“For a surfer, he's gotten quite ambitious,” Pete says.

Alex is in the kitchen of John John's house, wearing a shirt with a bald eagle on it and cutoffs. “I have this photo that kind of spells out everything,” she says to me. She scrolls through her phone, trying to find it. She's talking about what it was like, being a single mom, trying to raise three boys. She shows me a washed-out shot of Ivan, her youngest son, peering out from the backseat of a white 1953 Pontiac. “I never had the money for the good ones, but we always had cool cars,” she says. “We were always broken down on the side of the road.”

She finds another photo. “These are my parents now,” she says: a handsome older man and a handsome older woman, the man's hair slickly parted. He's on crutches, and wearing a black Thrasher sweatshirt. “My dad looks like Johnny Cash,” Alex says—and he does, a little. “He still dyes his hair.” They were good parents, she says. She grew up in Jersey with a bunch of surf kids, watching surf movies. At 15 or 16, she left home. “My parents drove me to the airport.” She went to Hawaii, and then all over the world, and then back to Hawaii.

She scrolls further down, shows me a photo of her and her boys skateboarding in someone's backyard. She's the one who taught them how to skate and how to surf. “This is just so you have an idea of who they are,” she says to me. Their expressions are serene and full of concentration. “I like to think they're punk rock on the inside and jocks on the outside,” Alex says.

She gestures toward the walls of John John's clean, sleek kitchen. “I don't know if it's because we were poor or what, but he likes modern-day things a lot.”

When they were young, she says, “I brought them everywhere. I got divorced pretty soon after we had the last one. I'd only been married five and half years.”

She was married to a man named John L. Florence. An unhappy story, though I know this more from his account than hers. In 2014, he self-published a memoir, F.E.A.R., with two explanatory subtitles: Fuck Everything and Run and Face Everything and Recover. Though he does not seem to have recovered at the time of writing. The book is disorganized and determinedly self-lacerating—a strange document of a guy listing all the ways in which he is terrible, and yet not quite believing any of them. He describes himself as an alcoholic, a criminal, and a thrill-seeker—“I am an ‘egomaniac with an insecurity complex,’ ” he writes—and questions whether early head injuries led to his lack of impulse control. In the book he tells of meeting Alex, whom he calls Surfer Girl, and their Bonnie and Clyde-style courtship. I will not repeat the demeaning, unverifiable details here. Suffice it to say the book ends shortly after John John's birth, with a present-day cry for help: “I sit here with an overwhelming sense of DOOM as I try and figure out how to pay for my DUI attorney. The attorney wants $15,000 dollars that I don't have. Here, at the end of the first part of my life story, I return to the beginning: I always have been and always will be doomed.”

When I ask John John about his father and namesake, this is what he says: “I spent a bit of time with him for a while before he moved, because he used to live in town. And then he remarried and had another kid. We have a half brother. Super nice. Yeah. Super cool. But they live on the East Coast now.”

Do you guys have a relationship?

“Yeah. It's good.”

This is maybe not the entire case, but I understand. His options here, in front of a reporter, are not great. Especially once I bring up the memoir.

“I have no idea,” John John says. He's visibly uncomfortable. “I haven't even seen it.”

It's called ‘F.E.A.R.’

“Really? Interesting."

So you haven't read it?

“No.”

It depicts a guy in a tough spot.

“Yeah. He's in a funny situation. But just, my relationship with him is good and whatnot. But I've just kind of grown into myself and focused on my own thing, you know? I'm pretty comfortable and happy with how my life has gone.” I believe him. John John and Alex and their family are far from the first to take shelter from the world here, on the North Shore, and to build something purer in its stead.

John John wants to check on his bees. He's been keeping a hive right outside the Lab. Even in his leisure time he can't help but do things that are a little scary. For a while, he was taking flying lessons. He loves to sail, maybe even more than he loves surfing; right now, in one of his garages, he's building a boat. To visit his bees he's got to put on a padded suit, in the Hawaiian sun, and shoes—which I otherwise never see him wear—and then, with a deep breath, he leans over the hive and pulls off the top. He gently removes the comb, stares at the bees crawling all over it from behind the mesh of his helmet. “I'm still learning a lot,” he says.

Florence keeps bees outside the house where he and his team edit his surfing films.

Like everything else with John John, the tableau is weirdly innocent—Edenic, even, with the bees and then the koi he keeps in the pond in front of a different house, and the garden he's been working on right over there, with radishes and lettuces and carrots. “You plant something and walk away and it just goes,” he says. Bees lazily trace a halo around him. And then, ever childlike, he leaves to take a nap.

Or maybe “childlike” is the wrong word—he is confident, and physically graceful, in a way most men I know will never quite be. But there's something stripped-down about his daily interactions with the world as I witness them. A determined uncomplicatedness. “Living in the moment and being present,” as John John describes it, a few hours later, after he's woken up. He knows this is the kind of thing surfers solemnly tell reporters. “That's such a common saying: Just be present, live in the moment. But there's actually really something to it when you really start to learn it.”

Ironically, he says, it was through competing that he finally learned how to do this. How to find his way back to the simple basic joy of surfing. “You could be going into a heat and be flustered that something happened to you before the heat, and you have to reset yourself and get back into that, just thinking about that moment in time and just about that heat. And then you can bring that back into everyday life.” When he really realized that, embraced it—that's when he started winning. Shrug off the losses. Just be present. “You're right there, and you're not thinking about anything else. Competing, you learn how to switch it on and switch it off.”

John John Florence after a morning spent surfing near his home on Oahu's North Shore The grille of his mom's Buick The shed where Florence keeps (some of) his surfboards

A napping spot next to the beach Florence's wet suits hang in the garage where he's building a sailboat Alex holds a glass that goes topless when filled with water

You have to have a weird brain to do what he does. It's a carefree profession that routinely kills people who practice it. John John has memories going back forever of seeing guys die surfing Pipeline. He's broken his ankle. He broke his back—“fractured my L3 and then compressed my L4.” He's torn all the ligaments in his left foot. I ask him about fear. I know it's a kind of unanswerable question but I ask anyway: What are the dynamics of it? When does it start, when does it stop? How do you contain it?

“Well, there's that balance of fear and that adrenaline you kind of get going. Once you get that adrenaline going, you're like, ‘I don't care about any of it.’ You're just going.”