It’s not an easy life, but it’s the only life Glen Horn would accept. Photo: Ebner
Everyone who surfs wants to surf forever. Hell, the point of surfing all the time is so you can continue to surf all the time. But time waits for no man, as they say, and it’s not waiting for Glen Horn, either. Horn doesn’t mind, because he’s a guy who knows that dedication brings rewards. And he is nothing if not dedicated to surfing.
“My classic moment in my life is going to be when I’m here and I’m surfing,” he said in The Bull: The Surf Legend Who Walked Away From Everything. “There’s a moment when we’re surfing here when the sun goes down and the back lit part of the wave is emerald green and there’s slight offshore breezes and every figure in the wave is just a shadow. But an average person is just looking at everybody in the water and all they see is a black figure. When I’m 100 years old, I’ll be out there surfing and you won’t be able to tell if that’s a 100-year-old guy or if it’s a 20-year-old guy or a 40-year-old guy. That’s going to be the classic moment that tells me that it’s all going according to plan.”
The film is a rare one in this day and age of surf videos. Eric Ebner, a fantastically talented documentary filmmaker from Michigan, put this gem together. It’s a story of a man who, as the title infers, walked away from everything. Or walked away from the things in life he deemed less important, anyway.
Horn is a bit of an underground San Diego surfing legend. His life revolves around waves and physical fitness; living quietly with a tiny footprint. He shaped his first surfboard at the age of 12. Soon after, he was exploring all that Baja has to offer, poking his nose into every nook and cranny he could find. He’s never stopped.
I’ve met men like Horn. There are a handful of them in Baja, especially. They’re generally a little crusty, but you can tell from the smile lines and the glint in their eye that they’ve tapped into something the rest of us haven’t. They’ve got their dogs sometimes. They’ve got the seasonal friends who land on the beach for a few months of waves, beer, and bocce before returning home to “real” life. But for men like Horn, “real” is just the present. For the right person, it appears to be a recipe for the simplest kind of happiness there is. It’s worth chasing, but it’s not for everyone. It’s a hard kind of happiness; one that only comes with years of self-reliance and adventures untold. Luckily, he found a partner who loved that life as much as he does.
“The beauty of this place is that it takes someone with a harsh want to live in this environment,” Horn said. “You work to get to this kind of place. But I do love this land deep into my soul… It’s not just a vacation, it’s my life.”
In The Bull, Ebner captures the beauty of living sparsely. Horn is 67 now, but you wouldn’t know it from watching him surf. It’s a lifestyle that’s easy to romanticize, but difficult to live. Horn, though, wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I would like to be remembered as somebody who kept the spirit of the way we started surfing alive,” he said. “Somebody who found that spot. That place in life where nothing else matters.”
