Q&A with Jeffrey Armstrong, Author of Asphalt Surfer

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Jeffrey Armstrong's Asphalt Surfer is the perfect summer read—a nostalgic, feel-good coming-of-age novel that spans both decades and thousands of miles across America. Inspired by Jeffrey's own hitchhiking adventures in the 1960s, the story blends humor, heart, and adventure as it follows a young man navigating the open road and learning new lessons with each ride. In the Q&A, Jeffrey talks about the journey behind the book, the memories that inspired it, and why the story still resonates today.

Book Description: Venice, Florida isn’t cool. The vibe in Venice, California is.

It’s 1968, and Jack Walsh has just graduated from high school. A surfer in Venice, Florida, Jack’s dream is to hitchhike across the United States to Venice, California, in search of the perfect wave. Along the way, the naive teenage surfer-wannabe encounters mysterious, beautiful, and terrible strangers, highlighting the social norms and cultural realities of America of the late 60s, transforming the young man into the adult he desires to be. 

Buy the book here. Author Bio: Jeffrey P. Armstrong grew up in New York and Florida and as a teenager, hitchhiked around America in the late 1960s. He has worked as a salesman in the health industries and as a registered nurse. He lives in Gulfport, Florida with his wife.

What inspired Asphalt Surfer? 

For years I’d been telling friends entertaining stories about people I’ve met and places I’d visited. Some folks were skeptical of these tales. My wife started saying I should write a book incorporating my stories.

During COVID, I invested in a gel pen and some composition notebooks and began piecing together the unique characters I’ve met over my lifetime. In particular, I thought about the ones that I’d like to hitchhike across the country with to fulfill a dream I had when I was young – surfing the waves in Southern California. 

The novel vividly captures a past era. How did you approach writing within the social and cultural context of the 1960s, and what challenges did you encounter when portraying a time period whose norms and daily realities differ so drastically from modern life?

I lived and learned through all that in my younger years. I joined many marches against the war in Vietnam and became an antiwar activist. I took on social actions like civil rights, farm workers’ rights, and helped form a workers union. We still need people to organize and continue that work today. 

How did surf culture of the 1960s influence the tone and rhythm of the novel, and what research or lived experience informed that portrayal?

I was part of that culture even though I didn’t have the big waves to surf on the west coast of Florida. My friends and I made our best efforts to surf on the small local waves. We were listening to all the surf music and reading surf magazines. It wasn’t difficult for me to write about because I totally lived that experience. 

What was your favorite aspect of writing this novel?

I got to relive my youth. Hopefully, younger readers will get a feel for what it was like to live through those times. Older people may find themselves reliving their own youth. It would be an added bonus if any readers are motivated to become more active in social causes. Mainly, I tried to keep it a short, easy read that is enjoyable. 

Did you run into any unexpected surprises or challenges in the writing process? 

I didn’t really have any challenges. There was no outline or storyboard. I just started writing with a gel pen in a composition book, and the writing started flowing. Eventually, I had a story with 115,000 words, which was cut down to 83,000 words.

The real people that my characters are based on do not appear as themselves in the book but may have different traits or be combined into fictional characters. Ultimately, the characters that Jack Walsh travels with from coast to coast are intended to help Jack reach his destination and learn something from each of them. 

What was it like writing a story where most characters appear only briefly, with the main character as the constant throughout? How did you approach developing these passing characters while keeping the focus on the protagonist?

The book characters are mostly a composite of people that I did encounter for a relatively short interval. The brief times that Jack spent with the passing characters is very true to life, then and now. Most people encounter a variety of characters in the course of a week or so. Occasionally, you strike up a longer, more personal conversation based on something random that happened in that brief period of time. Some of those conversations and faces stick with you a lifetime.

Did any side character become a particular favorite while you were writing? Why do you think you connected with them?

I probably related to Roscoe Campbell the most because he acted like an older brother to

Jack, and I have an older brother that talked to me straight. I learned about the Vietnam War from him before I was old enough to be drafted as a soldier.

Roscoe had physical and emotional damage from being in a war. In my later life, I went back to college for a second degree in nursing. I had a clinical rotation at a Veterans Administration Hospital where I was placed in a lockdown unit with many Vietnam and Gulf War veterans who were suffering from PTSD. I had seen that up close in my younger years in friends who returned from the Vietnam War. At the V.A., I was calling on my previous experiences dealing with PTSD and trying to help veterans in distress to find ways to manage their turmoil.

Surprisingly, Jack avoids misfortune for much of his journey until chapter nine, when he encounters someone trying to rob him. Can you talk about your decision to hold off on introducing the more dangerous aspects of hitchhiking until later in the story, and what you hoped that timing would accomplish for Jack’s character and the narrative?

In the 1960s, hitchhiking was most often a very safe thing to do. Rarely did we hear about anyone having an issue, let alone getting robbed. It was pretty unheard of back then.

Jack wasn’t totally naïve though. He was preparing for a problem by sewing a money pocket in his pants, and didn’t totally discount that a St. Christopher medal and a lucky rabbit’s foot might be useful in his travels. Jack’s conflict from the start of the story included a stressful relationship with his mother. She didn’t support him hitchhiking and didn’t understand what it meant to him. His family’s religion, Catholicism, presented another conflict that was reinforced when Jack attended the Christian revival meeting and observed Native American spirituality.

On the road, Jack was confronted with other stressors. He was fearful of the police when he hitchhiked, particularly when he was carrying drugs. He knew he couldn’t be truthful about his travel plans with them because he could be jailed for any number of real or falsified offenses. It wasn’t uncommon then for a questionable youth to be picked up and taken to a farm to work against his will as punishment for a minor infraction.

Watching an older woman being taken advantage of by a gas station attendant forced Jack to ignore it and lay low, or to do the right thing for the customer. He put himself in jeopardy with the shop owner who could have called the police to report the incident and him as a vagabond.

He had uncertainty and fear when Roscoe Campbell left him on the side of the road where he met Rupert Godfrey at another service station. Jack had trusted Roscoe to return his backpack and clothes that were left in his truck, but Rupert got in his head by asking him, “What if your ride doesn’t show up?”

Jack’s impulsiveness could lead him to uncomfortable consequences. He put himself in a bad position that might have left him dying in the Grand Canyon all alone. He made a bad decision by agreeing to go to a ghost town that set him up to be robbed.

The ending takes an unexpected turn when Jack makes a choice that contrasts with his motivation throughout the novel. Did you always know the story would end this way, or did Jack’s fate reveal itself as you wrote?

Jack’s fate revealed itself as I wrote the book. By the time he came to realize his own recklessness, he knew he needed to apologize to his mother and thank her without telling her how he’d come to that conclusion.

As Jack matured, he reflected on how and where his journey had taken him and those who helped him. Libby and her family were on his mind. He was drawn to the love and tightness among the Burke family and the Native Americans he had met. Their culture was very different from his and he found it comforting. Their spiritualism fascinated him, and he wanted to learn more to help him resolve his own spiritual conflict.

Jack accomplished his goal of surfing the perfect wave but I needed him to go deeper into his own self-awareness to continue learning from other people who had a much better understanding of the world. What do you hope is the main takeaway for readers of Asphalt Surfer?