It doesn't take a very long sentence to completely alter one's life. Over the years, there have been half a dozen or so short sentences that completely changed my life. In 1933, at the bottom of the depression, I was the only kid in my fourth grade class who had a job. I was earning ten cents every Saturday for spending all day in the neighborhood grocery store. I swept the floor, carried fresh produce, stacked groceries and made myself indispensable to the owner because of what he said to me. "As long as you come to work on time and work hard, you can have a job here."

In October of that same year, when I turned nine, my grandmother said, "Warren, here are a pair of roller skates for your birthday." The next morning, I was out of bed by 4:30, trying to learn how to roller-skate. Those roller skates gave me my first experience with a commodity called freedom. That eleven-word sentence my grandmother spoke, and her gift, changed my life forever.

Since then, other short sentences, or questions, have also dramatically changed my life. At the age of thirteen, my woodshop teacher in the eighth grade said, "Warren, I have a set of plans for a surfboard that I cut out of Popular Mechanics. Would you like to try and build one?" The surfboard was five feet long and two feet wide, Box Square, hollowed, and leaked a lot. Whenever I could get anyone to haul it and me to the beach, I was finding more freedom.

That same year, 1937, when our Boy Scout troop came home from a long weekend trip to the snow in the local San Bernardino Mountains, I somehow crossed paths with someone who had a pair of skis for sale that were hanging in his garage in downtown Hollywood. The $2 I spent for the skis and poles turned out to be the most important $2 I ever spent in my life. They were made out of pine, had no edges, and had leather toe straps for bindings. Just like that first pair of roller skates, I now had a freedom vehicle strapped to my feet and could go wherever there was snow. All I had to do was learn how to use them, which I'm still trying to do 61 years later!

By the time I was fifteen years old, a high school friend named Ted Nicholson said, "I'm going to San Onofre this weekend to go surfing. If you have a sleeping bag and can round up a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, you're welcome to come along in the rumble seat." That weekend, when he was too tired to surf anymore, he let me use his genuine Hawaiian surfboard. It was so big and heavy I couldn't lift it. It weighed one hundred pounds, so I had to drag it across the beach. I somehow managed to paddle out to where the waves were at least two feet high. Nearing exhaustion, I was barely able to paddle hard enough, catch a small wave that had already broken, and somehow stand up. That one invitation to San Onofre was another sentence that changed my life forever by offering me even more freedom.

Over the course of my life, my search for freedom has dictated almost everything I have ever pursued. For the next twenty years, I surfed all summer and skied all winter (even during most of my three-and-a-half-year stint in the Navy).

Sure, I took a little time out here and there to run a camera and try to explain to the people who came to see my ski movies that my philosophy was different than most people's. By the time I was 35 years old, I knew that a very simple gift or the right sentence could alter anyone's life. It could send them in search of their own individual freedom.

I believe that in every city the streets are straight, the buildings and rooms in them are square, and our bodies are sort of round, so they don't belong inside the buildings in the cities.

In 1962, someone said, "I have a great sailing catamaran I think you would enjoy. Can I give you a ride?" Within two hundred yards of when we sailed away from the dock, I knew I was going to buy that catamaran. And so, for the next twenty years, I sailed and raced a variety of boats every chance I had. And a lot of times I sailed or raced boats when I shouldn't have. One day in the late 1960's, at a sailboat regatta, Hoyle Schweitzer said, "I've invented this thing I call a windsurfer. I would like you to try it." When I got on that Windsurfer, #38, it had a mind of its own, just like that first pair of skis had a mind of their own. That windsurfer took me wherever it wanted to.

Today, I have a quiver of sails, four windsurfers, and the perfect condo to sail from in Maui, but several years ago, my wife Laurie showed me pictures of Glacier Bay, Alaska. Giant blocks of ice hundreds of feet tall tumbling into the frigid ocean with a thirty-foot boat rocking and rolling from the waves that the tumbling glacier kicked up. That glacier is nine hundred miles by boat from where we live in the summer, up near the Canadian border. When my wife showed me the pictures of Glacier Bay she said, "Warren, thousands of people have made the trip to Glacier Bay in small boats during your lifetime. If you don't do it this year, you'll be one year older when you do." I now have our windsurfing condo for sale in Maui.

I'm glad I passed on trying to learn how to snowboard last winter. Over a hundred years ago some prospectors came back from Alaska with a ton of gold. I know I'll come back from Alaska this summer with memories that will be worth at least ninety-seven and a half tons of gold and there is always next winter to try to learn how to snowboard.

Copyright 5/13/98