Morgan Sliff decided to surf every day for one year. Ten years later, she finally took a day off. It was not so much an ending, however, but a completion.
by Mark McDermott
A young woman stands by a window, looking out at the Pacific Ocean from her childhood home in Hermosa Beach. She’s 24, but feels much older. The ocean is a few hundred yards away but feels unfathomably distant.
Morgan Sliff grew up in that ocean. It was her childhood playground. She was a blonde-haired, sun-bleached grom who received her first board from Santa Claus as a seven-year-old and went through the Junior Life Guard program a few years later. Surfing had been her favorite thing to do. She could not have dreamed that one day she would stop.
But at this juncture, Sliff had not surfed in nearly five years. Adulthood arrived like a boot on her neck. She had married young, and badly. She had a supposedly good job, working in hospital administration, but it was soul-crushingly monotonous work. She had few friends, and even her attempt to change things up — pursuing a degree in environmental engineering — had backfired. The subject matter bored her, and became yet one more source of disconnection in her life.
“It just got to the point where it was like, ‘Nothing is right. It doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel good. I just want to do something that feels right and good,’” Sliff recalled.
So on this early summer day in 2015, Sliff made a decision. She had left her marriage a few weeks earlier. Now, she returned to the ocean. She dug out a dusty surfboard from her mom’s garage, went to the beach, and paddled out. A few waves later, she experienced a startling feeling. A wave rose up and slapped her, as if to say, “Where have you been?” Suddenly she was wide awake. It was as if she’d woken from a bad dream.
“It was like a revelatory experience,” Sliff said. “Like, ‘Oh my god, what have I been doing? Why haven’t I been in the water? This is my home. Why haven’t I been here?’”
Sliff surfed almost daily for the next two months. It felt like each paddle out, each wave, each moment spent in the blue wonder of the ocean brought her a little bit more back to herself. She felt something rising within her that she barely recognized. Joy. Accompanying this feeling was gratitude, and a need to make some kind of vow to never become so estranged from the ocean again.
“I needed a goal,” Sliff said. “I wanted some sort of purpose. And it just really made sense for me to be like, ‘Okay, I feel really good doing this. I am going to do this every day for a year. I don’t know what my life is going to look like in the next year, but I am just really excited to find out what that looks like. Or what unravels.”
What unraveled was most of what she did not need. The listlessness. The staleness. The mornings in which she awoke with more dread than purpose. The cage she’d made for herself, one that she had believed adult life required. Instead, she rose early, usually before dawn, animated with a simple purpose. Get to the ocean. Ride waves. Get stoked. She gave herself, utterly, to surfing. She moved to a little surf shack a block south of the Hermosa Pier. Its garage was bigger than its living space, all the better for storing longboards. She surfed a lot in El Porto that first summer, but ranged up and down the coast, from San Diego County to Malibu, and of course her home waters, in Hermosa.
After five years of stagnancy, Sliff discovered she was growing again. And while this was cause for joy, all growth also comes with pain.
“That first year was one of the most difficult spans of time because my body was changing so much, and adapting,” Sliff said. “I wasn’t just surfing once a day, either. I was surfing multiple times a day for a really long time, for however long I could squeeze in between my job, and so I was definitely physically exhausted, and emotionally overflowing, in a good way. And then figuring out the waves and the weather and trying not to get the shit beat out of me all the time, because that was an El Nino year. But then, ever since — well, especially in the last five or six years — I have more of a system. I’ve learned a lot.”
On July 21 of this year, Sliff paddled out south of the Hermosa Beach pier, for her 3,653rd straight day of surfing. A few dozen friends joined her in the water. Most were part of a “surf familia” that magically formed in the early days of the surf streak, and kept expanding with the years. They joined her because she had decided that this was the last day of the streak.
As Sliff wrote on social media that day, finishing the streak was a lot less about ending and more about completion. She described the streak as the ride of her life.
“Some decisions change everything about your life,” she wrote. “A decision I made 10 years/3,653 days ago altered the course of my life in a way that I could never imagine. After 10 straight years of surfing every day — and in that, healing, growing, loving, grieving, finding myself, and finding the best community I could ever wish for — I feel so full. There will be no day 3654…But the endless session is forever.”
Time is a funny beast. We measure our lives by years, but not all years are equal, in terms of how much living is packed within a calendar number. In the 10 years since the streak began, Sliff has surfed up and down the California coast, as well as in Hawaii, New York, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada (the Great Lakes for the former two states, a weird dirty river for the latter). She also surfed abroad, in El Salvador (five times), Nicaragua (five times), Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, Spain, Mexico (numerous times, including on the day of her own longboarder-vibed wedding at La Salidita), France, Portugal, the United Kingdom. She escaped mountain snow-ins, late flights, and any number of days that took bad turns and could have easily resulted in a missed session, but miraculously — sometimes just before midnight — always made it to the ocean.
And then there were the injuries, almost too numerous to list. A separated shoulder, which occurred only six weeks before meeting her first goal of one year, and required her to surf with one arm in a sling for over a month; a chondral fracture in her knee, originally misdiagnosed, that eventually required surgery in three different areas; two weeks before that surgery, a broken lisfranc joint at the base of her midfoot (caused not by a surf board, rather a dropped bottle of Costco-sized shampoo during a shower. “It would have been cooler if I wrestled with a shark,” Sliff said); in the last year, Sliff endured a labral tear in her hip, and a glute tear. And of course, there were many other relatively pedestrian injuries, like sprained ankles and potential bone breaks (Sliff returned to the hospital where she used to work many times, through the ER door) that just ended up as extremely painful injuries, especially for someone committed to surfing every single day.
And perhaps most challenging of all, Sliff surfed through the wear and tear of life itself, which means she surfed through breakups, disappointments, job changes, heartbreaks, and losses beyond heartbreak, including the untimely passing of her little brother David, by his own volition. But she also surfed her way to a new career, as a writer, and a new marriage, to a talented, tall, handsome, and like-souled longboarder, Christian Stutzman.
More than anything, Sliff surfed right into the heart of a life filled with everything she lacked before the streak — a life immersed in love, kinship, and the ocean.
“It’s way more than surfing, right?” she said, reflecting on what these 10 years have brought. “I was thinking about decisions and life choices that we make. I decided to do this [surf streak]. My life could have gone a bunch of different ways. I could have not done it, and then my life would look so different. But I did it, and I continued along this path, and then, all the people I have in my life, and the memories that I have…Everybody has a little solar system. And mine just was just built in the last ten years.”
Formation
Frank Paine abides. He can be found most early mornings in the waves or on the beach south of the Hermosa Beach pier. There is a cliche that says when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Like many cliches, this one often proves stubbornly true.
For Sliff, Paine was not exactly a teacher, though he is nicknamed “the Professor,” and is a salty sage, to be sure. More essentially, for Sliff, Paine was a rock upon which began construction on her new solar system. When she first returned to surfing, in May of 2015, she surfed in Manhattan Beach. Soon, however, she returned to the place where many of her happiest childhood memories had occurred, south of the Hermosa Pier. Paine awaited.
Paine has a big mustache, a deep-voiced drawl, and a quietly intense watchfulness sometimes mistaken for gruffness. He is a revered assistant surf coach at Redondo Union High, an artist, and the driver of an impeccable old VW bus. He’s a lifelong dedicated surfer who was part of the Lost Boys crew on the Avenues in Redondo Beach and, at the time Sliff met him, had recently reestablished himself — along with his buddy, the shaper Jose Barahona — south of the Hermosa pier.
“I started surfing again, and then naturally went back to my happy place, which is the Hermosa pier,” Sliff said. “And you know, Frank had really solidified himself there. I just remember this welcoming force, kind of magnetic, and it was really easy to return home. It was easy to go back to this place that I’d been missing for such a long time because Frank was like this happy gatekeeper.”
Paine was in the midst of teaching another person who’d recently been beat up by life, Boris Vishnevsky, how to surf. Sliff and Paine had never previously met, but something about his comforting presence helped make things right again. For both of them, watching Boris learn, and catch the attendant stoke of surfing, somehow fit naturally into this inclusive sense of surf familia. For Sliff, being back in Hermosa felt almost like going back to the better days of her childhood. It was the perfect way to begin again.
“I re-entered Hermosa because I had grown up surfing at Vince Ray’s surf camp, which then became the Chevron surf camp,” Sliff said. “I was essentially, in the summertime, raised by Vince and [surf instructors] Glenn Jensen and Heather Alley. They were like my surf parents. And I spent so much time in the summer down at the Hermosa Pier, it was like such a special place to me. I felt like I was reentering my home, but it was so foreign to me. Then I met Frank and Boris and I just told them what I was doing. They were so friendly.”
Paine offered encouragement in those early days of the streak. He and Morgan and other members of the quickly forming Surf Familia would meet most mornings, after surfing, at Brother’s Burritos. On napkins, Paine would make colorful illustrations documenting each succeeding day of the streak.
But privately, he had his doubts.
“Quite honestly, when she started, I didn’t think she could do it,” Paine said. “I thought there are so many mitigating factors — the weather, you have a really bad cold, or the flu — and I thought, ‘Man, if she could go for a year, that would be an achievement.’ And when she kept it up, midway through that first year, I thought, ‘Wow, she’s really dedicated to this.’ And then after that first year, she was just on fire. You could just tell most things revolved around her being able to do that. So after that initial wondering, ‘Is she really serious about this?’ then it just became something we all wanted to be a part of. It just really caught all of our attention.”
Ryan McDonald was a reporter with Easy Reader who was assigned — by me, actually, when I was the editor of the paper — to write a story about Sliff about 100 days into her streak. McDonald is a dedicated, lifelong surfer and thought sharing a session with Sliff would be a good way to report on her quest.
“Expecting bad weather, we had made plans to go out early on the south side of the Hermosa Pier,” McDonald said. “The sun was barely up when I got there, but conditions were already victory at sea, white caps in all directions. I couldn’t see Morgan from the sand, but I paddled out anyway, hoping to make the most of the wedges that were coming off the pier pilings. About 45 minutes later, I got out of the water, chuckling to myself that this was the sort of day that could stop even a well-intentioned streak in its tracks.”
“But as I skipped across the sand, shielding my eyes from the wind, I heard a voice that sounded as though it had never borne malice. It was Morgan, calling my name,” McDonald said. “She had in fact already surfed, finding a more sheltered spot to make the most of the conditions, and was now back in the Hermosa pier parking lot. She had texted me, long before sunrise, of the change in plans, and had even offered me a ride. I had failed to check my phone before heading for the beach. So she came back to Hermosa after finishing her session, and waited for me.”
McDonald has been friends with Sliff ever since, but felt like he saw the essentialness of her character that first meeting.
“For one thing, you almost certainly do not get up earlier than she does,” he said. “More to the point, it revealed a combination of personal drive, and desire that others not be left behind, that I have never really encountered in another person.”
A personal drive will only get you so far, but in tandem with that special connection with her friends, and particularly her surf familia — this combination became Sliff’s superpower, and enabled her to do what should not have been possible. When she tore up her shoulder only six weeks before reaching her first, one-year goal, then underwent a fairly complicated, major surgery, this superpower came especially to bear. Then, in 2020, her knee injury seemed almost certain to derail the streak. But in both instances, the day after her surgeries, her surf familia sprang into action.
“The next day, we put her whole leg in a plastic bag, taped it all up, put her on a paddleboard, and me, her brother, her mother, and some other friends, we all went and pushed her into the waves,” said Barahona, recalling the knee injury. “We kept doing it every day while she was healing up. There were a lot of other injuries, and surgeries, and she just kept going. Like the Energizer Bunny. ”
Barahona knew a thing or two about the kind of drive Sliff possessed. He’d escaped the civil war in El Salvador in the early ‘80s to make his way to Los Angeles. While still in high school, he was hired by Phil Becker of Becker Surfboards to sweep out the shop, and he bicycled 25 miles daily from 3rd and Vermont in LA to Cypress Avenue in Hermosa on what Sliff, in a journalism story, later described as “his tin can of a bicycle,” which lacked a braking mechanism, other than the worn sole of his shoe. He would work his way up in the shop, from cleaning to sanding to airbrushing to ding repair. And eventually, he became a surfboard shaper, first for Becker and eventually for his own company, Barahona Surfboards.
Sliff and Barahona met shortly after she returned to surfing. He was standing on the Hermosa Pier watching her surf and was struck by her joy and her style. “Her style of surfing was kind of eye-catching,” Barahona said. They were both going through divorces, and bonded over that, and surfing. She would come into his shop and together they would shape boards for her, in one instance adding the little birds that are tattooed on the back of Sliff’s shoulder into a surfboard design.
“From the beginning, we had a true daughter-father connection,” Barahona said.
I met Sliff about a month into her streak. Like Barahona, it was Sliff’s surfing that caught my attention. Unlike Barahona, I am not a surfer, so I didn’t really understand what I was seeing through that prism. I was covering the International Surf Festival, and standing on the Manhattan Beach Pier when I noticed a woman surfing with both determined ferocity and utmost joy. When I discovered her backstory, I asked her to write a blog for the Easy Reader. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate, she enthusiastically took on the project. For the next year, sometimes in the middle of the night, other times at the very beginning of a work day, Sliff sent me dispatches from her streak. We called it the Endless Session. Her writing was like Morgan. Organized, artful, unexpected, attuned to beauty, suffused with gratitude, sometimes exalted, often goofy. The blog struck a chord. Thousands of readers were suddenly along for the ride. And so was I.
As the end of that first year approached, Barahona concocted a plan. He obtained all the napkins Paine had drawn that documented the streak, from Day 17 onward, and made a surfboard adorned with the napkins. At a celebration on the day of her one year streak anniversary, Barahona presented her the board. She cried and laughed and for years after would refer to the board in a hushed tone as “my most prized possession.” But then, the next day, and the next month, and for the next year, Sliff did something that Barahona didn’t see coming.
McDonald wrote about the one year streak, and what came immediately after.
“When she emerges from the water on Thursday morning, Hermosa Beach resident Morgan Sliff will have surfed 366 days in a row,” he wrote. “She’ll gather with fellow surfers, as she often does, at Brother’s Burritos on 11th Street. She’ll have a party later that day to celebrate accomplishing her goal of surfing every day for a year.
And then, Friday morning, she will get up and go surfing again.
This kind of determination defies the traditional logic of sports and statistics. Streaks seem to need an end to become meaningful; we fence our lands to better convey the vastness of our holdings.”
As far as Sliff could see, this vastness had no need of fencing.
“We didn’t know if she was just going to do it for one year, or for how long. We didn’t know she was just going to keep going,” Barahona said. “We had no clue that 10 years later, we’d still be talking about this.”
Mission Impossible
In the fall of 2016, Christian Stutzman had been dating Morgan Sliff for several weeks when she told him there was something kind of important she had to tell him. He was feeling the pangs of a large and growing love, so he was more than a little wary when they sat down to talk. The big reveal was that she was on a surf streak.
“I think I probably had the same reaction most people do. ‘Oh, wow. That’s super cool.’ But also, ‘Oh, my God, that’s a lot of commitment to do that every day,’” Stutzman recalled.
Stutzman was a California State Lifeguard and a professional surfer — actually a well-regarded competitive longboarder, with consistent ranking in the World Surf League — so it wasn’t like the streak was a problem for him. In fact, at one point in the first couple years of their relationship, after realizing he’d surfed daily for a month without even intending to, he ended up on a streak of his own.
“I think I did like a year and a half myself, not because I had any mission or any goal or anything like that,” he said. “It was genuinely just because she was doing it, and I was hanging out with her so much.”
“You know, surfers, I think we can get a little princessy,” Stutzman said. “‘I am not going to surf today, it’s cold, or the waves aren’t good,’ whatever it might be. The year and a half I had my streak, I just forced myself to go out every day, no matter what, I found that I never regretted a session. Even on the worst days I’ve ever seen. YouThe wedding of Morgan Sliff and Christian Stultzman, which took place at Salidita, Mexico, in 2022. Photo by Brendan Simmons and Joey Anderson we are mad at yourself for forcing yourself to be out there, and then you come in and you are like, ‘You know what? I got two fun waves I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. That was one of the biggest takeaways I found personally, just finding merit on days otherwise you’d never want to go out and just doing something that puts you outside of what you want to do.”
And so the adventure began. Stutzman said people who knew about Sliff’s streak always asked him if it presented problems.
“I always got, ‘That must be a logistical nightmare. Like, as cool as that is, there are all these limitations with it,’” he said. “Like, ‘You can’t go to all these places.’ When I first learned about her streak, I had those same thoughts. But it never felt like that to me. It never actually posed a barrier to anything. If anything, it was really fun. Like, instead of being like, ‘Oh, we can’t do this, or we can’t go to this place,’ we looked at it more like, ‘How can we make this happen, with the stipulation that we have to surf?’ And that led to a lot of really fun and unique things that we never would have done otherwise.
“Even when we went on our belated honeymoon and we went to Denmark — I got to surf Denmark, a place I had always been told where there’s no surf in Denmark that can’t happen… you can only have those experiences if you really are on a mission like this.”
Surfing at 3 a.m. before an international trip became fairly commonplace, as did late night surfs, either scrambling upon arrival in some foreign place or returning to LAX with boards ready and the pedal to the metal towards the beach. But those were things that could be planned for. Other parts of the mission, like, say, getting buried under a snowstorm in Big Bear, not so much.
“I am not a snow person,” Sliff said. “Everytime I’ve gone snowboarding, I’ve gotten progressively worse.”
She and Christian were nonetheless convinced to take an overnight trip to Big Bear in the winter of 2019. They surfed the morning before they left, went up the mountain, and had a blast snowboarding that afternoon and the next morning. And then the skies dumped many tons of snow upon them, seemingly all at once, as if there’d been some kind of stoppage that had cleared up and all the snow in the heavens came down.
Sliff remembers thinking, “I have to get back!” but at 3 p.m., all the roads were closed. It looked like the end of the streak was upon her. In hopes of hatching some kind of plan, they went to a bar — where else could such a plan be hatched? — to try to figure things out. Stutzman, ever ingenious, was thinking about trying to find a froze-up fountain, and perhaps unfreezing it to create some waves.
“We were like, ‘We know there are fountains around. We have our surfboards with us. We’ll make our own waves,’” he recalled. “What she ended up deciding during the streak was that it matters less about the quality of the wave and more about the intent of what you are doing out there, and if you are riding a form of energy on water of any sort, right?”
“I think a lot of people get hung up on, what is a streak?” he said. “Like you have to do three waves or five waves, whatever people do when they do these streaks. But at the end of the day, if you paddle out to go surfing, and you’re kind of new at it and you catch one wave, or maybe you fall, or you don’t even get to your stomach or anything — you wouldn’t come in and say, ‘I didn’t surf.’ You’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, I surfed. Didn’t surf great that day, but I still surfed.”
The fountain idea was batshit crazy, but that’s what happens when you are a surfer at high altitudes surrounded only by frozen water. While still at the bar discussing the idea, Stutzman got a ping on his phone. The roads were open. They flew out the door.
“We got out as fast as we could,” Sliff said. “As soon as we got out, they closed the roads again, but we had made it out. We’re driving down the side of the mountain, and the conditions were really bad. There ended up being like a 40 car pileup…But if we wouldn’t have hit that 20 minute window, we wouldn’t have made it out.”
They pulled up to Sapphire Street in Redondo Beach at about 9 p.m. When they went to put on their wetsuits, they discovered that they were encrusted in tiny icicles.
“We put on our icicles wetsuits, and then got in,” Sliff said. “That was another close call.”
Other times it was planned insanity. Sliff, in her professional life, had found her calling. After writing the Endless Session blog, she realized that she’d always loved writing — which, in a sense, is a bit like maintaining a surf streak, in that every writing task is a problem, often seemingly intractable, in search of a solution. Sliff is a figurer out of things. At first it was a side gig, in which she offered writing services on a freelance gig site called Fiverr. But Morgan, being Morgan, became the empress of Fiverr — literally, one of the top ranked writers among thousands on the site, writing for everybody from a reclusive Canadian artist to a moving company on the Treasure Coast of Florida, including a lucrative stint writing a corporate white paper for an Italian cryptocurrency tycoon (and almost going to Italy but thinking better of it when the crypto people didn’t seem to comprehend her surfing imperative). Eventually, her skills caught the attention of a young up-and-coming company called eForms, where she began as a writer, then editor, and eventually rose to become Chief Content Officer. It has been in many respects a perfect professional fit, well-compensated remote work for a decidedly un-corporate corporation with enough built-in flexibility for her to travel and surf. However, a few years ago, the company hosted a Christmas party in a very wave-challenged location, Las Vegas.
This one perplexed Sliff. “How am I going to surf out there?” she asked Stutzman. “I can’t tell my work that I can’t go because I need to surf. That’s not an excuse.”
Stutzman had some ideas. The first seemed relatively simple: just rent a boat on Lake Mead, which is only 40 minutes east of Vegas, and Sliff could surf behind the boat. But it turned out boat rentals on the lake are strictly a summertime thing. So Stutzman went on Google maps to do some more reconnaissance, thinking maybe some other body of water within 100 miles or so “could tick the box.” And that’s how he came across something called the Vegas Wash.
“Essentially, what happens is all the runoff water from Vegas runs down the Vegas Wash, and gets filtered through all these like natural everglades and springs, and it eventually makes its way into Lake Mead,” he said. “It naturally filters the water so it’s clean by the time it gets to the lake. And there’s a spot about halfway down where there’s an incline that makes this free fall wave. So we brought like a five foot finless surfboard with us, and we would go there at five in the morning, because we just wanted, A. to get it out of the way in the morning, and B. just not to be these weird people who are showing up with surfboards and wetsuits with all these other people who are just hiking around. So we would just go up, get to the top of this incline, and you’d just kind of drop in and ride it as far as you could. It was like a 10-foot drop. We brought hydrogen peroxide with us and were washing our faces afterwards. It was kind of gnarly.”
The vast majority of the days were ocean waves, of course — as well as a few days at Kelly Slater’s wave pool. The times they surfed where surfing was impossible are some of Stutzman’s favorite memories of the streak.
“It’s just insane shit that was so much fun, more so looking back on it,” he said. “Just the logistics of surfing on the Great Lakes and making things possible that shouldn’t be possible.”
In finding a man who could find joy in surfing the Vegas Wash, Sliff clearly had found her partner in life. They were married in one of the best longboarding spots in the world, Saladita, a surf village in Guerrero, Mexico, surrounded by their surf familia, in a ceremony that included a paddleout. Officiating the ceremony was Kevin Sousa, the late great surfer, counselor, and musician who had been one of the stalwart presences in Sliff’s life, particularly after the passing of her brother, David, in 2017.
“Sousa walked me down the beach in Saladita to surf before it was Christian’s turn, since we weren’t going to see each other until later,” she said. “The swell wasn’t very big, but the best wave came in and all of the locals and Kevin called me into it. I just remember floating down this wave in my white one piece knowing that I was so certain and joyful about my life with Christian. I was riding toward the beach having never been more sure of anything in my life.”
Back home in Hermosa Beach, they were able to buy a home together, something few people of their age and surf-inclination are able to do anymore. As her streak came to an end in July, Sliff reflected that all of this — this love, this sense of belonging, this endless session — began with the decision she made in July, 2015.
“Meeting my husband, getting this job that I have, a corporate job but one that is like the least corporate job you could possibly have, and buying my house — working so hard not to get priced out of this town that I grew up in and love,” she said. “That has all come from this decision. That miracle.”
During her time of most unruly grief, Sousa had given her some simple tools to help her see her way through the darkness. “Focus on something you see, and say it out loud,” he told her. It’s a practice that has stuck with her beyond the darkest days and into the brighter ones.
“I’ve been doing that a little bit lately,” Sliff said. “Just be like, ‘Oh wow, this is the environment that I am in. That I have kind of created.”
Devotion
Those who do yoga call their time on the mat their practice. When I first arrived in the South Bay two decades ago, a musician-surfer friend used to implore me to surf. He knew I’d spent a lot of time on mountains. “Surfers,” he told me, “are the mountain men and women of this place.” What I came to realize much later, through both yoga and spending a lot of time around surfers, is that the ocean is where they practice. Spiritually, and otherwise. It is where they disappear into something larger than themselves.
It’s easy to forget that in surfing, more time is spent laying prone, paddling, than actually standing up on a wave. As you watch a surfer paddle, there is an element of devotion in the act, a steadfastness as they take themselves from shore.
“You are supplicating yourself to a greater entity, the ocean,” Frank Paine said. “Whether or not you believe in God, or the cosmic muffin, or hairy thunder or whatever, it is a form of supplication to something larger.”
In its essence, Morgan Sliff’s 10 year surf streak was exactly this: an act of devotion. The larger something she gave herself to was the ocean, but also something even larger, something harder to name. Something to believe in.
When she was strained to the point of breaking, first in the very beginning, and at various times in the last decade, most acutely when her brother died, but also later, after the loss of Sousa, followed by the loss of her father, the ocean was a holy comforting constant. She wrote about it, with hard-earned clarity, for Surfer’s Journal.
“The shine left everything,” she wrote. “David was gone, and with him went whatever I had done to make myself whole. There was only one thing I really knew how to do, and that was walk across the sand.
But surfing was different. In the ocean, David’s death was on loudspeaker. Land was less somber but more violent. I grew an angry edge and refound my place as the big sister protecting him from the homophobes that used to shout ‘Gayvid.’ It took thousands of waves to melt that chip off my shoulder. The water hurt, but my legs kept moving. They knew what I needed.
Eventually, the darkness lifted. It took years, which I counted in waves. Therapy, in and out of the water, helped. But the thought of him will never hurt less.”
If you know Morgan, she has either brought you to the water, or at least tried quite relentlessly to do so. Absent that, she almost certainly has brought you into her larger circle, which you could call surf familia, but is really bound by a larger sense of shared blue wonder.
Jodi Flicker met Sliff through the Jimmy Miller Foundation, the local non-profit founded in the memory of a young surfer who took his life while suffering from depression. The Foundation provides ocean therapy for military veterans and anyone else who might be suffering from trauma or depression. Its motto is, “To heal others, and ourselves, one wave at a time.” Flicker helped market a campaign that featured Sliff and encouraged people to do their own 30 day surf streaks, and they remained friendly afterwards.
A year after their meeting, Flicker was going through a hard time. She was taking care of her aging parents. A therapist made a suggestion.
“As a caregiver, you rarely find time for yourself, and you need to kind of hold on to certain things to give yourself a little bit of peace,” Flicker said. “And so this therapist suggested that I go into the ocean, because I’ve been surfing on and off now for a number of years, paddle out, sit there, and ask the ocean for help. Ask the ocean for answers.”
She was at Sapphire Street in Redondo Beach, and quite a few other surfers were out. She sat and asked the ocean for help, then turned to her left, and saw a woman paddling towards her with a big smile. It was Morgan, as if on behalf of the ocean. So began a deeper friendship, one in which Flicker found herself now part of the Endless Session.
“I have found that every time I feel like, ‘Okay, I need to go into the water,’ and sometimes you’re just not in the mood…I think of her, and it kind of pushes me,” Flicker said. “And then there’s also times when I can just reach out to her and be like, ‘Can I join you?’ I was really grateful for and inspired by her and her tenacity, the decision that she made and the differences it made in her life. I continually go back to her story, and it helps me get through times when I am feeling sort of stuck.”
When Sliff thinks about the streak in retrospect, it’s little moments that somehow reside with her most strongly, like when her trusty chiropractor, Dr. Ed Scale, would find a way to put her aching body back together, time and again, with tender resoluteness that extended to helping launch her in waves when she was injured. Or the time her friend Marion Clark joined her on a day she was running from the wind. “The most difficult part of the streak was the wind….The north wind totally annihilates the South Bay,” Sliff said. On this day, Palos Verdes was absorbing the north wind, so they hid behind the Peninsula “and ditched some crazy monster wind waves” for a few sweet sets at Seal Beach, followed by a few cups of ginger tea.
“It was nice to have a friend on one of the difficult days,” she said. “We made tea with a jetboil in the back of her car.”
The days of the steak so often felt like gifts. Which, in the end, may have been the ultimate mission accomplished.
“My life became so full from this that I think it helped me be open and more energetic towards other things, like growing my career, or just being a good friend, and just wanting to put more into the world,” Sliff said. “Because I was getting so much from the commitment that I was making to myself…The whys [of the streak] kind of changed a bit throughout. But for the last few years, it was just kind of making sure I gave a gift to myself every day.” ER
