Men's Journal

What you see here represents all that remains of Turner’s skull. An infection took the rest of it — and nearly his life. That didn’t stop him from making his pioneering surf films. But it did force him to radically alter his approach.

by Thayer Walker

Scars cover so much of Timmy Turner’s body that they look like a genetic trait. They start on his feet, where small pale marks testify to years of tap-dancing over sharp coral reefs. The serious business, however, begins with the two four-inch gashes etched into his right ankle, souvenirs from shattering the bone in a San Diego wave pool. The small discolored slash on his right pinkie? Hardly worth mentioning on a body so tattooed by carnage, except that Turner got this one in Indonesia and had to finish the three stitches when his friend couldn’t stomach it anymore. His back, chest, and arms are painted with scars of various sizes and severities, many of them parting gifts from the shallow, dangerous reef breaks he loves to surf.

But here in the Icelandic village of Kópasker, 18 miles below the Arctic Circle, these wounds are buried under layers of fleece, and all attention is on the sea. When Turner’s caravan arrived a half-hour earlier the streets were empty. Now, as the three pro surfers he brought with him paddle into the bay, some of the 100-odd locals emerge to watch the spectacle. “No one has ever surfed here before,” a rosy-cheeked Viking named Arnbjorn tells us. “We do some crazy things” — among them cliff skiing and rappelling hundreds of feet to collect seabird eggs — “but nothing like this.” Then it starts to snow.

Turner, a 27-year-old surf-film director whose pioneering movies have developed a cult following, shoots the action from the rocks, his mood improving as the weather worsens. He’s been in Iceland for seven days now, but the film is two years in the making, and this is the closest he has come to capturing the shot he’s been searching for: an inside-a-barrel view of a blizzard.

A plastic jacket protects his camera, and Turner is bundled in a parka. Every so often he slides off his hood, exposing his shaved head. In so doing he reveals another scar, one that makes all the others look insignificant: a deep-pink zipper snaking from ear to ear like a grisly yin-yang, crossed by a railroad track of staple marks. It’s the kind of scar that scares kids and intrigues adults, and it’s the reason Turner is chasing waves along a stretch of coast close enough to the Arctic that polar bears have been known to sail over on icebergs.

Kópasker may be one of the more improbable surf spots you’ll ever find, but this is one of the more improbable survival stories you’ll ever hear, and it all begins in the deep, resilient channels of Timmy Turner’s brain.

After more than a decade working over operating tables, few cases surprise Dr. Richard Kim. The California neurosurgeon has removed brain tumors the size of softballs and once had to bury his knee into a patient’s forehead to leverage a six-inch knife out of his skull. He has operated on infants with cranial fractures (“The skull looked like a cracked ping-pong ball,” he says) and a multiplatinum rapper with gunshot wounds (“He was very angry”). Kim has cut into so many skulls that the familiar process offers all the novelty of opening a can of tomatoes. So on December 17, 2005, when Timmy Turner was wheeled into the operating room of Newport Beach’s Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, Kim wasn’t anticipating anything he hadn’t seen before. Then he opened Turner’s head.

“Normally you see the brain,” says the 45-year-old surgeon, “but all I saw was white pus. It was the most serious infection of the brain I have ever seen.”

At best, Kim explained to the Turner family, they might expect Timmy to survive in a vegetative state, but most likely the father of two was going to die. Bacteria called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (better known as the worst type of staph infection on the planet) had eaten through Turner’s skull like acid and turned his head into a pressure cooker. Doctors suspected he picked it up surfing near his home in Huntington Beach after heavy rains had swept a stew of human and industrial waste into the ocean. His temperature hit 106.7, and his left eyeball bulged from its socket. “Another centimeter,” says his father Tim, “and his eye would have been on the pillow.”

The damage was so extensive that Kim had to perform a hemicraniectomy, the Hail Mary of brain surgeries that had fallen out of favor decades ago. To relieve the stress caused by Turner’s swollen brain and to clean the infection, Kim would remove half of the skull.

During the two-hour surgery, hundreds of people turned the hospital lobby into a standing-room-only affair in support of the “First Family of Huntington Beach,” as Timmy’s high school surf coach Andy Verdone calls the Turners. The clan has run the Sugar Shack Cafe, a greasy spoon and unofficial town hall a block and a half from the beach, since 1967. Timmy started working there before he was tall enough to reach the register. He joked with the regulars, cleaned the toilet without being asked, and eventually used his tip money to fund his films.

At the hospital friends and family consoled one another by swapping stories about Turner. Like the time in the eighth grade when he got so sick of wearing braces that he pulled them off with pliers. Or when he was in Indonesia surfing and had to stitch up a stranger’s back, a cut so deep you could stick your finger in to the first knuckle. Remember hitting the water with him before his LASIK surgery? His friends called it Braille surfing, but even without his glasses Turner would drop into 20-footers. And how about the time his mom had to fly his older brother Ryan to Indonesia to drag Timmy home to college after four months away. He still didn’t come back.

Surfing came naturally to Turner. He first picked up a board at age five and in high school was captain of the surf team. He took pride in his talent because as a kid he had struggled with the one thing that came naturally to others. Growing up, he suffered from a severe speech impediment that kept him in special education classes until the seventh grade. Kids teased him ruthlessly. The experience fostered a humility that stayed with him even after he became one of the hottest surfers in a town that proudly dubs itself “Surf City, USA.” As an adult he progressed to the point where he could speak comfortably to large audiences, whether theaters full of moviegoers or auditoriums of schoolchildren, and a demure charm emerged.

“Timmy is the kind of person people fall in love with immediately,” says his wife Jessica, who ought to know. She met Turner as a teenager at the Sugar Shack in 1999 when he mumbled something about taking her order. “He was really shy,” Jessica recalls, “and had the biggest blue eyes.” She had the $6 teriyaki bowl. “It was the best meal of my life.” They married three years later, when he was 21 and she was 22.

By that point, Turner had developed a passion for making surf films. His freshman year in high school, he had begun borrowing his dad’s camcorder to record his and his friends’ exploits, and at 17 he made his first movie, shooting in Indonesia. He returned there often and spent months on an uninhabited, malaria-ridden island filming and surfing waves so big and perfect and hollow and dangerous that they bordered on theoretical. He turned the adventure into Second Thoughts, the movie that launched his cult stardom and won Surfer Magazine’s 2004 Video of the Year award.

Later that year, after the devastating Asian tsunami, he went back to Indonesia to make another movie. The Tsunami Diaries, however, was not about waves; Turner and a crew of friends chartered a sailboat and delivered 75 tons of food and supplies to remote islands neglected by relief efforts. Ten months later Turner’s own life hung in jeopardy.

It started with the headaches. Severe headaches. Headaches that felt like a power drill spinning through his skull: a harbinger of events to come. The pain only intensified, but after a couple days of this Turner still refused to see a doctor. “I’ll get better,” he snarled to Jessica. He didn’t. And the man known for his soft smile and easygoing nature began to slam doors and scream irrationally.

By the third day, Jessica grew scared enough to leave the house, taking her daughters with her to her mother’s in San Diego. What she didn’t know — what no one knew — was that staph was burning through Turner’s sinuses and infecting his frontal lobe, swelling the area responsible for emotional control and judgment.

The next day Turner’s behavior worsened, and his uncle Joe called the paramedics. Turner greeted them in raging delirium, throwing the gurney at them. They figured Turner was whacked out on PCP and refused to take him. Later that night Turner collapsed in his bedroom. When his father Tim checked on him in the morning, Turner’s face was swollen like a balloon. It was “as if his brain was popping through his face,” his dad recalls.

His dad and uncle Joe and brother Ryan wrestled Turner into the car and drove him to the Huntington Hospital. By the time they arrived Timmy’s body hung limp. The staff told them to take a number. “You don’t understand,” Ryan pleaded, but they soon did once they read Turner’s temperature. “All of a sudden everyone was putting on masks and gloves, and doctors were coming in from everywhere,” Ryan says. “All hell broke loose.” The doctors quarantined the area, fearing a possible case of meningitis had turned Turner into a human biohazard. He began to spasm violently, and the hospital transferred him to Hoag, which was better equipped to handle such a severe case.

Turner’s mother, Michele, remembers the last moment she saw her son conscious. “He let out this pathetic cry,” she says, “and fell into a coma.”

Turner survived the first surgery but remained coma­tose and on life support. Dr. Kim described the results to the family as a mixed blessing.

“He’s alive,” he told them, “but in all likelihood he’s going to have a lot of deficits and need a lot of care.”

Over the course of that first week an avalanche of potentially fatal maladies pounded Turner: meningitis, acute respiratory distress syndrome, pneumonia. Jessica split her time between her husband at the hospital and her kids at home. On Christmas she curled up on the couch and cried. “I looked at a picture of our family, and I thought, Is this my life now? My husband is a complete vegetable?” Two days into the new year, and two weeks after the first surgery, Kim removed more of Turner’s forehead — a palm-size chunk of infected bone ­— leaving him with just one quarter of his skull.

As winter trudged toward spring, Turner began a slow but miraculous recovery. Forty pounds had wasted off his once-powerful 170-pound frame and paralysis crippled the right side of his body, but his spirit was strong. Doctors measured his progress in steps normally considered physiological afterthoughts. Gradually he responded to stimuli. He’d pucker his lips when Jessica asked for a kiss, and soon he could tell her he loved her. Still, he only flirted with consciousness.

“Once, I woke up and I couldn’t understand why people were taking staples out of my head,” Turner recalls. Finally he began to turn thoughts into coherent sentences. When Jessica explained what had happened, Turner asked, “Did anyone film it?” That’s when she knew he was going to get better.

With three quarters of his skull gone, he wore a helmet to protect his brain, which was otherwise covered by only a flap of skin. “You could watch it pulsate under the skin,” Jessica says. Turner grew sharper mentally by the day. Physically, he was regaining more movement, but it didn’t come easy.

During one rehab session a therapist gently pushed Timmy to try to move his arm. He couldn’t. For Jessica, the uncertainty was unbearable. “Timmy, move your arm!” she yelled.

He looked at her, his head a broken eggshell, his gaunt face washed in contempt for the seemingly impossible task his wife demanded. “He was so pissed at me,” she says. Turner slowly wobbled his arm toward the ceiling as if it were tied to puppet strings, then dropped it in exhaustion.

The medical staff nicknamed him “Miracle Man.” After nearly three months in the hospital he relearned to walk. Then he began skateboarding.

“The more he recovered, the more difficult a patient he became,” Kim quips now. “He wanted to do things before he was ready.”

“I was wearing a helmet,” Turner counters.

On April 5, 2006, 109 days after being rushed to the ER, Timmy Turner got a new skull. Based on a three-dimensional CT scan of his head, a Florida-based company called Biomet Microfixation constructed two white porous plates that looked like packing styrofoam, felt like plastic cement, and were composed of polymethyl methacrylate, the same material used to make contact lenses. In Turner’s sixth and final surgery, Kim fit the plates into his head like puzzle pieces and anchored them to his God-given skull bone with titanium plates and screws.

When Turner awoke, the doctor told him not to surf for three months. Four weeks later Turner paddled out at the Huntington Beach Pier.

Kim remains flabbergasted by Turner’s rebound. “If you had said that Timmy would make a complete recovery and be surfing again, I would have told you to go back to medical school. Surfing, not to mention filmmaking, is a very complex neurological activity. I’m an avid cyclist and a fan of Lance Armstrong, but, medically, what Timmy has gone through far surpasses that.”

Turner’s former surf coach Andy Verdone sums it up in layman’s terms. “Surfing with earplugs throws me off balance. This guy still rides huge waves, and he had his skull reconstructed.”

Which raises a question: Does the new skull leave Turner more vulnerable to injury? “Probably yes,” says Kim. “But is it worth keeping him from doing what he loves doing? Definitely not.”

But there was one last thing.

While he was still in the hospital, Turner got some strong words of advice from an infectious diseases specialist, and what that doctor told him was not easy to accept. Not for a surfer who called Indonesia his second home. Not for a filmmaker who had invested years in that country, shooting all four of his movies there, with a fifth in the works, before he got sick.

The doctor told Turner to steer clear of Indonesia; steer clear of the tropics in general. The chance of getting any kind of infection was too great, and if Turner did get one he might not be able to fend it off this time.

But Timmy Turner is not easily deterred. He figured if he couldn’t go south, well, then he’d go north. “When I still had half a head I called my cousin in Alaska to plan a surf trip there,” Turner says. Then came an expedition to Canada. He has snuck back to Indonesia a couple of times (“I couldn’t stay away forever,” he says. “I love the people, and the waves are perfect”), but mostly he’s focused his surfing trips the last two years on the coldest corners of the Earth.

Iceland, naturally, would have to follow.

“People like watching misery,” Turner tells me by way of explaining the popularity of his films. It’s April 2008, and given his current surroundings — Turner sprawled out on crisp white cotton sheets in a geothermally heated four-star hotel in downtown Reykjavík — it seems a slightly incongruous statement, but there will be plenty of misery to go around once the two-week surf trip gets underway. “People love watching things go wrong.”

In making his breakthrough Second Thoughts, Turner and his guys told their boat captain to drop them off on an uninhabited island and return in three weeks. “You watch the boat drive away,” says Brett Schwartz, a surfer who accompanied Turner, “and you think, I hope they understood what we said.” They braved snakes and mosquitoes on the jungle island and charged 12-foot waves in 12 inches of water. And although they wore full wetsuits in 80-degree surf to protect themselves from the sharp and shallow “suicide reef,” they still cracked helmets and ribs.

“Very few of the top pros are going to take that kind of risk. They’re in five-star hotels with entourages,” says Surfer Magazine editor Chris Mauro. “Second Thoughts was almost a backlash to that. It was a reminder of what real adventure was like and that it was attainable.”

As if the conditions in Indonesia weren’t challenging enough, the crew would take turns using Turner’s “board cam”: a 7-foot-3 surfboard with a water-housed camera mounted on the front or back. The board-cam shot has become a Turner trademark; if you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to get barreled off your gourd, watch Second Thoughts.

Now, in turning to cold, barren outposts, Turner has simply replaced one form of hardship with another.

“Every person I told that I was camping in Iceland in April thought I was tripping,” says Josh Mulcoy, a 36-year-old from Santa Cruz and one of three pros on this trip, as the crew prepares to leave the comforts of the Reykjavík hotel.

“I just don’t want to be stuck in the rain,” says another, Sam Hammer, 29. “That’s the part Timmy will like.”

Turner checks the forecast online. “It’s going to be cold next week,” he says. A smile creeps across his face. “I want snow. I want to freeze.”

Turner wants snow because he needs it for his movie’s crucial shot: the one in which he uses the board cam to film a blizzard from inside a barrel. “No one has ever done that before,” he says. “People will be talking about that shot for years.” There’s a reason no one has ever done it: It requires an elusive nexus of swell, wind, and snow — and the surfing and filmmaking chops to pull it off.

Those close to Turner insist he’s 99 percent recovered from his infection and surgery. Still, when talking with him you do notice things. He confuses words that sound alike, commonly swapping “ideal” for “idea,” and his diction is more often filled with aborted thoughts than pregnant pauses. Sometimes he’ll interrupt a jumbled sentence with a self-effacing smile and say, “That doesn’t make any sense,” without a shred of anger or frustration. Because of his childhood speech impediment, it’s hard to tell how much of that, if any, is a result of the staph infection. As Jessica noted in the blog she kept during Turner’s illness and recovery, “His speech has always been a struggle for him.”

His father has noticed one definite change, though. “Timmy’s a little more serious now,” he says. The first thing Turner filmed in Iceland was a cemetery.

Turner’s post-infection exploits don’t stem from any newfound invincibility but rather a greater sense of urgency. “If I’m going to live a little longer,” says Turner, “I want to accomplish my goals.”

After five days, however, southern Iceland is proving uncooperative. The surf is either too small or the conditions too windy, and the weather has been indifferent, offering neither sun nor snow, just a perdurable blanket of gray. On the night Icelanders celebrate as winter’s last, Turner and the crew seek refuge from a violent storm in a spooky abandoned airplane hangar next to a centuries-old “hanging rock,” where Vikings used to lynch one another.

In the morning frayed nerves mixed with a forecast of big surf and heavy blizzards in the north prompt the crew to drive up the meridian.

But first Timmy Turner needs a haircut.

Turner wears his scar as a badge of honor and plans to give it a starring role in this latest film, a testament to his own good fortune and tenacity. But this is a man so focused on his goals that he sometimes fails to consider the best way to achieve them.

In an empty parking lot of an Icelandic coffee shop, Turner ducks into a corner to use a trash can as a wind shield. Suddenly the unmistakable acrid stench of burning hair perfumes the air.

Timmy, what are you doing?

“I’m lighting my hair on fire,” he replies, as if it’s the most reasonable thing in the world.

Timmy, why are you lighting your hair on fire?

“I can’t find the scissors.”

This prompts someone to quickly locate a set of shears.

Throughout his filmmaking career Turner has turned his stubbornness into an asset, but the impatience that goes along with it carries liabilities. It may even have been responsible for his staph infection. He had been rehabilitating a broken ankle and was so eager to get back into shape that he ignored his better judgment and surfed in storm runoff rather than waiting a few days until the bacteria-laden water had washed out to sea.

To prevent any potential pyrotechnic mishaps, surfer Ian Battrick cuts Turner’s hair for him. Tufts of hair blow off his scalp like tumbleweeds, gradually revealing the deep gash in his skull.

When I first met Turner over lunch last year in San Francisco, he had a full head of hair that made his brain surgery seem to be little more than a rumor. He explained that his original skin, hair follicles and all, was never damaged and sits atop his new skull. Sensing my disbelief, he seized my hand and ran it over a strange bulge on the back of his head.

While in the hospital recovering from the surgeries, Turner suffered from hydrocephalus, the buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. Because of the infection, his brain could no longer absorb the fluid it naturally produces, and Turner again began suffering crushing headaches. To rectify the problem Dr. Kim drilled a small hole into the back of Turner’s skull and implanted a shunt — a soft, porous, plastic catheter — into a channel in the middle of Turner’s brain. A drainage tube connected to the catheter wraps down his neck, over his clavicle, and into the abdomen, where the fluid is absorbed.

Battrick takes a breath as he attacks the last patch of hair on Turner’s head, gingerly running the clippers over the cigarette lighter–size bump where the shunt sits. The rest of the crew stands transfixed. The only one who doesn’t seem the least bit concerned is Turner.

Josh Mulcoy knows what’s coming. He’s just pulled on his six-millimeter-thick neoprene armor and is walking into the surf at Kópasker. Thirty-five-degree water pours into his booties and seeps into the webbing of his toes, sending a chill so sharp his digits involuntarily curl. As he paddles toward the break, his gloves fill up, and his fingertips sting. Then comes the moment he has been dreading; a set rolls through and Mulcoy duck-dives under a wave. His face, the only exposed part of his body, tightens — the ocean is so icy it burns — and frigid water flushes into his hood and down his back, turning his wetsuit into a flash freezer. The suit is designed to trap water so that his body heat can warm it up to a comfortable temperature, but here at 66 degrees north in the Greenland Sea, it’s not the water that heats up but the body that quickly turns cold.

“This is the coldest I’ve ever been,” Mulcoy says, shivering as he trudges out of the surf and into the unsatisfying chill of a parked van. He has ridden waves in Alaska, Norway, and Canada, but nothing has prepared him for this. “It’s life and death out there.”

Mulcoy, Hammer, and Battrick spent 90 flag-planting minutes in the lineup, becoming the first people to surf this backwater break, and so the locals are treating them like guests of honor, firing up the town sauna and offering them a place to stay for the night.

One problem: Turner isn’t seeing the waves he wants. He thinks the group might find better surf someplace else. Hammer and Mulcoy, though, are in no hurry to leave. Not only are they relishing the privileged treatment, they’re anxious to get back out in the water. The surf has doubled in size since they first went in, with overhead waves breaking for 100 yards.

But Turner sees his grail within reach. Snow. Barrels. The Shot. “We’re going to Húsavík,” he proclaims, soon after he comes out of the surf himself, steam pouring from his shaved head as if it were a boiling teakettle.

As it turns out, though, Húsavík doesn’t have much surf to offer this day, and in leaving Kópasker, the crew winds up leaving the only rideable wave for a hundred miles. “I blew it,” Turner admits later. Dinner of pizza and fish is spiced with frustration and disappointment. At 9 pm, Turner drives off in a blizzard to check the surf one last time, crossing the line between obstinacy and obsession.

“Timmy’s out there searching for something special,” Mulcoy says. “Maybe it’s out there. But maybe it’s not.”

On one of their last days in Iceland, the gang heads for Vík, a hiccup of a town sandwiched between a glacier and the ocean along Iceland’s southern coast. There they find a long, empty beach with good waves. In the backdrop a catalog of geologic features conspires to create one of the most breathtaking surf spots on the planet: the glacier files down snowy mountains; snowmelt flushes sediment into the river; and the sediment flows seaward creating a sandbar, the gravelly terminus for waves that have marched hundreds of miles across the North Atlantic.

“Cool,” says Turner.

He sets up the camera and the guys go to work. Hammer hacks the chest-high surf apart with the power his last name implies while Mulcoy weaves through tiny barrels with aplomb. All of this spells good news for Turner, who films from shore. It may not be the shot he’s after, but these are some of the best waves he’s found all trip — and just plain fun.

I offer to take over the camera so he can paddle out, and eventually the surf becomes too tempting for him to decline.

Is this what the doctors had in mind when they told you to stay out of the tropics? I ask him.

Turner pauses as if considering the question for the first time.

“I don’t think so,” he replies, and runs into the surf.

This article originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.