We called him: "The Bolt" and he was the best surfer I have ever witnessed in person. Though I've had opportunity to be in the water with a few pros, both minor and major over the years, he was better than all of them, and he was from Maine.
As we didn't know his name at first, we christened him with our made up nickname, after the surfboard he usually rode. It was a deep purple tinted "Lightning Bolt." Single fin, rounded-pintail and about 7' long. The logo, made famous by Gerry Lopez, was a bold yellow lightning bolt that stretched about 2/3 of both the deck and bottom. No words, no names, just that yellow bolt. We'd all seen those Lightning Bolt surfboards under the feet of Gerry Lopez and a few of his team riders, Rory Russell most prominent, blasting out of Banzai Pipeline barrel after Banzai Pipeline barrel in both Surfer and Surfing magazines and the few surfing movies you could view at high school auditoriums and community centers in coastal towns on both coasts and Hawaii. Many of us coveted those boards and dreamed of owning one ourselves. In our area though, there was only him: The Bolt.
Lithe and lean, with cat-like agility and possessing every bit of relaxed grace as Lopez himself (he even sported the same mustache that GL did!) we would sit in awe of not only his rides but his otherworldly attunement to the ocean and its rhythms. So many times I witnessed him sitting there casually conversing with one of his buddies, only to spin around without warning and glide into a wave that none of us even saw coming. Though he was goofy-foot (again like Lopez!) and our home break was a long walled right, he took off backside deeper than any of the best regular footed surfers ever did, both then and to this day. Riding high and tight, feet close together and angled so sharply that his body was nearly facing straight ahead to the nose, he made sections that nobody could, sections that were closeouts fer cryin out loud! Everybody deferred to him, even the older guys. Though they were his peers, and would never let on to him how good they knew he was, (lest his head swell as one of them told me once) they always would back off, sit up, let him have any wave he wanted, and watch...even when they had position on him.
He wasn't flashy or radical like today's surfers. In fact, as I got into photography and started shooting surfing on occasion, I tried, in vain to get some good shots of him. I never accomplished this. Somehow, his surfing just didn't translate to film. The few shots I snapped, always looked rather flat and unspectacular. He didn't whack or gouge his board like everyone else was doing; spray didn't fly. He was more of a glider, a hawk, using the energy of thermal updrafts rather than their flapping wings, to keep soaring. Only his medium was water and waves rather than air. He sensed the waves energy in a way I've never seen since in another surfer. And his dance had to be witnessed in person to be appreciated.
His name was Ronnie Freeman. It took a whole summer to learn his name, and three summers before he said a word to me out in the water. But as I developed as a surfer, he started noticing me a little bit, talked to me some, and in time, we became, if not close friends, at least surfing friends. We both seemed to sense each others' passion for surfing and photography and he offered me tidbits of advice on both. He even invited me into his family's home (which was less than a hundred yards up the street from the Rivermouth; how cool is that that he could stroll down the street each morning to check the surf?) to show me his surf boards and talk design. I'd started shaping my own boards, and though I most remember him on that purple Lightning Bolt, he was always experimenting with new boards. He rode fish designs way back when nobody else, at least on the East Coast had even heard of them. He had his own personal shaper down in Florida where he wintered each year, who designed and gave him boards to try out and test. He made trips to California to surf famous breaks and check the latest trends in board design. He lived the lifestyle better than anyone else in our locale and he never, ever hung around to suffer through the blizzard nor'easters and 35 degree water winters!
Being underground, and from Maine and Florida, he never made a big splash in the surfing world, not that he was even interested in that, but he did have his occasional brushes with semi-fame. There's an old issue of Surfer magazine with a photo of he and Australian legend, Terry Fitzgerald, on a beach on the North Shore of Hawaii, holding a board and talking design. Terry frikkin Fitzgerald! And Ronnie Freeman from Maine, casually talking board design! He also published a couple of photos and articles in Surfer magazine. And this was back in the day when not anyone with a fully automatic, PHd (Push Here Dummy!) digital camera and their own little website could make a name for themselves in the mags. Perhaps his most infamous brush with notoriety was when he was wintering in Hawaii one season and paddled out out Pipline. For hours he tried catching a good clean wave to himself where some asshole didn't drop in on him and cut him off. Frustrated and pissed (which is totally out of character for him, being normally all about casual style and understated grace) he made it up in his mind that the next surfer to drop in on him he would simply...run the bastard over. And who just happened to be the next surfer to do so? Gerry Lopez himself. Mr. Pipeline. The Zen master. Lopez, owned that break! But not on this wave...Ronnie Freeman, Lopez' doppleganger from east nowhere Maine...ran him over! Now, you can call bullshit on this story, and for all I know, Ronnie could have been BS'ing me, in fact, when he told me this story, he did deliver the punchline with a twinkle in his eye, but, Ronnie was my surf hero and if he said he ran over Gerry Lopez, I believe him!
I haven't seen Ronnie in years. He used to come back to Maine each year after Labor Day to hopefully catch a hurricane swell at his old home break. But after working in gemstones in the family business for so many years down in Florida, he acquired enough of a stake to purchase a piece of property out in California at the old Hollister Ranch. The Ranch is a gated community which for a surfer who owns a home there, it means you have unlimited access to a coveted surf region that almost nobody else has. The waves not only are world-class there, but remain largely pristine of development and most importantly, hordes of other surfers. This seems fitting for Ronnie, retiring to soar across his own special waves in his own special way, in utter anonymity...stylin as always...
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