Friday, January 23, 2015

September 6th, 2009

September 6th, 2009
Find a spot on the coast, move a few hundred heavy rocks, argue a bit, move some more rocks. That’s how my family celebrates Labor Day weekend, with a dose of heavy labor. For as long as I can remember, abalone and Labor Day have gone hand in hand. Every year we go on a group camping trip with half a dozen other families, to the crest of a bluff that looks over the rocky rough coastline of northern California. In 2009 the trip almost took a tragic turn when, within seconds, our celebration erupted into chaos and confusion, when a man’s life was in true peril. This is my account of what happened.

The weekend is epic. The group ranges from infants to a woman in her 80s who still makes it to the camp.  The first day is spent diving for abalone, exploring the coast, building massive ziplines, and finally distributing the abalone for each family to cook up an abalone masterpiece to be devoured potluck style. The next day is dedicated to making an art project… a massive, blue-printed and engineered art project.
Just to give you some context of the scale of this camp, we build a 100 ft long zipline rigged high between two massive pine trees on opposite ends of the camp. The tension of the line is adjusted by moving a pickup truck tethered to the cable forward and backward depending on the weight of the fearless flier.
            Over the years the art project had become such an icon of the trip that emotions were high and everyone wanted it done right, or in other words, their way.  The majority of the men who are on the trip are contractors at a prominent San Francisco construction company; thus when they get a chance to be creative it involves moving boulders, straining backs, and dangling off cliffs. The endeavors are all inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose medium is nature itself. The rules are simple. Build jaw-dropping art without power tools using only the supplies that nature provides.
            Just like every every past project, this one had been planned out by the “leader” of our camp and his brother who venture up north to find a perfect spot and inspiration weeks before. By the time we get to the campsite there have been dozens of emails about plans, tools, and labor allocations for the big day. This particular year the plan was to create a free-standing arch and incorporate that into an already existing cave to form an igloo-ish form. The beauty of Goldsworthy's work is the impossibility of it. That moment when someone does a double-take to figure out if it’s part of nature or created by man. That’s the one we think about during the process.  
The day started early. We began creating molds for the arch and keeping an eye on tide tables and watches in order to not miss the short window of opportunity to climb into a small cove to to scavenge some appropriate rocks without getting caught in the freezing, rough water. About thirty feet away from the creation was a picnic and a gaggle of kids too young to be interested in the search for the perfect rocks. The half mile in either direction to the nearest access made it quite odd that there were also two fishermen not fifty feet from our project.
Then suddenly one of the men screamed for help in Spanish in a tone of sheer terror, a tone I hadn’t heard before or since.  This was a scream of losing a friend. As we turned around we saw him pointing into the water and signaling for help.
The other fisherman had attempted to climb down a cliff to retrieve a snagged lure. A rogue wave had snatched him off the rock into the freezing unforgiving pacific. The internal timers were set. Once you fall into water like that, you have about twenty minutes to live. Though no one said anything about this in the heat of the moment, we all knew that this man’s life was quickly being sucked out of him by the thrashing water.
The men started yelling for a rope and the women quickly collecting the gaggle of children away from the chaos. The rope was attached to a boulder down a small cliff. I jumped down into the water and freed the rope from the rock. The guys pulled it up and started throwing it out toward the flailing man in the water. By the time I could scramble up and catch my first glimpse of the man in the water, he was being thrashed around the cove and smashed up into the rough cliffs. It didn’t help that he was wearing baggy jeans, a puffy down jacket, and heavy work boots. As he floundered in the waves, we could see his boots pop out of the water in front of him. In the panic of the moment, he couldn’t understand the men yelling to him to take his clothes off. At that point boots and clothes will only weigh you down and speed up your demise. The misty air was filled with disorganized shrieks of terror and impromptu plans of action being yelled in vain.
           After being smashed into the sharp rocks a few times, the current sucked him out to sea, drifting south quickly. Everyone had his own idea of how to throw the wet, heavy rope yet none of the methods could get it anywhere near him.  At this point it became brutally obvious that this rope, regardless of how it was thrown, was not going to get the drowning man out of the sea. Words yelled to the man in English simply added to the fright and confusion and did absolutely nothing for the man. Though one could hardly consider the two fishermen lucky, they could not have picked a better spot for a calamity, alongside a party of intrepid athletic outdoorsmen. We were the only people for at least a half mile in any direction, and a few of us were fluent Spanish speakers. The man’s friend was panicking, useless in the effort until he joined my dad in yelling to the man in Spanish to take his boots off. He soon floated out beyond the small cove and started to be swept south. As a teenager with an opportunity to save a man, striving to take hold of the chance, I started to scramble up a boulder for a better look at the situation. As I got my feet on a precarious perch, however, there was an uproar from everyone, telling me “get down! The waves are splashing on that rock! All we need is another person in the water!” I conceded and slithered down.
            One of the men threw the heavy coiled rope over my shoulders and we started to run along the cliffs, trying tofind a vantage point where we could throw the rope again.  I was in the front with the rope, followed by one of the men who had grown up as a sea scout plus the friend of the man in the water. We each took our own path and seemed to be flying over the slippery terrain, taking leaps before knowing where our next foot would land. As soon as we got to a place close enough, I gave the rope to the scout for another attempt at the futile throws.
            Though I had no idea of it at the time, there were other rescue efforts taking place. One of our party climbed as high as he could, to be most visible, and removed his jacket in an effort to signal the already freezing man to take off his water-logged clothes. The man signaling with his clothes had also instructed one of the kids to go our picnic area and empty all the water bottles he could find and to stuff them into a burlap bag to form a makeshift raft. The former sea scout hurled the rope from our new location but again without any luck. At this point the Mexican fisherman on shore started hollering in Spanish that he wanted to throw the rope. Being the only one of us three separated from the rest of the camp who spoke both languages, I tried to convince the Latin man that though we clearly weren’t getting the job done, the man throwing the rope was the most capable of any of us and the most likely to save his friend. This conversation only held the man off for a few moments. He insisted and was beginning to get angry. After just one feeble effort to toss the rope to his friend, he quickly yielded and handed it back to the sea scout.
            All this seemed futile. I told the two men that I was going to get help. I scrambled back up the bluff and started running. All I remember was sprinting as fast as I could to get to the main beach. On the way I met an elderly couple, part of our camp heading toward the project. I asked them for their cell phone and told them I had no time to explain. As I ran, I called 911 and gasped to the operator that there was a man drowning at Salt Point. The operator fumbled and told me that there was no such location in California. I freaked out a bit and yelled that a man was drowning and that they needed to get there. Next thing I knew I was talking with the director of the California Highway patrol to explain exactly where I was. He said that he thought he knew where I was. I didn’t believe it from the tone in his voice and kept running to the beach. As I got there I yelled out for someone to drive me to the police station to save a drowning man. If there is anything to yell on a beach to get people’s attention, that was it. A man ditched his picnic and began running up the few hundred steps with me to get to his car. When we got up to the parking lot, we found a cop sitting in her idling  patrol car, with her siren on. I boldly jumped into her car. She barked at me that she was busy and that someone was drowning. I exclaimed that I knew where and we screeched off. We went winding down the short paved road, cutting corners with the siren blasting. We turned onto a dirt access road where the driver of an ocean rescue pickup truck was fumbling to unlock the gate. I jumped into the pickup to try to show the front vehicle where to go. Now came a tricky part. All the bluffs look exactly the same and the from the access road we couldn’t see anyone … anywhere. I made what was essentially a random guess of what trail down to the cliffs to take.  Minutes later I was startled to see that I had been spot on. After unlocking the gate, the ocean rescue guy started putting on a wetsuit while driving and looking for people at the same time. Putting on a wetsuit is an “all hands on deck” job for me, but he seemed to manage. By the time he jumped out of the car at the top of the cliff, he was already geared up. He grabbed his rescue duffel from the back of the truck and started scrambling down.
Just before our motorcade of rescuers arrived at the water, the guys of our party had managed to get the floater close enough to shore to drag him across a shallow bed of mussels and sharp rocks.  Now they were all in their underwear, lying on the exhausted, cut-up shirtless man to warm him up. He was a short burly figure. His extra body fat may have been his best asset in the freezing sea. To check his awareness, the rescue paramedic asked him where we were. He responded with a faint and confused “Bodega,” a nearby town. The paramedic said looked around for approval and exclaimed “close enough!”
The sound we all heard next took everyone by surprise. Over the cliff came the overwhelming noise of a huge helicopter with a dangling guy strapped to a stretcher. They circled down, got the victim into the stretcher and were off. We scrambled up the cliff and saw that there was already a huge circle of fire trucks and ambulances making a landing circle for the chopper. They lowered the stretcher down to stabilize the man in an ambulance before swooping him off to the closest hospital.

That was it… just as quickly as it had started, it was over.

We spoke to the police a bit and then wandered back to the picnic to regroup. A few people kept futilely working on the art project while the rest of us started the walk up to camp to decompress and talk over the hecticness of the day over a campfire. I’ll never forget the day I helped save a man whose name I don’t know any more than he knows mine.  I think I can safely assume that he’ll never forget the people that saved him. I can only imagine that we have moved on with our lives both telling opposite sides of the same story.