Lance Carson overcame a lot of challenges in his storied life. Diagnosed with spina bifida as a baby, he battled back that childhood affliction by learning to surf at four, eventually becoming the number two-rated nose rider (behind David Nuuhiwa) on a 1965 SURFER Magazine list of the ten most accomplished tip riders in the world.

When the '60s Shortboard Revolution pushed the “old school” longboard masters out of the limelight he refused to abandon longboarding. Instead he bought the only large blanks left in the market and started his own label: Lance Carson Surfboards.

As population growth and pollution began to dirty his sacred lineup at Malibu, Lance co-founded the Surfrider Foundation with fellow Southern California surfers Glenn Hening and Tom Pratte driving the start of the environmental movement in surfing.

And when today’s mass-produced, disposable boards began to get spit out of a shaping machine, he continued his hand-shaped and meticulously crafted longboard point wave shapes —some of the world’s best.

Now, all those challenges pale compared to what happened this week.

“It’s all gone,” Lance says, scanning the destruction of the neighborhood that was the pride of L.A.’s beach culture. “For three days we watched it burn to pavement. The Palisades is gone.”

It seems incredulous that the surfing figures who invented the surfing lifestyle could now be homeless.

“I’m making do,” he tells me with an astonishingly upbeat tone in his voice. He slept in his big van the first two nights. “All I could take with me was some clothes and my dog.”

And of all the personalities who have made the Palisades home - and the beaches below them into the image of west coast beach culture - Lance Carson may be one of the most eminent.

“When it came to surfing Malibu, nobody rode the nose better than Lance Carson,” his friend and author, Peter McGuire has written. “Different from Miki Dora’s smooth, narrow-stance, trimming style, Lance’s technique was a more upright, bob-and-weave approach; known for his tail block stalls and cross stepping sprints to the nose.”

Not many surfers become iconic enough to have a Hollywood movie written about them. Lance Carson provided the inspiration for the characters “Lance,” and “Matt Johnson” in his friend John Milius’ films Apocalypse Now and Big Wednesday. To the world at large, the Malibu icon may be the most well-known character on the silver screen.

Carson was a character well defined by his old friend and Big Wednesday screen writer Denny Aaberg. Brash, unrepentant, self-assured and yet easily hurt, Carson has lived his life simply and with style - sometimes in the shadow of his own mythology.

Now both the man and the myth are trying to climb from the ashes. Due to the toxicity of the fire debris no one has been allowed back to the Palisades. The dwelling Lance has lived in for over five decades is still standing but he doesn’t t know the exact condition – whether home is partially destroyed and what valuables are intact. “I’ve got a few things I want to get out”, he says, “There’s my very first board my dad made me. It is 4-foot – and I first rode it when I was four.“

There are bright spots, Lance notes. “My shaping room which I had just moved to the area above Pt. Dume survived intact. All my tools, blanks, and materials are still there. I’ll still be able to shape boards.” His musical instrument s are still safe in a storage in Hermosa, too. There is another note he mentions with a little choke in his voice.

“Some of my oldest friends have gotten in touch,” he says. “Sometimes I think it takes something like this to bring us all together.”

But like so many others who have lost everything in this cataclysm, he knows it will never be what he once knew. And none of us who ride California’s storied waves can know yet how much we all have lost.