Five minutes later, we stood on the beach and looked out over the reef. The sky was just now beginning to lighten but a thick fog obscured our vision. We could hear the waves but had trouble seeing them, catching only an occasional glimpse of frothy whitewater.
Rus adjusted his board to a better fit under his arm, gave me a quick nod, and then headed out. I followed, both of us tip-toeing gingerly over mussel-encrusted exposed reef in our wetsuit booties. We hopped off at a prominent rock, hit the water with a splash and paddled out side-by-side. The air was pungent with brine and the mist damp and heavy. We duck-dove several waves before finally reaching the lineup. I sat up to straddle my board and turned around, gazing back at shore. Except I couldn’t see shore. The fog was too thick.
We sat quietly for several minutes, waiting for a set to emerge. All around us, the bulbous heads of numerous bull kelp floated about, bobbing up and down on the surface, dotting the surrounding water like so many giant raisins. My heart was pounding in my chest so I took a deep breath to calm myself. Maybe, I told myself, if I forced my mind not to think of sharks I could erase the fear that now gripped me. But it didn’t seem to do any good.
I finally turned to Rus. “Hey, you ever think about—”
“Don’t even say it,” he cut me off.
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Yes, I do,” he said, giving me a pointed look. “I know exactly what you were going to say.”
Before I could add a rejoinder – witty or otherwise – Rus spotted a wave. He swung his board around and started paddling. I watched as he dropped down the face and disappeared into the mist. The second wave of the set moved through the lineup but I didn’t catch it. It rolled underneath me, broke with a resounding crack, and rumbled toward shore, unridden.
A lull ensued, and for several long minutes I sat alone in the lineup, hunched over my board, my legs dangling into the depths. I tried not to think of sharks; instead, I tried my best to focus my mind on other topics, like teddy bears, rose petals, unicorns, faeries, comfort food, very dry martinis – anything except oversized cartilaginous predators.
At that moment – wham! – something hit the underside of my board. It wasn’t hard enough to knock me off, but the suddenness – and the shock – sent my heart racing. This is it, I thought. My mind raced out of control, adrenaline pumping through me. This is the end. I’m a goner. I braced myself, clamping my eyes shut, expecting the worst.
When nothing happened, my eyes shot open and I looked around frantically. But there was nothing – no noise, no commotion, no fins, no churning water. It was strangely and eerily quiet.
What on earth had hit me? I wondered. I’d heard of sharks bumping surfers before an attack, so I half expected to see a fin circling back toward me. But there was nothing. Not even a ripple.
A bull kelp head suddenly popped up next to me, and swayed gently back and forth in the current. I stared at it, and it suddenly dawned on me. The kelp head – the large, bulbous “float” at the apex of the long, slender stem – had struck the bottom of my board. It hadn’t been a shark after all; it had only been kelp. I started to laugh.
There’s a scene in the classic Disney movie The Legend of Sleepy Hollow where Ichabod Crane, the “exceedingly lank” and superstitious pedagogue, is riding home alone through a dark and foreboding forest after attending a Halloween party. He is terrified at every little noise, and at one point he thinks he hears the galloping hooves of the dreaded headless horseman behind him, but discovers that it is only some cattails thumping against a hollow log in the wind. This discovery sends him into fits of convulsive and hysterical laughter.
I felt that way now, completely giddy. If my laughter was not exactly hysterical, it was at least garnished with a heavy dose of relief.
Of course, Ichabod’s laughter only presages the arrival of the real headless horseman, who subsequently swoops down on the hapless Ichabod with malevolent intent. All that is left of Ichabod the next morning is his tricorn hat.
As if on cue, I suddenly heard splashing. My laughter died abruptly and I tensed, not knowing what to expect. Rus emerged from the fog seconds later. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
He stopped paddling and sat up on his board. “Caught that wave all the way to shore. Then I got caught inside. Got totally pounded. Took me forever to paddle back out. You catch one yet?”
I shook my head.
He eyed me for a moment. “You all right?”
“Fine.”
Another set eventually rolled in and, this time, I caught a wave. In fact, by the time our session ended an hour later, I had caught several waves. By this time, too, the fog had dissipated, revealing a bright and sunny morning. All in all, my session at Shark Bites turned out to be much more fun than I had anticipated – the kelp incident notwithstanding.
On the drive back, I couldn’t help but reflect upon the nature of fear. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that fear – along with many other human emotions – is a physiological and psychological response pattern that has been shaped by natural selection to offer a selective advantage in certain situations. According to this scenario, the physiological manifestations of fear – such as increased heart rate, fight or flight response, increase in adrenaline levels, among others – have been selected to help us avoid situations that may lead to injury or death. At first glance, the concept seems difficult to take seriously. Fear can be a positive? For example, if a leopard is attacking, fear and avoidance are probably adaptive responses; better to take flight than trying to engage such a creature. Of course, fear is not always adaptive; if it leads to paralysis – an inability to think, act, or perform – in a stressful situation it can be maladaptive. However, on the whole, most evolutionary ecologists would probably argue that the capacity for fear is a positive human trait. Without it, humans would never have been able to avoid certain life-threatening situations.
This, of course, just begs the question: Why as humans do we constantly put ourselves in dangerous, stressful, and life-threatening situations in the first place? And why do we often do it deliberately? Why, for example, do big wave surfers deliberately ride mountainous, life-threatening waves? Or mountaineers climb to dizzying heights, thereby risking avalanche, frostbite, high-altitude sickness, exhaustion, and other dangers? Why, in short, do many of us get a kick out of situations that not only scare the crap out of us, but have the potential of ending our lives?
But I guess that is a question for another time…
Postscript: Since that first go-out at Shark Bites, I’ve become a bit of a regular there. It’s a spot I now consider one of my normal north-of-town “haunts.” The whole kelp incident seems almost funny now. Almost…
