The garage door rolls up at six fifty-two, give or take a minute, and a fine cloud of foam dust catches the first horizontal light off the Pacific. Hollis Marek steps out in a denim apron stained the color of beach sand, holding a mug of black coffee and a pencil tucked behind his ear.
He stands for a moment in the doorway. He does this every morning. He says it is not a ritual. He says it is just looking at the ocean before the day begins.
Behind him, leaning against the wall, are seven blanks of polyurethane foam in various stages of becoming surfboards. One is barely a brick. One is almost finished, its rails glassy and pale.
Hollis is seventy-one. He has been shaping surfboards in this garage in Port Orford, on the southern Oregon coast, since 1983.
The garage smells like resin and cedar shavings and, faintly, like the WD-40 he uses on his planer. There is a radio on a shelf playing a Eugene jazz station at low volume. He does not like talk radio in the morning. He says the boards do not like it either.
He works alone. He has always worked alone. There was a brief period in the early 2000s when his nephew came to help, but the nephew moved to Bend to work in software, and Hollis was, in his own quiet way, relieved.
The first thing he does after the coffee is sweep. He sweeps the concrete floor with a wide push broom, slowly, the way someone might rake a Zen garden. The dust goes into a bin. The bin gets emptied on Saturdays.
Then he chooses a blank. Today it is a nine-foot piece of foam destined to become a longboard for a woman in Eureka who surfs three days a week and wants something she can ride into her sixties. She is fifty-eight. Hollis has been making her boards since she was thirty-one.
He runs his hand down the length of the blank. He closes his eyes briefly. You feel where it wants to be thinner, he says, almost to himself. He does not so much shape boards as listen to them.
“He runs his hand down the length of the blank.”
The planer comes out next. It is a Skil 100, the same one he bought used in 1984 from a shaper in Santa Cruz who was getting out of the business. He has rebuilt it twice. He calls it Margaret. He will not explain why.
He makes the first long pass down the deck. Foam curls into the air like pencil shavings. The room fills with a fine white powder that settles on his eyebrows and the lenses of his safety glasses.
His wife, Ana, brings him a second coffee at nine. She does not come into the garage. She stands at the threshold and holds out the mug. He thanks her without looking up. They have been married forty-six years. This is how they do most mornings.
Around ten, a pickup pulls into the gravel drive. It is a regular customer, a fisherman named Doug, who surfs on his days off and has come to pick up a board Hollis finished last week. The exchange is brief. Doug hands over an envelope. Hollis hands over the board, wrapped in an old quilt.
Take care of her, Hollis says, and Doug nods like a man receiving a child.
Hollis charges between eight hundred and twelve hundred dollars for a board. He could charge more. Shapers half his age in San Diego charge twice that. He does not see the point.
He has a waiting list of about fourteen months. He keeps it in a spiral notebook in a drawer next to a tape measure and a tin of Altoids. He has never had a website. His son built him one in 2011. He took it down in 2014.
People found me before the internet, he says, sanding the rail of the longboard with a fine-grit pad. They still find me.
Lunch is a sandwich at the workbench at twelve-thirty. Sourdough, sharp cheddar, a slice of tomato in summer. He reads ten pages of a paperback. Right now it is a Patrick O"Brian novel he has read four times before.
The afternoon is for glassing, when a board is ready, or for the slow patient work of finishing rails. He says the rails are where a board lives or dies. He says most shapers rush the rails. He does not.
By four, the light in the garage has gone amber. He stops, regardless of where he is in a board. He says no good decisions get made after four.
He cleans his tools. He hangs the apron on a hook. He stands again at the open garage door and looks out at the ocean, which is doing whatever the ocean does in late afternoon in April. He does not surf anymore. His left knee will not allow it. He stopped six years ago and says he is mostly at peace with this.
Sometimes a young shaper writes to him asking if they can come apprentice. He writes back politely and says no. He says he does not know how to teach what he does. He says he is not sure it is teachable.
What he knows is the garage, and the planer named Margaret, and the slow turning of foam into something a person will carry into the sea. He knows it will end eventually. He does not seem worried about that.
When asked what he will do when he can no longer shape, he thinks for a long time. He looks at the unfinished longboard on the rack. He says he supposes he will sit in a chair and look at the ocean. He says that sounds all right too.
