Crazy for the Storm (25 page)

On the way home from the funeral I kept thinking about Grandpa. He stood with a very straight back and when everybody gathered outside the church he listened carefully to each consoling relative. He only spoke a couple of times and his words were concise and poetic—like music or colors that send you upward. I thought about how his eyes were the same blue starbursts as my dad’s and as mine and I thought about how my dad would be very saddened by Grandma’s death but not paralyzed by the grief, and I imagined him playing guitar for everyone outside the church.

We were driving down the freeway, Nick at the wheel, and I started to compare my dad’s fluidity to Nick’s jerky body language. Nick wrestled with each social interaction and at
the funeral he sighed a lot and belted out hardened proclamations about death and life and so on. He grated against things, in a fever, compared to how I imagined my dad acting—an enchanter. Nick’s pinched red face and Dad’s wide smile juxtaposed in my mind.

As we came through the McClure tunnel onto the Coast Highway Nick spoke about being a good person, responsibility, hard work and honesty. He used words like
colossal
and
catastrophic
as if we were about to go off to war and this was our pep talk. Instead we arrived in the sleepy Palisades on a windless, cloudless Saturday afternoon.

I wandered down the stairs lost in my observations and comparisons and saw the ocean lined with swells stacked to the horizon. Grandpa, Eleanor and Lee were on their way over and I was afraid to ask if I could go surfing.

The next day I hung out with Grandpa over at Eleanor’s house and nobody talked much.

Then in the afternoon Grandpa said, I have to fix the roof, and got in his car and drove back to Vallarta.

The following weekend I was doing my chores around the house and I noticed the waves picking up. I waited another hour to make sure the swells were not an anomaly. When they kept getting bigger and bigger I decided to take the 3:30 bus down to Topanga Beach. Nick and my mom had gone out to run errands and before they had left Nick reminded me that Sunny had been chasing coyotes into the canyon, which was a trap, and that our new policy was to put her inside or on the upstairs porch in the afternoon before it got dark so she wouldn’t get lured into the coyotes’ ambush.

No problem, I had said.

I reminded myself to put her inside while I made a melted cheese sandwich and Rolloff called from the phone booth at Topanga and said, It’s goin’ off the Richter. I got so excited that I just grabbed my gear and ran to the bus stop, inundated with visions of my board stabbing the lip and cutbacks and me riding inside a tube.

When I stepped off the bus a four-wave set was reeling in. The legends were in the water and I watched them tear it up while I slipped into my suit. Rolloff was perched on the lower deck of the lifeguard station and he asked me where I had been and I told him about my grandma’s funeral. He nodded and changed the subject. As I zipped up I noticed Benji staring at me. He was sitting by the lone palm tree with a few of his buddies. I ignored his stare and Rolloff said that Benji was talking shit about how he was going to snake me.

Watch out, said Rolloff.

I shrugged and told myself that the only thing that mattered was to ride the waves and avoid the bullshit.

I’m just here to have fun, I said to Rolloff.

That’s cool, said Rolloff.

I concentrated on the waves and how they were breaking and where I would take off and I ignored Benji’s stinkeye. I strolled to the point and dropped onto my board, ducking under a little insider. A layer of sorrow wiped right off me and it seemed like I could see for a thousand miles. I sat with the legend pack on the point and they asked me where I had been. I told them.

You’ve had a rough go, said Shane.

I shrugged.

Norm, he said. Just hang in there. It’ll turn around.

I nodded.

I surfed for an hour and it was hard to get waves with all the
heavy boyz
out. Finally Shane went in and that opened up a bit
more space. I was eager to snag a set wave and I could feel the frustration darting inside me. Something menacing was rising up and it seemed like everything I had hoped to let go of was surging back and that made me desperate to burn it up. Suddenly I really wanted to shred a wave in front of Benji and his crew.

I heard somebody calling my name from the bluff. I squinted and recognized Nick’s body language. He had one hand on his hip and the other waved me in.

Get your ass in here, Norman, he yelled.

I saw the crew on the beach turn from me to Nick then back to me.

Wanting to minimize the embarrassing drama I paddled right in.

Busted, said Benji with a smile when I passed him.

Most of the locals knew Nick from the old days and as I gathered my shorts, shirt and flip-flops they said things like
He looks agro. Tell Nick to take a ’lude
.

I meekly waved good-bye to the surf crew and hauled my gear up the dirt trail.

Nick had both hands on his hips when I reached the top.

Do you think we’re all here to clean up your fucking messes? he said.

No, I said.

He jabbed his finger into my breastbone.

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.

T
WENTY-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 sky was blue, yet I felt dreary, as if it were overcast all of a sudden.

You were doomed from takeoff, said Michael right away.

He pointed to one of Rob’s first transmissions:
I’m, ah, VFR
[Visual Flight Rules]
over, ah, LA en route to Big Bear airport for landing, I’d like, ah, radar following for a steer, unfamiliar with the area.

Thirty seconds into your flight Rob was already lost and had no idea where he was going, said Michael. He was using an underpowered plane with no instruments on a cloudy day—he never should have taken off, much less proceeded toward the storm ahead.

Apparently, air traffic control warned Rob three times during our flight not to fly VFR—meaning the pilot can see for at least two miles in all directions and there are no foreseeable obstructions to his maintaining this ability.

Worse, said Michael, it says here that the pilot never even got a weather briefing or filed a flight plan. Basic stuff, Norm. Had he done that, he would have known not to take off.

What a waste, I thought. My father wasn’t killed by an avalanche while skiing an epic powder bowl. No giant tube ate him
alive at the moment of ecstasy. Instead, a guy he didn’t know took him on a doomed, easily avoidable airplane ride, killing him, his girlfriend and almost his son.

When we had finished poring over the transmissions I was nauseous and wanted out of the plane. Michael was studying the NTSB tracking map of our 1979 flight path, and I searched for the door handle.

You want to retrace the flight? said Michael, and my hand froze on the lever. Figure out where Rob went off course?

I looked out the window—not one cloud in the sky. I took a deep breath. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I told myself.

Then my stomach lurched into my throat. No fucking way, I thought.

Yeah, that’d be great. Let’s go for it, I said.

Michael fired up the turboprop, went through his checklist, and I settled into the passenger seat, slipping on the headphones just as I had when I was eleven years old.

We retraced the 1979 flight path, wandering off course up San Antonio Canyon, swooping over Ontario Peak. It made me woozy but I wouldn’t get another chance at this, so I took it all in.

Then Michael flew us over the Big Bear airport. The landing strip, tucked into the mountains at nearly seven thousand feet, cut a black swath in the tall evergreens and butted up against Big Bear Lake.

It’s an unmanned airport, he said. There’s no one down there to guide you in—you’re on your own. If Rob had filed a flight plan and weather briefing he would have known that he was flying into a socked-in airport. Even with my turbo power and all these sophisticated instruments I wouldn’t have tried to land there on that day. No way.

The first thing that struck me when dawn broke and I stepped out of my car and stood facing Ontario Peak looming over me was how unfriendly the terrain was. It was a clear September day in 2006 and I was wandering around the foot of Icehouse Canyon Trail, just above Baldy Village, contemplating how to climb up to the place near the top of Ontario Peak where I thought perhaps our plane had crashed. By chance a woman named Katie was starting up the trail on her morning hike, and I asked her if she knew the Chapmans.

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting next to Pat Chapman in the same rocking chair, warming my hands by the same potbelly stove, as I had twenty-seven years before. We had some hot chocolate and recounted the events of February 19, 1979.

Pat was awakened that morning by a loud thud. Her first thought was that it sounded like a plane crashing. Then a coyote kept howling and she remembers a strange beeping noise. She didn’t say anything to her husband Bob because she just wasn’t sure of what she had heard.

Later that morning, nagged by a remote yet unshakable feeling that something bad had happened on the mountain, she led her two sons on a miserable hike to the meadow. They called out toward Ontario Peak, above the crown of rock, into the long apron that she called Gooseberry Canyon. Although the canyon was several thousand feet away, their voices echoed off the canyon walls. The wind and heavy fog buffered their voices some that day. When no one answered, she figured that her hunch was wrong.

Pat told me that not long after she had safely delivered me to the detective, a sheriff’s deputy came to her door and asked for a statement. Pat recounted the day for him. How she had been awakened by a noise that sounded like a plane crashing into the
mountain, and how she later climbed to the meadow. When she finished her account, the deputy informed her that she could not have heard a plane and that it must have been the snowplow clearing the highway.

I didn’t respond, she told me. Some things are not easily explained.

Eventually I got in touch with Glenn Farmer, the teenager who I ran into on the dirt road. I think we were both shocked to hear each other’s voices—we hadn’t seen or heard from each other since that day twenty-seven years ago when Glenn carried me in his arms to the Chapman Ranch. We talked on the phone for an hour. He was a wealth of information, and finally I asked him why he was on that dirt road in such nasty weather, yelling out.

Glenn explained what led him there on February 19, 1979. At around 2:30 p.m. he had spoken to some sheriff Search and Rescue guys outside the burger joint, a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Chapman ranch. The rescue guys were pointing up at Ontario Peak, talking about how long it would take them to hike up there. He asked them what was wrong and they said a plane had crashed. Because it was so foggy, hiding Ontario Peak from view, Glenn mistakenly believed that they were pointing at the crown of rock—the backside of the massive ridgeline—thousands of feet lower.

So when Search and Rescue drove away, Glenn decided to hike up toward that lower crown of rock and see what he could find. He was never able to get close to the crown because the buckthorn was too thick. Glenn said he had yelled many times and, having given up, was walking back down the dirt road when he decided to give it one more shot.

A month after my first meeting with Pat Chapman, I met up with her son Evan Chapman for a guided tour back up the mountain. He led me across the meadow, tunneling us through the buckthorn, with no snow traps to worry about this time, and we scratched up the waterfall of rock—iceless—and up the gulch and the long apron, right to where I had found Sandra—he knew the exact place because his father, the late Bob Chapman, had pointed it out.

After locating the area where Sandra had ended her violent fall, he left me alone for a few minutes. I told Sandra I was sorry she didn’t make it, that I was sorry I blew it and miscalculated her slide path. Then Evan led me across the enclave of trees and we found the frame of the seat that had slid down to the same area.

At 7,300 feet I thanked Evan for his guidance. He handed me a walkie-talkie and pointed me toward the infamous chute, one of three that forked up to Ontario Peak.

When I came upon a seam of pure dirt that cut down one side of the chute, free of shale, I knew that, when covered with snow, it became the brutally slick funnel. I had to crouch onto all fours to follow it upward. About an hour later I recognized a tree. It was the tallest amongst a line of them, rare within the chute. It was so steep that even without ice I had to lean my shoulder into the hill in order to look across the chute and study the tree. My gut told me it was the tree that had supported the wing, our shelter.

Tired, sweaty and dusty, I sat on a flat rock where I figured the impact zone was in relation to the tree. Right away I began reliving my time here twenty-seven years before in the snow and wind. After a while I was finally able to focus on my dad.
Although I had no hard evidence, I believed that this was where his magnificent life had been snatched away.

Well Dad, this is where it all ended, I said aloud. Thanks for protecting me. I wish I could have saved you.

I felt him like a steam rising out of the mountain. I let him seep in. Tears spilled and I moaned and I wondered if the bears or the coyotes heard me. I drifted there, savoring everything we had accomplished together, so fantastic and grueling.

Cautiously I rotated and lowered and kissed the rock, the general area where he had died. When I opened my eyes there was something orange and white under a crushed pinecone, wedged between smaller pieces of shale. I dug it out. A carbon fiber shard as big as my hand, the orange paint dull and mealy. I dug more and found two more pieces much like it. Our plane had been orange, red, and white. The tire housing and other mostly superficial parts of the plane were made of carbon fiber. I turned the pieces over, marveling at the discovery, then kissed the rocks and the pinecone and told my dad how much I loved him again.

I looked out over the long apron, known as Gooseberry Canyon, and through the gulch, searching for the meadow—my true north. But I could not find it. I knew where it was, I had walked through it four hours earlier, but I could not see it over the massive ridgeline rising from the gulch and blocking anything to the left of the gulch. I was perplexed.

Adding to the mystery, when I returned home I discovered an audiotape recorded from a TV interview that took place the day after the crash, February 20, 1979, and on it I say,
There was a meadow and I tried to go toward that every time because I knew there was a house near there.
Yet from my highest vantage point on this clear October day in 2006 I was not able to see the meadow and failed to spot it during my descent that
afternoon. It was eclipsed by the ridgeline and only visible once I made it through the gulch. I checked my photographs taken from that high vantage point in the chute, and there is no mistake. The meadow is not visible. Only the rooftop is visible from the chute—it sits right in the sightline of the gulch. The overgrown dirt road cutting up from the rooftop is visible too. But not the meadow—it’s too far left, hidden behind the ridgeline.

I had always believed that I had spotted the meadow, the rooftop and the dirt road just after the helicopter flew away, and that
I tried to go toward that meadow every time because I knew there was a house near there
. And even in the face of insurmountable contradictory evidence I still have a vivid memory of heading toward that meadow, compelled to reach it, believing that it would guide me to safety.

Bears and wolves navigate wilderness by instinct, and migratory birds are guided by an internal compass, so maybe the notion that I had to see the meadow in order for me to perceive it is an artificial concept.

Maybe I sensed a place where I could rest from the steep ice and broken terrain—a place where other humans like Pat were compelled to go—just as a wolf or bear can sense such places. Maybe the footprints of Pat and her boys, those human markings, called to me, and because I was cut off from civilization I was able to access my animal instinct and hang on to life.

When Noah was born I was concerned that he would grow up feeling the same pressure to be a great surfer and skier that I had felt. I prepared myself for the genetic code to kick in, directing me to push my son as I had been pushed.