[Baz]

Florida's Last Beach Bum Lived in a Van Until He Died Surfing


Dana Brown surfed every day except Saturday, based on his strict interpretation of the Bible.
Photo courtesy of Bob Brown

VERY long piece and worth reading.

Dana cared for his dad every day, carrying him when he couldn't walk. Even after George was diagnosed with advanced heart failure, Dana remained convinced his father would not die. But he slipped away early one March morning in 2016, with Dana beside his hospital bed. Shocked, Dana traded watches with him. He believed he'd see his father again in the afterlife, and they would trade back.

Soon after, dozens of local surfers headed to 16th Street for a "paddle out" — a surfing ritual in which surfers form a circle in the water to remember one of their own.

The Browns held a small, informal funeral beneath a pavilion, where Dana stood and spoke, at times tearfully, about George's last months. "They were all telling me that he was going to die, but I didn't believe them," he said. "I didn't believe them until the very end."

In a wooded cemetery, the Brown sons dug a hole in the ground and buried their dad themselves. Dana planted a garden on top of the grave and visited every day. Sometimes he'd ask the cemetery owner if he could spend the night. On his Facebook page, he wrote that he missed his dad "something awful."

"Dana without his father — it was hard to imagine how this was going to work out," surfer Tom Goffinet says.

He tried to get a job as a lifeguard. He started a campaign to run for president and took to YouTube to lay out his platform: protecting the rights of the unborn, rooting out corruption in the Federal Reserve, cleaning up Wall Street, and bringing the Bible into the classroom. He added more plants to the garden blossoming on his dad's grave. He found work as an adventure guide in Cocoa Beach. Finally, in September, he packed up and headed west. His destination: Huntington Beach.

"Everybody has a dream beach," Morelle says, "and that was his."