Anyone can use Steemit, but it takes a marine biologist to understand it. We have whales and minnows. Some Steemit users refer to themselves as “small fish” “big fish”, “dolphins” or even “plankton” (for those who don’t know, that’s whale food). An octopus and a BBQ bear have been sighted in this habitat. On dry land, dogs and cats have posted in the # introduceyourself tag. The list of witnesses includes a lion, a puppy, a chicken, and a deadly spider, all of whom apparently know how to swim just fine with the fishies.
And then there’s an aquatic donkey (me). I’ve had a number of experiences in the aquatic environment. There was one experience that I’d rather forget.
Today’s story illustrates why I never, ever want to see sharks on Steemit. (Or anywhere else.)
Surfer Kid
Like many kids growing up on the California coast, I learned to surf. Not that I was much good, but I rode waves and loved every minute of it. I kept surfing until my teens, when drugs took over a lot of the people I knew. It wasn’t my world anymore.
I still loved the water after that, but I became interested in other things. Thankfully, one of those things was school. For the first time, school started to make sense to me.
I turned away from surfing for a while. A “while” became a year, then a decade, and pretty soon it was permanent. The ocean still calls to me sometimes, but it’s not an unrequited love. It’s more like an itch.
All I need to do is remember the day I almost got eaten. Then I’m in no hurry to go back.
Strangely, my traumatic event happened earlier. I still surfed for a couple of years afterwards, and it never bothered me much. I guess that’s one contradiction about being a kid: you think you’ll never see age 30, yet you’re dumb enough to believe you’ll live forever. Somewhere along the line, life became more important than surfing, but my absence also helped me realize that I’d almost died one day in the water.
I still go to the beach. I watch people surf. I live through every move they make on every wave. And I even dream about it sometimes. I dream about surfing, but not my brush with death. If that ever creeps into my dreams, then I’ll call a doctor, but it hasn’t been necessary so far.
On a hot day at the beach, I’ll take off my socks and shoes. I’ll go waist deep. I’ve even body-surfed in the breakers a couple of times. But I don’t swim with the big fish any more.
100 Years Ago, A Serial Killer Struck
You may have seen the news stories recently, especially if you live in the United States. 100 years ago this week, Americans lost their innocence on the beach. Until July 1916, there had been no recorded shark attacks anywhere on American coastlines.
Sailors had seen angry sharks at sea, and if there had been shark attacks on beaches, then peoples’ lack of scientific knowledge probably caused them to blame monsters or devils. But whatever was true in the past ended in July 1916.
In a 12 day period along the New Jersey shoreline, five people were attacked and four of them were killed.
Even scientists knew little to nothing about sharks in 1916. Most believed that sharks would not attack humans in shallow coastal waters. There was a debate about this in academic circles. When the July 1916 attacks happened, even some so-called “experts” could not believe that a shark had been responsible.
After the first attack, Pennsylvania’s State Fish Commissioner and the former director of the Philadelphia Aquarium stated that the shark had been attracted by the victim’s dog splashing in the water, not by the human victim. He was quoted in a Philadelphia newspaper as saying that the shark had come in to bite the dog and had nipped at the man in passing. “I do not believe there is any reason why people should hesitate to go in swimming at the beaches for fear of man-eaters.”
And the New York Times printed this ridiculous letter:
In my opinion it is most unlikely that a shark was responsible, and I believe it much more likely that the attack was made by a sea turtle. I have spent much time at sea and along shore, and have several times seen turtles large enough to inflict just such wounds. These creatures are of a vicious disposition, and when annoyed are extremely dangerous to approach, and it is my idea that (the victim) may have disturbed one while it was asleep on or close to the surface.
The last two attacks in 1916 did not even happen at the beach. In Northern New Jersey, some kids were swimming in Matawan Creek, one mile inland from the ocean. A big fin rose up and one of the kids was mauled by the shark. The other kids ran naked into town, screaming that a shark had attacked their friend. Of course, the adults believed the kid had experienced a seizure. A local businessman jumped into the water to rescue the kid, thinking he was drowning, and the shark killed the man as well.
Even today, scientists debate what kind of shark was responsible. Some hold that it was a great white shark, while others believe that only a bull shark would have gone so far inland in fresh water. Was it one rogue shark that swam up the Jersey Shore, attacking five people in a 12 day period?
These attacks set off a frenzy. There were shark hunts all along the U.S. East Coast. Fishermen went out and killed every shark they saw. Near the site of the last attacks, a young great white shark was killed and it had human remains in its stomach.
The attacks stopped afterwards. But the war between people and sharks had begun. And the innocence was gone. In America’s coastal waters, humans were not at the top of the food chain. You never know what’s under the water.
Jaws
Half a century later, in the 1960s, a writer named Peter Benchley was inspired by stories of fishermen catching huge great white sharks near his home in Long Island, New York. The 1916 killings, just a few miles down the coast, provided a perfect roadmap. Benchley began working on a horror story involving a huge great white shark that attacked people at the beach. In 1974, he published Jaws, which became a bestselling novel.
In 1975, Steven Spielberg turned the novel into one of the most frightening movies anyone had ever seen. The movie Jaws became a smash hit, the highest-grossing film of all time until Star Wars arrived. Jaws scared young and old alike, bringing a fear of the deep and a hatred for sharks that was unprecedented. I won’t mention shark fin soup.
If you’ve never seen Jaws, these two free clips will help you understand what an amazing movie it is.
A piece of advice: If you’re ever in the water and you start hearing the theme music from Jaws, get out. Nothing good can come from being afraid of something below the surface that probably isn’t even there. If it’s in your mind, get out. I did.
The Red Triangle
I didn’t grow up on the sun-baked beaches of Southern California. My friends and I used to surf up north, where my family lived at that time. From the San Francisco Bay Area on up, much of the California coast is quite cool because the coastal fog can linger there. In the summertime, the skies can be gray with fog for days at a time, as the foggy marine layer is pulled in by hot air in the inland valleys.
Back then, you didn’t see a hundred surfers in the water at a good beach. Adventure sports had not hit prime time yet. Hawaii and Southern California were the surf meccas, and Santa Cruz to some extent, but it had not caught on yet in other places. Most of the surf breaks were along beaches, where sandbars shifted constantly and the wind came off the water for most of the day, destroying any good shape the waves might have.
In other words, the surf was mostly crappy. The waves could be good one day and bad for the next three months. But we didn’t know any better. If you’re riding waves and having fun, that’s all you really need from surfing.
The famed Mavericks break had not been discovered yet, and aside from Santa Cruz and a couple of beaches right around San Francisco, nobody outside of our area knew anything about the places we surfed. Plus, both the skies and the ocean were gray in the summer, and you had to wear a 4-millimeter thick wetsuit in the cold water. It wasn’t very inviting.
Many times, we’d go out and it would just be us in the empty ocean.
Shark experts know this area as the red triangle. It is an area of ocean with triangular points at Big Sur just south of Monterey, the Farallon Islands outside the Golden Gate, and Bodega Bay on the Sonoma County coast. The red triangle hugs the coast for about 200 miles of coastline.
It is an area of intense great white shark activity. Sharks come for the seals, sea lions, and otters that are highly concentrated in the area. 38% of all shark attacks in the U.S. (11% of all shark attacks in the world) have occurred on that 200 mile stretch of coastline where I grew up surfing.
Still, your odds of being attacked by a shark are very low. More people die from lightning strikes each year than from shark attacks.
My First Shark
Some time earlier, I had been at a popular beach to the south where normal people (non-surfers) often went on warm days. There was a holiday and lots of people were there. The beach even had lifeguards, which the other beaches we surfed at didn’t have.
And on a nice warm day, I was out in the water past the breakers when someone saw it: a fin cut through the water and then disappeared. The word started to get around, but not everybody believed it. None of the surfers got out of the water, maybe because there was a lull in the wave sets then. But surfers are a pretty stubborn crowd.
Then we saw something that all of us believed.
About 100 yards out in the ocean, a shark jumped out of the water and crashed back down into the ocean. This wasn’t a whale; I’d seen plenty of those. This was a pointy, white and gray body with a fin on its back, twisting and writhing until it disappeared into the water. It was a freaking shark.
The lifeguards had seen it, too. A horn blew on the beach. I didn’t even know they had alarms, but they triggered some kind of alarm then. Fire alarm, tsunami alarm, I don’t know what it was. It was loud. I’d never heard it before, but it got everybody’s attention.
Even the surfers started paddling in. Not because of the lifeguards or alarm, but because of that thing that jumped out of the water right nearby.
They say you’re not supposed to run from most predators. If you meet a mountain lion or a bear, for instance, running is the dumbest thing you can do. It sets off their predator instinct and they will chase you down.
Is that the same with sharks? Over a period of 400+ million years, sharks have evolved into perfect, cold-blooded killers. They are the ultimate predator of the sea. And they’re out there looking for seals. They can’t see that well. If you are swimming or sitting on a surfboard and you suddenly start stroking or flapping or paddling furiously for the shore, you bet it will trigger their instincts also. Easy prey.
I’m happy to report that we got out of the water that day. No one was attacked. We later heard that the shark was sighted again the next day. That particular beach was closed for three days in a row.
Aside from another time that I was surfing in San Diego and had some smaller aquarium-sized sharks swim under me, that was the only time in my life I had ever seen a shark in the wild. And there was no question in anyone’s mind that it had been a great white shark that had jumped out of the water.
The Attack
Fast forward to a gray, cloudy day about two years later. It was late autumn. In the wintertime, the waves generally got bigger, thanks to storms out in the Pacific Ocean that churned up the surf. This day wasn’t that big yet. The wave swell was probably 4-5 feet high.
We’d been out there for a while when we saw the seal. It was playful. I just love being out in the water with animals. There have been a few times when I’ve been sitting out there when dolphins are all around me. I’ve seen whales further out as well. And birds are usually around. That connection with nature and with the ocean environment is probably the part I miss most about surfing.
So this seal kept popping its head up, looking at us, and then going back down. It had a spotted head, which meant that it was a harbor seal and not a sea lion. When a wave comes, seals normally dive down to avoid the crashing water. We had been riding some waves and I hadn’t seen the seal for a while.
Then while I was sitting on my board waiting for a wave, I felt something brush against my leg. I smiled because it’s kind of neat to be touched by a fellow mammal in the ocean. Anyone who swims or surfs or dives will tell you that fish bump into you and sometimes nibble on you just like and seals sometimes give you a playful nudge.
But this time, no one saw a seal.
I had caught a wave and surfed it over towards the rocks on the right side of the beach. Of course, we kicked out of the waves before getting too close to the rocks. And I was paddling back out past the breakers when I heard a yell.
In front of me and to my left, another surfer was in distress. I looked and saw that it was my friend. I’ll call him Denny. He was a really good friend. We had grown up together and rode in the same car to the beach that day.
Denny was pushing at something in the water and he started screaming. It was a weird scream, kind of low and primal sounding. I paddled toward him, knowing instinctively that something was very, very wrong with this picture.
There was one other surfer nearby and he was coming in, too, but I was the closest. I could see that Denny was being pulled by something. It had his leg and it was big.
Before I could get there, Denny was trying to pull away from this thing. I still couldn’t see it, since the shark was under water. But he had managed to get his leg free.
I reached him then and I grabbed Denny from behind. I put my arms around his chest and pulled him toward me. That was when the shark struck again.
I could see it in slow motion. It was like a movie. Denny was with me, but the shark grabbed his surfboard. I could see its head coming out of the water, that sharp snout turning, and the row of teeth bit into the front rail of Denny’s board. That was all I saw of the shark.
It was an image that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I didn’t see the shark’s eye, but I saw its nose and teeth. Still gives me shivers.
Denny was falling backwards towards me, off his board, when the shark bit the front of it. If I hadn’t grabbed him, would it have taken another bite from his leg? I don’t know. But I couldn’t get him onto my board without losing it; two of us were too heavy for one board.
“LEAVE IT!” I heard from behind me. The other surfer had arrived on the scene. He grabbed Denny and slipped his own body into the water, a few feet from where the shark had been just a moment before. We both got Denny onto this guy’s surfboard. He was bleeding badly. I was still sitting on my own board, believe it or not.
Man, were we lucky this guy showed up. His name was Michael and he was a real waterman. I’d watched him surf and handle himself in the ocean. Michael was really strong and he knew the water. Plus, I was just a big kid, and I was shell-shocked, but this guy was thinking fast.
To sacrifice his own body like that, going into the ocean next to a shark, so he could give Denny his board? Come on! The shark was right there a few seconds earlier. It could have taken Michael’s legs right after that, but he jumped in and put Denny on his own board. That told you what kind of person Michael was.
We paddled/swam/pushed/pulled and even surfed a wave into shore, two of us on boards and one strong-ass dude pushing Denny’s board as he swam. I held onto that board also and did my best to pull it as I paddled with one arm.
We got to the beach and got out of the water. Other people were there; I don’t know where they had come from. There had been people on the beach, I guess, and the other surfers were coming out behind us. Denny was alright, but his leg was pretty messed up. There was a lot of blood. Someone had a knife and we cut his wetsuit.
Then Superman took over. It turned out this guy Michael was not only a waterman supreme. He had been a medic in the Army! What are the chances that you get attacked by a shark and the guy surfing next to you is a trained medical professional? He stopped the blood flow right away and someone called 911 for emergency help. That was before cell phones.
The next thing I knew, a helicopter was landing and it took Denny to the hospital. We weren’t that far from a highway, but I guess they figured the chopper was faster. Denny survived just fine, thanks to the help he had in the water and on the beach. I never saw Michael again, but he was the real hero that day.
After my friend healed and went through rehab, his leg functioned perfectly. He just had a huge scar to mark the occasion of his attempted murder. And some pain that came back from time to time.
Lessons
Within days, I was back in the water surfing again. When you’re young, you just roll with the punches and move on. Back then, nobody thought about getting us therapy. My friend Denny got back out there, too, once his leg had recovered. He knew if he didn’t do it right away, he might never want to surf again. But he was a hard-charging adrenaline nut, much more than I ever have been. He went back surfing again and didn’t have second thoughts.
For the next couple of years, I didn’t think much about the shark attack. It was a story we kept telling, for sure, and an experience to relive. I also realized that it may have been that shark, and not a seal, that touched my leg before the attack. But I didn’t think then about how dangerous the water can be. It didn’t bother me then.
After I stopped surfing was when it started to bother me. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have bad dreams about it and it doesn’t haunt me. I just think about it when I ask myself if I want to swim in the ocean. And the rational truth is that I really don’t.
I’ll always love the ocean. I live it and breathe it when I’m on the beach. But I’ll always fear what’s beneath those waves. I’ll wade in only until I hear the Jaws theme in my head. Then I’ll get out.
No Sharks
So that is why I hope we never have any sharks on Steemit. Whales don’t bother me. I love minnows and plankton and salmon fry, dolphins and orcas, whatever you want to call yourself. Loan sharks, card sharks or sharps, land sharks, great white sharks, fraudsters, cheats, and thieves? You’re predators. Stay the f*** away. Don’t ruin it for others. Let this community thrive without fear.
Sources:
1916 attacks National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150702-shark-attack-jersey-shore-1916-great-white/
Local news Recalls 1916: http://www.mcall.com/news/nationworld/mc-nj-shark-attacks-centennial-0706-20160706-story.html
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Shore_shark_attacks_of_1916#cite_note-39
Benchley Obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/books/peter-benchley-author-of-jaws-dies-at-65.html?_r=0
Red Triangle Surfer Mag: http://www.surfermag.com/features/the-red-triangle/#SMH545zllLcizCIx.97
My own life