A wedding, a funeral, one last trip
Wife to take surfer spouse’s ashes to Africa
On their first surf trip to Mexico in 2006, best friends Kelly Callin and Maciek Pukowiec drove down to the Baja Peninsula in a beat-up black Chevy Cavalier they got for a bottle of rye.
“We fixed the brakes on it, and off we went,” Pukowiec recalled. “It started to leak coolant from the moment we got into Oregon.”
The Edmonton pair spent 18 days driving south on the Pacific Coast Highway, making a pit stop in San Diego to buy surf boards they strapped on the car roof with a rope.
On June 27, 2013, Callin and Pukowiec took another surf trip to the Baja. They only had a few days this time, so they flew to Cabo San Lucas then rented a car and drove up to Pescadero Surf Camp, a hostel with surf board rentals and instruction that’s just across the highway from the ocean.
Three hours after their flight landed, the guys were on the beach. It was nearly suppertime, too late to surf, so they went for a swim. Callin went first while Pukowiec watched their belongings on the shore, then they swapped. “Kelly passed me in the water and said, ‘Be careful, the riptide is strong,’ ” Pukowiec said. He thanked him for the warning, then swam off. It was the last time he saw his friend alive.
Callin, 32, died in the water that afternoon. He was wellknown in the local music scene as a member of reggae band The Soulicitors, and had been married less than a year to his wife, Tarah, who he had known since elementary school in Edmonton.
How, precisely, Callin’s life ended isn’t known. “I had a feeling something was wrong when I got back to shore and he wasn’t there,” Pukowiec said. Just then he spotted some Mexican teenagers on a cliff. They were waving and pointing.
“That’s when I told myself, ‘I need to do something.’ I swam out as far as I could, screaming his name.” There were no signs of his friend in the water. Pukowiec swam back to shore and ran to the rocky point. “What’s going on?” he screamed at the teens. They were making a hitting motion on the back of their head, then pointed to the ocean. “I was going to jump in again but I couldn’t see anything, just white foamy water.”
Callin had his new waterproof camera with him. “I don’t know if he was on the rock taking pictures, or swimming with it,” said Pukowiec, who endured a tumultuous three days of language barriers, police car rides, coastal searches and sleepless nights searching for Callin. Three days later, his body turned up in the water, just 150 metres from where Pukowiec last saw him.
The autopsy report, which Callin’s family had translated from Spanish, said he died immediately on impact and had no water in his lungs, Pukowiec said. “Maybe he wasn’t swimming. He may have slipped.”
Returning to Edmonton the following Tuesday was surreal. “I left with my best friend beside me and, coming home, I had him in a box on my shoulder crossing customs,” he said.
Callin was born June 14, 1980, in Edmonton, the older of Wade and Nancy Callin’s two sons. He attended Ekota elementary school, where he played soccer with the future love of his life. Kelly and Tarah (then Edgar) were in a split class (he was in Grade 3, she was in Grade 2). Tarah didn’t have a crush on him then.
“Kelly was a jogging-pants-tucked-into-rubber-boots kinda kid,” she recalled. “A boy’s boy, into only sports and mud.”
In 2007, Tarah and Kelly bumped into one another at a bar on Whyte Avenue. They talked about their elementary school teacher and their love of travel.
Five years later, in 2012, they were husband and wife. You could call it a bit of a Whyte wedding; the couple got photos taken on the famed Edmonton avenue where they first hit it off, and Tarah even staged a special event at The Next Act pub, where they’d downed countless pints of Grasshopper over the years and become friends with the pub owners. Before the wedding, Tarah had secretly bought Kelly his dream guitar, a cherry-coloured Gibson Les Paul Standard, and stashed it at The Next Act so she could surprise him on the big day.
“He was like, ‘Is this for me, do I get to keep this?’ He worried it was something I’d rented for the wedding photos.”
Kelly and Tarah were happiest on the beach and had visited Costa Rica, Colombia and Barbados, among other coastal destinations. They had busy careers — Kelly worked at Telus after studying telecommunications at NAIT, and Tarah is a school teacher — but travelled as much as they could. The couple had booked a big trip to South Africa in December 2013, one last child-free hurrah before they started having kids.
The unusual circumstances surrounding the death of Kelly Callin had all those who knew him reeling. Hundreds of mourners gathered for a wake celebrating his life July 11 at a Mill Woods community hall.
“Kelly wasn’t just my best friend. Kelly had many best friends,” Pukowiec said at the memorial, describing his friend of 20 years as charismatic, hard-working, happygo-lucky and courageous. “If there was ever anyone in the world I would follow into battle, it was him.”
Also speaking at the wake, Callin’s younger brother, Cory, made note of the Iggy Pop song Lust For Life, which had been playing in the hall beforehand. It was Kelly’s favourite tune at age 16, and “it sums him up,” Cory Callin said.
Kelly was one of the frontmen for The Soulicitors. His bandmates, Joel Johnson, Corey Burgess, Fred Brenton, Cam Green and Josh Miller, organized a benefit concert July 13 to offer financial support to his wife.
Tarah Callin will miss her husband’s mischievous, hearty laugh, their ritual of sleeping in every Saturday morning, the way he’d connect with her first, before anyone else, as soon as he came into a room. “I always felt like I was most important in that way.”
And, even though it drove her crazy, she’ll miss how her musical husband would play his guitar while having a conversation with her. “I’d be like, ‘HONESTLY. You have to STOP PLAYING the guitar now. You can’t do both at once!’ ”
At the wake, she spoke of their ability to forgo chores like lawn-mowing and shovelling, and instead make the most of each moment. “Each day we experienced a simple happiness and for that I am so grateful.”
Pukowiec is still trying to process his friend’s absence. “I catch myself, driving my car, looking to my right, because that’s where he’d always sit, and he’s not there. I don’t know what the road is, but it’s going to be long.”
Tarah Callin will travel to South Africa this winter, in part to honour her husband’s wishes. Kelly was always sure he’d die first, and he made Tarah promise she’d take his ashes somewhere warm. “He didn’t want to be sitting in a box in Edmonton forever,” she explained. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be eternally cold. I want to be in the ocean.’ ”