and artists living in British Columbia. They were all featured in his new book, Builders of the Pacific Coast. At that point I was sold. I called Danny.

“We’ve got to get back up there,” I said.

Last fall I customized a van for Dream Steeple, a film project I was involved with. Derrick Disney, Kenny Hurtado, and Corban Campbell came up to Ocean Beach to surf and help with the build-out. When I modify vehicles, I need a trip planned to gather inspiration. I need to imagine living in the rig, and having a mission in mind helps shape the project. We decided that we would take the van to Canada, and that Derrick and Danny would build boards for the trip. These are some of the photographs that Kenny made along the way.

—Jay Nelson