It is believed that Boren, who had been wearing a dark wetsuit, had been lying on his yellow kneeboard in 10 feet (3 m) of water just beyond the break point, when the great white struck from the left side, biting through both Boren and his board. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Asilomar, California, yesterday, 1643hrs
It looked a lonely place to die. A lonely way to die.
The coldest, cruelest, most horrifying way any surfer has to die.
I gazed out over the kelp beds, oily and wet under a grey sky. Great brown rafts of it undulated silently, as if serpents were roiling beneath them. The swell was blown out, chunky, about six foot out on the reef. No one was out. It would be a long, spooky paddle out to the break.
For Lewis Boren, it was his last.
You remember Lew. If you don’t you should. Lewis Boren was the surfer who paddled out by himself on December 19th , 1981 at this very spot. He never made it back in. Later, when his kneeboard washed up, it was confirmed that he had been attacked by a Great White shark. A mammoth shark. Judging by the bite radius found taken out of his board, it may have been the largest white shark ever to attack any man in recorded history. 21 feet, maybe more. A submarine with teeth. Close your eyes and think about that for a minute.
I did. As I stood there looking out over where a giant dinosaur attempted to eat Lew Boren. It would be five days before they found Lew’s remains. The bite radius stretched in a great crescent from his shoulders to his hips.
And Lew was a big fella.
I could remember the national uproar it caused, the sensational press. Every major paper and TV station in the country covered the story. I’d always remembered the feature story in ROLLING STONE. I could even remember the artwork that they ran with the article. It was, more than any photograph, more than any movie I’d ever seen, the most chilling depiction of a shark attack I had ever seen. I had ripped it out of the magazine and pinned it up on my wall. It was an artist’s underwater head-on view of a monster shark cruising slowly, perfectly, through kelpy shallows at night. It was a sinister, silent looking image, you could make out the shark’s shadow on the sand just inches below its white belly. Pale moonlit shafts shot down from the surface and dappled its great broad back. And it might have been strangely beautiful…if not for the gore and blood, diluted pinkish by the nighttime sea, streaming from the monster’s gills and running down its body.
So disturbing was the image that my girlfriend, upon seeing it, ripped it down and burned it over the stove.
Don’t call these things to you! She hissed at me.
I have often thought of that image since then. Standing at the spot looking out over the very sea brought it back. Along with the thought that the magnificent, deadly creature that attacked Lew Boren was probably still out there. That there was a pretty good chance that tonight, it would be cruising silently through the shallows, perfect and unknowing of its own horror, those shafts of moonlight dancing on its back. It is believed that White Sharks can live for hundreds of years.
I remembered reading somewhere that boxing was considered the last mighty sport on earth, the last great primal sport because it is the last arena where murder is legal, where one man may beat another to death for all to see. And that boxers who have died in the ring should be exalted for belonging to such an exclusive breed, such a rare breed of man. Blessed with the power of the ultimate sacrifice and violence in his hands, peered only with the honored dead.
Well…then what is to be said of surfing? The last sport on earth where it is possible to be eaten alive by a sea monster? By a great, powerful, stealthy fish, out for blood and meat? How mighty does that make a surfer? How primal our sport? How should we exalt those who have died in our arena by our ultimate sacrifice? What about our honored dead?
Surfers like Lew Boren?
I found myself staring glassy eyed out over the tide-pools. I had to shake my head to clear it. The fog was rolling in now, clinging wet, lonely wet. A chill was setting in. Out there somewhere, the first foghorn sounded. I turned and walked back to my car.
I felt as if I’d just visited a graveyard.
