A lesson in integrity from the Farmdog Surf School

Our family’s summer tradition is to vacation on the Outer Banks and get an annual surfing lesson. It is amazing how much talk, laughter and planning occurs all year because of that one day’s event.

About a half dozen of our family members usually do the surf lessons and Robert Farmer, who runs the Farmdog Surf School, is faced with the annual challenge of gathering together the right mix of instructors and surfboards for us. Since we only surf one week a year, we are a perennial group of beginning to low-intermediate surfers, ranging in age from early elementary to nearly AARP-age. (Disclosure: I’m the nearly AARP-age perpetual beginner.)

The instructors have always been patient professionals and superb surfers. We’ve never been disappointed.

Robert’s Farmdog Surf School is part of the Outer Banks Boarding Company’s store in Nags Head, but often the lessons are held wherever the waves are breaking best closest to the student’s vacation house.

The four wheel drive area where we rent our vacation house is a two hour drive from Nags Head: one hour on the road and one hour driving on the beach after the road ends. That means Robert and the instructors take a four-hour roundtrip trek to give us a two-to-three hour lesson.

This year, when our group stepped down onto the beach for our 9:00 a.m. lesson, Robert and a couple more instructors were right on time to meet us with a bunch of boards sticking out the back of their 4WD vehicle.

Everything was all set – except that there were no waves and the ocean was as smooth as a pond. That isn’t the way it usually is on the Outer Banks, but that’s how it was that day.

Robert said they had seen nothing in that whole stretch that could be surfed. “It’d just be stealing your money,” he said, “to try and give you a lesson on that.”

I told him I understood, and asked if I could at least pay for the considerable amount of time and gas it cost him to make the trip up to us. No, he said, if he couldn’t give us something worthwhile, he wouldn’t charge us for anything. I urged him some more and he refused some more.

There would have been nothing wrong with his accepting my offer. He couldn’t control the waves and he wasn’t responsible for their condition. But Robert didn’t want to do what was merely “right”, he wanted to maintain his own high standards of personal honor.

Robert’s bottom line was that if he could not do the work he had been hired to do, he did not want to get paid. Period.

It might seem like a small thing, but can you imagine the change in our country if that attitude was adopted by the President, the 535 members of Congress, and all the leaders of the Fortune 500 companies?

Every year at the end of the lesson, our group closes out the time by praying for Robert and his instructors. At least we were able to keep that part of our annual tradition before they began their long drive back down the beach.

Our family missed having our surfing lesson this year, but no one complained. We knew we had been given the gift of a greater lesson in personal and professional integrity.

Sharman’s column runs every Tuesday. He lives in Madison.