When I was around 40, I was working in a corporate job, and I remember thinking, “I am better than this, but damn, I can't see a way out of it.”  My confidence was shot. I was just not having fun in life.

And I had this quitting fantasy: I was going to paddleboard across the Bay from Oakland to Mountain View on my final day. That didn’t end up happening, but the message was clear: “Get on the water! You love being on the water.” 

I grew up on the North Fork of Long Island, and in fifth or sixth grade I heard about windsurfing and I thought, That sounds amazing! And so I mowed lawns and I saved up money to buy this giant boat of a windsurfer, made by Bic, the pen company, and I taught myself how to wind surf. I weighed like 100 pounds — but I was a kid that could power myself with wind! I think there was something about that sense of freedom. 

So when I was stuck in this job, and things were just shitty, I was like, “Oh, I could get back in the water.”  And so I took a lesson to learn how to kitesurf, and so that got me kind of back on the water and reconnected to it. So I did that for a number of years, and then three or four years ago, I started wing foiling and surfing during the winter.

I feel graceful when I'm on the water. You know what I mean? That’s much more with wing foiling than with surfing, but it’s like, my body just knows how to do this. I've been doing this long enough in my life that I’m doing all of these unconscious physical maneuvers that help me do this incredibly improbable thing.

I went out under the Golden Gate Bridge recently. There were unbroken waves that were over my head. We were going up and then foiling down these unbroken faces in a way that was so fun and also terrifying. 

Windsurfing and kitesurfing and foiling have also given me a little community in a way that’s really wonderful. I don’t have a ton of older role models, but I have these summer friends at Point Isabel. There’s a kind of camaraderie amongst this interesting group of guys. One guy's a pilot, one guy's a firefighter, one guy is a retired contractor. It feels like a little community in a way that is just really wonderful to me, you know, like having this connection and appreciation, and people excited for one another. It’s a type of care that I think is just harder to have in masculine spaces. And I think that's really cool to see that. 

One time I was at Marina Bay, out in Richmond, and I came in from wing foiling and somebody’s kitesurfing kite had gotten stuck in the tree. There were about six people around this tree, and some of them were in the water. Everyone's trying to figure out how to get the kite out. Somebody had a pair of clippers, and as the “young guy” in the group, I climbed up the tree and managed to clip off the branch. And everyone was cheering and high fiving. And one of them was 81 and the others were easily in their 60s or 70s. And it was just like, This is awesome. It was like we were six years old again.