Gone surfInG WITH… the Channel islands restoration crew from right: Field Manager, Daniel hart; head ecologist, elihu gevirtz; and Project Manager, Kevin thompson. P ho t o: SubM i t t e D
Go ne sur fIn G WITH D anIel H a r T
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by Ch ri S t i a n be a M i S h
t might sound kind of cheesy,” daniel hart told me the other night over a couple of beers at Island Brewing Company in Carpinteria, “but when I saw Laird hamilton get spit out of that barrel at teahupo’o in Step Into Liquid, I knew what that felt like and I wanted to surf.” this was many years ago in Cleveland, tenn., where hart had spent most of his life (his family with deep roots in Appalachia, going back many generations). now 38-years-old, hart and his wife Amanda (also from Cleveland, also with family roots deep in that soil) have been living and raising their children in Carpinteria for ten years—moving out west primarily for the waves. A friend of theirs lives in south Pasadena and even if not a surf town, the harts were visiting on every holiday, daniel trekking out to surf the LA beaches. Also, back home in tennessee, they would make the ten-hour drive to the outer Banks once surfing became part of daniel’s program. But as any surfer knows, you can’t just surf “sometimes.” It’s a pursuit that takes day-in, dayout dedication for mere proficiency. Bad traffic one day had daniel pull off the road in Carpinteria, and one look at the town—Linden Avenue, the shops, the mountains just back from the coast, the beaches and proximity to Rincon, the schools–made him think “this was the place for us.” he said it reminded him of their hometown. so they made the leap, Amanda staying behind with their four kids (at that time) until daniel could establish a home base. With a degree in Landscape design and a minor in horticulture from the university of tennessee, he’d long been managing projects and over the past number of years he has been doing restoration work as an operations Manager.
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More on that in moment, but for now, consider the pull of surfing that would have a man move his wife and four children to the opposite side of the country, away from the networks of friends and family. And it’s not that Cleveland, tenn. is a terrible place, either. the town might not have a world-class point break five-minutes away, but those Blue Ridge Mountains hold magic of their own in the ancient forests and creeks, hidden hollows, and the turning of the seasons. still, you need an ocean if it’s surfing you’re after. the harts don’t complain, that’s not their style, but we talked about how surfing gets—the entitlement some of us “native” Californians feel, the aggressive vibe in the water sometimes. they don’t want to come off as being critical, but it’s been hard for them to understand the guarded feelings they encounter occasionally when people make a point of stating the number of generations their families have been in California—the subtext being ownership, possession. My words here, not the harts’: But California and the infrastructure that makes living and working here possible has been subsidized by warfare, indigenous subjugation, and the Federal Government since statehood, so “claiming” the region—either outright or by implication—entails a thick gloss over an unsavory history. “the way I see it,” daniel told me as Amanda brought us another round, “there are givers, takers, and keepers: ‘Keepers’ keep to themselves, ‘takers’ just take, and ‘givers’ give.” Consistently working in recent years with the Carp skate Foundation, a nonprofit group of mostly born-and-raised Carp skater/surfers, the harts are committed to seeing a public skate park built in the city. the city council is on board, and the project is in the planning phases