Duotone Magazin No.01 2019

“Connecting with the land is important to me. I feel very at peace at home.” I spent the first 8 years of my life in a small mountain town in Northern California. My parents had a big piece of land where they had built a house themselves. My dad has been a builder all his life and I learned a lot from him. From a very young age he would give me small jobs like cleaning up the building site and bringing him tools. When I was a teenager I worked for him after school and actually financed my first trips to PKRA events around the world by earning money working construction. My dad is the type of person who likes to do everything himself and he really instilled in me the importance and value of learning how to do things on your own and not needing to rely on other people to do work for you. Building and learning how to build things has always been part of who I am. When my wife Kristin and I first stumbled across this overgrown piece of bare land and realized it had a stream running through it, we definitely fell in love with it right away. After a hard day of work in my shop making boards I like to jump in the stream to cool off in the evening. I built almost everything on our property: House, workshop, concrete driveway, outdoor pizza oven, chicken coops, turkey coop, CNC machine, stone walls, etc. Next project is a hydro generator to supplement our off-grid solar system. I love being in the ocean, but I also really enjoy the satisfaction of being able to stand back at the end of the day and seeing what I’ve accomplished. Building things with my hands and working on the land gives me a different sense of achievement than my sports do.  Connecting with the land is very important to me. We have a lot of fruit trees, which have now been long enough in the ground to carry fruits – mango, banana, papaya, lilicoi, avocado – all the stuff that grows well in Hawaii. I just harvested the bananas, about 200 pounds. They all get ripe at the same time. We peel them, put them in the freezer, and can use them for making smoothies. We have bees, grow a lot of herbs and also a few vegetables which are easy to cultivate. And we are also harvesting our own chicken and turkeys, and are eating our own animals. I feel very at peace at home. To Kristin and me this property has a very special value because of all of the blood, sweat, and tears we have put into it and we definitely enjoy the serenity of this place. Home is where the heart is and spending my time here with Kristin and our three dogs, Red, Lily, and Harley is what makes this place really feel home for me and what gives me the inspiration and drive to commit myself to my ‘real job’ of creating new board shapes.​ SK Y SOLBACH S H A P ER Photos: Tracy Kraft T R U E 35 T R U E S O U R C E S O F P O W E R 34