After I graduated from Westmont and returned home, I did what all college graduates do: I found a job that required hardly any of my schooling or qualifications, and played with my friends every conscious hour that wasn't spent actively in the workforce. I became an aide at a preschool, even though I had enough units to be a teacher (which could have gotten me $2.50 more an hour, but what did I know?); this meant that I got thrown up on, peed on, pooped on, I wiped man-sized boogers off tiny faces, and cleaned up toddler-generated messes in an infinite cycle. But I digress.
Being twenty-two or twenty-three years old yielded my friends and me a super power that if I'd realized I had at the time, I would have appreciated it more emphatically: we could get up at the butt crack of dawn, work an eight or nine hour day, and proceed to engage in countless extra curricular activities until we couldn't hold our eyes open and felt like collapsing. Then we'd start over again the next day. Our main group during this time consisted of four boys who lived together: Mark, Justin, JJ, and Andrew; and Jon, Lynnea, and me.
Lynnea and I had been friends since high school. I first remember meeting her at youth group, when we were both in the 8th Grade Girls small group, then shared a cabin at Hume Lake the same summer. She'd attended Atascadero schools, like everyone else, and I was the lone Templeton kid. It was akin to being a homeschooler as far as the A-town contingent was concerned. Nae was nice to me back then, and I remembered that later, when our mutual group of friends brought us together again.
By college, we'd realized how incredibly alike we were. We had the same sarcastic, biting sense of humor (which was very hard to find in the church college group girls... very hard), we could be around each other every waking moment without driving each other insane, and we didn't like to sit still for too long. To each other, we were the sisters neither of us actually had. The rest of our friends were always boys, because in general we enjoyed doing more active and extreme things than most of the other girls we knew. We rock climbed, skate boarded, biked, played dune tag, hiked mountains in the pitch dark, explored old mining shafts, broke into a dilapidated and fenced off insane asylum... and surfed.
I bought an old longboard from a friend for $5 (he just needed lunch money that day), and Nae ordered a custom-made board from CCS that featured her signature purple swirled into it. I purchased myself a used wetsuit I'd seen in the classifieds that took exactly an hour and half to squish myself into. Once it was on I experienced a perpetually-being-strangled-feeling and I couldn't move my arms. But at least I was a fraction of a degree warmer whenever I plunged into the Pacific. Nae even traded in her purple Toyota Tercel for a small Nissan pick-up truck... for the sole purpose of transporting our surfboards.
Our goal was simple. Once we got the hang of things, we would graduate from our plank-like long boards to a couple of sleek, sharp-nosed short boards that, under our precise guidance, would slice through the water like perfectly placed arrows. Were we slightly delusional due to our obsession with a popular film from 2002, Blue Crush? Maybe. Who doesn't want to have a career as a hotel maid, as long as you get to live on the North Shore of Oahu and moonlight as a professional, sponsored surfer girl?
This fantasy led to our decision that we needed to train. How could girls like us, with noodles for arms and eight-foot-long surfboards to maneuver, ever survive two hours of paddling out, let alone an entire Vans Triple Crown competition? We'd already mastered the "pop-up" and could actually get up fairly consistently, as long as the waves were no bigger than approximately two and a half feet.
We both had boogie boards and hypothesized that paddling around on them for a few hours every weekend would build the upper body strength required to become bona fide surfing phenoms.
That's where this story of terror begins.
We chose our surf spots based on the food selection in close proximity... Splash Café, a favorite of both of ours, was right up the street from Pismo Pier. So that's where we began our training. Neither of us had ever had a problem with the ocean. We loved playing in it as kids, and as big kids/young adults, we had the ability to swim or paddle out to imposing depths without hesitation. This particular day, we sloshed through the shallow white water, jumped onto our boogie boards, and began paddling out to the decent sized waves. We rode waves in, paddled out, rode them in, paddled out. Sure, we were getting tired, but we had our futures as Billabong Girls to think about. We'd probably been out for less than an hour when we both saw a giant shadow streak through the wave forming right next to us.
Let me clarify something here. In the summer of 2003, SLO county suffered the only shark attack from my lifetime that I remember hearing about. It involved a twelve to eighteen foot great white, a woman who routinely swam laps in Avila Beach's calm waters, and it was fatal. Lynnea, Jon and I immediately rented Jaws and proceeded to be bored out of our minds watching it (our memories had failed to remind us that Jaws is story-driven, and the lack of bloody action did nothing to quench our presently morbid fascination with shark attacks). Needless to say, the attack had happened a couple years prior, and no others had occurred. So the two of us had no qualms about plunging into the water mere miles away from the attack site.
Despite this lack of fear, I assume I don't have to explain exactly where our minds jumped when we saw an immense, fish-shaped shadow whiz past us, our puny, weak, seal-costumed human bodies becoming glaringly apparent.
One of us may have yelled "SHARK!!!", but that might have been my own thoughts pounding loudly against my skull. I also may have said (trying desperately not to become hysterical), "It's probably a dolphin! Is it a dolphin?!" All I know is that the second time the shadow shot past us, we abandoned any pretense of bravery and instantly began flailing in the water, attempting to "swim" back to shore with all our limbs in tact and no blood loss.
Nae was an accomplished swimmer in high school, and much shorter than I. Logically, I knew that if the shark got anywhere near us, the long legs hanging off my sluggish body would be the first morsels to be devoured. We kicked urgently and propelled our hands into the sea, digging in and pushing desperately against the water's resistance, our hearts punching our ribcages so hard that all sea life on the West Coast could probably hear them.
All at once, we realized after less than a minute (that seemed like hours) of swimming as fast as we possibly could, we had hardly moved any closer to to the beach. Hysteria set in and we started howling with frantic laughter, knowing that we could both die at any moment. As we tried not to suck down ocean water, gasping for breath between panic stricken guffaws, we slowly but surely doggie paddled back to shore. Adrenalin pumping through my veins, I spastically spun on my heel to survey the water. I wanted to see if our "buddy" was still visible. Then I saw it: the friendly, curved, gray fin, along with a gust of moist air being forced through a blow hole. "SHARKS DON'T HAVE BLOWHOLES!!" I screamed triumphantly. As our delirious laughter continued, a real surfer trudged through the sand toward us, holding his short board in the crook of his elbow. Looking at us with tremendous concern, he inquired, "Dude, did you guys see the shark?!?"
Nae and I just turned to each other and giggled as he walked away, our hearts still regulating themselves back to a normal rhythm. "Want to get some chowder?"
These are the stories you will remember when KK gets old enough to go out and about on her own...and it will FREAK you out!!!
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