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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