Crazy for the Storm

You do not exist at the center of the universe, he said, punctuating some words by jabbing harder.

I know, I said.

No you don’t. You’re a fucking self-centered thankless little shit.

I shook my head.

No I’m not, I said.

Yes you are, Norman. Yes you are.

What did I do? I yelled at him.

You left Sunshine out.

Oh shit. Is she okay?

That’s beside the point. The point is she could be dead by now. Eaten alive by those fucking coyotes. You don’t give a shit about her or about anything but yourself.

That’s not true, I said.

Yes it is.

No it’s not. I just got so stoked that I forgot.

That’s a bullshit excuse, Norman.

He pressed his nose against my nose. The whites of his eyes were mucus yellow. I recognized that he wanted to hit me and punish me and make me squirm. In that moment I envisioned myself much older and I was screaming and hell-bent, fighting a bunch of angry faces, eager to punish them like Nick wanted to punish me. When I came out of this vision and saw him again I was merely fascinated by his rage. What else could Nick do but fight all those demons, I thought, and try to slay them before they sucked him into their darkness?

I slapped his finger off my chest and stepped back. He snickered at my retreat.

I never want to become you, I declared to myself.

Tears welled from a hot cavern in my chest and washed him out of sight. I moved away and followed my feet. When I looked up I was walking along the bluff away from the point toward the bus stop. I held my board tight to my ribs and I cried and watched the waves roll into the cove. I wanted to dive into those long bending swells. As I imagined my escape the rage and pain converged with the shimmering light blooming off the water. It all blended into one, like rivers entwining. This invisible current swept me up and it felt right to go with it.

I ran down the embankment and across the horseshoed sand in the cove. The beach was empty and smelled like seaweed. I dropped my board and streaked for the ocean. When I hit the water my skin stung as if cakes of dried mud were tearing off of me. Now there was nothing buffering me from the pain.

I miss you, Dad.

I felt my tears flooding into the water. I opened my eyes. It was murky down there. A big shit storm.

You vanished.

I dove deeper and skimmed the sandy bottom. Dark.

You left me all alone. All alone.

I needed air. Surfaced. The ocean under my chin rippled and swayed. I was not okay like I wanted to believe. I was sad. I was angry. And it made me feel ugly and lonely and cruel sometimes.

I came to shore and pounded the sand with my fists. I kicked and beat the sand for a long time. When I was worn out I rolled onto my side and stared at the ocean.

I was in pieces. Unable to gather myself back together. I stopped trying, and it wasn’t so bad to be in pieces. I was calm, easy, light. Then the pain cut deeper into me, all over me. But somehow it was all right to feel things so close to my bones. The pain did not crush me.

The ocean spread out and the swells undulated and the waves looked beautiful peeling down the point. Dad taught me to fly right there on those waves. They were there for me to ride for all time, like the powder, streaming through the center of my body. I stood up.

The sand filled out the high arches of my feet, balancing me. In the hiss of the surf whispered my dad, asking me to trust that heaving wave in Mexico, trust that the ominous wall would bend and wrap me in its peaceful womb, revealing everything essential, a dream world of pure happiness—beyond all the bullshit.

Off the point at Topanga Beach I stared into the eye of a distant wave. Somewhere in the oval opening I grasped what Dad had always tried to make me see. There is more to life than just surviving it. Inside each turbulence there is a calm—a sliver of light buried in the darkness.

EPILOGUE

TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, I was driving to Mammoth with my six-year-old son, Noah, and we pulled into Lone Pine. As always, I pointed out Mount Whitney. It was haloed by swirls of snow dust alone in the bluest of sky. Noah was playing his Game Boy and he glanced at the blocky summit, yawned, then suddenly asked,

Did your dad use to show you Mount Whitney too on the way to Mammoth?

Yep, I said.

Is it true that you skied the Cornice when you were four?

Yep.

But you’re not going to make me ski it. Right? he said.

No. Those were different times. My dad made me do lots of things that I’d get arrested for making you do.

Really? he said.

Oh yeah, I said.

Like what?

By the time we reached Bishop I had chronicled our skiing exploits from L.A. to Utah, and Noah had stowed his Game Boy in the backseat cubbyhole.

Noah asked me lots of questions and I answered them the best I could. Then as we climbed the Sherwin Grade out of Bishop he asked me about the airplane crash. I paused. He knew the general facts, his curiosity piqued by the scar on my chin. Now it was time to reveal more details, leaving out the goriest parts. I wanted to demystify the ordeal so that he would understand that reaching deep into yourself to overcome something seemingly indomitable was accessible to everyone, especially him.

Forty minutes later our car skidded and lurched in the snow along the road to our old cabin. It was snowing hard. I pulled into the driveway, stopped and looked in the rearview. Noah was staring at the back of my head, eyes narrowed, mulling over the ordeal I had just laid bare for him.

That’s the story, I said.

Were you scared? he said.

Yeah, but I was in shock, I said. I just focused on getting down. There was no time to be scared.

I opened the door and then his door and he stepped out into the fresh powder. We looked at each other and I saw that he was okay, eyes bright and strong. He kicked the snow with his boot and the crystals spread wide, floating.

Should be some good powder skiing tomorrow, he said, parroting my enthusiasm.

Yep, I said. If you have any questions it’s okay to ask them. You can ask me anything. Okay?

I know, he said.

I had always wondered what exactly went wrong during our flight back in 1979. It took me twenty-seven years to get up the guts to find out. I obtained the National Transportation Safety Board’s Accident Report for our incident. The verbatim transmissions between the pilot and the control towers were included in the report.

Once I had it in hand I met my friend Michael Entin at the Santa Monica Airport. Michael has over twenty-five years of flying experience. When I sat down in the front seat of his four-seat Cessna and saw all those switches and dials, and the radar tower out the windshield, my throat went sticky and my heart beat against my breastbone. The