Surf City, Canada

Raph Bruhwiler’s first surfboard came by way of barter. His father accepted it as payment after felling a tree for a neighbor in the Vancouver Island rainforest where the Bruhwilers lived. This was in the mid-1980s. Raph was ten. The board was homemade, sun-browned, waterlogged.

“It was kind of buried in the guy’s lawn,” Raph recalls, “collecting moss and leaves and stuff.”

His parents had built a house in the woods just inland of a sandy crescent called Chesterman Beach in Tofino, the small, isolated fishing village that sits about midpoint on the island’s west coast. Raph and his three siblings (sister Catherine and brothers Sepp and Francis) spent as much time as they could playing in the waves, despite wearing thin, ill-fitting kayaking wetsuits in water temps that hovered in the 40s and 50s year-round. The Bruhwiler kids would surf until their teeth chattered, run to the house, thaw in the bathtub, then go back out for more. In winter, when