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'Surfwise'

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Dr. Dorian Paskowitz shunned society and took his family for a life on the road, looking for surf.

A man who is both a free spirit and a rigid ideologue is a curious mix, to say the least. And the more you know about Dorian Paskowitz, patriarch of a family of surfing gypsies, the more complex and confounding he becomes.

Visionary or cultist? Adventurer or extremist? Disciplinarian or bohemian?

Ask anyone who has known the native Texan over the course of his 84 years, most of them spent as a militant nonconformist, and you hear that he is many or all of these things. Documentary filmmaker Doug Pray interviewed the man himself, together with family, friends, colleagues, disciples and his mostly estranged grown children for the making of "Surfwise," a fascinating case study in how parents can both liberate their children from the stifling powers of convention yet leave them not wholly prepared for adulthood.

Having the courage of one's convictions is admirable. But when you are just as resolute and inflexible in your way as society is in its attempts to homogenize people into definable little boxes, you risk becoming what it is you seek to avoid.

Like many an outsider, Paskowitz began as a conventional sort of fellow with conventional aspirations. Steeped in the Jewish tradition of education and service, he was a magna cum laude graduate of Stanford University Medical School, yet before long chafed at the role he was expected to play, both in medical practice and in life.

"I refused to enrich myself on the lives of sick people," he recalls thinking, just before rejecting all the trappings of status and wealth-building in 1956 to live the life of a romantic, joining the nomadic community of surfers and raising a family of rebel enthusiasts. Raising them, that is, with his very simpatico third wife, Juliette. Together, they took their nine children along for the ride — all 11 of them cohabiting in a 24-foot camper.

Paskowitz had felt himself a fraud, that his years as a professional were "the lowest of my life." Now he was infused with a zealot's determination to carve a new, pure existence, free of society's contaminants. "Surfing re-creates you," he believed, and was living proof in his mission to recapture the "grace of the wild" — something holy in nature — that humans had lost.

Frequently the family was down to their last dime, which Paskowitz considered a signpost of achievement. Paskowitz also rejected the conventional wisdom on health, viewing it as much more than the absence of disease.

But while he took a measure of pride in his Stanford degree, his attitude toward schools of any kind for his kids was intractable: "Education be damned," he said years later. "Education means wisdom, not knowledge, and you get wisdom from living. I just wanted my children around me, surfing." To him, public school was far more perilous than surfing with sharks.

Today, he realizes he did not give them all the tools they needed.

Pray, best known for the documentaries "Big Rig," "Scratch" and "Hype!", clearly is intrigued by the question, What is the genuine American dream? In the process of plumbing that notion, he recounts the Paskowitz clan's journey, revealing that under the surface of seeming permissiveness was an adamant, tight-fisted control.

Paskowitz, whose disavowal of '50s conformity met its perfect partner in the '60s counterculture, raised his eight fiercely competitive sons and one daughter to be self-sufficient. But though they became legend in the highest reaches of the surfing world, the kids felt hollowed when the time came to leave the nest.

Paskowitz's philosophy is either an immense success or an abject failure. "Surfwise" does not judge. What it does do is run the curls of wave after wave of stories — some bordering on soap opera — to fashion a frank, unsparing and memorable film, one benefitting hugely from a cache of Super 8mm and video footage supplied by his subjects.

Reach Bill Thompson at bthompson@postandcourier.com or 937-5707.

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