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appeared in a national beer commercial on a Cantrell board, and twenty eight months after Sports Illustrated , Good Morning America , and Entertainment and Sports Program Network covered the first National Snowsurfing Championship, March and Mike moved from the first house they owned in the Marina District to a large place on Russian Hill with a hundred and eighty degree view of San Francisco and the bay. Both homes were a huge change from the crumbling, drafty, three-room Eleventh Street apartment over a warehouse, that first place in the City they’d moved back to after Mike had quit his job at Spreckles .
    In that old building, near a knot of San Francisco’s freeway interchanges, was where March chased two small and energetic little boys while her husband worked long hours producing the ski boards he sold in the local mountains on winter weekends.
    One tired and impossible-to-keep-clean-apartment was where both she and Mike took turns cooking dinners in an oven that burned the edges of every casserole they struggled to make, and where they had scraped by on graphics work she did on mornings so early it was still dark out, and during the kids’ nap times.
    As bad as that apartment had been, in retrospect, it was where the Cantrell family really began, and being there brought them all into a time when the boys didn’t need naps, a place where the oven worked perfectly and a job where March oversaw the graphics end of Cantrell Sports, Inc.
    Skiboarding had morphed into snowsurfing , and into snowboarding, a new sport which bred almost simultaneously on both sides of the country—on the West Coast by Mike, and the East Coast by Jake Burton. Both called visionaries, kindred in their love and creation of snowboards, who along with some other enthusiasts from surfing and skateboarding promoted and pushed the sport, met then raced each other at events in Colorado, Vermont, Lake Tahoe and Mt. Baker. The Entertainment and Sports Program Network desperately needed to fill 24 hours a day of air time and began to televise the meets and races on cable TV.
    By the time the Cantrell boys were nine and ten, snowboarding parks were successful at some of the major ski areas and the family move to the Russian Hill came about because of an absurd need for a much larger tax write-off.
    But the truth was: March loved the house from the first moment they walked inside. They were lucky to live in such a romantic, red-blooded city, and certain landmark homes were natural to that terrain. The classic old glorious houses she had driven past so many times began to sneak into her wildest dreams.
    Like some foreshadowing of what was to come, over the years March had felt some odd sense of joy just sitting at the red light and merely looking at that same house. Living there would make life perfect.
    It was a big beauty of a home on a famous corner near the crookedest street in the world, with views that went from foggy bridges and city lights, to glimmering water and all those blue skies. Wrapped in California stucco the color of butter, with a terra cotta tiled roof and dark-timbered doors and window frames, it spoke of the homes on coastal hillsides along the Mediterranean and had once belonged to an infamous Spanish opera singer.
    Shortly after they moved in, March redid the second floor master bedroom in Chinese red, because she’d read enough history of the place to believe the room needed color—passionate color. The night after painting the room red, she and Mike drank a rich bottle of Sonoma County cabernet, listened to Carmen, fed each other fruit and imported cheese and made love three times on a three hundred year old antique silk rug.
    Not long afterward March was sick every morning and sound asleep by seven o’clock every night, signs she knew all too well from her previous two pregnancies. Nine months and three days later, Molly was born, to the instant delight and future dismay of her two older brothers, Scott and Phillip.
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