The Legend of Joshua Solbach

It was my sophomore year in college and I had been invited by a group of guys that I knew from the freshman dorm experience to go in on renting a house.  We found a large house in West Eugene with five bedrooms.  Well, four bedrooms to be exact but the laundry room was large enough for a desk and a bed so I took it in exchange for a discount on rent.  On move in day we met Josh.  As we were going in and out with furniture and boxes through the front door he let himself in, barefoot, sat down and started talking.  He had longish blond hair and piercing blue eyes.  Because of the unusual way in which he had just walked in and become friendly he struck me as child-like.  Once we had put our boxes away and settled down a bit he said he had some weed and asked us if we wanted to smoke.  A number of us partook.  That was actually the only time I ever remember him having any weed of his own, but for the rest of that year he always seemed to be around to smoke our weed when it was available.  He said he was from Bonaire, a small communist country in the Caribbean Sea.  As we got to know him over the course of the year, we discovered his fascinating life story.

Josh's family actually came from a rural area in California where his father was a building contractor.  At a certain point, when Josh and his younger brother were small children, his father sold his successful business and moved the family to Bonaire.  There the two young boys grew up with access to the beach and Josh took to the sport of windsurfing.  He was prodigious, and because of his success in winning various competitions, at the age of sixteen he qualified to join the professional circuit and was offered a sponsorship.  He wanted to go and tour the world, but his parents didn't want him to go and without their permission he could not leave until he had reached the age of his majority.  And so, at the age of 18, he took the offer and went on tour, despite the fact that his parents didn't feel he was ready for this lifestyle.  He went on the traveling windsurfing circuit and began to have success.  By the time he was 21 he was the 3rd ranked professional windsurfer in the world.

The lifestyle he was living would be the envy of many young men.  He was making money doing what he loved, traveling to the most beautiful places on earth.  There were also temptations because it was a party lifestyle, which included drinking and drugs.  One day, as Josh was staying on the Northern California coast, he dropped acid.  Then he got in his car, drove to a cliff overlooking the sea, got out of his car and ran and jumped off the cliff.  I suppose under the influence of the drug he felt like he would be able to fly but instead he fell and broke his back on the cliff.  This cut short his professional windsurfing career.  When we met him he was still in the process of rehabbing his back, dreaming of making a comeback as a surfer.  He would sit with us on the porch drinking beer and watching the clouds; somehow he was able to tell us what the waves were like 50 miles west of us on the coast by interpreting the patterns of the clouds.  He couldn't hold down a job (too lazy) and lived with his girlfriend in the loft of the house next door to us.  One day he just up an disappeared.  From what I understand he had moved up to the Columbia gorge where conditions were favorable for practicing kite surfing, which apparently had taken over windsurfing as a competitive sport.  I don't know what ever happened to Josh but his younger brother Sky became a professional kiteboarder with his own board shaping company.  The internet is littered with videos of Sky catching big time air...  I bet it feels like he is flying.