Profiles

When supply chain issues disrupted Ashley Lloyd's surfboard building during the pandemic, a friend asked her, "If you were to start something, what would it be?" 

“Whatever things accumulate in my body overnight, I want to rinse them all out,” he says. He starts the day with a glass of spring water he collects at its source in Carlyle, PA. “Twice a month, we go to the spring and collect 50-plus gallons of water to bring back home. Fresh living water out of the mountain.”

All around the Santa Cruz farmers markets, signs hang on stands bearing the seal of CCOF, or California Certified Organic Farmers. Closer inspection of my pantry reveals CCOF certification on items ranging from purple sweet potatoes to nori-wrapped energy sticks.

Yet it’s easy to forget, in an era when “organic” is a common label on products even in mainstream mega-grocers, that it wasn’t until 1990 that the “certified organic” claim really meant anything.

I’ve loved surfing for years, but before the pandemic, I couldn’t regularly go. When lockdown began, though—with my husband’s dawn commute over the hill on pause and our kids out of preschool—I regularly forced myself out of bed at 5:30am and biked to a nearby spot. 

A couple months into quarantine, water days outnumbered my under-wetsuit swimwear supply...

Santa Cruz Movement’s Leela Kalow and Dean Yerushalmy were excited to open their beautifully renovated, airy Midtown studio in March of 2020. After teaching at the Tannery since 2018, they had leased a former furniture store and invested in turning it into a movement studio with mirrored walls, an appealing, light-filled aesthetic, hanging bars and rings, and a marley-type floor. 

The title of Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 best-selling novel, The Fortress of Solitude, is an allusion to Superman’s private retreat, located far away from his primary residence in Metropolis, the sprawling city that in many ways defines the Man of Steel. Likewise, Lethem, who is known to many readers for writing about his own metropolis, Brooklyn, New York, is often found in another, more secluded home, in Blue Hill, Maine.