On a February day, so cold that it’s snowing on Mount Tamalpais, Jay Nelson, Mike Etchevers, and I are in the parking lot at the south end of Ocean Beach, preparing to jump in the dark green water. The air temperature hovers in the high 40s, the water temperature in the low 50s, and a drizzle settles on our bare skin as we slip into our black neoprene wetsuits: the sealskin–like rubber will allow us to bob in the frigid waters for a few hours with only minor shivers and slightly numbed extremities. A few other surfers are already out, and I marvel that we aren’t the only ones nuts enough to be getting in the ocean rather than sipping a cup of hot tea. Jay is obviously in another mind-set altogether: “Oh my god, look at that left,” he shouts with glee, as a jade-colored surge of water transforms itself into a perfect wave. The wave peels left, the direction a surfer would ride if he were on it, and as the thick upper lip pitches and then plunges down to the base, a hollow tube is formed that ejects a thin mist from its mouth in a puff. Jay wants to be inside that tube, to be the frail human projectile spit out of the icy tunnel, and he hurries with the finishing touches of his suit, a snug hood and booties.

In no rush for the inevitable ice-cream headache, I watch as Jay and Mike paddle through frothy stockades of oncoming whitewater. But when I see Jay’s small body racing down a smooth face and then pulling into that tube he was hoping for, enough adrenaline kicks in to get me down the sharp, slick boulders that line the parking lot and into the cold waves.

Ocean Beach is dangerous. A surfer just drowned here in January. The currents, due to the amount of water surging in and out of the bay, are relentless, reaching seven knots on occasion, and there may be no place in the world with a more difficult paddle out. The waves are thick, dark, and often very large, and they break in unpredictable ways. Fred Van Dyke, a well-known big-wave surfer, once wrote that surfing Ocean Beach at 15 feet was more difficult than surfing the famous Waimea Bay on Oahu at 30 feet.

Today is fairly small, about head high. But the waves deliver a solid thump, akin to a 100-pound water balloon breaking over your head, and I’m saying my typical prayers as I dive under them. “It’s good,” Jay says with a goofy grin when I get out. “Really good.”

Before the wind ruins their shape, the three of us ride glassy, beautifully formed waves practically alone. We hoot for each other when one of us gets a good one, and the cold and rain seem to disappear into the background. The hot tea I’d been thinking of in the parking lot is a distant memory.

It feels like I’m out with old friends, but Jay and Mike are part of a fringe pocket of San Francisco surf culture that I’ve only recently discovered. They call themselves the Mollusk crew, and their quasi-religion revolves around San Francisco’s perilous waves and Mollusk, a new surf shop and art gallery in the sleepy outer Sunset that opened 10 months ago. There are many surfers and surf “crews” at Ocean Beach, each with its own hangouts, social structure, board styles, and favorite breaks. But the Mollusk family, as Jay calls it, seems to be the most quintessentially San Francisco. It’s a growing group of young artist-surfers searching this foggy urban coastline for the purity that surfing once had. “The Mollusk thing is unique to this city,” says Matt Warshaw, an Ocean Beach surfer and author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing. “I’ve never seen that anywhere.”

Like the beats and the hippies before them, the Mollusk crew comes from everywhere but San Francisco. But also like those groups, they may end up being more influential than they realize. In the increasingly flashy and fractious world of wave riding, they’re paddling against the current; and, almost without even knowing it, they’re reliving a piece of San Francisco’s history.

It’s a much warmer day earlier in February when I head down to 46th and Irving to visit Mollusk for the first time. I’ve heard that owner John McCambridge, a 32-year-old surfer and artist who moved to San Francisco from Cambridge, Massachusetts, 15 years ago, has been throwing well-attended art and music events at the shop, as well as selling rare, beautiful surfboards. On this particular Friday, the hot sun is shining on the brown, mustard-yellow, and army-green Mollusk emblem, and John and a few friends are outside chatting about the surf, recounting rides, and analyzing the weather conditions in great detail, as surfers do.

To most Bay Area residents, Ocean Beach is a foreign country, a vast wasteland on the outer reaches of the city that doesn’t seem worth the drive. The concrete wall lining the beach is coated in graffiti; the sand is filled with glass and charred wood from beach fires; and odd bohemian characters with unruly hair and thick beards are usually lurking about, scaring off tourists. But to surfers, the beach is a roughneck playground of the best kind. And in the last 10 years, the number of wave fanatics has increased exponentially. On a sunny day with offshore winds and shoulder-high waves—conditions that don’t happen all that often in San Francisco­­—you might see 300 or so lawyers, doctors, artists, and college students riding breaks in front of Balboa, Noriega, and Sloat. Many Ocean Beach surfers remember a time when Wise Surfboards was the only surf shop nearby, but now there are at least four, each one doing quite well.

“It seems San Francisco has come of age as a surf city,” says Dan Duane, an Ocean Beach devotee and author of Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast. Many of the new zealots probably never imagined they’d be San Francisco surfers. “There are a lot of moneyed surfers out here,” says Clark French, a real estate investor who has been surfing at Ocean Beach for 14 years. “And a lot of them got started later in life because they had the time. You sit out there and talk about what you’re investing in. It’s pretty humorous.”

When scores of “transplants” and “aliens”—the names hurled at surfers who aren’t from the outer Richmond and Sunset—began taking up surfing in the ’80s and ’90s, and especially during the dot-com boom, the beach developed a natives-only, macho, almost gangland vibe befitting such cold and dangerous waves; the streetwise surfers tried to defend their territory. “There were beatings,” says Rick Whittington, a manager of the Aqua surf shop, “people getting scared out of the water, boards broken, cars vandalized.” Occasionally surfers still run into legendary, somewhat comical hecklers like “Bad Vibe Bob” and “Bad Lieutenant,” who have been known to intimidate newcomers. But the sport’s growing pop-cultural sway—multimillion-dollar surf films, Kelly Slater video games—has drawn enough newbies to crowd out the ruffians, making for a less intimidating if less distinctively Ocean Beach vibe. “They could only fight for so long,” says John Schultze, owner of SF Surf Shop. “They just gave up.”

Surfing is at a crossroads. Its beautiful imagery and sense of risk are highly marketable, and the sport is now extremely popular. But crowds, the rising cost of coastal real estate, and the proliferation of gear, vacations, magazines, and professional stars have gradually eroded the fringe nature of being a surfer. Surfers are like underground hip-hop acolytes dealing with the explosion of their passion into an international business. The very identity of surfers is at stake. “Everyone surfs now,” says Mark Renneker, a San Francisco big-wave rider. “It’s happening anywhere there’s a tiny resemblance of a wave or beach, and in a way, it’s sucking the juices out of what it means to be a surfer.”

But the Mollusk crew is nothing if not distinct. Walking through the doors of the shop, I feel like I’m in both a Mission District art gallery and a scene from the 1964 film The Endless Summer. John McCambridge wears a Doobie Brothers–style beard, and Mollusk employee Tyler Manson sits looking bored on a funky patterned love seat. Tyler looks like a throwback to the early ’80s: straight blond hair all flopped to one side, ripped jeans, classic Vans. Behind him stands a large tree house, which Jay Nelson built for an art show and later transported to the shop. The tree house, with its purposefully misshapen, colorful wooden pieces, and the sofa give Mollusk a playful feeling. Surfers are almost always hanging out here, strumming guitars and goofing off.

Unlike many Northern California surf shops, which tend to focus on hard-core gear for hard-core surfers, Mollusk seems more like a museum with actors in full character. Many of the surfboards are thick, stubby fishes (boards with a split tail) or tall, single-fin guns for bigger waves. Rather than selling big-name brands, Mollusk’s boards and clothing are largely crafted by independent designers, including the Mollusk crew. Most of the apparel appears vintage (’60s, ’70s, and ’80s) with a modern twist. The shop also carries skateboards, classic banana cruisers and longboards with big Kryptonite wheels. “Yeah,” says Tyler when I ask about the somewhat dated styles, “but they’re all pretty functional, as well as aesthetically pleasing.”

Tyler is friendly. He tells me about a current surf-photography exhibit and weekly yoga classes taught by Alex Martins, who recently competed in the Maverick’s competition. Like much of the Mollusk crew, Tyler grew up surfing in Southern California and moved to San Francisco for the art scene. He quickly became an Ocean Beach fan, and finds the lack of crowds—compared to those he encountered on his home breaks in Ventura—heavenly. “Occasionally you hear someone screaming, ‘Transplants’ or something,” he says in a distinct Southern California lilt. “But it’s just silly. You can always paddle away.”

Loitering at the shop without buying anything, I soon meet the core Mollusk group. Serena, who grew up in Hawaii, rides around the shop on one of the long skateboards. Tyler’s brother Jeff comes in strumming a classical guitar and singing. Keith Aderholdt, a 20-year Ocean Beach surf veteran, marches in wet from a morning session, announcing that he has a surfing problem, meaning addiction, and he can’t wait to get back out. Dave Muller, a painter and surfer from Encinitas who has designed some Mollusk T-shirts, follows, muttering something about a therapeutic conversation with his neighbor. And Dave introduces me to Jay Nelson, a quiet 25-year-old, also from Southern California, who wears an aqua T-shirt that says “Way of the Bird” on the pocket.

The Mollusk crew has no stated creed or philosophy, but one thing seems clear: they want to re-create the free, unfettered feeling that early surfers seemed to possess, and think they can do it in San Francisco. “We wanted this place to be a community center,” says John, “where surfers and nonsurfers would feel comfortable hanging out.” Dave adds, “We wanted to take the corporate residue off surfing.” There are about 30 regulars who hang out at Mollusk—from professional Maverick’s surfers to Mission district artists—and, unlike many who fit the surfer stereotype, they don’t seem angry that their beloved sport is popular. “People see that surfers are tan and healthy, and they want that,” says Tyler. “If they start surfing, that’s fantastic. If not, that’s OK, too.”

As the sun sets, the crew is thinking about surfing, but Tyler can’t because he has to keep the shop open. “Man, I can’t believe this,” he says with real suffering in his voice. “Trapped.” The guys say I can surf with them, which surprises me. I’ve been in dozens of surf shops in my life, and I’ve never been invited to surf with the employees. Most surf shops feel like locals-only clubhouses. Inviting an outsider breaks the code.

Strong onshore winds end up ruining the surf, and we don’t go out. But I don’t care. I’ve met a group of young surfers who are perhaps the most unstressed bunch I have ever encountered in San Francisco. On a weekday afternoon, they all have flexible agendas, and their loose plans seem to revolve around three things: hanging out, making art, and surfing.

Looking at the basic principles, nothing seems purer than riding a wave. Imagine gliding on a surge of spiraling liquid energy. A wave begins as a spinning tube of wind-generated force on the ocean called a swell. The swell becomes a wave when the churning tube hits a shallow sandbar or reef. At that point, it’s like a person who trips on a crack in the sidewalk: the lower part of the spiraling force stops, but the top of the swell continues at the original speed, pitching the water forward. If conditions are right, the wave breaks in a smooth domino effect, allowing the surfer to soar along the shimmering face just in front of the breaking point and sometimes even get inside the hollow section while the crest of the wave hurls outward and down. Often, the swell has traveled hundreds of miles across open ocean before transforming into a wave, and the surfer rides it in its final and most glorious moment.

Deep down, most surfers still probably feel their sport is a somewhat spiritual practice, the activity that the Hawaiians called “the sport of the kings.” But raised in an era of commercial surfing, most young guys are more comfortable discussing the pro tour. It wasn’t always this way. Long before the multimillion-dollar surf films, a small group at Ocean Beach knew what surfing was all about. “It was about fun,” Bill Hickey tells me when I meet up with him at the Java Beach Café across from Ocean Beach. “It was about unity, camaraderie; it was about the fire, and the people who gathered around it. It was what I did to recharge my spiritual batteries.”

Bill will turn 70 this year, but he maintains the trim waist and barrel chest of an obsessive waterman. His knees are shot, so he can’t surf as much as he used to, but he’s still out in the water a few times every month, and he continues to make some of the best surfboards in the world. At a time when most surfboard shapers just shave polyurethane foam to the right size and have specialists cover it in fiberglass, Bill is still glassing his own boards, making his own fins, and hand-painting the art.

Bill was one of the first San Franciscans to make surfing a lifestyle. He and some friends began bodysurfing at Ocean Beach in the mid-1950s, before proper surfing wetsuits were invented. Back then, the scene necessarily revolved around a bonfire that surfers kept raging all day, and sometimes all night. “Our basic routine was: run up and down the beach to get warm, hang out by the fire, surf until we got cold, then huddle up by the fire again,” Bill says.

In the early ’50s, Bill had seen surfboards at the beach on hot days, but no one could stand on the things. Then one day in 1956, he and a friend watched a guy knee-paddle out on a balsa-wood surfboard, take off on a perfect wave, and shoot the curl. That night, Bill wrote a letter to Hobie Surfboards and ordered his first longboard for $75, plus $4 for shipping. You could say that, right then and there, Ocean Beach developed its first surf scene. Jack O’Neill, Fred Van Dyke, and many others were there with Bill, and their crew surfed as much as humanly possible in water that’s usually around 53 degrees.

Nothing could stop them. The year after Bill got his first board, he broke his neck diving off a big wave onto a shallow sandbar. He fractured three vertebrae, knocked out his teeth, and bit some holes in his tongue, but he was out surfing again within the year. While Bill was stuck in the hospital, Jack O’Neill asked him to help start a surf shop on Wawona Street. “Jack, who’s going to buy our surfboards?” Bill asked. “There are only 10 surfers in the whole Bay Area.”

But when Bill got out, he helped Jack at one of San Francisco’s first surf shops. It was simply called Surf Shop. If you couldn’t find Bill or Jack at the beach, they were busy making boards. Yet “work” for the early Ocean Beach locals was what they did to eat and keep surfing. They rented the cheapest rooms, drove the funkiest cars, and spent every free minute they had on the beach. For his part, Jack moved on to Santa Cruz’s growing scene and started one of the biggest surf companies ever. But Bill stayed in the city and kept at his small, custom surfboard business. Riding waves had created a community unlike any other, Bill says, and through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s a camaraderie remained. “We welcomed you into our crew even if you were an outsider,” says Bill. “We all just loved the beach.” When Bill’s wife, Gloria, a competitive swimmer who body-surfed every day, recently died of lung cancer, he scattered her ashes on the first stairway leading down to Kelly’s Cove, the area just below the Cliff House.

There’s a large northwest swell pouring in when Jay and I go surfing together for the first time. The best surfer at Mollusk and one of the best on this beach, Jay is considering an early session at Maverick’s, the world-renowned big-wave spot 20 miles south. Maverick’s terrifies me; thankfully, by the time I pick Jay up, the winds have changed, making the enormous waves too sloppy to ride­.

Because he seems to be at the shop almost any time he’s not surfing, I can’t help thinking of Jay as the center of the Mollusk crew, though he insists he’s not. He looks like a surfer. He has blond hair and small eyes that match the color of the ocean when it’s an opaque greenish brown. His hair is cut unevenly, and he sticks out his chest when he stands, arching his lower back—the posture of someone who surfs a lot and can’t unhinge his body from the cobralike paddling position. He’s shy, especially when he talks about his budding art career—the recent magazine interviews, his recent show in the Mission that sold out, his latest tree house installation at the Oakland airport—and his surfing. But his friends brag for him. “Jay is one of my favorite surfers to watch of all time,” says Dave. “He’s not all flashy like some of today’s surfers, but his abilities are ridiculous.” John adds, “You wouldn’t guess it, but Jay will paddle out by himself on a triple overhead day­—just, like, gnarly—and enjoy it, not even be scared.”

When I pick Jay up at Mollusk, he’s cleaning out his rusted white Honda CRX. He bought the car for $200 and stenciled a red-tailed hawk on the side, a “spirit guide.” He also paints on all his boards, many of which he makes himself. On the right side of the car, next to the hawk, he has scribbled the words “Grow Fins.”

Tossing out some old orange peels, Jay suggests we drive around and look for waves, something San Francisco surfers are often forced to do because of fickle conditions here. Jay packs three surfboards into my van, each one wrapped in one of his own handmade yellow, brown, and green plaid board bags. “I can never decide what to ride until I get there,” he says, laughing, presumably at his own obsession. One of the boards is a thick, turquoise 1970s single-fin that looks impossible to turn. Jay surfs all kinds of boards, but he says he especially likes the older-style single-fins for Ocean Beach. Whereas most modern surfers prefer tri-finned shortboards, or thrusters, that allow the surfer to whip around on the wave in flashy, jolting movements, a
single-fin lets Jay to dig the full edge, or rail, into the water on the first bottom turn and then cruise to the top for a smooth glide. Dave says that Jay is “re-embodying soul surfing.”

From the Sloat parking lot, the waves at Ocean Beach look messy, surging into each other with crushing force, so we continue on to a small-wave spot called Linda Mar in Pacifica. The surf is big and crazy today, and the smaller waves at Linda Mar are probably the only ones nearby that I can ride. Jay keeps looking off into the distance to a grisly break on the horizon called Pedro Point, saying it might be doable. But, given that he had earlier suggested we go night surfing under the Golden Gate Bridge, I’m skeptical that the word safety is even in his vocabulary. Besides, he seems happy to surf Linda Mar, and he pulls out a new 5-foot, 4-inch fish with a round nose and four fins, a cross between a 1970s board and a modern one. It looks more like a giant egg than a surfboard, but Jay insists that it’s perfect for these smaller waves.

The water is unusually cold and an eerie brown color. But the sun is warming our faces, no one is out at our end of the beach, and the waves are bigger than they looked from shore, perhaps head high on the sets. I get a few muddled waves and do nothing on them. Jay, on the other hand, keeps paddling for waves that look impossible to make, taking off late, and garnering enough speed on his little board to continue shooting down the wave, kicking back a white spume as he turns. He repeatedly ends up 40 yards down the beach, and still manages to apologize several times for dropping in on a wave that I paddled for, too—an unnecessary display of politeness among friends.

After an hour, we get breakfast at a little diner back on Taraval, where the warm coffee is like bright sunshine in an Alaskan winter. Jay tells me how he started building tree houses. “Art has to be fun,” he says. “What’s more fun than a tree house?” He’s now drawing detailed, idyllic landscapes with gargantuan mountains and perfect waves. He says he tries to capture the purist’s state of mind, one that he has experienced a lot while surfing. “They take weeks,” he says, “but they’re really fun.”

Jay recounts his surf travels all over Europe, Central America, California, and Hawaii. But after seven years of surfing Ocean Beach, he says, this wave is his favorite. He also loves Ocean Beach because it’s in San Francisco, which is very different from other surf towns he has lived in. Santa Cruz and the small towns in Hawaii were a bit too small, Los Angeles too conservative. “Anything is possible here,” Jay says with sincere optimism. “I could, like, dress up as a woman tomorrow and no one would even think anything of it. It wouldn’t be a big deal ’cause everyone’s done that already. That’s why art can flourish here, why the surfer-artist can flourish here.”

It turns out that Jay and I have surfed many of the same places, and as we recall shared surf breaks, it strikes me how unique the urban surfer’s life is. Here we are, an artist and a writer living in a major metropolis jabbering on about symbolism in art and the sharpness of a reef in a small fishing harbor on the island of Hawaii. We analyze the way the water surges, sucks, and spits in a particular fashion, remembering warm, clear waves and laughing about scary situations narrowly escaped. “Hawaii’s overrated, though,” Jay concludes. And we leave it at that, a reminder that we’ve chosen our location wisely.

When Jay’s not surfing, he often strolls along the beach collecting driftwood for art pieces. One day in 2004, he was hiking on a trail over by Fort Funston, just south of Ocean Beach, and he saw an old woman in a bikini sitting on some nice driftwood by a roaring fire. The woman’s hair looked as if she had been tossed around in the waves, and her skin was dark and leathered from salt and sun. Jay introduced himself, hoping to score a few pieces. The woman’s name was Carol Schuldt; it turned out that she and Jay had a lot in common: they both drove rusted old cars, loved art, and went to the beach almost every day to surf. Carol, who is 73 now, doesn’t use a board. But riding a wave is riding a wave, and she and Jay bonded over the fire, telling tales of the elements and art projects.

Jay later learned that Carol is known as the “Queen of Ocean Beach” and was one of the only women body­­surfing the treacherous waves at Kelly’s Cove in the 1960s with Bill Hickey and friends. More than 40 years later, she still rides waves almost every day without a wetsuit. “I don’t need one,” she says. “I like my body to feel the water.” Carol thinks wetsuits reflect modern people’s separation from nature. “It’s the style, the fad now,” she says. “Don’t feel too much.” She also doesn’t go to Kelly’s anymore. The memories are too intense, and there are too many fast-paced people who don’t understand the spirit of surfing. “They don’t feel the beach,” Carol says of modern surfers. “They go from the car to the surf, the surf to the car. No community feeling, no courtesy, no nothing. We always surfed together. We would say, ‘Oh, you take this wave,’ and that’s how it went.”

Carol’s life has revolved around San Francisco’s cold water. Her first marriage was clinched when a crush of hers rescued her after a wave slammed her into the cliff at Kelly’s. Carol saw the first man to surf at Deadman’s, a somewhat secret break in San Francisco, and watched the first surfer ride a wave under the Golden Gate Bridge. “I’m the last of the Mohicans,” she says, “the last one from that era who is still out here every day.”

From Carol’s skin, you would think she lived on this very beach. But she has a big house on the Great Highway, and Jay began visiting her there. “It made me appreciate this place so much more,” Jay says. “There is history here no one knows.” Carol’s house is packed with beach trinkets and art. Sea horses are carved in the blue wooden window shutters, and paintings of waves and beaches hang on her kitchen walls. A small oil portraying Kelly’s Cove is mounted above Carol’s bed. Behind the house is a vegetable and flower garden, where Carol’s chickens run wild, laying eggs wherever they please. Jay adored it, as any artist would. He saw the big garden and the sturdy trees, and the image came to him: a tree house.

Before long, Jay was building a tree house in Carol’s garden, making it high enough that he could see the surf. Carol, who tries to help any fellow beach lover in need, liked the idea. She has been known to take in kids who can’t afford rent, and Jay would be one. In the end, due to safety issues, he ended up living in John’s attic instead, but he goes to see Carol every now and then, and he talks about her all the time.

The waves are good all through early February, and I’m out at Ocean Beach almost every day, sometimes with Jay, but mostly alone. Once, I surf solo at an outer sandbar in front of the Beach Chalet, when the waves are better than I’ve ever seen: glassy, a few feet overhead, and completely hollow. One other guy is surfing a wave 50 yards down the beach, and occasionally we look at each other, as if to marvel that we’re witnessing so many gorgeous waves go by with no one on them. Another day, I surf in fog so thick that I can’t even see the oncoming waves. The density keeps the water smooth enough that a wasp lands gently on the surface, and we bob together as I wait for a wave to emerge from the whiteness. On another day, I compete with eight other surfers for waist-high shore break near Sloat. None of us smile, cheer, or even talk.

By the third week in February, my muscles are sore from paddling, and I decide to climb up on a dune and just watch. There’s a pack of 15 competing for head-high waves. Two other surfers, obviously avoiding the crowd, wait for waves about 15 yards north. Strangely, the two loners are getting the best rides, even though they’re not sitting at the prime take-off point. One surfer in particular rides with a smooth style that I recognize. It’s Jay, out there before work, with Dave. Jay is obviously a better surfer than any of the other guys. But he stays clear, politely riding smaller waves with grace, even grabbing a tiny tube on one ride.

Watching Jay and Dave catch wave after wave, I decide that even if surfing used to be better, it’s still pretty good. Everything changes. Culture gets recycled. And wherever San Francisco’s developing surf scene heads, Jay and the Mollusk crew seem to have captured some of what Bill Hickey and Carol Shuldt enjoyed in the beginning.

Later that night, I go to find Jay in his room, the attic near the surf shop that John lets him stay in rent free. I climb the white ladder onto a ledge near the ceiling, tiptoe around an old surfboard, and climb up another rickety wooden ladder through a small hole in the ceiling. Jay’s attic is a sort of octagonal pyramid with a five-
candle chandelier hanging from the center. Art utensils are strewn on a coffee table. A stream of light pours through a window that’s just big enough to climb through to get onto the roof, which is where Jay goes to check the surf every morning.

I lean against the futon, and he pours me a shot of Jameson in a plastic cup. We speculate about wave conditions: when the next swell will hit, which sandbar will most perfectly transform that swell into waves. Jay then starts talking about a girl he has a bit of a crush on. She lives in the East Bay, though, and he laments that it probably won’t work out. She’s just too far away. After questioning whether the East Bay is really all that far, I realize how attached he is to this life: his little attic near the surf shop by his favorite break in the world. Most people wouldn’t think much of it. The room is small. The beach is still dirty as ever. But Jay has everything he has ever wanted. “I never want to leave,” he tells me. “This is paradise.”