Raising A Soul Surfer Read online

  There were a few other ports of call, and though Tom had never been out of the country, unlike a lot of the men on his ship, he was not particularly enchanted with the seedy rows of flesh dens, grimy bars and alleys full of con artists aggressively trying to hustle any sailor they could. In particular, he remembers Subic Bay in the Philippines as inciting both pity and revulsion for the desperation with which people hounded the sailors—offering everything, including themselves, for money or cigarettes or trinkets.

  Not to mention that Tom recalls that sick bay was always full after the more infamous ports.

  From Subic Bay, Tom’s ship escorted the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk to Vietnam, where they anchored a mile offshore, providing fire support for the marines and army onshore.

  The blast of the huge guns spewing explosive shells deep into the jungle was exhilarating at first, but when Tom started to listen in on the accuracy reports, he was faced with war in a way that conflicted and disturbed him. Over the headset, he heard artillery spotters report that the shells had missed their mark and landed on a village of “friendlies.” Tom sat in silence, trying not to imagine the innocent men, women and children snuffed out by his ship’s guns. He tried to dismiss them as collateral damage, like the guy on the radio did, but it haunted him.

  Still, he had an enviably safe job, miles offshore, far from the brutal field conditions and persistent violence and horrors of war. Sometimes he got to head into the nearby base via helicopter, on a “milk run,” ferrying bags of mail to and from the ship. But overall, his war experience was cushy. The things that happened in the wet jungles couldn’t touch him.

  Tom’s nonchalant sense of security came to an end during a standard milk run over a dense rain forest that was supposed to be enemy-free.

  The Vietnam War had come for Tom.

  To this day, Tom won’t talk about it. So I let what happened remain in obscurity. Maybe someday he’ll be ready to talk about it, or maybe not. I can respect that he doesn’t want to ever revisit his experience.

  But I do believe that the shock of “this can’t be happening to me!” that Tom got that day in Vietnam was a kind of preparation, or maybe a dress rehearsal, for the similar dismantling of our own nest of casual security when we first heard that our daughter, Bethany, had been viciously mauled by the second most dangerous shark in the world.

  Vietnam could be blamed on politicians and revolutionaries. In the case of Bethany, when Tom wrestled with the very real possibility of losing his daughter forever, there seemed to be only one person to blame . . . God.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Destiny

  My times are in your hands.

  PSALM 31:15, NIV

  My dad was born in Denver, Colorado, and he lived his life with a high level of activity and adventure. I can get dizzy watching the home movies my mother took in the early years of their marriage.

  In high school, he was a super athlete and achieved a high level of skill in most sports. His abilities are showcased in back-to-back clips of skiing, gymnastics, tennis, high dive and swimming laps—including the breaststroke, butterfly and crawl. He is shown horseback riding, ice-skating, cross-country skiing, and more.

  After high school, he joined the Marines and was recruited to play on their football team. His team won the annual United States Football Championship two years in a row at Quantico, Virginia, against the Army! After his military commitment, he was able to go to college on the G.I. bill, in Denver. He studied and worked hard to make it on his own, while barely surviving on peanut butter and crackers.

  In his last year of college, my parents met on a double date, although they were not paired with each other. My mom was attracted right off and nabbed a date with him soon after, followed by marriage and the birth of my older sister, Debbie. After completing his four-year degree at Denver University, my dad landed his first teaching job in a nearby mountain town called Glenwood Springs. Dad and Mom packed up my one-year-old sister, Debbie, and Grandma Julia, and moved to their new home.

  Glenwood Springs was not only my birthplace, but also the place where I first fell in love with water. In Glenwood, hot volcanic mineral springs bubble up to fill what was the largest swimming pool in the world back in 1953. This premier pool was the first training ground for two future surfer girls. The pool stays open all year round, even in the dead of winter when you can immerse your tired muscles and achy bones into these naturally hot, healing waters under glittering snowfall or a starry summer night.

  My dad took his first position teaching history and coaching the wrestling team. This meant traveling on weekends to various high school competitions. Late one night, while my dad was away at a competition, my mom went into labor. Without a car, she left my sister asleep in the crib while she, accompanied by Grandma Julia, carefully walked over icy sidewalks in the falling snow to the small hospital clinic. It was 4:00 A.M. on Valentine’s Day, 1953, when I came into the world, ready to fall in love with the water and begin training to live my ocean-bound life.

  My parents were probably the most regular swimmers at the hot springs pool. We have photos of my sister and me jumping into the pool as babies. It must have been easy to become water babies where the land is covered with several feet of freezing snow and the pool water is warm and wonderful!

  After two years in snowy Glenwood Springs, my dad took a new job in the dusty, dry desert of Arizona, at Yuma High School. We found a house in a family neighborhood with lots of desert critters. We missed the hot springs pool back in the mountains of Colorado, so my mom came to our rescue. She had our backyard paradise fenced in to keep out the rattlesnakes, and then she made a water park playground to cool us off. We turned brown from playing in our kiddie pool under the blazing Arizona sun.

  My younger sister, Karin, soon arrived. When she got big enough, she was put in charge of squirting us with the hose. My mom kept busy washing diapers, which were completely dry by the time she hung the last one up. This was a big change from the frozen diapers hanging stiffly on the line in Glenwood Springs! My mother took great care of us. She sewed beautiful little dresses for Easter, enrolled us in ballet dance classes, curled our hair and made the best taquitos ever! My dad, though, was California dreaming. He worked extra after-school hours selling cars to save up vacation money to scout out San Diego.

  During the summer break, our family would pack up our station wagon and go camping on just about every beach in California. We went everywhere along the ocean, which helped my dad confirm his decision to move to San Diego. He loved the beaches, the zoo, the beautiful harbor; and he set his course to eventually move to this wonderful beach-lined city. It wasn’t long before his winning reputation as a wrestling coach at Yuma High caught the notice of a football coach at San Diego High. I once asked him about his two state championship victories in Yuma. He said the real secret to his success was the amazing talent of his team who were mostly Navaho indigenous people.

  At last, our ocean-bound destiny became a reality. We packed up our Ford Fairlane station wagon and moved to San Diego. You might get the impression that my parents liked to move around a lot. But the truth is, once they got to San Diego, California, that was it. Looking back, I can only thank God.

  Like Tom, my family ended up living near the beach. But you can hardly get any farther removed from New Jersey beaches than sunny Southern California, where I grew up. Once I hit elementary school, I was firmly ensconced in the idyllic fifties-era childhood—Barbie dolls, roller skates (they had steel wheels back then), and Saturday movie matinees, complete with Giant Sweet Tarts, Milk Duds and sticky floors.

  Today, with all the dangers to children that we see in the news, it’s hard to imagine a time when the only real rule was to be back home by the time the street lights turned on.

  We had a limited spiritual education as children. My mother would take us to church on Christmas and Easter—like most people. Because we had just moved to San Diego, and we didn’t have any friends yet, Sunday Scho
ol would be a great way to meet some other neighborhood children. We’d walk to a nearby church, probably to enjoy wearing our pretty homemade dresses of frilly taffeta and our white gloves. It was only when, one Sunday, I happened to pick a rose growing over the fence of a house along the way to church that everything went wrong.

  He must have been deranged, because some old man came rushing out of the house, swearing and yelling at us. He swung a shining butcher knife over his head. We didn’t stay to see if he was crazy enough to use it; but because of that terrifying experience, we stayed home on Sundays from then on, and that stunted my spiritual education. Occasionally, our folks would take us to a beach area church that was having Vacation Bible School so they could have a few hours on the sand without us.

  Once we were all in school, my mom went to night school and took classes to complete her teaching credential. This allowed my mom and dad to share vacation times with the family. I also remember that they would use us as guinea pigs for all the different kinds of educational and intelligence tests their schools were experimenting with.

  Please don’t get the impression that I was a dainty china doll. Sure, we had music lessons (piano lessons, and I even played violin in the school orchestra), and we played dress-up; but Dad made us do yard work with push mowers, and my sisters and I rode bikes, played kickball, explored canyons and romped all over half a dozen beaches. Surfing wasn’t on my horizon yet, but I can only imagine that many people viewed it as just another fad that would fade away. Playing with jacks would be all the rage when, suddenly, for no particular reason, hopscotch took over to be followed by marbles and then foursquare.

  Our whole family was the outdoorsy type. Dad would load us all up with the tent in our station wagon (the minivan of the time), and we’d spend summer vacations camping along the Pacific coastline, all the way north into Oregon.

  My dad was a hard-working guy, always having to be doing something. He worked a side job at a local hotel; and on top of that, he attended college for his master’s degree. He’d decorate the yard with tiki torches and turned our front porch into a tropical garden. He also bought beat-up homes near the beach, and we would spend weekends helping to fix them up for resale. Then my sisters and I could take our canvas air-mattress rafts and play around in the ocean.

  The beaches became our new playground as we fine-tuned our water skills on rubber rafts, riding waves all summer long. My parents soon found their favorite beach at La Jolla Cove. It was a snorkeling wonderland. We swam alongside my dad as we held our spears in readiness. I don’t remember ever catching a fish by myself, because I couldn’t bear the thought of killing one. We learned to get abalone and let my dad get the lobsters. It was painful to watch them die as they were dropped into the boiling water when we returned home for dinner.

  The Gidget scene (remember those beach movies?) was exploding in Los Angeles. Our cousins, who lived in West Covina, were very aware of this latest surfing craze. My mom’s brother, who was an officer for the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), had four daughters. His oldest daughter, Kathy, was now sweet 16, and she decided that she wanted to try surfing. She figured that as soon as her family planned a visit to her water-immersed cousins down in San Diego, she would plan a surf venture.

  My sister Debbie and I agreed to rent two boards and give surfing a try. My mom dropped us off at the Gordon and Smith Surf Shop in Mission Beach, a tiny hole in the wall, and we rented two boards for 50 cents each per hour. With the sidewalk baking our feet, we three girls took turns doubling up, carrying the heavy surfboards for a 20-minute walk up Mission Beach Drive to the designated surf zone. That left 20 minutes to surf before we had to walk back another 20 minutes to the surf shop, completing our one-hour rental.

  Debbie and Kathy rode their first waves as I watched from the shore. Then, at last, it was my turn. I took hold of the board and pushed it out just inside the main middle breaking section of waves. I knew I didn’t have much time left before we had to return, so I just went for it and took off on a little ankle snapper wave barely six inches high. When I reached the shore, I was told it was time to go back; so taking turns carrying the heavy boards, we walked back silently, inwardly focused on our thrilling adventure. I was so elated! Although I had only caught one tiny wave, I knew even then that this was all I ever wanted to do. All of my other goals in life disappeared: all of my plans for the future—being a P.E. coach, my art, all of my other sports. All I could think of was surfing and how I could go out again.

  Debbie and I pooled our savings and bought a yellow Gordon and Smith longboard for $30. Not too long after, we each had our own surfboard and were paddling out into the lineup at Law Street in Pacific Beach. We learned to surf by trial and error. Our first big error was trying to surf after covering our bodies with baby oil, which was the tanning rage of the day. It took us a few embarrassing days of constantly slipping off of our boards before the light went on! We became part of a small minority of avid surfer girls in a male-dominated world.

  Debbie and I soon had surf knots on our knees and the tops of our feet. We rode 9-foot-6-inch, 30-pound long boards, or tankers, as they were nicknamed. They were heavy, which is probably the main reason most girls did not take up surfing. At first, we would both carry a surfboard to the water; but soon the guy surfers at Law Street would always insist on helping us out and even waxing them for us with the standard paraffin wax. Everyone always shared wax back then, as it was cheap!

  We hung out with the same group of guys at the beach all summer long. Most of them were excellent surfers who only really cared about riding the waves. We always saw Skip Fry and enjoyed watching his amazing style. Not every girl could handle it. In the late sixties, surfboards were still big and heavy. Leashes hadn’t even been invented yet; so if you wiped out, it meant a long swim in chilly water to get your board back. Wetsuits made specifically for surfing were in their infancy and were largely ineffective. While conditions were nothing like what Tom was experiencing back in New Jersey, a cold February morning in the kelp-filled Pacific could turn you blue and numb in a hurry. It made sense that most people considered surfing to be a sport only for tough, hardy males. Someone forgot to tell my sister and me. Even if they had, we would have paddled back out for more.

  We improved our surfing pretty fast, but Debbie was always the best. She could switch stance so naturally and had the most amazingly smooth style going for the biggest of the set waves! We had fun paddling out on our knees and would stand up when going over an unbroken wave. Otherwise, it was a workout to plow through the wave with a push up when trying to get out past the breaking surf.

  We didn’t have leashes back in the 1960s, so we had to keep our guard up and not get hit by a flying board after someone wiped out. I began to surf well by most standards for women, and I won several contests back then, but I always felt second because of my sister’s incredible talent.

  One day, my parents would not let us bring our surfboards to the beach because the surf was supposed to get really big. We were so upset when we got to the beach, because the surf was perfect, with nice shoulder-high waves just like we liked it.

  Once in a while, our family would go to Ocean Beach, and we would surf by the jetties, but my parents preferred to go to La Jolla Cove. They would drop us off at Law Street to surf because it was on the way to their beach. An unusual coincidence was that two other girls, named Debbie and Shary Melville, the same ages as we were, surfed the same break! Later in life, I found out that Debbie Melville got married on the same day as Tom and I did. Not to mention that my co-author, Rick Bundschuh, surfed Law Street at the same time and was best friends with my boyfriend!

  After my older sister got her driver’s license, we could get to the beach on our own. We borrowed my mom’s car and started surfing Sunset Cliffs regularly. We liked the reefs, as it was an easier paddle out through a channel, not having to punch through closed-out sets at the beach breaks.

  We damaged Mom’s car several times and busted out th
e oil pan going over the bumpy dirt road at the end of Sunset Cliffs. Then we wrecked her driver’s car door when we pushed the car out of the garage with the car door open in order to not wake up our parents at 5:00 A.M. But I don’t ever remember my mom getting mad at us!

  Soon my sister got a boyfriend, and I was surfing by myself. Abandoned, I started hitchhiking with my surfboard to the beach. At 16, I got my driver’s license, and my dad bought me a car, so I didn’t have to hitchhike anymore. He probably saved my life!

  After I got a car, I would surf Sunset Cliffs every day at Abs. I surfed it for a solid six years. On occasion, I would go north up to the Cardiff area and surf Pipes. In high school, I made friends who surfed, and we would all pitch in for gas to go surfing. My friend, Pam Falgren, from high school tennis, also surfed. And she always made everything extra fun.

  Not only were my parents teachers, but they were also history buffs. It was popular in the sixties to put murals on your walls, so we had the Greek Parthenon painted on our living room walls and marble furniture that looked like it came from Greece. Our specialty home deco was a statue in the living room of Venus de Milo almost two feet tall. This is one of the most famous sculptures of ancient Greece. How many kids grow up with that in their living room? I now see it as God preparing my eyes for what the future would hold.

  After the shark attack, we had a week of interviews at a friend’s house up in Kalihiwai Ridge. As soon as I walked into the living room, I was confronted with the Venus de Milo statue again! It was too close to home. No one else noticed it until I pointed it out. But it reminded me that I had grown up with that statue.

  Later, when Bethany and I attended the ESPY Awards in Hollywood and stayed at the Morovian Hotel on Sunset Blvd, I noticed that our hotel room contained old antique items that were for sale, and our room had a magazine with the Venus de Milo statue featured on the cover. It was a bit strange to have this recurring theme.