The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
True To His Ethic
Mankind, being what and how it is, has evolved into a broad variety, differing in look and outlook, encompassing the myriads of human nature. We exist at the mercy of our own behaviors—naively putting ourselves at risk of succumbing to nature’s balancing mandates. Thus far, we’ve been swept along—self-important, procrastinating, argumentative, in denial and disagreement—while our effluence overwhelms the Earth that spawned us. Some are now awakening to it all, alarmed and struggling to reverse the damage. Amongst them, Lloyd Kahn is one of the more unique.
Born in the Bay Area in 1935, he was drawn to riding waves in the early 1950s, during California’s balsa phase. The then-sparse surfing population all knew each other. Jack O’Neill, Rod Lundquist, Jim Fisher, and the Van Dyke brothers and sister were among his peers. Bright, fit, energetic, and athletic—though admittedly less skilled as a surfer—Kahn’s stoke was enough that at Stanford he selected a major that allowed for Fridays off to be spent at Steamer Lane. After graduation he became an insurance agent, a fitting employment for a Stanford man, serving as Jack O’Neill’s broker during his earliest moments in the wetsuit trade. Kahn, realizing that selling financial safeguards was not his calling, subsequently quit and began working with his hands, building houses. He was attracted to structural framing—relating to the solid, grounded feeling of freshly installed planked floors nailed to cross timber on concrete foundations. Once completed, he liked the feeling of standing on them.
Kahn made a business of his beliefs. His longtime and current publishing company, Shelter Publications, was born in the roots of the Whole Earth Catalog, the late 60s printed manual that gave its readers a deep resource for learning about how to directly obtain life’s needs independently. At Whole Earth, he worked under publisher Stewart Brand and served as the homes department editor, dedicating ten years to articulating the Bucky Fuller dome concept before concluding that their myriad facet joints were prone to leakage and the curves wasted space and didn’t accommodate use. The Whole Earth was itself a hand-made publication that defined the newborn aesthetic of its generation.
When Brand arbitrarily decided his mission was accomplished and ceased publication, Lloyd continued under Shelter Publications. Logic-based structures and the poetry of nature became his mantra. There immersed, he absorbed nature as might an art aficionado standing transfixed in a gallery. In an expressionist surge, he sought to live by that passion, absorbing artistically complex yet simple facets of the world he was attracted to. Then he began sharing them on printed pages, creating hand-composed books and illustrating nature-inspired forms that facilitated an earth-kind, positive life. Nearly a half century later, he’s produced numerous building publications, selling hundreds of thousands of copies that have provided he and his wife of 40 years, Lesley, their livelihood.
On their Bolinas half-acre, purchased ages ago for $6,000, raw margins define the specific details. Smallish structures made of recycled wood stand tucked here and there, with exterior shelves adorned with decades of collected shards, bone, teeth, vertebrae, shells, fossils, rocks, crystals, and gnarled driftwood. In one corner, Lesley weaves scarves and shawls of lamb wool, some imported from Asia and hued with organic dyes made with dried insects. In another, she crafts fine earrings, necklaces, pins, and baubles. In yet another, she hand sews quilts. All contribute to their living via shops and galleries in nearby Mill Valley. Through an open doorway is Lloyd’s dusty gym with handled “paddling” pulleys, workout machines, and weights.
Across the yard sits the office where he and his son Evan conduct long hours detailing conceptually involved, hand-wrought, computer-refined works for Shelter Publications. Each work area is cluttered with gear, projects, computers, files, and stacks of published texts—past, present, and future. Non-work spaces are strewn with publications that have attracted his interest, constituting a slew of quite varied subjects, some attached by the thinnest of threads, yet all with a connective aesthetic. Lloyd attacks book publishing with an intense, painstaking energy. He conceives, curates, photographs, narrates, and scribes lines to connect images to corresponding text blocks. He is consumed by process, and justifiably enamored with results. He can only hope others are too.
“I really like the smell of wood. I’ve always been interested in working with people who did stuff with their hands. It occurs to me that I’ve never had a mortgage and never paid any rent, which has allowed me time to fool around.”
In the past, he has achieved high-volume best sellers. Recently, digital technology allows him to actualize ideas in small-run releases. He crafts each book, throws it into the air to his chain of devotees, and hopes each toss attracts enough support to pay the bills and fund his next effort. This has been his life: a flow of outputs, some big, others small and choice—all reflective of his mode. He’s made it work and he isn’t quitting. He hopes for another decade before handing the controls to Evan.
Though his output and outlook might appear elementary, to him it’s purely about logic and satisfaction. For instance, his eating habits involve procurements that, while providing he and Lesley with tasty nourishment, might cross your eyes. He does shop, but he also hunts, fishes, and puts to use what he gathers and salvages.
“I’ll eat a perfectly good roadkill whose undamaged parts offer plenty of meat,” he says. “It’s delicious.” That goes for squirrel, rabbits, and salvaged deer. “There’s nothing as good as sautéed roadkill deer liver with a glass of red wine,” he says, speaking with neither pretense nor prejudice. For Kahn, the practicality and honesty of it being eaten verses going to waste handily obliterates the squeamish perspective.
At 83, he still craves pure sensation. A member of an up and downhill bicycle cadre of well-aged fellows, he also runs cross country, ocean swims, distance paddles, avidly skateboards—a nonstop, manic doer. “I’m a carver,” he says. His focus on fitness, a nature-inspired lifestyle, and organic structures and their uses for human purposes all interlace to become Lloyd Kahn: surfer, waterman, builder, hunter and gatherer, naturalist, publisher. Kahn is dedicated to live by his two hands—true to his ethic—while performing service to the world he occupies.
—S.P.
My Surfing Friends
“Bad road, good people. Good road, all kinds of people!”
—Mama of Mama Espinoza’s Cafe, El Rosario, Baja Norte
When I was 4 years old, my dad took me up into the Sierras with his hunter/fishermen friends from back in the 20s. At that time, building a cabin or property out there created a lease with the government, like homesteading. We stayed in some cabins at this remote lake with a pier. I fell off the pier. I remember being under water, looking around, thinking it was pretty cool. My dad reached down, grabbed me, and pulled me back up. He asked me, “What were you thinking down there?” I said, “I was going to turn on my putt-putt and come up.” My first experience in the water was pleasant.
During college at Stanford, I went south to stay with my roommate Richard Zanuck, the son of movie producer Darryl Zanuck, in Santa Monica. I was dazzled by the film industry and the movie stars. We’d walk across vacant lots at Malibu Colony to surf its easy waves. Richard’s sister, Darrilyn, was married to Bobby Jacks, a handsome beach guy with a 10-foot redwood and balsa board. He told me to take it out. I hadn’t surfed before, but he insisted. “Just take it out,” he said. “If you get a wave, get up on your knees.” I did, and the first wave I ever paddled for I caught, got to my knees, then thought, I’m standing up! So I rode all the way into the beach and jumped off. Before I could do it again, my friend Buster grabbed the board, took it out, and broke it in half. After that, it took me a year before I got another ride.
By the time I was a sophomore, I was so stoked on surfing that I changed my major to economics, because it didn’t have Friday classes. I hung out in Santa Cruz during the years before wetsuits. There were maybe 20 of us in the wintertime. Jack O’Neill hadn’t shown up yet. We’d go out in the winter with no wetsuits on! I can’t believe we did that. I recall an early surf with Dave Devine, Gene Van Dyke, and George Kovalenko at Steamer Lane on a foggy morning with 8-foot waves. It was uncrowded then. Everything in 1950s Santa Cruz was. It was just the beach and town before the university came.
Out at the Lane, there was a cliff. You’d put your board down onto a ledge, climb down the rope, and then pass your board down to the sand. You came back up the same way. It was before they put all those steps in. Sometimes we’d jump off the cliff to stay dry. It was about six feet above the water, so we’d wait for a wave to wash up, then, holding the board sideways, jump when the water was highest as a wave washed in. You’d hit and scramble onto the board and stay pretty dry. Surfing in natural forces is the feeling that motivated us. I’ve got a great picture of Chubby Mitchell walking the nose at 300 pounds. There’s a message in that. He could sleep standing up. He did it at football practice.
I remember an experience at Rincon when Peter Van Dyke and myself were driving down to the UCLA vs. Stanford football game. As we drove by Rincon it was happening so we never made it to the game. The Van Dykes knew a family who lived right at Rincon, the Farmers. They invited us to stay for a spaghetti dinner. That family later got really pissed off at surfers for stealing firewood. It all went downhill from there.
An early surf trip happened in Canada with Bruno Atkey, one of the builders in the book Builders of the Pacific Coast. We went by boat to a place 30-miles north of Tofino, a spot you can’t get to by land. I caught an 8-foot wave there.
A fellow is currently making a film about San Francisco surfing that includes Rod Lundquist. Rod was a goofyfoot and very powerful. He was a swimmer like Jim Fisher. There were three or four surfers then in San Francisco and all of them ended up in Santa Cruz. Rod would take off in impossible situations. He was also a Shakespearean scholar. When we were 18, he was playing Beethoven symphonies and quoting Nietzsche, Spinoza, Hume, and other philosophers. It was interesting for a surfer to be into something other than “groovy” stuff. I learned a lot from him. We used to talk out there when the sun was setting, feeling this incredible thing happening. I remember a night when the water turned purple and pink—it was a meeting of minds. We’d have philosophical discussions when we were 18 years old. I mean, Rod was listening to Bach and Mozart and Shubert and he was a fuckin’ surfer. Lundquist had some kind of an estate he rented for $10 a month up on Plateau Avenue, with a century plant in front that bloomed every few decades. Rod used to wear this silk smoking jacket and had big Hi-Fi speakers in the house, so we would hang there.
After that, he became a hang glider. He crashed and died. A lot of my surfing friends are gone, more than college or high school ones. I don’t know why. The Van Dykes were an incredible family: four beautiful kids. All except Gene are gone. Maybe we just live fully in a short period of time, like the poet Rimbaud or Otis Redding.
Jim Fisher is still alive and well down in Venice Beach. I think he hooked up with some moneyed woman who passed away. Fisher refused any kind of work. He, Buzzy Trent, and Fred Van Dyke, just before Jose Angel got there, rode Makaha really big and became well known. I remember there was this restaurant in Hawaii where if you could eat a giant steak dinner and all the trimmings in an hour it was free! Not just a steak, a 78-ounce roast! Pat Curren did it in 20 minutes! His motto was, “Great eaters never chew.” He’d spend the first few minutes cutting everything up into tiny pieces, then he’d pick the plate up and slide it all down his throat.
When Curren came to Santa Cruz, he joined up with one of the early surfers, Ted Pearson. Pat had married by then. When one of Ted’s girls, Charlene, asked him what it was like, he replied, “When you’re single, you have to bring home the bacon. When you’re married, you got to bring home more bacon.” I’ve got a picture of a bunch of us standing out front of the mailbox at Lundquist’s, on which is scrawled in dripping paint, “Lundquist-Curren.”
If I could have one more ride, it would be at Steamer Lane, for sentimental reasons. I always thought of the Lane as an all-time big-wave spot until I paddled out at Sunset Beach. I was reminded of that again at Salsa Brava in Costa Rica, where Gene and Betty Van Dyke’s son, Kurt, has a hotel. I paddled out there one time and actually got an 8-footer. It was so fun, so fast, but I stayed in it too long and wiped out. I was swimming back out with my leash on when the next wave broke and just about tore my foot off. That’s when I realized I was out beyond the limits of my ability.
Timber and Paper
“I’ve published things that sold well so I could publish things that didn’t.”
—Lloyd Kahn
when i was 12, my dad built a concrete-block, slab-floor house in the Sacramento Valley. I shoveled sand and cement into the concrete mixer for him. He turned it into a rice farm and duck hunting camp where I’d work on weekends. After three or four months, when we’d gotten the carport up and framed, the carpenters gave me a hammer, nails, and nail apron. I went up there, got on my knees, and started nailing the sheathing down. I really liked the smell of wood.
At 18, I got a carpenter job with a shipwright on the San Francisco docks. The ships came in, loaded cargo, and we’d frame it in so it couldn’t shift in heavy seas. When I got out of the Air Force, my first wife and I had a little land in Mill Valley. I started building during the day and working as an insurance broker at home every night. Then, in about 1964, I started smoking pot and listening to the Beatles. I hitchhiked across the country, came back, and quit the insurance business.
In 1965, I started as a foreman carpenter in Big Sur, working on a heavy-timber house built out of used bridge timbers on a 400-acre ranch. We moved out there and lived in a chicken coop until I built my own house. I always liked used materials. I met two brothers from Mill Valley, and one of them turned me on to organic gardening and to considering everything you do from the perspective of whether it damages the planet or not.
In the mid 1960s, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll had started, along with Rodale’s Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. Communication with dolphins, Organic Gardening and Farming magazine, building your own house, growing your own food, astrology, astronomy, Buddhism, Hinduism—all of these things were being discovered by the Baby Boomers. I went to Stanford, but I didn’t learn anything about Asian culture. I started doing Zen meditation in San Francisco early in the morning, even as an insurance broker.
When I moved to Big Sur and began building domes, I’d get letters from all over the country asking for dome measurements. I realized I was writing the same response over and over again. So I asked myself, “Why don’t I mimeograph something?” While I was at it, I threw in organic gardening, owner-built housing, and the usefulness of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalog or The Edmund Scientific Catalog. It was a particularly apt time for all that, because you could get by on so very little money.
Then, I met Stewart Brand and his wife, Lois, in Menlo Park. I noticed all these books about things I was interested in. I said, “This guy’s ahead of me. I’m going to join forces with him.” When Stewart published the first Whole Earth Catalog, I became the “Shelter” and “Land Use” editor. I learned how to make books, then went to work at a hippy high school for two years, building 17 geodesic domes while trying out different materials.
I was teaching at Pacific High School in the Santa Cruz Mountains when they decided that bussing kids up from Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Redwood City was costing too much money. So they turned it into a boarding school. My partner, James Baldwin, and I had planned to build an 80-foot dome in Golden Gate Park for the Wild West Festival. I had a model of the dome in my van when I ran across the kids and their high school director in Big Sur for a graduation ceremony. They’d all taken acid and gone to the beach. They saw the dome and, as it turned out, the kids ended up building their own domes to live in at the high school. That’s a whole story in itself.
Domes were the iconic image of 1960s buildings. In 1970, I produced Domebook One. We printed 5,000 copies and they sold out immediately. In 1971, we produced Domebook Two. By then, the Whole Earth Catalog was so popular it had moved distribution to Random House in New York. Later, it was taken over by Bookpeople in Berkely, who used hippy distributors. But Random House was the best publishing company by far in those days. Its first print run was 50,000 copies out of San Francisco. We shipped them off to Random House with no review copies, no publicity, no marketing—nothing—and they sold like crazy. We’d printed 160,000 copies by the time I figured out domes didn’t work.
After two years building domes from all different kinds of materials, like foam, aluminum, plywood, nitrogen-inflated vinyl, triangular pillows, I was having second thoughts about dome building. I took some mescaline, walked up a canyon, and had a really nice day watching water skeeters. Coming back down, I rounded a corner, saw a grassy glade and thought, What if there was a dome in that glade there, and it was falling apart? And it was made out of plastic and aluminum, and it was my fault because I’d published the information on how to build them?
I called my agent and told him to take Domebook Two out of print. It was a good book, just on the wrong subject. He said, “Are you crazy?” I said, “No, I don’t want any more domes on my karma.” So I quit Domebook Two and I started thinking about all the fans out there, and if two people read every copy sold, it would be over 300,000 people.
I gave up on domes, but they got me into the publishing business. I needed to show people other ways to build. So I took two cameras, a Nikon and Nikkormat, one of which shot color slides, the other Tri-X, and started traveling through the U.S., Canada, and Europe, studying the origins of building. Coming back, I took a two-week trip with a photographer friend of mine, Jack Fulton, in my little BMW out to the southwest, shot pictures, then came back and created and published Shelter in my dome. That got me into books on building.
I’ve always been interested in working with people who did stuff with their hands. It occurs to me that I’ve never had a mortgage and never paid any rent, which allowed me time to fool around and figure out what I wanted to do. If I’d built the right house in the first place, it would have saved me five wasted years building domes.
I built a house in Mill Valley and sold it, and went to Big Sur and built a house and got paid $11,000 for it. Then, I bounced around until I got here, built this house, and finally got the homestead working. I’ve done all these books showing other builders things they can create. Now I’m doing a book on this place.
There’s a lot of stuff I’ve learned just from out in our garden and the buildings here that I can communicate to people. Does it make any sense to build a house these days? It’s hardly possible in the Bay Area with building codes and everything. When I bought this land in 1971, the building permit was $200, the water meter was $250, and I built it with used lumber. The building permits are $50,000 now, the septic conditions are absurd, and they probably wouldn’t allow used lumber even though it’s better quality wood. But I think that if you go to small towns, it’s still possible to do this sort of thing.
In my last book, Tiny Homes, I said that in the 1960s we wanted ten acres in the country to build a log cabin. Nowadays, I would look for a rundown house to fix up. Find one where the foundation is okay and you’re not starting from scratch. I had an architect friend who’d drawn plans, and we started to build the foundation. “What do we do, Bob?” I asked. He picked up a shovel and said, “This,” and started digging.
To see more of Lloyd Kahn’s building and architectural publications, head to shelterpub.com.
[Feature image: Kahn’s hands tell all at his Bolinas, California, abode.]
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