5 posts tagged with "Book"

Feeling the first surge of energy run through me after a meal, I sit down to write.  This is a gift not to be squandered, this deafening smashing beat that flows through me, the writing coming off my fingers, sparks in my mind, swinging on vines through lush forests, kicking over clanging trash cans, rolling up in fast cars, jumping off a highway overpass from a full speed car, knowing you've gotta die, certain you'll live.  Where does this come from? Sugar, the rush of corn tortillas dancing in my veins, the pulse of blood in my arms, the feel of music in my head, the weird and wild and muse feeling of being possessed by the gods of writing, flashing black and white lights, screaming Yeah, here comes the story, knowing that all along. The idea of telling the truth no matter what, always being rewarded for doing the right thing, whether people are looking or not.  What do you want?  Tell me the truth.  Always tell the truth, why is that so important?  White marble  The swelling curve of a knife blade, the dark and grey swirls in metal, a thousand folds, crafted through ten thousand years of working metal in fire, combining basic elements into a utilitarian tool of beauty not only in the use, but simply the looking.  True form and function. I can barely take it, that heavy ripping rough sounds.  The story she tells, the way each of us can feel that same story in our own history.  You know the name of the bar, you remember the look of the jukebox, the smell of the place, the way the door in the bathroom creaked, the cheap plastic flags, the glasses you used to steal, even the beer you used to order.  It's all there, in your mind and Joan Jett's.  I love Joan for the writing, for the passion and feeling and fight in her voice.  That's a mouth that spits the truth, she does rock and roll, as much as I do along with Willie Nelson and a few others. Pure and clean, just your voice, that's all I want to hear.  Add some drums, give it a beat, then slide those deep bass notes up and down the neck of the guitar, choking it and at the the same time grinding out the beauty of vibrations on metal strings. Then there's the simple sound of a Spanish guitar.  Del Castillo covering Willie, the ting of a metal triangle, the left ear starts to feel the beat, to get it, to sync up with the song just in time for the voice to come through, that nasally voice that is always in my dreams when I think of cowboys and fishing trips and my Dad in an old car, McDonald's on a Saturday morning, the smell of a lumberyard, the sawdust, projects in the workshop, dissecting a frog, the smell of the formaldehyde. The rush of water over gravel, I use a spin rod, Dad fly fishes.  I  remember every Willie song I've ever heard, even this one I haven't heard before.  Every time I hear that voice, I feel all that history come back up again.  I can feel the cold dark morning of West Hartford, I can feel the chilly windows as the sun comes up over the horizon.  That's where my love of getting up early comes from, from the wayward dance of guitar notes, from the love of my Dad, from those moments we shared out there on the Connecticut river, when it was just us, and the world was simple and clean and pure.  I don't remember the rest of the day  I don't remember the nights, I don't care, just the the mornings where we drove and listened to music together, when life was so clean and pure, and the aching and pulling of heart strings wasn't yet part of my conscious experience, where I only felt the emotion in this music and asked those simple question that encompassed so much more than the words.  I just enjoy the glimmering trill of the music, the voice of Willie, and a simple guitar riff. You know, hard hittin'.

Just stumbled on this, wish I'd kept writing more.  Some funny stuff, all of it still pretty much true.  Like you guys, I'm a little older and wiser now.  Enjoy. NFH There are three things that let you know you are truly alive.  The opening shock of a parachute, the sound of a sixty firing, and that primal thrill of cold water immersion.  Those are short, sharp experiences.  It is known only to you whether you enjoy each, or any, of those.  For those of us that have, this book was written. I left those experiences on September 13th of 2000.  On that day I walked off the SEAL Team 5 quarterdeck and into the unknown of the civilian world.  I had served as a peacetime SEAL, aping the behavior of more experienced frogmen; fighting in bars, pulling the dumb stunts, ripping dares out of mouths and shredding them with the laughter that comes from ignorant cockiness.  When I walked off that quarterdeck there was no doubt in my mind that I would be a success at anything and everything I tried.  Ten years later, I have learned new meanings of success, I have plumbed depths of despair I didn't know existed, and realized that there is no limit to the things that let you know you are truly alive. Indianapolis, October 2001. I stared down the barrel of my .45.  Safety off.  Finger on the trigger.  I had hit my low point, and it had only taken fourteen months.  I didn't know what I wanted to do.  I thought I had hit the high point of life as a 23 year old SEAL.  I had taken the toughest the U.S. military could dish out, and I had laughed.  I had out run, out swam, out shot, and out thought almost every person I had come up against.  I had competed on a world stage and roared in exhilaration while passing competitors.  I had thought that the hardest boundaries where those of the physical world, and I had conquered them.  I had so much to learn. I started out like most ex-military and took a vacation; Australia for two months.  Living in hostels, spending my savings, as carefree and unattached as it is possible to get.  Moving from place to place, shaking off a schedule that had been with me for 5 years.  Dramatic changes were seen in those first few months, breaking old rules that no longer applied, flaunting the freedom that civilian society takes for granted, answering to no pay grade above my own.  10 years later I'm still an early riser, still working out every day, still scanning the streets, still checking rear security.  10 years later I am more deeply changed than I or any of my closest friends would have thought possible. I returned from Australia ready for the next great adventure.  For me, it was a sailing trip.  Five and a half months, a 22 foot boat, 6,000 miles of open ocean.  I sailed naked, reveling in my freedom.  I sat with port captains, ate fish with locals, drank in foreign bars, surfed empty spots, and swam with dolphins.  I thought I was as far away from the Navy as I could be, and I was, for that time.  I still woke up early, still stood watches, still adventured in the physical realm.  I felt alive during the knockdowns, when the spreaders kissed the wave tops and we scrambled to the high side to right the boat.  When the cold water blasted across my face on the night watch with the wind up and the spinnaker billowing in front, dragging us to the outside edge of control over the crest of a wave and into the next trough, I remembered the three things that let you know you're truly alive, and I laughed to be living. Not realizing yet that there are no goals that give ever-lasting satisfaction, and trained to believe that there were, I raced from one goal to the next.  From port to port, from record day distance to record time away from land, I pushed myself towards goals, each one a painting of life.  I thought I could live in those paintings.  I thought at that point that I knew what I was doing, that I knew where I was going, that I had it planned out.  I was going to Stanford, I was going to swim on their team, then on to the Olympics.  I would find a wife, find enough money to pay for everything and anything I wanted, start a family, and travel around the world.  I would look like a vagabond and be rich as a king.  I would travel rough for months, then lounge in luxury recuperating.  I would work for the CIA on the side, and tell no one.  Then I would go back to my wife and family and perfect house and perfect life and no one would know what I had done but me, and it would be enough.  But it never happened. I sold the boat in Jamaica, and after 10 days of partaking of all the pleasures that country offers, I was back to the U.S. to meet my future wife.  I still had the SEAL persona, it was still how I defined myself.  I realize now, at almost 30, that being a SEAL will always have a place in my definition of self that is out of proportion to the amount of time I spent doing it.  Perhaps that is because I was impressionable.  Perhaps it was because the experiences were so intense.  Maybe it is because I haven't found a core definition I like more.  It was late summer 2001, and when I moved into a house my father owned in Indianapolis, I had my life plotted out.  Almost completely wrong, but that's what life, and exploration, and new experiences are all about. I started with a map in my head of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.  By the time I stopped to check where I was 5 minutes down the trail, I was irrevocably off course.  It happened in both little and big steps.  The first few are little; I got out and smoked a joint; hey, look at me, I'm not in the Navy anymore, I can do anything.  Being high was fun, there's a reason so many people like it.  But I couldn't keep it up.  Every time I got high I'd get about an hour into it and start thinking about all the productive things I should have been doing.  So I ping-ponged to the ultra-healthy side, and tried a raw food diet because, hell, it's something that most people can't do, and I knew I could do anything.  I was still defining who I was by what I could do that others couldn't, a classic SEAL trait.  After a week of raw food, carrot and garlic juice, and shots of wheatgrass I realized that living on raw food is unusual for a reason, but I can do it if I have to.  Still, there was something to it, so I kept exploring.  By now I was so far off my original map that I couldn't even begin to get a bearing on where I had been, so I started drawing a new map for myself. I didn't know it, but drawing and redrawing your own maps is a disorienting process.  After I let go of the old one, I thought it would be easy and fun to write a new one.  Bits of it are, but there are some parts that give you real insight on just how easy the "hard" training was.  I had so many more choices the second time that they occasionally overwhelmed me.  I looked for new friends and they constantly let me down as I held them to a standard they couldn't, wouldn't, and didn't want to understand.  I reached out to old friends, and they helped, but I was exploring territory that was years ahead of them, and I couldn't make them understand what the hell I was going through.  What I was doing was what we'd all talked about doing, and how could it be anything but fun?  This isn't to say that my buddies from the Teams weren't helpful, they saved my life.  Of course, they didn't know they'd done it, and they didn't know how, and they probably didn't mean to. Searching for a new identity was not only not on their map, it wasn't on their radar.  Once a SEAL always a SEAL.  Except when I was working for minimum wage teaching little kids how to swim.  Then you're just that weird guy with a bunch of tattoos and more foul language than most mothers want to hear.  Let me give you a hot tip; no mother likes to hear their kid being told to "put the fuck out" as

Gents, Some on-again off-again writing for a book.  Thought you'd dig it so far.  Comments or edits always welcome. NFH The story starts long before the early morning landfall smell of smoke rises off the Jamaican coast line.  Inky black nights, alone in God's creation, feeling that the world is something more than just bits and bones, that there's a hell-spark in all of us that roars into wild blaze every so often, experiencing Nature in all her naked glory, when raw lust for that pure and hard and clean spirit rushes through the heart, and belief in immortality leads down devilish roads. There's canyoneering, campfires, a mountain stream, fresh meat, drifting and moving and wondering and loving.  Long road trips across the west, tires singing, windows radiating the heat of a place unwelcome to each of us bags of water.  A circle of friends and heroes, cool headed, hard working, laughing, confident. There's that spirit that grabs hold when it shouldn't, when the world is right but it ought to be wrong, when the world isn't delivering enough pain to remind you that life is too rich for misery and scrabbling after the values of a dirty humanity. Maybe it's a good enough reason to forget all the rules we struggle to abide by.  When that little piece of metal and rubber takes off and the world falls away in the roar of a thousand factories brought through 180 horses ripping away at a single prop dragging the whole contraption up past the smog to a clean and windy blue.  Flying off the coast, instant flatness, development stops, and the vastness of a loving and bountiful and pitiless mother begins.  Blue water, two whales, largest creatures ever to have lived, nostrils huge and smooth and clamping shut before the water rushes over, smooth movement, timeless and unstoppable.  The blue white of flesh underwater, the incommunicability across species.  Why do you swim?  Why do we fly?  Why do I go back to work when I should just jump out of this plane and return to what we evolved away from.  Can a mistake be fixed in a short free fall that took 400 million years of evolution to fuck up? Dropping back into another reality, purple curtains, Joan Jett, that rolling ripping heavy music in my own head drowning out the easy hippie music from tinny speakers, the deep blue bruising streaks of heavy pressure from a thick and low bass riff, all the toxins coming up out of the skin, a hard massage, roll me off the table limp and weak. The unfolding of my lungs through repeated runs, overexertion, through the jerking of heavy weights, the cold stink of an early morning gym, the clean scent of morning mist, the cracked and grey sidewalks and the black shadows of night running up the sides of buildings. This is a story about running into overdrive too early in a race, of recovering only through sheer willpower, of crying and broken hearts and crooked noses, of the stink of piss under a bar, the satisfying crack of slate as you flip a pool table.  This life is equal parts warm puppies and heavy fists, love, and life, the juxtaposition of a modern warrior and an old soul. This story is poetry and fresh baked bread made with my own hands, of old trucks and long unmowed grass, dogs rescued from a cold winter and cats shot dead in the street.  My story is of life and growing and all varied and weird and wonderful mistakes that go along with doing the right thing, even too late. Here I stand, alone and in the best of company at 32 years old.  146 pounds, ripped and hard, running faster, lifting heavier, loving more with more anger and angst and understanding and compassion than ever before.  This place here, filled with friends and foes, with sudden bursts of understanding blended with the goddamn blind incomprehension of hate and emotional release is where I am.  The story begins. I grew up a lost Indian in a suburban white body.  Always reaching for something different, always feeling a long and ancient connection with nature and natural things.  That connection fought with some kind of inherent evil, a knowledge of lack of consequences, killing cats and lizards  and squirrels through wanton abuse of all the gifts given. Squirming and squirelling, wriggling through that tunnel that is too tight, of love and doing the right thing even when no one is looking, or trying too hard for too long with no reward only to see it open up before up before you big and bright and scary as your wife sliding down a rock water fall.  The whole world out there, full of no safety nets, of black holes of the wrong thing, of occasional flashes of brilliance and love when the heart explodes into its own case, held together solely by the power of right and good and pure rushing energy.  That is my life. When, through countless tries and errors and victories, I come on serendipity in one moment, on the edge of a cliff, the urge to jump off, to see what's on that other side, breathing too hard.  Stopped on gravel, hands and knees, red digging craters in my hands, pebbles and dirt and grass and stains that don't come out. Every one of my pants is stained.  I don't have a t-shirt that I'm proud to wear that is unsulllied.  This life I'm living is one of experience, of hard won victories, of easy defeats, of the constant realization, over and over again, that I am the sole power in my world, the only creator, completely and terribly responsible for all I experience.  The warring souls in me, the rushing thoughts of blood and violence, the deep love for humans and animals and clouds and every single soul on the highway crash together daily, churning out actions incomprehensible in their singularity, only understood through a wide lens. Driving on the highway I feel the sudden heavy and unstoppable guilt that comes from killing, without warning or reason other than curiosity or the mild excitable rush that comes with meaningless power.  This mixes and blends with those moments of remorse acted out, of saving a lost dog, helping a stranded lady,  changing irrevocably the lives of hundreds of young men through faith in self acted out in a myriad of blessed and holy ways.

On a warm May morning last spring I walked out of my house in San Clemente and down the overgrown trail to Trestles's for an early surf.  I paddled out to glass and the peace that comes with a morning session.  Tuesday morning, twenty surfers.  A four foot swell coming in from the south, just above average waves in long sets, separated by 15 minutes of complete peace on the water.  To my left, towards the enormous twin breasts of the San Onofre nuclear plant, ten surfers, all but one wearing a wetsuit.  The one without a suit was well built, tan, with medium length dark hair tipped with blond from the salt and the sea. After catching a wave and paddling back out, I found myself almost next to him, perhaps five feet away.  As he turned away for a perfect left, I caught a glimpse of his back, a mass of criss-crossing scar tissue , the white lines apparent against his surfer's tan.  Jesus, I thought, what happened to him?  I saw him skim down the line, his head and shoulders rising and falling behind the crest of the wave he rode.  He was good, smooth, with the kind of movement you get from long hours on the water.  Forty minutes later both of us were still out there, and by chance, and I admit, some, I found myself next to him again.  I gave a nod.  "Nice morning."  "Yeah, not many like these, eh?"  He turned, looking for a set to roll in, and unable to contain my curiosity, I burst out.  "What happened to your back?"  He turned and looked at me.  "What do you think?" "Goddamn, looks like you fell in a thresher to me.  When'd it happen?"  The words ran away from me, and an embarrased silence filled the space between us.  "Sorry, didn't mean to be nosey."  I turned away, praying for a wave to come and let me ride off. "In the spring of '98," he began, and I turned around.  He smiled at me.  "Not many people ask." He began again.  "In the spring of '98, my girlfriend and I sold most of what we had, packed the rest, and flew to Morocco.  We went to learn Arabic, and because we were in love with the desert, and the mystery of Africa, and traveling.  We went to a language school for two months, taking class in the morning and working in the afternoon, her dying cloth and me chopping wood.  The jobs didn't pay much, but we did them more for the experience and the opportunity to learn the language than we did for money.  We've got enough."  A shy smile.  He was proud, almost arrogant, of having "enough". "After two months we decided we knew enough of the language, and the wanderlust was strong, so we bought two camels for a hundred bucks each and started to tour the country.  For six months we went everywhere we could think of, climbing high into the Atlas mountains, smoking the most amazing  hash, coming back down and lounging on the beach, haunting old cities, looking for old movie sets, talking with people. We were in the middle of a two week trip into the back country when we realized she was pregnant.  It would be our first child, and neither of us wanted anything to go wrong.  We hadn't planned for it, but it also seemed romantic to have a baby in the desert."  He blushed.  It was hard to imagine him saying "romantic". "We came in to re-supply in Fez, in the north.  As we came into the town, we realized something was wrong.  There had been some problems with the government, but neither of us had given it thought.  Fez was tense, guys in the streets with AK's, people hurrying everywhere, you didn't go outside without a purpose.  We left Fez with the rising sun, after a hot, uneasy night.  Sketchy.  We made camp a about an hour beyond town, hobbled the camels, unrolled our blankets, and built a fire.  After a long night of talking and thinking, our options were three.  One, to stay in Morrocco and continue our trip by camel.  We had three and a half months left on our visa, and we felt it was a shame to waste the time and run home as soon as we felt a little threatened.  Two, to walk back into town, hire a taxi and go straight to the airport, flying back to California the next day and damn the expense.  It was probably the wisest option, but our least favorite.  Three, if we could neither continue our trek nor fly out of the country, we would try and cross the border to Algeria and find a flight out. We decided to sleep on it, go back to town, re-assess the situation and make a decision.  Early the next morning we woke, broke camp, and by late afternoon were on the outskirts of Fez. The town was on fire.  As we got closer, we began to meet people going the direction we were coming from.  We asked them, "What's going on?" and they answered, "War.  The government's taken the town."  We turned around again and walked back to safety.  Our three options had turned to one.  We would trek to Algeria. After two weeks of dodging patrols, we crossed the range of mountains that runs down the spine of Morocco, and were days away from the border.  We took shelter outside an old goat corral and lay down to rest.  We were tired, but not beat.  Hungry, but not starving.  At that point, we were basically two kids having a bitchin' time, a little scared, but enjoying everything." "We woke to kicks and slaps, the camels screaming, and gunshots.  At first we thought we had been caught by a random government patrol, and prayed at least for some kind of legal process, a trial, anything. It was clear after a few grunts in Arabic that these weren't government, but bandits.  Hell, they were doing more or less what I'd have been doing in their shoes.  Taking advantage of the economic situation.  Looking back, I can't say I blamed them, and it ended being great karma  that we we re captured, but what happened after..." He paused.  "Well.  What happened after, eh?  They kept us for two days, and at sunrise on the third, after the morning call to prayer, we were taken to a thick wooden post planted firmly in the ground and tied bac k to back.  A line of men faced us from ten yards away, all carrying automatic rifles, AK-47's.  We were going to be shot.  Neither of us could speak." The surfer stopped talking. "Jesus", I said. He looked at me, coming back from his story.  "Not exactly a morning session kind of story, eh?" "She spoke up that day, my chick, and saved us.  She'd been reading the Koran for ages, was all into that funky religious shit, you know how some people are, searching for God, looking for something.  She found it, found it that morning, and pulled us back from the other side." "She was taking fast, stumbling over herself but at the same time very clear, and it took me a while to make the transition back to Arabic; we had been talking in English since we left Fez. I had to pay attention and translate in my head what she was saying.  Apparently there's some old fuckin' ceremony for prisoners in the desert, from the Koran or some fuckin' book, something to give them one last shot." He half smiled, and I knew right then that he was immensely proud of himself and embarrassed at the same time for whatever had happened that day in the desert. "The deal is, and you'll want to remember this if you're ever rounded up some dark African night,".  A quick smile.  "Remember to request the seven days to freedom. Or, maybe not.""The seven days bit is a lie."  A quick grimace. "You ever seen a camel up close?", he asked. "At the zoo, not close." "They're big animals, man, and stubborn.  Gotta whip 'em sometimes to get 'em to do what you want.  You use a camel whip, leather, 'bout three, four feet long, braided at one end for a handle.  Other end is a hard, two-inch wide strip." "For seven days, one man, a volunteer, can take punishment from a camel whip.  Nine lashes a day, five in the morning, four in the afternoon.  During those seven days the man may make no sound, and is allowed no food.  If, after seven days, those conditions have been satisfied, the captors are obliged to free their captives.  Nothing more."  He cleared his throat.  "Fuckers are harsh." He turned and stretched, a calculated movement.  His white scars stood out in the sun. "Sixteen days", he said. "If you make a sound, or eat, you start over.  Once you begin, you succeed. Or..."  His voice faded.  "Usually, you die." Jesus H. Christ.  Who the fuck was I talking to?  The moment seemed surreal.  The sun reflected off the water, the wind was beginning to pick up, offshore, a rarity.  I looked around.  We were surrounded by other surfers, listening to the story.  They had paddled over unnoticed as they caught bits and pieces. "You smoke pot, man?", the stranger asked.  I looked at him in dumb confusion.  "What?" "Dope, man, d'you smoke fuckin weed?"  Off balance, I answered.  "Yeah, when I can get it."  "Don't ever let those fuckers tell you dope's bad, brotha, it got me through". "Two days into it, I was delirious.  They left me tied to the post, tied my chick to another one.  She tried to help me when they whipped, but couldn't get near.  She was chained up so she could get close to me, maybe five feet away, no farther.  They fed her, talked to her, shot the shit.  It was so wild, here I was getting whaled on, and five feet away, five fuckin' feet, my girlfriend is talking about the rights of women.  Fuckin' chicks."  He smiled, and in that instant I saw everything good and noble about him.  I can't explain it, not even now with a computer screen in front of me, safe and warm in my own house, with the distant sound of waves coming through the kitchen window.  I saw a guy give a bum a hot sandwich on a cold winter night once, that guy had the same look on his face, like... redemption.  I don't know.  The stranger started talking again. "After three days I had nothing left, no food in my gut, no fat on me, no reserve.  The dope kicked in.  All the hash we'd smoked in the mountains, before she was pregnant, before the war, before we were caught, came out of what was left of me, and I was in love with mankind, man, I was high as a kite, higher than I'd ever been.  When they hit me I'd smile, and imagine my chick was just peeling skin off my back after a sunburn, me on my belly, her on top, straddling, on the beach right here, at Trestle's.  That's what got me the extra days.  On the fifth day I yelled out, "Harder, Achmed, I can't feel it."  I don't know if he understood what I said, but I felt it that day.  The seven days started over." "Four days later, the same thing.  My chick was screaming at me when she saw me open my mouth, she knew what was happening, she was watching me fade, it was bad, you know.  Right after I said it, something smart-ass again, you know, "Come on, take me to the next level", I saw her mouth open.  I couldn't hear anything, but I knew I'd fucked up.  Because." "It wasn't hurting ME, man.  I was beyond.  I was at the next level.  I couldn't feel it.  But it was her.  She was pregnant, watching me, watching her man being beaten to death, and she was so brave, women are strong, man, and she'd figured out how to get through, knowing how men are, and me, and how we like a challenge, how we all want to be tested, how we all want to be The Few.  And I was fucking it up." The guy was crying.  Right in the middle of about a hundred surfers, waves piling up, passing under us, you could see the heads bobbing up and down, we were all a part of the ocean then, a part of each other, feeling this guy's story.  It was incredible, I'll never forget it.  The sun, the cold water, the scars on his back, a light offshore breeze just rippling the water.  It was a day to surf, but we were all listening.  Mesmerized. "Seven days later I won.  They cut the straps that held me to that block of wood and I fell over like a bag of shit.  My chick was on top of me, crying, and I could feel her tears hitting my bones, I saw pieces of my skin on the ground around the post, and my blood, and the rest... I don't remember what happened until I landed in Madrid." "She did it all after that. She told me after they cut me down they just walked away. We had nothing. No camels, no food, no water. Man, I'll always hold the door for a chick, every one of them deserves, fuckers are strong. I would've lain there till the birds come, but she picked me up and tromped off to some village. Got a taxi to some dirt runway airport, sweet talking about fifty people along the way, got to Algiers, got on another plane to Madrid, called my folks, got money wired in, and I was home four days after I was cut off that post. Three years ago, that was." "Got two kids now, the one we made in the desert and one from here. Figure I'll tell 'em when they ask. Figure I'll tell anyone when they ask, you know?" He looked at me. "Jesus. What'd you do when you got back?" "Nothing really. I laid on my belly for a while." Short laugh. "Don't really do anything now. A little gardening, watch the kids. Surf. The chick supports us. Got a website for desert explorers, you know. Figured she doesn't want anyone else to get hurt like us. Great chick. The best." He turned, and I saw his back again. "Jesus." "Later, man." He lay on his board and gave three or four deep strokes as a mammoth wave rolled through. He shot by fifty surfers in twenty yards, the pack that had surrounded him. Standing up fluidly, he gave a whoop, a quick turn back, a smile. All of us watched, seeing him disappear behind a wave, riding freedom, untouched. It was a long wave, and he rode it all the way to the beach. He jumped off his board, picked it up and splashed through the shallows to the tow-headed little boy running towards him. I couldn't hear anything, he was maybe 200 yards away. A light haired woman came walking down the beach toward him, carrying another kid, a baby. I turned, and caught a wave.

13 February 2001.   Journal entry: "Tomorrow we will attempt to make San Juan del Sur.  We have spent the evening talking with 'Harmony' and ' Slipaway'.  The weather reports they have given us are not good.  We are running low on food, and the wind is still high.  This moment seems very serious now, with our lives hanging in the balance.  This is why, though we do not admit it now in our time of fear, that we travel.  This search for the crystal clear snap decisions that decide our mortality.  For the moment when the words we say and actions we take matter.  This emotion is one that cannot be found at home, one that should not be found anywhere normal humans have the ability to perceive.  This is the moment before battle, before struggle.  This time smells like…VICTORY.” We didn't know it then, Jason, Bruce, and I, whether or not we would be victorious.  We were off the coast of southern Nicaragua, well into our second week of heavy wind sailing in a small boat.  We were sailing from San Diego to Virginia via the Panama Canal.  In our first month of sailing, we had only six days total of heavy wind, and those six days were downwind screamers-the boat flat, putting up a wake and making amazing time.  We had seen dolphins off the bow in the morning, glorious sunsets, seals following the boat for hours, and swordfish jumping at night.  It had been perfect. Our bodies were a deep sailor brown after thirty-five days of being on the water, and our hair was bleached blonde.  We had sailed over 1,000 miles and had safely gotten through the Gulf of Tehuantepec, where the ripping offshore wind makes the endless Pacific a barren danger zone of viciously choppy seas.  It howls in Tehuantepec, the wind screaming through at anywhere between forty and sixty knots. Boaters wait in groups for a weather window, or calm spot, when the wind dies down to around twenty.  Twenty knots is about twenty-four miles an hour.  Imagine driving down the road in a car with no windshield, doing twenty-five miles an hour.  You can't see very well, it's hard to breathe, your skin dries out, it's difficult to hear what your friends are saying. Now imagine going to the bathroom off the side, or drinking coffee, or eating.  It gets unbelievable. After three days of constantly getting thrashed by the wind and sea, we pulled into port on the far side of Tehuantepec for eighteen hours; enough time to make phone calls, stock up at the grocery stores, do laundry, and take off again.  We thought we'd sail straight to Costa Rica, an easy four day trip under the right conditions.  Under any other conditions, it becomes a matter of tenacity, hope, and survival. 05February01, Apocalypso Log Entry Strong Easterly this morning, lumpy seas.  Wind went right so we tacked to a new waypoint inshore off El Salvador.  Hoping for smoother water and may stock up on H20 in El Salvador/ Upwind sure is another ball game then downwind! 'Apocalypso' doesn't like steep chop,slamming; hard to sleep.  No one would respond on Channel 16 for weather forecast. We were 20 miles offshore, the skies were sunny but the wind was howling and the water was cold.  The Humboldt Current had dipped toward shore on its way up from Antarctica, and the water temperature had dropped to the high 50's.  The only warmth to be had was below.  "Below" was in the cabin, a space that was three and half feet high at the highest, about two feet in the bow where our head went when we slept and just under six feet of sleeping space. It was tight, two men on a large couch with walls.  It had no ventilation, and when the weather got bad we stopped washing ourselves-it was too much of a chore.  Below was warm and damp and stank.  Below was dark, and when the waves came over the cabin, water would come in and Below would get wet.  Below was the nicest place to be on the boat. On deck was where the boat was sailed.  On deck had unending wind, cold sea spray, and no protection from the Central American sun.  Jason and I were on deck at least 18 hours a day, usually more.  We stood 3 hours on, 3 hours off watches during the night, and we both stayed up during the day.  The log entry for the next day is in my handwriting this time. "2-3 foot wind swell.  Uncomfortably upwind.  Still slamming, slept 2 hours last night. Yes!!!” The next day_; "Approaching Tamarindo, Bay of Fonseca.  Hard going, no sleep for Nik or Jason, boat leaking portside at the bow, re-threaded jib sheets, still 15-20 knots on the bow.”_ We anchored at Tamarindo that night, thinking we were safe, but as soon as we had anchored, a fisherman drove up in his panga and through repeated broken English and our dictionary Spanish, told us to head up the bay for better anchorage; we were in danger.  We had been sailing for 3 days, and had 12 hours of sleep between Jason and I, with Bruce in a seasick coma below.  We did not want to move.  We cooked a salty goulash, then got our heads together.  Our anchorage was rolly, not much better than sailing, and we figured going up the bay couldn't be worse.  We pulled anchor, and three tired boys and one beat up boat headed deeper into El Salvador. As soon as we rounded the headland into the Bay of Fonseca, the wind died down, and the phosphorescence lit up our wake in an electric blue.  We rode an incoming tide into anchorage just off the Navy base in La Union, El Salvador.  We stayed on anchor for that night and the next, resupplied and got moving again. We left at 8 o’clock the evening of the 9th, on an ebb tide.  We had a gentle wind behind us through the night, warm with the smell of the earth and tinged with salt from the sea.  It took us across the border and into Nicaragua the next morning, then died.  We jumped in the water to wash off the night, got out, dried off and sat around waiting for the morning onshore breeze.  This was the sailing we remembered; calm mornings, clean bodies, the feeling of crispness, of being a new person from the day before, of having made it through another night. After 20 minutes of no wind and the boat drifting, we decided to start our tiny motor.  I was yanking away on the cord when I heard Jason yell "Breeze On, get the reef in!" I looked up to see a dark spot on the ocean heading for us, and Jason and I hurriedly dropped the sail down to our first reef.  Putting in a reef means lowering the sail and tying off the bottom end to make the sail a smaller triangle.  Sailors reef when they get more wind than the boat was designed to take with a full sail up.  From that point until I sailed into Costa Rica, we had at least one reef in. That day, the 8th of February, was the beginning of a heavyweight beating that would last a full seven days.  Those weren’t nine to five days, with Comfort reaching out warm hands to you in the evening, those were five full-on days of man pitting himself against Nature, of struggling to survive, of thinking about living every second.  Those were some of the best days of my life.  I don’t have a sense of time, or sequential events.  I have to look back to the journal I kept, as well as the boat’s log. 13February01 Journal Entry Anchored in Nicaragua, emergency line out… 35+ kts of wind.  The hardest sailing I've ever done-very tired, cold and wet….  Ho. Lee. Shit.  Anchored, thank sweet baby Jesus. Later that day…It's amazing, the wind.  It whistles and howls and screams in the shrouds.  Jason reckons it's gotten up to 40 knots.  Wish we had an anemometer.  Our nav light broke last night-maybe the bulb.  This is good time for thinking.  I don't wish for anything so much as for the wind to die down.  For a while it was burgers and fries, milkshakes, biscuits and gravy etc., but my world has devolved to one small boat in heavy wind off of Nicaragua. I remember sailing less than 100 meters off shore to avoid the seas that build beyond, of having to sail through a plume of smoke a half mile long, from a fire on the shore, and listening to Les Miserable five times in a row because I could neither leave the helm, nor wake up Jason to change the CD.  I remember thinking of my family, wondering what they were doing; glad they didn’t know the danger I was in. Every phone call or e-mail I sent back to them was full of cheerful lies.  It wasn’t until I finished my trip, and had flown back from Jamaica, that I told them how many times I saw that tall gaunt figure, Thanatos.  I remember cracked brown lips, sores from sitting in salt water, sun poisoning; little white pustules on my arms, and thick, salty hair. On the morning of February 14th, 2001, we set off for San Juan del Sur, leaving our emergency anchorage.  We had decided the night before to go for it.  The reports we had were of 70 knot gusts of wind two miles off shore, and 15 foot seas.  The only food we had left were protein shake packets, which had to mixed with water.  We had one gallon of water for three people.  We did not know how long our trip would take. When I told ‘Slipaway’ and ‘Harmony’, two other boats that had emergency anchored near us, of our shortages, they told me to come by in the morning and accept a package of food and water.  I declined.  I would do this on my own, with my own body, with my own provisions, with no outside help.  Jason and I had a bitter argument about it, but I was the Captain and the final call was mine.  We left with no help.  All three of us dressed in all our foul weather gear-Jason and I had full suits, Bruce had only a jacket. We pulled up the sail in 25 knots of wind, Bruce and I hauling in 300 feet of anchor line, fifty feet of chain, and the 20 lb anchor. Sweat dripped down the inside of our foulies, our faces were red with the rush of blood, we were pulling the boat into the wind.  We had our deep reef in, the smallest amount of sail possible without taking everything down.  Jason drove, and Bruce and I hiked out. Hiking out is hanging as much body weight as you can off the high side of the boat to help counteract the force of the wind on the sail.  As soon as we left the shelter of the anchorage, into the full 35 knot force of the wind, we were knocked down, the boat slammed on its side.  A knockdown is an awesome experience.  As in awe-inspiring that Nature can put a 2,000 lb boat on it's side with the force of her windy breath.  A knockdown means it’s time to put in another reef, but we had no more reefs to put in. We had our smallest sail up, we had 300 pounds of flesh hiking out, the only thing we could do was to point higher, or into the wind more, to lessen the pressure on the sail.  When you point too high, the sail begins to luff, or flap, as the leading edge of the sail gets wind equally on both sides.  Luffing a sail destroys it, the constant snap weakening the fibers as the wind screams past.  For the next 8 hours the sail never stopped luffing.  That day is still clear to me. The beating sun, the scattered clouds whipping overhead, the spray coming off the bow wave, the feel of the waves as they passed under the boat.  We sailed so close to shore where the ocean changes from deep water to shallow reefs that waves like watery whales would hump up under our boat.  We could easily see houses on the shore, the trees around them permanently bent under the constant overseer’s lash of the wind.  I remember incredible igneous rock formations, huge twisted arthritic fingers reaching out of the sea.  I remember the blue of the water, the white foam in streaks on top, and the icy feel of Poseidon’s touch when we dug into waves. We made it that day, made it to San Juan del Sur.  When we arrived at the harbor entrance it was 3 o'clock.  We had been sailing 8 hours, covering 20 miles of the heaviest wind we would see on the trip.  As we tacked up the harbor towards the shore, the fishermen gathered on the decks of their 60 foot boats to watch us.  As we passed them, our lean, gaunt faces peering out from under the hoods of our jackets, they screamed and whistled in admiration.  They knew the fury of the ocean.  I have never been more proud. ******** Context:  I originally wrote this piece during my first semester at college.  It was for an English class, and the professor had asked us to write about something dangerous we had done, and how it related to the character Chris McCandless in Jon Krakauer's story "Into the Wild."  Here is the final paragraph of the paper I submitted: ******** When I read about Chris McCandless and his final days, I saw in him pieces of my journey.  The freedom, the independence, the pitting of man against nature, the acceptance of your own strengths and weaknesses.  I know how McCandless felt when he died.  It is something that I have done my best to explain, and still cannot come close.  It is the feeling of being at the helm of Destiny, of steering your own course, of following your heart. It is a selfish life, not taking into account the feelings of family or friends.  Before leaving on my journey I was constantly told to stay in San Diego, to find work with my friends, it’s so much easier to surf every day, you can learn how to sail slowly, please, stay with us. I could not, as McCandless could not.  We two have shaken hands with Death, have felt those bones pressing into the flesh of our palms.  Chris McCandless could not let go.