Sharla Dawn Gorder

It’s hard to believe it was more than 20 years ago, December 23, 1994…

It was a Friday I think. And cold. They all had on hooded wetsuits, at least the guys in the water. The photographers in the helicopter, and others in the boats and on the cliffs were bundled up too. Everyone was waiting.

Pillar Point is a treacherous looking jut of land. Even on this relatively clear morning, the place was scary. Could have been the terrible juxtaposition of boys tethered tenuously to surfboards—measly dots bobbing on a surging horizon—and the 40 foot swells that began their long-awaited siege on the craggy coastline. I wasn’t there. But it was all caught on film. He had called out the paparazzi. He always did.

The cameras were all trained on him when he died—well, moments before he died. We have no way of knowing how long he struggled beneath the wave. Once he was down, all cameras turned to Bradshaw, the next surfer in the line-up as he took off on his first monster wave of the day.

It was more than an hour later when Mark’s body was found, still attached by his ankle leash to a scrap of his surfboard. He had died as he knew he would—famous, surfing, and young.

Twenty years earlier, we were all Mark Foo’s paparazzi, crowding the halls of Gulf Breeze High School. He didn’t need to be surfing to have an entourage. He carried his own glaring lime-light everywhere he went. And I for one, loved the frenetic heat it cast. He was “a legend in his own mind” we’d joke. He later referred to himself in an interview as “surfing’s consummate living legend.” He had no self-esteem issues that kid. And I adored him.

And boy did he piss me off. He absolutely delighted in embarrassing me in front of my latest crush. “Kiss her, go ahead and kiss her!” he taunted on more than one occasion. He never cracked a book—I never even saw him with a book, and he aced every damn test. He had the handwriting of a dyslexic cave-man, and could eat an entire 9 x 13 slab of lasagna before I could hand him a plate. He loved to talk—about himself certainly, but also about God, and life, and my boy problems. He never stopped moving. Never. I cannot imagine that he ever slept.

The day he told me his news, I was furious. How dare he? He hadn’t even finished high school. He couldn’t move away before graduation. What did Hawaii have over us? Well, duh.

I knew he’d go. Of course I had dealt with many friends moving away over the years. Pensacola is a military town. People come and go. But Mark’s departure saddened me on a deep level.

I knew I’d never see him again. At least not on this earth.

My 15 year-old heart was still open enough then, open to truths I couldn’t possibly have understood. I just knew.

Twenty years before he died, I wrote to Mark, on April 12th, 1974, in this corny ABCB poetry quatrain:

I guess that people must seek their dreams
To find a sunnier day.
And in the end we’ll share that dream
When we enter those golden gates.
‘Cause as long as we serve and trust the Lord,
A life in heaven waits.
So seek your dreams here on Earth,
In preparation for that day…”

Mark has been quoted by the press as saying, “If you want the ultimate thrill, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” That’s gold, it is. Most of us aren’t chasing such titanic dreams, and one might say that anyone who does has a certain death wish. But Mark, to me, seemed to have a life wish. He knew he would die young. He talked about it often and without apology or fear. He was gonna live while he lived.

I couldn’t have known, as he was relentlessly tapping the back of my chair in Algebra class, that he’d go on to become among the most famous big wave riders in history. But I did know, somewhere in my young soul, that he would “enter those golden gates” long before I would.

After Mark moved away he sent me a postcard from Bali. That card stayed tacked to my wall throughout my adolescence, right under my surfing-Snoopy-Cowabunga poster. I visited Bali years later, on my honeymoon, and thought about Mark as I looked out over the beach at Sanur swarming with young surfers, to the vast, teal Indian Ocean beyond.

I have thought of Mark often over the years. And while his death still feels tragic to those of us who knew him, his life was so large for so small a space in time. And at the risk of being sappy, I can honestly say that I’d do well to learn to live while I live too, right here, right now in this small space that God has provided.