DC Green's profile of Australian kneeboarder and photographer Peter Crawford ran in the Summer 2004 issue of Surfer's Journal. Crawford died at age 48, on Christmas Day 1999, in Bali, reportedly due to complications from either a snake or spider bite. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

1995: The first Quiksilver G-Land world tour contest. Pro surfers filled the cabin at Bobby’s Surf Camp, while the media bunkered down two by two in the less-plush “jungle camp". There were plenty of sniping comments at the appearance of photog legend Peter Crawford, then shooting for one of his own, ill-fated surf publications. Bent over with a back injury, he mostly hung with his gorgeous Zen-calm lady. One morning I emerged from the bush toilet and there he was. Crawford approached me with a mischievous look in his eye. “DC . . . .” He smiled and rolled his eyes back to introduce himself. “PC . . . .” The eyes rolled further up, and his mouth curled into a smirk, then a laugh, as he repeated “DC, PC, DC, PC,” as if the combination of our initials was the most amusing thing in Java.

Crawford then opened a clenched hand to reveal a palm-full of colorful pills, which he ostentatiously gobbled down without water, cackled, waved a farewell, and was gone.

That was our first ever conversation. I’d said nothing, though I wondered much. Were the pills a conduit to realms few knew existed? Were they just fancy vitamins? Were they a prop, to be spat out? Or was he in that much pain? At first, his actions and words seemed affected, even deranged, though I have since thought of more than a dozen interpretations of that coded conversation.

Later, at the meal tables, Crawford told me about his 36-second tube ride at Desert Point, a wave that so altered his perceptions he did not surf for six months afterwards, as if it took that long to digest the magnitude of the spiritual insight the wave had force-fed him. Then he shot me a quizzical look, and again I was off-balance. Was he was testing, playing, fibbing, deluded, or earnestly revealing the path to enlightenment?

I have often been described as a gonzo journalist ("gonzo" as in actively participating in the story instead of passively reporting, frequently with the aid of mind-altering substances, especially as popularized by Hunter S. Thompson). Yet when Crawford’s girlfriend allowed me to read through the journals of his last two years of life, I realized how little I understood about the genre; how I am a timid Prufrock wading in the gonzo shallows compared to the way PC hurtled himself into the deep end, naked and screaming. His journal pages bulged with brilliance and diversity, with quotes from favorite songs, Woody Allen, and Omar Khayam; with photos and poems of his father and children; with cartoons, weather maps, newspaper clippings, dried four-leaf clovers, short film reviews, endless lists of things to do and people to contact, family birthdays, and equations that were either whimsical or deranged, such as: “Positive over Enchantment = Buddha x Tibet x the square root of infinity over the square root of God over Teacher = Flame, Time, and the number 7."

Now I am supposed to write the truth (whatever the hell that is) about the last days of a man who was not only a groundbreaking photographer in the thick of surfing from the formative years of professionalism, but was himself one of the best surfers in the world, as well as a writer, board designer, bonsai gardener, insomniac, husband and father. He was said to be the tightest of mates, tortured, unknowable, a man who cried at sad movies, could sleep under tables at parties, read auras like morning newspapers, and learned his limits by regularly voyaging beyond them. Printworthy Crawford tales could bloat an entire volume of magazines, so I apologize to the many whose names and stories I have brutally culled, and for chapters that have becoming sentences.

Peter Crawford died one week before the year 2000 dawned. The news shook the surfing world, yet few of the published eulogies mentioned the people who were with him at the time of his death, and then only cursorily.

The official story is simple: death by snakebite on Bali. Others say he died by spider bite. While for some, any sort of death by wildlife just seems too mundane, especially for Crawford. So rumors have multiplied like buzzards since his death. Was it karma, for his running down an old Indonesian three years earlier? Was the snake a cover-up for a drug overdose? (As rival photographers were only too eager to point out, Crawford certainly knew the sights along the road of self-abuse.) Was his bizarre passing a defiant rock star piss in the face of old age? A radical divorce from his convoluted marriage with convoluted Indonesia, so he didn’t have to witness the Sari Club rubble of the new millennium? Crawford was a kneeboarder, too, and by the time of his death, kneelos were like dinosaurs after the big meteor smote earth, existing in ever-dwindling pockets, seemingly destined for extinction. Was his death somehow symbolic of the corporatization of surfing, the demise of surfing’s truly weird and innovative, the extinction of pure gonzo? Or was his ending merely that which we all fear the most, a random, stupid accident? None of which explains my feeling that, even now, Crawford's eyes are sparkling like that morning at G-Land, delighted at all our confusion.

In a diary entry dated November 14, 1999, one month before he died, Crawford exultantly lists the birth details of Chris “Critta” Byrne’s new-born daughter, Milla, concluding with a quote from the Brian Cadd song: “A little ray of sunshine has come into my life in the shape of a girl." Crawford visited Byrne's home in Wollongong to check in on the newly-expanded family.

Four years later when I call on Byrne, the former aggronaut pro surfer, he clearly remembers that Crawford visit. It was the last day Critta saw his best mate alive. “We’d been soul buddies since 1974," he told me. "We both knew if something was wrong with the other. That time he seemed a bit distant, a bit sad and agitated. He mentioned he had something wrong with the valves in his ticker, and kept telling me to take really good care of that beautiful kid.”

Like virtually everyone I spoke to about Crawford, Critta struggled for a moment with emotion. “Before he left, he went all serious. He said, ‘When I'm gone, look after my legacy. Make sure they don’t make a mockery of me.’”

Peter Crawford was born on July 26, 1951. At age one, his family moved to the hard Sydney beach suburb of Dee Why. The PC-sized holes in the walls of his home were testament to the violence of his youth. Remembers John Harris, a few years younger: “Dee Why back then was another world. It was tough. The separation [from the rest of Sydney] wasn’t just in kilometers. We had the heaviest wave, and no one else was having it. You couldn’t hide from the Point.”

Indeed. Dee Why Point was the brutal barrel that shaped, in order, Crawford’s brilliant kneeboarding, and his ultra-tight style of water photography.

Both activities, of course, paralleled ex-pat American George Greenough, who was pulling full-bore roundhouse cutbacks before such a move existed, and peering out from behind the curtain with insane regularity before Lopez had grown pubes: a fact most people managed to ignore in the 1960s (and since) simply because Greenough was a kneeboarder. Crawford inherited George's mantle in the ’70s, becoming the antipodal eccentric. Critta: “Peter loved Greenough. Not just his surfing and photography, but his style on land as well. Greenough was always barefoot, and kept his pants held up with a rope around his waist. Crawford was the same, with his own dress code—socks with plastic sandals and a groovy shirt.”

For both men, of course, surfing spoke louder than fashion. It took two decades for the stand-ups to catch up with the kneeboarders’ roundhouses, deep tube riding, carve 360s, barrel rolls (like the one Crawford pulled at the ’76 Aussie titles) and ability to take on the heaviest of breaks.

Crawford and Critta first met at the NSW titles when PC was in the middle of his extraordinary domination of Australian kneeboarding, winning a hatful of consecutive titles. The two regularly bailed out of the city to surf secret South Coast reefs together. When Critta broke his back, PC helped get him back in the water, and helped again when Critta almost lost an eye in Indonesia. “He’d had so many illnesses himself, being a tall, skinny cunt always carrying heavy tripods, cameras, and housings. So he was a book of information about living."

Critta continues: “Basically, he was good at everything. He did my gardens and knew all the scientific names of the plants. He built his own waterhousings. He was a talented writer who could layout and produce a whole magazine on his own.”

I bring up Peter's untimely death, and Critta agrees there was an air of mystery around it, and that it was possible other substances were involved. “He wasn't old when it happened, but life was moving toward an end. Peter was brilliant early in his career. Then came his divorce; his magazines went down one after the other, and every year there were another 30 new photographers with auto-focus." Critta pauses. "Fuck, I miss him. Every day.”

Looking back at Peter Crawford’s last two years, about half the period was spent in Indonesia, on and off, and much of that time with a core group of people who I'll get to, including Critta (though not on the final trip). Bali, especially, was Crawford’s work and pleasure retreat, where he truly lived. Critta: “After Gerry Lopez and company stumbled onto Ulu’s in the early ’70s, PC wasn’t far behind. He didn’t like how Kuta evolved into such a rat race, but he always liked hanging out with the local surfing crew. His favorite eateries included the fish market for noodles, soups, and fish, Aroma’s for vegetarian food, Tubes for surf movies, the Sari Club, like all Aussies and ex-pats, and Club 66 for a bit of a laugh.”

The influence was two-way. "Peter was my teacher, my father, my friend," says Indonesian surf photographer Piping. He gave me many tips—how to play with current, how to protect your energy when you swim, how to shoot manually and play with the camera. He one the Westerner who supported me, who say the feedback will be more strong if I give to the people than if I just surf for myself."

1995 was a turning point. President Soeharto’s famously corrupt son Tommy wanted to develop the land around Dreamland on the Bukit Peninsula. Yet the old man who owned the land wouldn’t sell, despite the urgings of his son. According to Pamela Peel, Crawford's girlfriend at the time of his death: “They needed a Western person to run him over, famous even better. And so the old man was shoved in front of Peter’s speeding car. Peter stopped and was amazed to see that the car following him contained a foreign doctor and nurse, ready to pronounce the old man dead. But everyone was mad because the old man was only injured.”

Added Critta: “They all wanted to kill PC.”

Steve Palmer helped Crawford leave the country and arranged a cash transfer to placate the old man’s family. Steve's memory of the event is different from Pamela's. He doesn’t think the old man was pushed onto the road, and remembers him only breaking his leg. Steve, furthermore, is sure PC would have been “driving at a good pace and chatting at the time, even if to some imaginary passenger.”

Three years later, Crawford returned to Bali with a new passport. Tommy Soeharto owned Dreamland. That was the trip Crawford re-met David Smith and discovered Pamela Peel, both of whom would be with him during his final days.

David Smith met Peter Crawford on a surf trip to virginal Papua New Guinea in 1986. A dozen years later, the two met up I again, inside the Uluwatu cave. David, now 35, was (and still is) a rep for Indo Dreams in Bali. For the last two years of Crawford’s life, on and off, the two had “amazing conversations” and plotted clandestine photographic missions, “thick as thieves.” Best of all was a break called Crumplecar, a secret wave barreling down the side of a shipwrecked hull, photos of which fast became myth.

David: “We got up at 4:00 a.m. every day for two weeks, Peter was so excited. The photos that resulted were amazing, especially considering he had hardly anything at that point, gear-wise, just second-hand cameras, old flippers, and his girlfriend’s ancient bodyboard.”

That was the same trip Crawford met Pamela Peel.

David: “She was already friends with Dick Hoole and Jack McCoy. They were a classic couple—the Hawaiian princess double-riding PC around on her motorcycle with his 70s hairstyle flying everywhere. Money came and went quickly for PC, so Pamela was good for him. She inspired and pushed him, and funded a lot of his projects. He went through rolls of Velvia like ice cream. PC was in the wilderness there for a few years before he met her. Unfortunately, not everyone sees her like that.”

I met Pamela, 51, an exotic English-Irish-Polynesian-Chinese-French blend, at her NSW Central Coast family property, nestled between an abandoned petrol station and a wrecking yard. Shifty, her hulking 11-month-old bull terrier-pitbull mix, bounded out and slobbered his welcome. I was even more floored when Pamela announced, “You’re the first journalist to ever ask me about Peter. But I knew you’d come. I knew Pez (Steve Pezman, Journal publisher) would send someone. Pez was a father figure and mentor to Peter, the one editor who recognized Peter’s brilliance through his eccentricities, who was always loyal through the highs and lows.”

Pamela herself is emerging from a long low. She nearly died in a car crash six months after Crawford’s death. She lost her mother, too, and her health and finances had fallen apart. Yet the return of high times seems inevitable for this lady who has lived a life so varied and determined that Crawford considered her “his amazing female equal.”

The two met at the Sari Club on April 24, 1998. (Unbeknownst to each other, the two were neighbors at Sunset Point in 1976, when Pamela was living with former world champ Felipe Pomar). She remembers hearing a voice behind her: “I finally found you. I’ve been looking for you all my life.” Pamela whispered to her friend, “Who is he talking to?” Her friend smiled and replied, “You!” So a somewhat stunned Pamela turned and replied, “Well, come and introduce yourself.”

PC smiled, “My name is Peter Crawford. And I’m famous!”

Pamela: “Lovely to meet you. I’m Pamela Peel and I’m infamous. But I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of you!”

Pamela smiles at the memory. “He laughed, threw his arms up and cried, ‘Perfect!’ And we were together from that day until I left him in the morgue, 20 months later.”

In that short time, Crawford contracted Dengue fever, spent a week in Wyong Hospital after getting tangled in another surfer’s legrope at Forresters, and was presciently bitten by an assortment of miniature wildlife. At the Noosa Longboard contest, he was savaged by sandflies. A month later he went to the hospital, where doctors discovered sandfly eggs inside the remaining bites. A scorpion in Indonesia bit him. Again, infection followed, and a trip to the hospital. Crawford’s weird hyper-metabolism, which was actually tested by fascinated scientists at Sydney University when he was seven, seemed a magnet to the invertebrate world.

Pamela: “I miss him terribly. Most people are so boring, but Peter’s mind was buzzing with endless ideas. We had a great relationship, the same friends and the same interests, from I Ching to film. We were sitting in Aroma’s once and a mist appeared beside us. ‘Hello, mother,’ Peter smiled like it was the most natural thing to talk to a dead relative.”

On December 12, a little more than two weeks before he died, while back home in Dee Why, Crawford made an offering to Duke Kahanamoku. It consisted of a piece of a palm tree that resembled a surfboard, a giant Queensland orchid, angel hair, and a big cloth poster of the Duke.

December 16. Packing day. Peter’s sons, Justin and Scott dropped by in the afternoon to share a few chuckles and wish him a happy Christmas and a safe trip. On his final night in Australia, Peter was struck down with a fever. Remembers Pamela: “We almost didn’t go, but being holiday time, Garuda Airlines wouldn’t change the tickets. Still, I was glad to leave Dee Why. Peter always fell back into old bad habits there.”

December 17. At Sydney Airport, Peter and Pamela bought liter bottles of duty-free tequila and scotch. On the plane, flying over Bali, Pamela remembers Peter peering out the window: “He had his glasses on and his binoculars out, looking like a mad professor, searching for Crumplecar, his baby. Then he slumped forward and said, ‘I can’t see it’.” Around four in the afternoon, the two were picked up at Tuban Airport and dropped at Panorama Cottages, where they had stayed so often before.

Pamela: “The doors to Number 18 were wide open. It was like, ‘Welcome to your destiny.’ Late that evening, I asked Peter if he was coming to bed. ‘Oh Pamela,’ he replied. ‘Let me enjoy our beautiful garden and get drunk on the first night of our holiday. I deserve that.’ Standing beneath a giant heliconia tree, wearing only his boardshorts, a glass of Cuervo in one hand, he looked up at the moon and said, ‘We’re finally home.’ As he reached up to touch a flower, a lipi gadang uncurled, bit him on the left arm above the elbow, and went back up into the tree.”

Crawford joined Pamela in bed soon after, unaware of the magnitude of what had just happened.

December 18. In the morning, Pamela remembers being scared when “Peter’s eyes clanged open like a robot, or an alien, in a cold way I’d never seen before. There were silver spots in his pupils.” When Pamela asked if Peter was OK, he snapped angrily, “Nothing’s wrong! You’re stupid!” He leaped up and Pamela noticed the lump on his arm, the size of half an orange. Because of his foul mood, she went to the beach to visit friends. Later in the day, she returned and found a message from a surgeon: “Peter has had an operation. Please come to Sanglah Hospital.”

At the hospital, Pamela found her boyfriend asleep in bed, knocked out by anesthetic, his arm bandaged. Beside him were a kidney dish and a metal syringe full of mustard-colored pus. "I wrote him a note saying I’d be back at 9:00 in the morning, and left him some rupiah, snacks, and water.”

December 19. Pamela: “Peter was ready to be checked out that morning. The doctor asked if he wanted the pus tested. But besides costing $50, the test results would take 14 days, and we weren’t even sure if we’d still be on Bali then, so Peter said, ‘Forget it. I feel fine.’ That afternoon, he rested at home.”

December 20. Pamela: “We went to the clinic to have the dressing changed. Later that morning, David Smith came over, so I went to the hairdresser while Peter rested and chatted about Crumplecar. In the afternoon, we decided to go to the movies. David’s girlfriend wanted to watch 

 [a sci-fi horror film about mutant sharks], so we did. Then Peter wanted to watch 

December 22. Peter's final journal entry: “David Smith and I voyage back to Crumplecar to see the . . . .” The sentence ends there. The boat was gone. Peter and David drove their rented bemo to Benoa Harbor to see where it had been towed.

December 23. The last full moon of the millennium would also be the brightest, as the moon closer to the earth than at any point during the entire century. After dusk, Peter, Pamela, David, and girlfriend walked next door to Paul King’s bungee tower.

Pamela: “Peter raced up first, like the roadrunner, to photograph the moon.” As Tim Baker would later eulogize, Crawford was “chasing thrills beyond the endurance of his legendary constitution until the end.”

Pamela: “Later, Peter was sitting up in bed, picking photos for Alby Falzon’s new book. He started to shake. A bluish color crept across his neck like a shadow, which I later realized was his lymph gland releasing dormant poison. Then it was gone and he went back to normal. Seeing how worried I was, Peter said. "I’m OK. You know my crazy metabolism." So I got him the takeaway spring rolls he wanted, his cure for everything, and he went to sleep. Around midnight, he woke and said he was hungry again. I asked if he wanted to drive to get some food, but he said no, he wanted some exercise. He returned at 4:00 a.m.”

December 24. Pamela: “The next morning, Peter seemed alright. We went to breakfast with David’s girlfriend and her architect friend. It was Christmas Eve, so I went to book us a table for four at the Aussie Smorgasbord lunch at the Gardenview in Legian. My motorbike had a puncture, so I was gone two hours. It was very hot, so when I returned, I was sweating like crazy. Peter didn't look well. We’d moved the mattress downstairs onto the cool tiles, and he just wanted to give me a hug and sleep there with the fan on. I walked over and told David then returned to the room to read magazines while Peter slept. Late in the afternoon I kissed Peter on the forehead and went to the supermarket across the road to buy juice, water, and supplies. I picked up a bag of sugar, and it exploded outward, not down with gravity. The Balinese girls packing shelves looked at me and went, “Ohhh!” In retrospect, that must have been the exact moment.

“During the short time I was out, a storm rolled in. Thunder crashed and rain bucketed down, so I ran across the road with the shopping bags. ‘I’m back!’ I said and went over to PC to give him some juice. He was limp, his forehead cool. ‘What?’ I cried and started shaking him. I couldn’t believe it. I’d only been gone 15 minutes. ‘Peter! Peter!’ I felt for a pulse. There was none. Lightning flashed. I started giving him CPR and screaming to the Balinese workers out the back. I couldn’t stop. The workers came in and called for help. I refused to stop giving Peter CPR. I was in total shock and couldn’t do anything else. Brown liquid dribbled out of his mouth and nostrils. Finally, a Javanese doctor and nurse arrived, Doctor A.H. Herman Anggawisata, who’d been on a call at Kuta. He gave Peter three adrenaline shots while I kept crying, ‘Look up! Wake up! This isn’t funny anymore!’ I was going mad.

"My soul was screaming. The garden flooded. Finally, the doctor said, ‘He’s gone.’ I went with Peter to the hospital, where they said the same thing, then to the morgue, where I had to fill out all the paperwork. I kept expecting him to sit up and laugh. The doctor said the run-up the bungee tower had released the poison, but it would have been released in the next two weeks and killed him either way. The whole thing lasted from 8:00 to 11:30 p.m. Back at Panorama, the police came and I had to go to the station in the rain. It was surreal, like a movie. All the police wanted, when they finally drove me home at 4:00 a.m., was a Playboy magazine."

December 25. Pamela: “The crazy man wasn’t there anymore. I maybe slept for one hour. When it started to get light I talked to Peter in my mind. Then I went to David’s. Thank God he was there. I would have died of grief and shock. I was so shattered, I just couldn’t think or function at all. David was a great help. We made an offering of flowers and personal items and blessed Peter. That day was horrifying. So many heavy decisions.

"I called Critta, Mick Mock, the boys, as many people as I could, but telling the story over and over was just too hard. At that point, I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, if it had been a spider bite, or what. I couldn’t sleep in that room, so I moved to another room. I talked to the manager and made sure no one touched Peter’s room for three days, so he could get used to being in a spirit body.”

December 31. PC’s embalmed body flew back to Australia at 1:00 a.m. so he could see in the new millennium at home. Pamela flew back two days later.

January 7. PC was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens and Crematorium in his favorite clothes: brown Quiksilver shorts, sarong, and an Outer Island shirt with a hibiscus motif and Egyptian eyes. At the request of Scott and Justin Crawford, no autopsy was performed.

January 8. At his beloved Dee Why Point, hundreds paddled out to say farewell, including perhaps the last great gathering of the kneeboard clan. A double circle was formed, representing PC’s favorite number, infinity, and his ashes were thrown into the air from film canisters.

A gardener friend of Crawford’s remembered a conversation two weeks before the end in which PC told him, “I think I’m going to be bitten by a snake and go to my mother’s arms this Christmas.”

In Bali, I sniffed around Crawford’s favorite hangouts. Wayan Tirta, manager of Panorama Cottages, showed me through the rooms of Number 18. I found no answers or clues, physical or psychic. Wayan: “Of course I not forget Peter. He lovely man, always funny, but sometimes very nervous, and rushing. He always chew the side of his sunglasses until he destroy. He give to me the chewed glasses, but I lose.”

We went into the garden, where Wayan named all the plants. I checked them all, but from a respectful distance, in case whatever fanged creature within had developed a taste for surf media folks. Wayan’s name for the big tree with many colorful flowers and upright purple leaves was a Kamboja. “In Java, they have these in cemeteries.”

Wayan mostly remembers Pamela crying on the fateful evening. “I must report to 

, because Peter is my guest.” He seemed dubious about the cause of death. “I never hear of people die from snake in Bali. If green snake bite, it burn. People go, ‘OHH!’ Peter little sick, but later he go up bungee tower. From that, I not believe in snake or spider.”

“I think he sick already inside.” Wayan taps his chest. “He cough like he have flu. He have often. I wonder why he not have health report.”

Piping was blunter: “I think snake bullshit, because snake lives in bush. Whatever happen, he just go. Hopefully, PC have a good place, because I know he have good karma.”

For others, the snake makes perfect sense. Kim “Fly” Bradley, long-time Bali denizen, spent many nights partying with Crawford at the Sari Club. “I knew a guy who died one month after being bitten by a snake. Also, PC was known to be very allergic. When the two of us were in Sumbawa once, he was bitten by something and his arse blew up like a football. So I don’t believe the other stories. His mental state in his final months was really positive. He’d met Pamela, he was loving life and focused on his work.”

Drugs? Fly shook his head. “Just beers by the pool, maybe a few big nights a week. He wasn’t doing anything else, at least not in front of me.”

According to Pamela and David Smith, not to mention his own journal, Crawford’s future was solidly booked: a Philippines trip in January, a Paul King Indo project in April, more Indo, more books, plus Crawford’s gonzo goal to film himself kneeboarding Chicama for several kilometers. None of which supports the rumor of a man planning to end his own life.

There are other, darker rumors, too, although no one would put their name to any for this story. This, in a way, also makes sense. Rumors make the story more intriguing—like the 

 headline, “Star’s Mystery Death.” Rumors create ambiguity, rendering Crawford’s death not unlike his life. But they also tarnish. As David Smith said: “Peter always called a spade a spade and didn’t care about the repercussions.” Yet there were always repercussions. Critta put it this way: “Some of PC's bad situations resulted from the envy of his peers. Sometimes he was too brilliant for his own good. As for his death, no one will ever really know.”

Beyond all the bullshit, Peter Crawford’s death was but a minuscule fraction of a remarkable life. His legacy, his work, his photos, will endure.

In Bali, a friend lent me a book by James P. Carse, 

, about the two types of games people play. The object of the finite game, which is the more common of the two, is to establish a winner and loser according to set rules, and thus end the play. Infinite games, played by more advanced souls, continually open up and expand, for the object is to continue play. Even beyond death, perhaps. At every turn, the book reminded me of Peter Crawford, surfing’s ultimate infinite game player, laughing even now at my feeble attempts to unravel the unravelable.

"INFINITE GAMES: THE FINAL DAYS OF PETER CRAWFORD," by DC GREEN

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