CHAPTER 1
February 19, 1979. At seven that morning my dad, his girlfriend Sandra and I took off from Santa Monica Airport headed for the mountains of Big Bear. I had won the Southern California Slalom Skiing Championship the day before and that afternoon we drove back to Santa Monica for my hockey game. To avoid another round-trip in the car my dad had chartered a plane back to Big Bear so that I could collect my trophy and train with the ski team. My dad was forty-three. Sandra was thirty. I was eleven.
The Cessna 172 lifted and banked over Venice Beach then climbed over a cluster of buildings in Westwood and headed east. I sat in the front, headphones and all, next to pilot Rob Arnold. Rob fingered the knobs along the instrument panel that curved toward the cockpit’s ceiling. Intermittently, he rolled a large vertical dial next to his knee, the trim wheel, and the plane rocked like a seesaw before leveling off. Out the windshield, way in the distance, a dome of gray clouds covered the San Bernardino Mountains, the tops alone poking through. It was flat desert all around the cluster of peaks, and the peaks stood out of the desert as high as 10,000 feet.
I was feeling especially daring because I had just won the slalom championship and I thought about the big chutes carved into those peaks – concave slides, dropping from the top of the peaks down the faces of the mountains like deep wrinkles. I wondered if they were skiable.
Behind Rob sat my dad. He read the sports section and whistled a Willie Nelson tune that I’d heard him play on his guitar many times. I craned around to see behind my seat. Sandra was brushing out her silky dark brown hair. She’s dressed kind of fancy, I though.
How long Dad? I said.
He peered over the top of the newspaper.
About thirty minutes, Boy Wonder, he said. We might get a look at your championship run as we come around Mount Baldy.
Then he stuffed an apple in his mouth and folded the newspaper in a rectangle. He would fold the Racing Form the same way, watermelon dripping off his chin on one of those late August days down at the Del Mar track where the surf meets the turf. We’d leave Malibu early in the morning and drive sixty miles south to ride a few peelers off the point at Swami’s, named for the ashram crowning the headland. If there was a long lull in the waves Dad would fold his legs up on his board and sit lotus, pretending to mediate, embarrassing me in front of the other surfers. Around noon we’d head to Solana Beach, which was across the Coast Highway from the track. We’d hide our boards under the small wood bridge because they wouldn’t fit inside Dad’s ’56 Porsche, then we’d cross the highway and railroad tracks to watch the horses get saddled. When they came into the walking ring Dad would throw me on his shoulders and hand up a fistful of peanuts for lunch. Pick a horse, Boy Wonder, he’d say. Without hesitation, he’d bet my horse to win. Once a long shot named Scooby Doo won by a nose and Dad gave me a hundred-dollar bill to spend however I wanted.
The mountaintops appeared higher than the plane. I stretched my neck to see over the plane’s dashboard, clasping the oversized headphones. As we approached the foothills I heard Burbank Control pass our plane onto Pomona Control. Pilot Rob told Pomona that he preferred not to go above 7,500 feet because of low freezing levels. Then a private plane radioed in, warning against flying into the Big Bear area without the proper instruments.
CHAPTER 2
The summer before the crash my grandmother’s washing machine broke. Grandma and Grandpa Ollestad had retired to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and the inflated prices for appliances in Guadalajara or Mexico City would have strained their budged. Also, renting a truck and picking up a new machine themselves was a major ordeal I those days. So my dad decided would go to Sears, buy a new washer and haul it down to Vallarta himself. He would borrow Cousin Denis’s black Ford pickup, cross the border in San Diego and cruise the Baja Peninsula highway all the way to La Paz. He’d take the ferry across the Sea of Cortez to Mazatlán, which was mainland Mexico, then head farther south through the deep jungles, hitting as many of the rumored surf spots as he could before reaching Vallarta.
Hearing this news made me stiffen with fear. I went silent when my mom explained it all to me on our way home from summer school, where she taught second grade and I was preparing for sixth. She didn’t say anything about me having to go but it was in the air – looming – more threatening than if it were a certainty. The idea of baking inside that pickup truck for three or four days and hunting for surf – and worse, finding it and having to paddle out in big waves and float alone out there with just my dad in the vast sea – was not appealing at all. He would be focused on the surf and I would be left to fend for myself. I envisioned my body crushing under the lip of a wave, tossing around, clawing upward, gagging for air.
Mom’s car turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway and I heard the ocean shushing. I was starting at my blue Vans, listening to the Beatles on the eight-track and I felt carsick and had to look out the window.
We arrived at my mom’s house on Topanga Beach, the southernmost cove in Malibu. The homes were built right on the sand, slapdashed together and teetering at all angles as if shelter were an afterthought, second to the essential need of being on the beach. My dad used to live there also. When I was three he moved across the highway into a cabin on the edge of Topanga Canyon. By the time I had gathered various tidbits of information, forming a sketchy portrait of what broke up my parents.
The foregoing is excerpted from Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
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