John Peck Squared
Posted on January 17, 2007 @ 11:43 AM
FORCES OF FATE AND COINCIDENCE AND BIG WHEELS TURNING IN THE BAJA DESERT
By Josh Kimball
To put it mildly, John Peck’s existence has been filled
with many … how shall I say? … rather extraordinary
experiences. He’s sprinted away on a silver thread
of light through the cosmos, each stride becoming
exponentially larger on his way to the infinite reaches of
space; he’s escaped through the steel bars in a jail cell via
cultivated yogic power; he’s watched an approaching FBI agent
mysteriously drop dead milliseconds before his armed attempt
on Peck’s life; he’s surfed macking Sunset Beach on a leash-less
longboard . . . while soaring on LSD. Yet, mysteriously enough,
once the following tale is added to his canon of oddity, the incidents just mentioned (and perhaps all those in Peck’s life)
will come across as not too bizarre after all.
So for good measure, here’s another: Around the time
these incredible events were transpiring, while he was in the
prime of his life as a grown man and surfing superstar, he was
also a small child growing up somewhere in San Diego. That’s
right. At the selfsame moment Peck was a psychedelic ranger,
he was simultaneously a toddler probing the boundaries of his
sponge-brained, empty-slated infancy.
Flash forward some 25 years, and the John Peck experience
has arrived fully formed in the year 2006. John regularly loses
himself and his 62-year-old persona, leather-skinned and longbearded,
deep in the Baja peninsula … or off to Europe to act
as a spiritual guide for a certain seeker … or wherever he wants
and wishes and feels appropriate. Yet it’s important to recognize
that he’s also a 25-year-old surf-stoked resident of Encinitas,
California, regularly surfing Swamis and Cardiff Reef just as he
did some 30 years in the past.
John Peck emerged into the earthly realm somewhere in
Southern California on July 19, 1944, a day on which the world
accepted a rather different sort of soul, a being truly unique in
its perspective. Yet many of the more incredible experiences,
the stuff from which legend has been derived, wouldn’t begin
to emerge for some two decades.
Born the son of a Navy serviceman, Peck bounced around
to various locales due to his father’s occupational requirements.
While lacking spatial stability, the youngster caught the
surf bug early, and the infection relentlessly followed him
throughout his family’s transient state. By the time he was
a senior in high school, Peck had already become a surfing
legend, as his skills at Hawaii’s infamous Pipeline rapidly
garnered international fame and praise.
On November 26, 1980, another John Peck emerged into
the earthly realm in Connecticut, some 3,000 miles from
the corporeal beginnings of his future counterpart. As with
the elder Peck, the family uprooted while John was a mere
five years old. Oddly enough, they would soon be residents
of Carmel Valley, California, not far from where Peck Senior
began his quest.
Some years would pass before an initial meeting of the
two. During this time, the elder Peck’s existence ran the
gamut from tranquility to madness, from sobriety to excess.
Always on the search for meaning in a mysterious universe,
Peck’s years were filled to the brim with techniques for
realizing spiritual maturation, some tried and true, others
more unconventional. And Peck Junior simply dealt with the
questions plaguing a fresh spirit, mainly those of the ‘what’s
this whole show about?’ variety. Like Peck Senior in his youth,
Peck Junior possessed an insatiable desire for the higher
ground, for knowledge of those things spiritual and, perhaps
most importantly, for the ocean and its keyhole into the surfing
experience. It would be this latter piece of the puzzle that
would lead to a most bizarre encounter in San Diego, where
two unrelated men with the same name, who acted, spoke,
thought, surfed, and (hair-styles notwithstanding) even looked
alike, were about to intersect on a random cosmic plane.
“It was at Cardiff Reef,” says the elder Peck (who will
be referred to from here simply as Senior). “I had seen him a
couple of times at Cardiff Reef. Joel Tudor introduced us one
day. We ended up out in the water together, and everybody
commented on how much his style was like my style, only he
was a little bit smoother maybe,” Senior laughs.
“I remember something about seeing him, and knowing
he had the same name. It was just very strange,” recalls the
younger Peck (who we’ll call Junior). “Then I saw him surfing
… and it was sort of surreal. I had seen video of myself, but
to see the similarities, and the way we both go about it … just
being true to that natural line of energy, and flying through the
wave. So when people started to figure out that I had the same
name, they started to wonder if I was his son. I was getting all
these crazy questions, you know? People would tell me I surfed like him. But it was never a conscious thing.
I can honestly tell you I watched maybe
three minutes of (Senior) surfing on tape
before all this.”
“Then I saw him surfing … and it was sort of surreal. I had seen
video of myself, but to see the similarities, and the way we both go
about it … just being true to that natural line of energy, and flying
through the wave.”
After the two logged a fair amount
of water time together, their friendship
naturally progressed, eventually uncovering
similarities of a more metaphysical variety. “We found … lucid
awareness of what was going on with each other,” says Senior.
“Some telepathy. Interesting things. We just ended up having a
lot of fun together. He’s kind of like a spiritual son.
“John and I just know that we have a deep, intuitive,
natural connection,” continues Senior. “We can understand what
we’re thinking and feeling, even from a distance. When I was
coming into town, he could feel me coming into town, and I’m
the same. If something’s going on with him I get a feeling about
it, like I know what’s going on. So it’s really very interesting.”
“There is a certain amount of telepathy between us,”
concurs Junior. “Something. A weird connection … ” He
speaks with a similar style of speech, tone, and the excited,
eager long-windedness of his elder namesake. “John spends a
lot of time in Baja. I won’t talk to him for a month or so while he’s down there, but the second he crosses the border I get an
urge to call him. Or say there’s a troubling situation in either of
our lives, something triggers in our heads to call one another,
automatically. And other stuff. We’ll be sitting there talking, and
he’ll just finish my sentences, or I’ll finish his. We’re just really
in tune with one another is the best way to say it.”
Over the years, Senior has developed a reputation (among
others in his fascinating existence) as something of a Baja surf
guru. Dozens of trips there throughout the years have allowed
Senior to develop a keen sense of where to be, when to be there,
and what equipment to take along the way. Many a swell has
shared its combing peelers with the man.
Inevitably, some time after the two Pecks met, the topic of
a joint Baja trip surfaced. An opportunity to embark presented
itself shortly thereafter, as the tropical waters off mainland
Mexico began brewing something fierce, threatening to
bombard the arid desert peninsula.
“There was a big hurricane down there, and he really
wanted to go surf Scorpion Bay,” recalls Senior. “The hurricane
met us right at the turn off to the north road.”
“We knew a hurricane was coming,” Junior says, “but
we thought it was just going to go out and head west, towards Hawaii. It didn’t. It cut right up the
center of Baja. It had kind of been
raining on and off all day as we had
been driving through all the arms of
the hurricane. All of a sudden it
just started going crazy. It was a full-on
hurricane.”
The pair made it to the town
of San Ignacio, a sort of desert oasis
in the middle of the normally arid
peninsula. Thoughts of carrying on
were soon thwarted by the tempest
raging outside. With options
dwindling, torrential rains pouring
down, and camping totally out of
the question, the duo had no choice
but to seek shelter, and quick.
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