An Oral Memoir Podcast

Two Boards
and a Guitar

When he finished college, he already had the job. He bought two surfboards and a guitar instead, and left. The Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Fiji. The trip was not a detour. It was the education.

A son interviews his father · The Pacific · 1998 · The road to medicine

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The Podcast

Listen to the memoir

A 20-minute audio story, told in his voice and mine.

Runtime: ~20 min · Recorded 2026 · Miami, FL

The Story

The long way to medicine

My dad finished college in California in the fall of 1997. He had a plan: drive cross country to Miami, go to work at his father's landscaping business. A clear next step with someone waiting for him at the other end. He was twenty-one. Most people at twenty-one are just trying to do the next logical thing.

He did not do the next logical thing. He bought two surfboards and a three-quarter Ovation guitar, and he bought plane tickets instead. The Philippines. Indonesia. Australia. Fiji. January through June, 1998. Six months, a camera, and those two things he actually loved.

I am seventeen now. I needed to know what he was looking for out there, and whether he found it. Because the answer, as far as I can tell, is that he was not looking for anything specific. He just went. And the trip found him something anyway: a diver dying on a ferry in Palawan before the boat had even left the dock. A swell at Lakey Peak that humbled him in ten seconds flat. A kava ceremony on a Fijian island where, starving from the boat crossing, he ate vegetables for the first time in his life. Each of those moments was teaching him something about the body, about impermanence, about paying attention. He did not have a name for the subject yet.

He came home in the summer of 1998 and went to work for his dad. Then he started studying Traditional Chinese Medicine. Acupuncture. The body as a system rather than a machine. On the surface, a California surfer with a guitar ending up in medicine makes no sense. But it makes complete sense if you were paying attention to the trip.

The wandering was not the detour. It was the point.

Digital Artifacts

The route, 1998

  1. 01 Philippines Palawan, beaches, the overnight ferry
  2. 02 Indonesia Lakey Peak, Sumbawa, the Periscopes swell
  3. 03 Australia returning somewhere familiar, differently
  4. 04 Fiji the island, the kava, the first vegetables
Dad at 22 on the trip
On the road, 1998. Courtesy of family archive.
Playing guitar on a tropical beach
The guitar on the beach. He played because he loved it, not because it was useful.
Surfing a large Pacific wave
In the water, the Pacific, 1998. The ocean did not care about his plans.
Kava ceremony, Fiji
Drinking kava, Fiji, 1998. The island where the trip shifted.
Group gathering on the island, Fiji
Gathering on the Fijian island. People cooking three meals a day, talking about food differently.
Fiji island beach with thatch hut and calm water
The island he took the three-hour boat to reach. Thatch huts. Calm water. Courtesy of family archive.
Sunset over the Pacific, May 31 1998
May 31, 1998. Somewhere in the Pacific. Shot on film.

The Barreto Connection

One technique I borrowed

The thing Barreto does in Rebel with a Cause that I kept coming back to is how he finds the one object that tells you everything before anyone says a word. In Chapter 2, Angel is waiting alone in a room at La Cabaña when he notices a book on the nightstand. One book. Barreto does not explain what communism means or why it should be feared. He lets the object carry all of that. The book on the nightstand does more work than a paragraph of political context would.

I used that in the ferry scene. I did not write that the Philippines felt foreign or chaotic or hard. I wrote about a man dying on a boat that had not left the dock. One moment. And everything about being twenty-two and alone and out of your depth arrives through that single thing, without me having to name any of it.

Barreto also taught me to pay attention to what a person carries into a scene. In Chapter 1, describing Angel in the machine shop, he writes that his hands, already calloused, became tools themselves. The hands tell you who he is before he does anything. That is where the surfboards and the guitar came from. My dad did not just pack equipment. He packed a portrait of himself at twenty-one. The boards say he was there for the water. The guitar says he played because he loved it. Together they say everything about who he was before the trip changed him.

word count: —

Statement of Goals & Attribution

Notes & credits

Statement of Goals: I set out to understand what my father was actually looking for when he left for the Pacific at twenty-one, and whether the answer had anything to do with who he became. The thematic realization I was after: the trip was not a detour from his real life. It was the curriculum for it.

Interview: Original interview conducted by Rio Costa with Michael Costa, June 2026, Miami, FL. No AI-generated scripts. No pre-existing recordings.

Music: Acoustic fingerpicked guitar. YouTube Audio Library, royalty-free. Creative Commons license, free for reuse.

Sound effects: Ocean waves, tropical birds. Pixabay Audio, royalty-free. Pixabay Content License, free for reuse.

Photos: All photos courtesy of family archive, 1998. Scanned 2026.

Mentor text: Eduardo Barreto, Rebel with a Cause: A Cuban in the Congo (2025).