Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

Growing up in Lisbon, Maine, Yvon Chouinard admires his French-Canadian father’s toughness and skill in a number of trades. Chouinard dreams of becoming a fur trapper when he grows up. At the age of seven, Chouinard and his family move to Burbank, California. After the predominately French-Canadian Lisbon, Burbank feels alien to the young Chouinard. Bullied for his small size and inability to speak English, Chouinard retreats to the outdoors by himself, developing an unusual independence throughout his childhood as he spends every day “gigging frogs, trapping crawdads, and hunting cottontails with my bow and arrow” (29).

Chouinard remains a misfit into high school. He excels in athletics but crumbles under pressure, deciding as a result that it is better to invent his own game so he can always win (29). He finds his people in the alternative “game” of falconry. With his falconry club, Chouinard catches and trains his own bird and also helps establish the first falconry regulations in California.

Chouinard is introduced to climbing through falconry—he learns to rappel down cliffs to the birds’ aeries. He and his friends quickly become enamored with rappelling itself, developing new equipment so they can descend faster and faster. In his first years of climbing and rappelling, the inexperienced but bold Chouinard has a number of near-death experiences.