Slow Baja - Surfer Glen Horn A Study In Slow Baja

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Glen Horn is about as Slow Baja as it gets. He has prioritized a life filled with surfing, physical fitness, and living modestly and in harmony with nature. After moving to San Diego as a "young tike," Horn grew up playing Davy Crockett in the local canyons. Soon his older brother was surfing, and the Horn boys were hitch-hiking down Balboa Drive to the beach. He began surfing as a youngster and tried his hand at shaping a board when he was 12 years old. Soon he was exploring Baja looking for his version of Endless Summer. Amazingly, he found it and has held on tightly to it for decades.  In The Bull, Filmmaker Eric Ebner captured Horn's beautifully spare existence feeding his surf habit and living his soulful life. "A secret spot in Baja, California, hundreds of miles from civilization. An old milk van converted into the perfect surfing mobile. A 67-year-old man at the peak of his physical fitness and in line with mother nature every step of the way. "The Bull" is the award-winning story of San Diego surfing legend Glen Horn and his journey to an unconventional lifestyle. Enjoy this intimate Slow Baja Podcast with shaper and surfing legend Glen Horn. Hearty thanks to his wife, Roberta Horn, for her help in making this conversation happen.

This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down, my favorite tequila. Hey, folks, it's that time of the year again. It is the Nora Mexican 1000. The Slow Baja Safari class is your ticket into the happiest race on earth. We take the green flag every morning. We drive the best stages, but we've got a little time. We're going to stop.

We're going to take photos. We're going to take a little swim, maybe buy an ice cream cone. And we're going to get back across the finish line in time for a shower and get cleaned up and watch the racers come in. And then we all go to the big fiesta. Each night, have a fine dinner. And back at it the next day. It's five days to get from Ensenada to San Jose del Cabo. We start on April 30th in Ensenada, and we end up with a huge beach party, May 5th, Cinco de

at San Jose del Cabo. It is a major league adventure in the Slow Baja Safari class is your ticket in. For more information, N-O-R-R-A, that's nora.com, or you can always message me through Slow Baja. Hola, amigos, Michael Emery, Slow Baja here, and I am super stoked to bring you this conversation today. But before I introduce the show, I've got to give my heaping dose of gratitude to Matt Sawyer for suggesting today's Slow Baja conversation was surfing legend Glenn Horn. Recently, I was on the Baja XL, as you know, and I happened to be in Guerrero Negro. I had Zil Martinez take us out on a whale watching trip, and I was parking Slow Baja in the secure parking and camping lot right in front of his house across the street from his shop.

And as I was parking, a guy said, hey, are you Slow Baja? Of course, you know, the name's right there on the door. So, yeah, I'm Slow Baja, and it was Matt Sawyer. What a great thing to run into him and to be able to put the name and the face and connect all the dots that he had given me the tip to check out Glenn Horn. And it was just terrific because, of course, we had just interviewed Glenn a week or so before Matt and I met in Guerrero Negro. So to get on to Glenn, Glenn Horn is about as slow Baja as it gets. I implore you if you haven't seen it already to watch the amazing 2017 documentary on his life. It's called The Bull.

It's made by Eric Ebner. It's won awards all over the world in film festivals. And it's an excellent, excellent short documentary on Glenn's surfing life in Baja. All right. Without further ado, Glenn Horn today on Slow Baja. Hey, man. Hey, it's nice to be here. Hey, great to have you here.

I've got Glenn Horn, surfer, shaper, Baja. He is as slow Baja as they come. We're working on that one, yeah. He is super slow Baja, and I'm just stoked to be here in. Tell me the name of your rig. Well, the name of the rig is El Toro Rojo Grande, the Big Red Bull. It has a set of Texas Longhorns on the front. It's got a tail and a set of Cajonis.

Real ones. Real ones. It's a real, real sack. And the Mexicans, when I was at one of my favorite breaks, said, if you're going to have a set of horns and a tail, you've got to have a set of cahones. So I feel really sorry for the bull, but they went out and gave me a set of bull. Well, he probably became a pretty good fiesta anyways, so, you know, mother nature. So, Glenn, again, I had four pages of notes here written.

and maybe I'll swing by the airport and see if they're still sitting there. But you moved to San Diego when you were a kid. When I was five years old. And so how long did it take you to get down to the beach and start surfing? Back in the day, well, we hitch with the folks or a friend. But at that time, Balboa was just a vacant street. And if we wanted to hitchhike, it might take us sometimes 15 or 20 minutes to get a ride, get a car, even see a car and back then we were on the edge of the the frontier we lived up in

Claremont and the coyotes the bobcat and the deer would come up in our front yard that's how distance that was from a kind of real civilization and what brought you out here your dad I'm oh my dad worked for the telephone company and he said back in the day when he decided to move was that it was getting too much traffic and that was back in 55 54 and so we moved to San Diego and I'm sure glad he did so so you made your way to the beach and you found surfing I'm assuming you moved up the chain from body surfing to surfing surfing did get an e-board in there in between no my brother my oldest brother was the surfer of the family okay he had an old

balsa board and it was patched with tar and so if we went serving you'd get it all over you but that's my first experience I even remember my first wave which was actual green water wave after the white water and that was in La Jolla Shores wow it's good stuff to remember that wow and at what point did you say like this is my thing did you play other sports as a kid were you a baseball player or baseball a little bit i was a gymnast in high school pretty much that was it stayed in the canyon my whole life as a kid go down in the morning after breakfast come up for lunch go back down until dinner and uh played davy crockett and dania boon san diego's a little different now oh boy a little there's a few more people here yeah well

when we first moved here uh solidad had horse ranches on it yeah so Yeah, I talked to Eve E viewing about that, the big ranches and the horseback riding and all that here in the 40s and 50s. There's a lot of open space. Yeah. Well, so you eventually got to Baja, which I guess is we ought to just jump to that and get on with it. My first experience of Baja was crossing the border was with my folks. and that was in the late 50s. That's when you go down the street and you haggle with the merchants to get your price down and everything else.

And then after that, when I was able to drive, it was 66, 65, 64, 66 was my first actual drive across. And I've been hooked ever since. And what sort of vehicles were you taken down in 66? I've had a lot of vehicles for Baja. That one just happened to be an English Ford Thames van. And you wouldn't believe what it was painted like, but you can't show that on public. I think I saw some pictures of it in your film. Is that right?

Kind of light blue? Oh, he did, yeah. The P.B. Horny Toads? Yeah, P.B. Horny Toads, yeah. Yeah, quite a van. Is that something we going to talk about, the P.B. Horny Toads? Well, P.B. Horny Toes was a group of guys that just had a fictitious club, but they had cards and everything else,

and called a P.B. Hornetotes. It was just a bunch of surfers. There's a couple guys that still, I know one guy for sure, still has one of the cards, and that was back in the 60s. Amazing. 70s, yeah. Just good fun.

Oh, yeah. That's when you can park on the street in front where my surf shop used to be. And where was your surf shop? On the corner of Phelpspar and Ocean Boulevard, which is Ocean Boulevard is now a park. But I grew up around that, shop and when it became available I bought it and I had it for 12 years and then turned it

into a successful business because it was flailing when I bought it and good fun real good fun had all the rats hanging around my shop and everything else in fact there's a picture of it on the shaping room wall and had it for 12 years and retired at 38 well let's talk about that So you started off as a carpenter. Right. Got some skills that could serve you for the rest of your life. Yeah, I was a carpenter for about 10 years, yeah. And was it, you know, framing or finish or everything?

Well, I started out as an apprentice. And went to school for apprenticeship. And I was a framer pretty much. That's when San Diego was being built. So you can walk down the street with your tool bags and get a job. And that's what I did. I just went from job to job. and work for three months and take three months off, jump on my motorcycle, go for a trip through all the states west of the Rockies, and come back, go surfing, start all over again, just keep surfing and ride my motorcycle and working.

It looked like Harleys from the pictures I saw. Yeah, there's a couple Harleys, Triumphs, Gold Wings, Honda Gold Wings. Okay, that came a little later. That was my last one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A bike I'd say I'd never ride a full dress, but I did at the end. Did you and Roberta have matching jackets and talk to each other with a head phone? Brenda.

Did you know Brenda? Oh, yeah, Brenda was great. We're laughing for making an earlier reference. I've got Christopher Kaiser, my podcast producer, first time. The two of us are actually in the same place working together, and he's getting Glenn loosened up by referring to breakfast with Brenda, which Roberta didn't know a dang thing about. Yeah. Hey, so, Glenn, you made some trips to Baja. with your family. And did your family have a sense that you said your older brother was a surfer?

Did your family have a sense that surfing was a calling for you guys or that surfing was just a distraction from that's just what you did when you weren't working or weren't studying or was it a problem or did they get it, I guess is what I'm going to. My parents were cool. They never told any of us if I had two older brothers. Never told us or gave us suggestions of what they wanted us to be or would do anything. They just let us be ourselves and so from there my career is a slow Baja guy developed from there so my parents weren't well they were beachgoers because when I was a little tyke when we lived in Los Angeles we'd go to Seal Beach and they'd rent a cottage and we'd all go to the beach I think for a week I think

and then that's what my actual introduction to the ocean was as a child, a really small character. Before you got your master's thesis in oceanography by nine months of the year in Baja. Yeah, yeah. Masters thesis, PhD, international oceanic superstar. Well, so from the P.B. Horny Toads in your Thames van, was it right-hand drive? Thames. T-H-A-M-E-N-E-N-E-N. No, it was left-hand drive.

It was a four-cylinder. Painted all up. Oh, yeah. I'm surprised my parents even let me park in the driveway because back then, you know, all the neighborhoods were pretty conservative as far as how you park your car and everything else. But this thing was off the chart. And you guys had some messages painted to the local ladies? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

All right, we won't go into that. It's there if you watch the movie. X-rated. Yeah, if you watch the movie The Bull, they've got a nice cut of that. Hey, so you started getting down to Baja and you started surfing down there, and I guess that's where we ought to really stop dancing around and get into it. Tell me about Baja in those days. Oh, boy.

They kept the secrets pretty tight for a long, long time until the stinking Internet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was the kind of days when you would go down, and we didn't have good maps. At least I didn't have a good map. And my buddy, Bill Menard, who I grew up with, who's a great shaper right now. Now, he and I would explore Baja. You go down dirt roads, look at a point, going, oh, this is great, but there's no surf.

He might be there at the wrong day of the week or the wrong week of the month, and it might be a place that just goes off the chart. So we just went exploring all the different points and all the different places. We went all the way down to Toto Santos one year. Actually, it was the year, the next year, after the highway was finished, which was 73. And that was our first major expedition. Up until then, a deep Baja trip was Colanette.

Right. So you're staying pretty far north. Unexplored territory in Colonnette, if you can imagine that. Yeah, yeah, no, I can. Sure. You know, crazy wild country. So from there, we just kept on exploring. You never told anybody what you did.

You never gave out any information or anything. In fact, after I got big red, I'd have to lie about when I was leaving because people wouldn't want to go down and follow me to go find out where I was going and stuff like that. So I'd give them the wrong date, the wrong month, and then I'd take off. It's pretty stealth. You had to do it, or otherwise people know where you were going. Yeah. You'd expose your secrets.

What's that surfing magazine cover where the guy shot from inside the tent and you could see the curl? and that's where people were saying, I think I can figure out where that break is in Baja. Yeah, yeah, that's on my wall. That's on your wall? Yeah, it's in my phone. It's pretty legendary. Yeah, it was Kevin Notting and Craig Peterson's trip.

Those are the legendary guys. Yeah, they just did a book, I think, recently. Yeah, maybe I'll have to get them on Slow Baja. Oh, yeah, they've, yeah, world travelers. Those are the ones that change surfing. I got distracted with the great racing movie on any Sunday, but the surfing movie by Dana Bruce Brown. Endless Summer.

Endless Summer. What happened in your life when the Endless Summer came out? When Endless Summer came out, I can see that to this day. It was film. Bruce Brown was, in those days, with the film in the movie theater. Right. And he would be narrating it. And it first showed at the Roxy Theater here in San Diego.

which is no longer here. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, a landmark, and they tore it down. Now it's the post office. But I remember that going to that movie, fully packed, standing room only, all the aisles were filled. There were no fire marshals coming into that movie and saw it for the first time at the Roxy Theater. And that changed the whole perspective of what surfing could be. It's just amazing. at that time that was the ultimate movie

and you look back at it now and it's still a great movie but the guys that you thought were just totally ripping just standard longboard guys now but it was it was a and that changed a whole lot of people's lives endless summer classic yeah so I

think it must have just turned on a generation to the sport of surfing and the adventure of surfing afar. And were you already doing some of that? You were making some Baja trips already by the time the film came out, yeah? Well, short ones.

Yeah, that was the beginning. I think Bruce Brown made a statement of something like when I made this film, there were 50,000 places unsurfed nobody knew about. Now there's 50,000 surfers that visit all the breaks that were in the movie kind of thing. So it kind of gives you an idea

of what was happening back then as far as popularity of unknown places. There were plenty of them. So take me through that trip when you got down to Toto Santos. Let's talk about that. Because even with the highway opening,

that there was pavement, it didn't mean that Baja was now easy-peasy. I mean, there's still, you know, yes, there was pavement, but was there going to be a gas station? where we're going to stay, where we're going to get provisions. I mean, it still was a country that was pretty different, pretty Spartan compared to the United States.

Well, it was long before NAFTA was passed, so there was hardly any food per se, fresh fruit, vegetables or anything. You can get it from maybe a farmer and stuff like that. But the gas stations, there were plenty. They had them every, what, 50 or 75 miles. Now you can see all the derelict places where the gas station. are. This is still when it was all brand new and it didn't have to make a profit. It just had to be there and brand new. Yeah, they just wanted people to come down and, you know, buy gas and then that's when they had what they called the, the Green Angels. Right. Yep. Rolling up and down the highways.

Trucks going down with storage bins on the side and supposedly if you break down, you hopefully had a part that you needed. Right. And the guys could supposedly know something about cars. and yeah it was a fun time you had to take all your own water because you didn't know what kind of water you were going to get if he went someplace and asked for water like a farmer or something like that Unless he had a well, then you'd have good water. So you had to take all your own food, all your own water to be safe. You had to make sure you had... I always had a checklist, and I made sure I had everything from tools to parts and everything else.

So if anything happened, you needed a tow rope, you needed a jack, all kinds of stuff. Everything that you needed to fix a car you had to take with you. So you had to have a special car. And I had to have good suspension and, you know, things like that. But a lot of guys made them in small cars. I did it in the Jeep. You were smarter than the average bear, I think. Well, I grew up in the mountains with my parents.

They always were up in the mountains fishing and stuff like that. So as a child, I was exposed to camping and, you know, supplies and things like that. But the trip that I did that you're talking about when I went down to further, Bill Menard and I and my girlfriend at the time and my dog, which was a black lab. If you can imagine a C.J.5. No walls, no roof, no doors, no anything. It was just a CJ5. I put a piece of four-byte plywood on top over the row bar and over the windshield. I put those store carrying crates.

And in between those, on each side were the carrying crates. In between those were surfboards and two guitars. And all of our goods were packed on the, top, Bill sat in the back on a folding chair. My dog was underneath him, and all of the inside was filled with food, water. Excuse me for laughing. No, that's fine, because it's quite a, it's quite a circus in this thing. And then the tent and everything was on the bumper. We just barely had enough room to sit in there, and we did the trip. It was a good trip. And did you have the, did you have the folding chair bolted down or attached or anything? So he was just rocking and rolling. He was riding, he was riding free.

We hit a bump. If we were to hit a bump, I could just see him going out the back, but he never did. Yeah, you know, it was just a little different in those days before safety first. It was safety third, I think, then. Safety third. I don't even know if we knew how to say safety back then. So, again, I think that the takeaway, you were super prepared. You had a checklist.

You had all your gear. You had a very capable vehicle. and you had some skills. I mean, a lot of people went to Baja in whatever they had, a Carmen Gia or a whatever, which was inappropriate with no skills and probably poorly maintained. And so you're starting in a totally different place

and taking it pretty seriously. But the practice, the ethos, the never tell where you've been part of it is I think what's really changed. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, my wanderlust grew, my sense of adventure grew from the two magazines that were stacked up in the cabinets next to the TV when I was a kid. So right-hand cabinet, 25 years of National Geographic. Left-hand cabinet, 25 years of Road and Track magazines.

So, you know, I loved reading about cars from, you know, as 70s, 80s kids. I love reading the old 60s magazines and seeing the National Geographic. and seeing these places all over the world that just fueled this interest. I mean, you had an encyclopedia in the library, but you didn't have this exposure in your own home like a National Geographic. And now when the entire world's at your fingertips

and can be into your fingertips 24-7 off the grid wherever you are, I think it's really interesting to realize the adventures that you had through your own kind of sense of the word, ignorance. You didn't have every last detail. You didn't have great maps. You didn't know where you were at all times. You just had to figure stuff out.

Right. And you didn't have internet surf reports that told you that this place is going to go off. Oh, yeah. After a storm. It had to be going off when you were there, or else you didn't see it. It was by leck and by golly when you were traveling. Exactly. By luck and by golly. That's a good way of putting it. And the whole

time, there was never any rush. You had time to explore. If you didn't have time to explore and you didn't have time to break down, you shouldn't have been in Mexico at all. You had no business being in Mexico because Mexico is a place where time does not exist if you do it right. You just go by how you feel, how the wind blows you along. And my favorite saying in Big Red is, well, you're driving down Highway 1, you go down the There is a RO you hang a left, then you hang it right over the bridge, and time stops. We slide the doors back and try to let the cactus catch up to us because we only drive between 40 and 48 miles an hour.

Big Red will go 75, 80 miles an hour, but I won't drive it that fast because there's no sense in doing it. You're going to miss the whole experience of Baja. And that's what it's all about. All the rigs that I've had before the CJ5 have been good rigs. I've been able to work on all of them. I had a, well, I had the, what was that, 59 English Ford Thames Van. Then I had a 56 Chevy Station wagon. Then I had a 65 Dodge pickup truck.

Then I had a 63 Dodge Power wagon. That's the one where I did a lot of Explan. and that was a beauty. It still had the kind of round top that this has that I built for it. We called it the water truck. And I explored a lot of places with that, just myself and my girlfriend and my dog. And those good stuff. A lot of places now that I have pictures of, there's campsites that are stacked side by side.

You have to turn sideways to go between the cars. You know, excuse me, excuse me, and you can hear the guy next to your fart, you know, or blow their nose or whatever. So that's not my kind of camping. I still go where I have space and I have peace and tranquility where I can actually feel the moods of Baja, which has so many moods. Yeah, tell me how it progressed.

So when did El Toro Rojo Grande come into your life? And when did you say this is the ideal vehicle for me in the ideal vehicle for living in Baja, and this is how it all comes together. Was that, walk me through that. There was kind of a premonition of what I wanted after building all the different rigs that I did and outfitting them for Baja and stuff.

I had the idea of a box van would be the way to go because you don't have to get outside to go inside. I'm driving down the road, Roberta can come in here, she can make a sandwich or whatever while we're driving. The dogs are right with us. We know exactly what they're doing, what they need. And it's perfect because it's all self-contained. And you don't have to...

Yeah, well, so I had a cross-country trip when my kids were young, and we borrowed a friend's parents slightly decrepit RV, and it is exactly what you said. My dad came along as the captain. And I was the flight attendant. So at 60 miles an hour, I'm walking down the aisle and get you a juice, get you, make you a sandwich. And you know, and you keep on clicking off the miles until you get there. Yeah.

And then when you get there, everything's right there. You've got your house. You got your sleep. You got your food. And it's pretty amazing. And this is a pretty robust rig. I mean, four-wheel drive. It's not too big.

But once you get inside, yeah, once you get inside, it's pretty, pretty big. tidy, well laid out, and the woodwork and everything has a real beauty to it. There's a warmth, there's a, you know, there's a real hominess to it. When I got this rig, like I was saying, that the ideal rig would be a box fan. One day I'm walking down the street from my shop, and down the street comes, I hear this beautiful sound of twin pipes, glass packs, coming down the street. And I go, that's the sound of a car. that I know is in good shape.

The engine's good. What does it look like? And there it goes. It drives right by me. And I go, oh, my God, that's the rig that I've been thinking of. Well, three or four weeks later, I hear that the guy's trying to sell it. And I go, oh, my God, I happen to know the guy. So I tried to figure out where he was out.

I couldn't figure it. I know a place he wanted too much for it. So another month goes by, and then I heard he's jonesing for some money, big time. And I found out where he was. and happened to be in a local bar, and I walked up to him, and I said, hey, I heard you sell in your van. He goes, yeah, but it's not running. Well, I knew what a good-sounding engine was,

and I knew there was nothing wrong with the engine. It had to be something that he didn't know what was wrong with it. So I offered him, I says, I'll go look at it, and if it's what I think it is, I'll come back and we'll see. So I go down there, and I look at it, and I go, There's nothing wrong with it that I can't fix. So I go back and I offer him a certain amount of money. And he goes, okay, done deal.

The rig was mine. All right, done deal. Done deal. The rig was mine. I bring it back. And I pull it in the driveway and I start working on it. And I go, I found out that the car was stolen. Oh, no.

But he had stolen it from a friend of his. And he had the pink slip. The friend did. And that's how I got it because he had the pink slip and he signed it over to me. Then I heard it was stolen. I went, I'm going down to DMV and registering this thing before anything happens. I go to register the DMV. The car's mine now.

If it's stolen, it's still mine. I've got the pink slip. Howie or I ever got the pink slip, I have no idea. Anyways, two days later, the guy comes knocking on my door. The other guy that got stolen from, and he goes, hey, Glenn. I know this guy too. He goes, so-and-so, that's my rig. I got to go, how's that?

He goes, well, he stole it from me. And I says, well, he's got, he gave me the pink slip, and he signed it over, and DMV said it's clear. So you're going to have to take it up with him. And that was the way I got big red. It was pretty. And then from there, it transformed into this, because it was just a box fan.

It had no windows in it, except for the front windshield. And then I just slowly started doing stuff to it. And it took, now I've had it for 38 years. Here at Slow Baja, we can't wait to drive our old land cruiser south of the border. And when we go, we'll be going with Baja Bound Insurance. Their website's fast and easy to use. Check them out at Bajabound.com. That's Bajaubound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994.

I want to know, so you had this stint as a carpenter, but then you also had the surf shop. Were you always shaping your own boards, or did that come naturally from working with your own hands? Or how did that come about? jeepers, man. I'll tell you what. When I was much younger than becoming a shaper,

my first board I ever made, I went to ride out plastic, which was off of Highway 1, bought a piece of foam. It wasn't surfboard foam. Didn't have a strainer. It was just a square piece. I cut out what I thought was a template of a surfboard.

This was like I was like, 12, 13 years old, hung it between two sawhorses to get the rocker, glassed it with a sheet, had kind of softened the rails with some sandpaper, and that's how I got started. And that was the worst board that ever floated on the ocean, I think. From humble beginnings, folks.

Yeah, and then from there, Bill and I would, he got some good tips from, Diffendurfer of Channing and Diffenderfer of shaping boards and glassing boards and stuff and so he and I started in his garage shaping boards that was back in the late 60s mid to late 60s and then I was a carpenter at that time

and then from there in the late 70s I bought the surf shop because he had told me hey Glenn so-and-so is selling the surf shop And at first I went, no, I'm not even a businessman. I'm not going to get into that. And then a couple months later, he says, Glenn, she's giving away the surf shop. And I go, okay, my parents were on a vacation into Montana. I called them and I said, hey, folks, I want to buy a surf shop.

This is the kind of folks I had. They go, okay, what do you need? They go, well, I need such amount of money. It was nothing. They go, okay. So they gave me the money. I went and bought the surf shop. And I couldn't, before that, I couldn't even be a paper boy because I didn't know how to make a change.

So here I have a surf shop in my hands. I don't even have to make change. My brother, my oldest brother was in on it with me as far as trying to help me do this thing. And after about a couple of months, he says, hey, Glenn, you got to learn how to make change or are you going to lose a shot? because you're giving away more money than you're making. That's how bad I was as a businessman of making change. Well, from there, snapped me out of it. I learned how to make change, and I became a successful businessman.

I turned that business around 10 times for what it was doing. And in the mid-80s, I lost lease. Then they blew the surf shop out of the ground. But that's how I got to be retired. My whole business world just said, Okay, time to go surfing for good. And that's what I did. Yeah, and I started shaping a whole lot after that.

And you had a little bit of a plan on a health front and on a how you wanted to live your life. Let's change gears and get into that. You're a fit mofo. You're a dude who's in fine shape. I'm coming up on 74. But when I was 14, I had a vision of, well, you're a. always watch those Hercules movies and stuff like that. I always wanted to be a guy that was in shape.

But then I became a gymnast in high school, and that really kind of set me off on my health conditioning and everything else. But I had a vision as far as my lifestyle, too. I had the idea that somehow, some way, early on in life, I don't want to be an old man when I'm retired. I want to be able to be free, and I couldn't stand working for somebody else

when I was a carpet. The bosses were just terrible. And it kept festering in me. I'm not going to work for somebody my whole life. Somehow I'm going to make money on my own. And then when the surf shop came, that's what happened. But I had that vision, and I kept my vision in my head the whole time, and I finally did it. In the end, I was free.

Even though I was shaping after I sold the surf shop, It was, and I was supplying surfboards for other shops and stuff, and I had a lot of custom orders on my own. I didn't feel like it was really work, because I was surfing all the time and shaped boards and stuff. It was no, it was something I didn't have to do, but I chose to do it, so for me that was not work. So I consider myself pretty much free and easy after the surf shop.

And what does it mean to have a Glenn Horn shaped board? I don't know, you'd have to ask somebody that has one. That's honest. That's honest. I mean, what do you bring to it? What's your magic? What's the secret sauce? What I like to do most of all is surf with the person that I'm going to be making a board for,

which I never know if I'm going to be making a person I'm surfing with a surfboard until they come up to me and say, hey, I'd like to try one of your boards. Or I like the way it's surfing. I'd like to get one of your boards. And I go, okay. So we'll sit down. And most of the time it's in Baja. And we'll just sit down and talk about it.

And then when I come back, I start shaping the board here in my shops here at my house. But what's funny is I don't listen to music when I work. I love to have my mind visualizing. And it gets cluttered with music, even though I love music. So when I go into the shaping room, I shut that door and it's my whole world. of basically kind of like a meditative time. And I visualize talking with that person, and I start drawing the template and everything that we talked about.

And then I start rolling the film in my head of him surfing that board or her surfing that board before it's made and while I'm making it. And so I watched their style in my head, and I start putting what I feel they need in the board. So every board is a custom board. I don't use a shaping machine or anything else. I just start to finish is all me. And that's the fun part is because I get to watch them surf the board before it's even done.

So I go into this kind of like bliss into my shaping room. Well, you've brought up the word, but it looks like a bit of your life is lived in bliss. And I hate to get too woo-woo on that. But, I mean, you're in this rig on a pretty remote. stretch of Baja for months at a time. Yeah, yeah. It's not glamorous. By no means.

And it's not meant to be glamorous. You're not out there glamping. But you've got a fitness regimen. You've got a gym that you bring with you that you've crafted. Yeah. And it looks like you're pretty in tune with your surroundings. Oh, yeah. See, that's my favorite part is when I'm down there.

I, it's, uh, Roberta and I have this, this saying when we turn off a highway one and we're on the, on the dirt road. We go by this set of cactus. It looks like, well, she named it. It's called the greeters. So they greet us coming into our special area, which is, uh, we're not going to tell. We, uh, we're not going to tell. And don't try to follow me either because you're never going to find me. Well, nowadays, everybody knows.

The, uh, kids in bars in San Francisco know where you are. Yeah. So it's a pretty blissful lifestyle because I'm more connected, I believe, down there that I've ever been with all the things that are around me. The thing I love the most is when I wake up in the morning, I can tell before I even get out of the car what the temperature is without looking at a temperature gauge. if there's a change in the weather, I open the doors and I walk out on my porch and I can tell if there's a dew factor, if it's going to be warm or wet or cold. Obviously when I step out the door,

it's either warm or cold, so that's no big deal. But I love to watch the clouds to try and figure out what's going to happen with the weather that day or in a couple of days. And it's just becoming part of that spot on the planet that is special for me. When I found this place that I go to all the time, I used to spend a lot of time there.

I still do five months, six months at a time. You become part of everything that's around you. All the plants, the animals, I love watching the animals. You can be sitting there doing something. You hear a coyote go off. or you'll hear the Osprey give their call flying over with the fish in their talons. One of my favorite moments is I was sitting there one time early on in the season. I was leaning against my tire and my dog was sitting beside me.

It's dead silent. It's hard to believe that Mother Ocean can be without a wave at all. But it does happen where you just hear the shh, of the surge on the ship. shoreline, there's no waves, so there's plenty of silence in the air. And I'm sitting there, and it's warm, the sun's coming over the east, eastern mountains, and I'm just sitting there with my dog, and it's a warm part of the season. And it's so quiet that I'm watching this lizard jump from rock to rock, and then he comes across on the sand.

You can hear him, his feet on the sand, and then he stops, and he does his push-ups. He looks at my dog, and I go, man, you're lucky that my dog. doesn't see you because my dog was asleep and then he just walked right by his face and then out into the bush and then at that time I hear this and I look up and it's a whole flock of pelicans flying by you could hear their wings it's so quiet that kind of stuff is what I live for and I do a lot of diving so I dive for my fish and being underneath the ocean is a whole special world too you just completely escape anything and now you're part of sea life instead of the life on the land.

So that's my, that's my world. That's what I love. Do you want to get a little philosophical and talk about your religion a little bit? Because you've expanded it. I mean, you're the, you were the subject of a film, a beautiful film, and we're going to get into that in a second. But I found it quite profound to hear you talk about your religion as we're becoming so polarized in our lives here in this side of the world.

that your religion is the environment. That is my world. That's my religion. It's everything that I just said about the plants, the animals, the land, the sea, the fish,

everything that I have in my life that's important, other than my wife and my two dogs and Big Red, is there. That's my religion. the planet, the earth, everything that surrounds me that speaks to me. Nothing's more precious to me than that. That's my religion, yeah. Just living in that environment.

I could do that for the rest of my life if I had some sort of means to be able to do that. I come back to my wife and everything else and she loves it down there. We'll be apart at certain times of the year because she likes to, she's an ultra runner, so she likes to do a lot of stuff. on her own and I like to do my stuff but we don't have any problem being apart but we always love being together as well so she loves it down there as much as I do and the beautiful thing about if you really stay in tune with what's happening with nature you take your dog down there and you can watch your dog transform now a dog has as far as we know has no logic so it doesn't logisticize why he's there or anything else but you can watch animal transforming in this beautiful natural animal from their city life the way they think the way they act to this beautiful animal that my dog interacts with the coyotes interesting he has been in the pack with them i've been out running around and he'll get involved with the coyotes and they'll be

around him but he'll be in the middle and they'll just kind of look at each other and nothing happens there's a white tip one down there that he is really good friends with they have a game he chases it and he turns around and walks back to camp and the coyote will come back with him then he sees the coyote and he'll chase him back out

and it goes on for five minutes or eight minutes and then they'll finally just separate and say that's good enough but yeah he's I love watching all my dogs I've had three different dogs have all lived to be 13 years old and to watch them

transform into the Baja. So that transfers over to me, letting me know that I'm actually transforming too while I'm watching him. And you become very sensitized to all that's around you. Your fingertips change. Once you get in tune with what's happening to yourself, you start realizing that your sense of touch, your sense of smell, your sound is so much more acute. and what you see. You see around you. You see everything that goes on. And it's a pretty amazing thing, which is, that's why I don't, for one thing,

I don't listen to music when I'm down there. And I listen to everything that's around me. Yeah. It's a pretty good tune, though. Oh, it's a beautiful orchestra. Yeah. Hey, let's talk about this film that you were part of, that you were the subject of. How did that come about?

Eric Ebner made a beautiful movie called The Bull. and it's about you and this rig in your life. And it's a beautiful art piece documentary and won a bunch of awards. How did that whole thing come about? The way of things transform where I go, things do happen for whatever reason. Somebody came, he came by and he was camping,

and we got to say hi, and then the next day a little bit more conversation than one day he'd come up. I'd like to do a documentary on you. Would you mind? And I go, I don't mind so long as you don't say where I'm at, you know. And I'm still living in the code that I don't want to talk about the actual places. I'd just as soon be in that state of mind that was blissful at the time.

I carry that with me through my whole life. So he came up and we did a documentary together. and he was inside Big Red, and we just talked, and I spilled my guts on how I felt, and then he put it together, and it's, yeah, I like it. Yeah, I mean, how did you feel about having your story told so poignantly and correctly and earnestly and, and, and, and, I mean, that's pretty deep seeing yourself like that so revealed to the world.

I don't mind. I don't mind at all because there's something that is there that most people, well, I shouldn't say most people, I should say, that it's hard to come about, and I don't mind talking about it because I think it's very special. It's hard to find that kind of a lifestyle now because everything is so immediate, so accessible. So when I talk, I like to let it out that there was a beauty in everything and there still is. He just have to pay attention.

It's hard for people to pay attention because there's so much going on. there's so much noise around a campsite that you never hear the coyotes you don't even hear the waves sometimes the one thing i do notice that i i enjoy to watch me i'm a people watcher so i like to watch is they look up at the sky and they see the stars for the first time they see the milky way for the first time they see shooting stars for the first time i mean how's that i mean that's been going on since millennia millennia and that's what i grew up with and i still love it Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I just thought of, my celestial sign is right above me, Taurus. And so I look up every night, and then I see, there I am in the sky, Taurus. And it's pretty special. My last name is Horn. So I have the Bull, which is Mexican heritage right there, and I have a set of horns on it. So you've got the horns, horn. Taurus and my sign.

And that's a... I feel like I'm pretty darn lucky to have that stuff, you know, all that connection, but then look up and see my sign up there. Right above my camp, straight above my camp. I think you're pretty lucky. I think you're pretty lucky. Hey, we're going to wrap up, Glenn, and I just want to say there's beautiful soliloquy in that film where you talk about

your age, you were 67 at the time the film was made and your health philosophy and your workout regimen and that end of the day when there's an offshore and the surfers are just

silhouettes and when somebody is on the beach and they're looking at watching a surfer do its surf, watching a surfer surf and they're just a silhouette they can't tell that you're 100 years old. 40 years old or 20 years old.

I mean, I didn't put it quite right. We're going to have Christopher rip it off from the film. Go ahead and go it again, Michael. Well, yeah, you want to say it, Glenn? Well, my perfect idea of aging is I want to be living until at least at the age of 120. So one of my ideal moments in the water is I'm 100 years old. I plan on doing the same thing when I'm 100 years old. Still plan on working out, still carrying my gym with me and being in big red.

But the ideal moment is when the sun is starting to set over the ocean, the waves turn into this beautiful emerald green and a slide offshore. and all the figures in the wave are shadows. There's no, you can't tell because they're just a dark figure surfing. But if an average person was just standing on shore, just, you know, grandma, grandpa, or kids or whatever, they see all these surfers in the water riding these beautiful waves. And they can't tell if that's a hundred-year-old guy surfing on that wave

or if it's a 40-year-old or a 20-year-old because I plan on being able to utilize, all my ability of using my body, being limber, being still fluid, to where they can't tell if that's me in the water at 100 years old. That, to me, is the ideal moment when I realize I've reached what I've actually believed in my whole life. I mean, I've thought of being 120 years old when I was in my teens, and I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I just kept trying to be healthy. trying to stay, you know, doing everything I can to be in shape, stretch.

I still stretch to this day. I can still do the splits. And so I just got to keep doing it and keep focused. Well, I hope you like that one. Glenn Horn, one amazing human being. And big thanks to Roberta, his wife, for doing all the scheduling that allowed Kaiser and I to get into El Toro Rojo and record that. I hope you watched it on YouTube. I think we're doing a little dancing downstairs and a below decks and a boat there.

It's a beautiful space, but it was very tight, and Kaiser did incredible work to film it and to bring it to you, so I hope you enjoyed it. Help us out. Got a lot of miles coming up. I'm doing the slow Baja safari class. I'm leading that again in the Nora Mexican 1000. Comes up at the end of April. That's right. You've heard the promo. Well, I'm going to be driving five days all the way down to the bottom of the peninsula. back and then I'm heading off to the Overland Expo West. That's right. I'm going to be telling people all about my Slow Baja, Slow Travel Philosophy, and the truck, Slow Baja, my 1971 Land Cruiser is going to be on display and the DIY Vehicle Showcase. And I'm going to be camping right there for the weekend. That's May 19th through May 21st, Flagstaff, Arizona. If you're there, if you're at the Overland Expo, please come say hello. Tell me you're listening to the show.

look for my bright yellow Seeger A-frame tent and the old slow Baja. And who knows? I may have a little tequila fortaleza for you. You never know. I don't know. But say hello. Can't wait to meet you in person. And, well, without wasting any more of your time, let me tell you about my pal, Mary McGee.

Love to get her on the show and video. And her pal, Steve McQueen. Yeah, that's Steve McQueen, the famous one. The guy who raised the Baja boot, made a few movies. You know, he was talking to Mary McGee at a New Year's Eve. and said, hey, McGee, you got to get off that pansy road racer and get out into the desert and ride dirt with me. Well, he also said, well, I'm paraphrasing. I'm paraphrasing here, folks. He said, Baja's life, anything that happens before or after is just waiting.