From the East Hampton Star
Taking Autistic Kids for a Surf in Montauk
By Russell Drumm
(09/20/2007) A young boy walked up to Israel “Izzy” Paskowitz at Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk on Saturday. His mother was at his side. His eyes seemed to be looking elsewhere, but very politely, at his mother’s urging, in a soft voice he said, “I want to thank you for the surfing.”
“You’re welcome,” Mr. Paskowitz said. The boy put his hands to his face. “I want to go again,” he said.
“When?” asked the founder of Surfers Healing, a organization created specifically to take autistic children out of their mysterious shells, and to turn a beach here, a beach there, into a sanctuary of shared understanding for moms and dads who most days struggle alone to cope with their challenged children in the “normal” world.
“Now,” said the boy, his eyes still focused elsewhere but now flitting eagerly. “My vest is back there. Who can take me?”
“I will take you. Let’s go,” said Mr. Paskowitz, a former competitive surfer and the father of Isaiah, a boy with severe autism. Isaiah, now 16, was 3 or 4 “when the clarity went out of his eyes,” said Joshua Paskowitz, Izzy’s younger brother and part of a team of world-class surfers who have perfected a method for getting autistic kids into the surf safely.
It’s not always easy. On Friday, mothers and fathers led their children to big surfboards waiting on the beach pointing seaward. Some kids went willingly. Others balked, held their faces. Some screamed, not in terror of the water, one mother explained, but in fear of doing something outside their narrowly proscribed experience. Each was greeted and encouraged by the men who would paddle them offshore, and by two others whose job it would be to catch the surfboards when the tandem team approached the beach on a wave.
At the start of the day, Izzy Paskowitz had gathered the volunteers into a circle. His healing surf sessions began in 1999 when he and his wife, Danielle, saw the peace that surfing brought Isaiah. He told volunteers not to be afraid of their charges’ resistance. “If they grab and scream, that’s okay. They can be combative, resistant, but this is something different for them.” One of the team offered a prayer in the Hawaiian language, and the surfing began.
The waves were small, ideal for 11-year-old Nicholas Daly, who had flown to New York from Surrey, England, to take part in the Surfers Healing events at Long Beach two days earlier and in Montauk on Saturday. Steven Daly, Nicholas’s father, said he was living in Cape Town, South Africa, when his son was diagnosed with autism at only 7 months. The family moved to England and from there commuted to New York in search of therapy.
“They are tactile-defensive,” Mr. Daly said. Autistic people do not like to be touched. “This allows them to be coated, enveloped without threat,” he said of surfing. “It’s freedom. I guess it’s what surfers feel but don’t think about.”
Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that the local volunteers watched the children being paddled out, some lying prone in front of their guides, others sitting, still others, the younger ones, riding on their guides’ backs. They were paddled out to the lineup, where the small waves were forming up and breaking. The first wave was caught. The guide stood, reached down, grabbed the child’s life vest and hoisted him to his feet. The beach erupted in cheers and applause as the autistic surfer approached the beach, his face alight with joy.
Again and again, all through the day, more than 50 autistic kids surfed wave after wave. Their joy was infectious. Smiles and tears.
John Russell from Oakdale took part at a Surfers Healing event at Long Beach last year. He goes to a school that has a work program. He files papers. “I never thought he’d get that far. I knew nothing. All I knew was ‘Rain Man.’ There was no help out there,” said his mother, Justine, referring to Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond in the Academy Award-winning 1988 movie. She said that when John was diagnosed, the occurrence of autism in the general population was 1 in 10,000. “Now, it’s 1 in 150.”
Justine Russell’s other autistic child was on the beach, too, although he could not participate. He was going through a difficult period. His hands had to be restrained to keep him from harming himself. His twin sister is free from the disorder. The cause is a mystery, Ms. Russell said, and no, she did not think it was genetic. “Nothing runs in my family.”
Lisa Meyers is the executive director of the East End Disabilities Association, which co-sponsored Saturday’s surf session. She and her husband “came together from other families,” and are both parents of autistic children. They met while advocating for state help in the early 1990s. The association, which started as an after-school program in Westhampton Beach, now employs 250 people from a home office in Riverhead. Services include a crisis center where children “with trauma” can be taken to give exhausted parents a break.
“I’m surprised to see it in person,” said Ms. Meyers’s husband, George Fertal, speaking of surfing’s therapeutic properties. “Autistic kids don’t want to be touched. Their personality becomes one with their surroundings, with the water. They’re gleeful. I think it’s a God thing, or umbilical, reminds them of the womb once on the board and in the water.”
“It’s the motion of the ocean,” was how the singer Jimmy Buffett put it. Mr. Buffett, a surfer himself, showed up to volunteer on Saturday afternoon. Later that evening, he performed for parents and volunteers at the Sunset Saloon on Fort Pond Bay in Montauk.
The Paskowitz family was well known for their good works long before Surfers Healing. Dorian Paskowitz, M.D., is the father of nine children, Israel and Joshua among them. He’s known as the Surfer’s Doctor as well as the father of surfing in Israel. He took surfboards to that nation in 1951. On Aug. 21 of this year, the 86-year-old “Jewish Hawaiian” donated and personally took 12 surfboards through the barriers at the Israel-Gaza crossing to Gaza’s small surfing community, in the hope that it would help foster peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
“Autism is a mysterious affliction,” Joshua Paskowitz said on Saturday afternoon, a day without a cloud in the sky. “It’s like they hear at double speed a record that’s playing at normal speed. They experience overwhelming input. They are a part of another world, another speed. They absorb things differently. One kid on my board said, ‘Look, a rainbow in the sky.’ ”
As parents and surfed-out kids began heading home, a tired Israel Paskowitz talked about autism’s sensory overload, and the quieting effect of the sea. “They are on a different frequency. They see the sun differently, tastes are alien. The water captures every one of their senses, neutralizes [the static]. It’s not surfing,” Mr. Paskowitz said. “It’s the ocean.”
Members of the Surfers Healing team helped a boy with autism overcome his fear of a new experience at Ditch Plain.
Russell Drumm Photos
Once on a wave, fears evaporated and smiles appeared.
Paul O. Colliton
Israel Paskowitz, the founder of the Surfers Healing Foundation, hoisted a glass at the Sunset Saloon in Montauk with Jimmy Buffett, a volunteer, after a successful day in the surf with autistic kids.
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Sorry for embarrassing you. Hang in there! Prayers for God's grace and goodness for you and your's today.
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