In Over my Head
In 1991, I came very close to death by drowning in some big and treacherous Northern California surf. After surviving the experience, I had a strong impression that when I properly understood what took place in the water, I needed to share the story. It’s taken almost 30 years for me to understand what happened that day and the current COVID experience prompts me to share it now.
Those who know me well, know that I have lots of stories to tell, and I enjoy telling them. What they may not know, is I have lots of stories that I don’t tell, they’re not fun or funny and I don’t enjoy thinking about them, let alone telling them. They are my personal experiences with self-loathing, feeling like I don’t belong, loneliness, depression, anxiety, addiction, and my inability to breathe freely (thanks to asthma and allergies). I’m committed to begin telling my stories with the hope it’ll help others survive the really bad days, and to live with more vitality than suffering.
For me personally, I enjoy being alone, likely much more than the average person. I’ve learned, however, that it isn’t good for me to spend too much time alone. While surfing and skating are very much individual activities, more often than not, communities spring up, and friendships form that will last a lifetime. C.S. Lewis, in his book the Four Loves, talks of friendship as the most misunderstood and undervalued of the loves and how it starts and centers around shared activities. He refers to friendship as a ‘noble irresponsibility’. This description seems well-suited to surfers and skaters.
I heard a speaker once say that if you greet every person you meet as if they were dealing with some serious trauma or heart ache that you’ll be right more than half of the time. We have no idea what other people are going through, let alone understanding what moves and drives the thoughts and feelings inside of us. The surf and skate communities attract a unique type of person, who is more likely to struggle with what might be considered ‘normal life’. With COVID-19, people are talking more than ever about the need to be actively engaged in communities, meditation, mindfulness, and the human need to feel connected to others, to be needed and loved.
At a very young age, before I did anything wrong, I learned to feel shame and embarrassment for being different from my siblings and kids at school and church. For example, I wasn’t able to recite the 12 months of the year, even though I knew them, until I was 10 years old. I would get to August and September and I would get stuck; my mind would go completely blank and I couldn’t finish. This is the dictionary definition of dumb: temporarily unable or unwilling to speak. I understand now that it’s not an uncommon condition to get nervous, stage freight of sorts, and to freeze up physically and mentally. My emotions were also something I couldn’t control. Around 8 years old, while watching a Garfield cartoon with my older brother, I wept for what I thought, at the time, was the most awful of possible experiences. In the episode, Odie was caught by a dog catcher, imprisoned awaiting a gas chamber where the unwanted animals were killed. Odie didn’t understand the danger he was in and Garfield, in rare form, was kind and caring while trying to help Odie escape. He also apologized for being a bad friend. My older brother saw my tears and ridiculed me for crying, saying, “You can’t cry watching Garfield”. Years later, Tom Hanks said something similar in the baseball film, League of Their Own, “There’s no crying in baseball”.
In recent years, I’ve felt a lot of guilt for surviving several years of foolish behavior, when close friends didn’t survive. When my friends and I were engaged in dangerous, reckless behavior, I took some comfort that we knew the risks and we were working with the same information to help us navigate our stupidity. I know now that I was wrong. My parents and grandparents imparted wisdom to me that I believe my friends lacked, which is why I want to include life lessons in the stories I tell. Here we go:
My mom taught me when I was a child that if I ever found myself in a situation where I was truly powerless to change it, that I would need to learn to see it a different way. The context of this instruction was her experience growing up with an alcoholic father. As a child, my mom prayed that God would make her dad stop drinking and that prayer was never answered. As a woman, she understood that she had prayed for the wrong thing because her father needed to choose sobriety.
My dad taught me that playing in the ocean was dangerous, and that to survive, I would need to conserve my energy and if I was ever caught in a current, that I should do my best to relax, and make a plan before exerting any energy to improve my situation. He also taught me not to fear death, that death was a passing from one state to another and that I would be welcomed by family and friends on the other side.
If there’s anything noteworthy about my life, I would say that I have a lot of experience being inexperienced and that experience includes a few close calls with death.
Circa 1991 Northern California surf spot - Secrets
Some context… big waves at beach breaks frustrated me on several occasions because I couldn’t make it out due to a paddling deficiency. My friends could and I didn’t enjoy spectating. This specific surf spot was in a cove with beautiful lefts that would break off a cliffside. It also had a channel so you wouldn’t have to fight the waves to paddle out. The waves were meaty and after they broke, it looked like a two story house of angry white water; it was frightening to the core and deafening. The forecast said the waves were going to be 12-14 feet (faces) and they were all of that and then some. I tried to catch a few but I wasn’t feeling it nor was my board the optimal size. It all sort of felt like death. Ocean people know, no matter how big or small the swell, you can expect a few rogue waves that are bigger than the rest. On an already big day, you kind of don’t want to see that big rogue wave unless you’re already familiar with riding them. I was not.
After about 45 minutes in the water, not able to catch one, the big rogue set came in and closed out the entire cove. With the board floating next to me, I took a deep breath, and started swimming straight down, thinking I was going to escape the wave’s power but lose my board. About 10 feet deep, feeling increasing tension on my ankle, meaning I was ‘tombstoning’ the board, I met with an underwater explosion. My leash broke instantly; I didn’t feel any pull on my leg, and my board was gone. It felt like I was being ripped in different directions but the dominant direction was down. I used about 20% of my oxygen swimming as deep as I could, as quickly as I could, and the force of the wave that sent me spinning down further took another 40% or so. I spun head over heels six times or more, covering my face and head with my arms thinking I was going to get smashed into the ocean floor but that never happened. I felt a strong and stable current grab me and it stopped the spinning enough that I could open my eyes to figure out which way was up.
When I opened my eyes I felt only shock, terror, and a profound sadness because I was certain that I was going to drown and die. Understanding depth and distance in the water can be tricky but it appeared to me that I was 40 to 50 feet deep and the undercurrent was taking me deeper and out to sea. With most of my oxygen already used up, I made no attempt to swim up out of the current because I knew I wouldn’t make it and even if I did, I would only have the second wave land on me, repeating the process. I didn’t understand what a panic attack was in 1991 but I had one for about five seconds. I wanted to cry, scream, and scramble up for air and I’m guessing my heart beat about 30 times in those five seconds using another 10% of oxygen; my heart never felt heavier, I was positive that this was my end. I also felt an incredible sadness for my mom; I knew my death would break her heart. With no reason or hope for survival, I remembered what I learned from my parents and I decided to see the situation differently, relax and enjoy my last moments alive so I had a good story to tell when I crossed over and I was reunited with my dead. I could have titled the story, “In Over my Head, a Story for My Dead”. That was my plan. Then, everything changed in an instant as if my decision to relax and try to enjoy my last moment alive smashed the proverbial safety glass, and I pressed the big, red survive button inside of me, that I didn’t know existed.
My experience is similar to what is described in Torsten Durkan’s article on theinertia.com, “Understanding Freediving Blackouts and How to Prevent Them”. I’m guessing I was approaching a depth of 60 feet when the ocean hugged my sadness and despair away. I slipped into a lucid dream, my heavy heart was as light as a feather and I felt more happiness and contentment than at any other moment in my life. In the moment, I imagined it was like floating in outer space (strangely similar to the music video from Gorillaz, “Saturn’s Barz (Spirit House)") and I saw the ocean around me as a beautiful universe inside of another universe. The cliffside that made the cove was not a cliff, it was a mountain that could’ve been hiked. I was visually overwhelmed, feeling grateful and humbled, as if I were a child experiencing Disneyland for the first time. The depths of the anxiety, depression, and self-loathing that I experienced as a child and a teenager were reversed and I felt a blissful peace and profound contentment. I felt completely whole. … and although the universe was massive and expansive and I was like the smallest grain of sand in comparison, the universe was good, intentionally designed and I was good, a part of that design, and that I belonged. I also felt a connection to all truth, an incredible comfort that even though there was so much I didn’t know, I knew I would know the truth when I came upon it, and truth would be available to me when I needed it.
This euphoric dream seemed to go on for several minutes, but it was interrupted when I saw, in my peripheral vision, a wave breaking on the ocean’s surface. I have no idea how much time had passed or if I was under the water for one, two, or three set waves. The experience felt like it could’ve been five or ten minutes but I’m positive that was not the case. What I do know is my perception of time changed radically. When I saw the breaking wave out of the corner of my vision the euphoric lucid dream began to fade and it was gradually replaced with a simple calm, like falling asleep; I was starting to black out. With about 10 feet of ocean water separating me from the surface, it felt like someone or something gently shook my shoulder, waking me up and said, “If you want to live, you need to swim up.” Without any urgency to breathe, I put my body back in gear, and in a few strokes I was able to swim to the surface and I took a breath as if nothing had happened. The offshore winds were blowing the water off the tops of the waves and with the sun shining in the background, I was greeted by a rainbow. Reminded of my mortality, overwhelmed with gratitude for my life and the beauty of the ocean and this experience, I felt some hope and confidence that I would be a father someday, life was worth living, and I had a good cry.
It took me about 20 minutes to swim in, the shore break was violent and difficult to navigate. I was able to retrieve my board and when I got back to my friend’s truck, I had a pounding migraine headache, and a persistent prompting to share the experience, sometime in the future, when I really understood what happened.
This is what I understand now:
The ocean has more power than a thousand strong friends could ever offer so surviving isn’t about strength and power, it’s about trust, submission, patience, staying in the moment and not stressing the outcome. There’s an ebb and flow to life, a balance, always a reckoning. The reason I couldn’t escape the wave’s power that day by swimming under it was because of the cove; the power and force of the broken wave bounced off the cliffside and thrust me into the deep. Surviving hardships and crisis is less about strength and more about acceptance, adapting, fostering hope, even when having hope seems hopeless.
While I was blacking out, I had no anxiety, no fear of death, and no desire to breathe; I was at peace. The voice I heard, the invitation to swim up if I wanted to live, did not seem like it was coming from me, but outside of me. The words were also a proposal of hope, a hope that I did not have before 1991: I could live a life worth living, that I could have a life with joy and peace, pain and struggle included.
So, for anyone struggling right now, or might be in the future, for my friends and family in (or out of) the surf and skate community, and anyone else that reads this, please don’t give up on life. Your story is worth living and you do not have to suffer all the time but you might need to look at your life and your current situation differently. You also might need to relax and let go of fear.
up.
swim
…and if you want to live,
I would love to know what you think and hear your stories too.
Feel free to connect with me on instagram @stayskating and use the hashtags #stayskating and #stayskatingstories