In the beginning, there was the wave.

​A beast of a thing off the coast of Northern California, the wave started when a storm near Alaska raged long enough and strong enough to send its energy barreling over two thousand miles of open ocean. That energy hit the continental shelf about 80 miles offshore and continued full force until it slammed into a shallow reef a mile from Half Moon Bay. From there, the underwater topography focused the energy and forced the water to stand up into a 40- or 50-foot wave.

In the 1960s, some surfers who surfed nearby named the beast after their dog, Maverick. They considered the big wave, which breaks a half mile offshore, un-rideable. That seemed to be the prevailing thought until 1975, when a 17-year-old local named Jeff Clark paddled out.

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On the VPK blog

Admittedly, I picked the first doctor in a fairly juvenile way. I was a self-employed writer with the cheapest insurance I could find and, reliably healthy, I had never used it. The tingling in my fingertips, however, seemed like it meant something — like my fingers were trying to tell me something — so I looked at the HMO’s website and picked the doctor with crazy, curly hair.

Her brown mop was unruly just like mine, and I took that as a good sign. In the end, though, the primary care doc and I didn’t know each other long, and I never grew to trust her. She kept me waiting for 25 minutes, then spent five minutes with me and referred me to a neurologist. “Goodbye,” she said as she slid out the door. There had been no time for questions or discussion. She was gone.

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