Back Into The Water
Article by ESPN.com
Written by: Tom Friend
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OLANA BEACH, Calif. — Other than the helicopters and the lifeguards and the coroner, he had eight miles of beach to himself that morning. The posted signs said, “Get Back!” and “Enter At Your Own Risk!” and “Shark Warning!” but he rushed past all of them to his father’s reef.
As he knelt in the sand, the ocean spoke to him. He could hear his father’s low, soothing voice, which made him break down and weep, and he spoke back: I’m coming in. I’m coming in the water to see you. The shark’s not going to win.
So that’s how it happened. That’s how a man decided to surf and swim at a reef that was off-limits, at a reef where his father, only 24 hours earlier, had lost his legs and his life.
They still talk about it in the quaint San Diego suburb of Solana Beach. They talk about how a grieving 41-year-old man inspired an entire town to get back in the water. But what they don’t know, to this day, is what it all meant to the woman who was swimming next to the man’s father. The woman who saw the shark. The woman who, in the aftermath, could not stop crying and shaking and heaving.
The Woman With No Name.
She slipped through the cracks. The local papers never found her, and the coroner never interviewed her. She was a throwaway line in the news accounts — referred to only as “another female swimmer” — but dig deeper and she and the dead man’s son are intertwined in a most curious way.
She has sat in counseling sessions, asking, “Why did the shark turn left and not right? Why did the shark see his shadow and not mine?” She has been consumed by guilt and fear and crying spells, but something compels her to keep swimming. She has entered triathlons as far west as Big Sur and as far east as New York City, races that begin with her diving head-first into a murky body of water. Birds will often swoop toward her in the ocean, and it’ll remind her of that morning in April, when seagulls circled her as she held a bleeding man in the sea. Why does she put herself through that? Why does she still compete? Why does she risk her sanity?
It’s mind-boggling, but there’s an answer.
If you fall in love with the ocean, it’s usually at first sight, which is what happened to Dave Martin 40-plus years ago.
He’d been raised on an alfalfa farm in Riverside, Calif., and had become so fond of animals that he became a veterinarian. In the late-1960s, he flew to Solana Beach for a job interview, and his prospective boss never showed him the office — he showed him a view.
They walked to the top of a steep set of stairs, overlooking a beach called Tide Park and a reef called Tabletops. The view, the clarity of the water, the blue horizon that went on interminably — it took Dave’s breath away. He accepted the job on the spot, bought a bungalow, raised a family.
His first-born, Jeff, took his first steps in the sand. Dave carved Jeff’s first surfboard with his own hands, and showed him how to “hang 10″ 100 yards off the coast, by Tabletops. They’d go to Hawaii, on family trips, and he’d tutor Jeff on the surf culture. One time in Oahu, he’d instructed Jeff to be aware of the locals, not to swipe their waves. But Big Dave, all 6-foot-2, 200 pounds of him, ended up intercepting a wave himself, and some locals chided him harshly. Jeff thought maybe his dad would end up in a brawl, but Dave was tame and non-confrontational, the type who never even honked his car horn in anger at another driver. When one of other surfers told Jeff, “Go for the next wave, brotha” — mistaking Jeff for a local — Dave simply paddled in to the beach and watched, grinning.
Life moved on, and five kids and two collapsed marriages tested Dave’s easy-going manner. He was in his 60s now, needing an outlet for his stress, and instead of choosing golf — like most men his age — he chose triathlons.
The ocean was the lure, and as Dave began to improve his biking and his diet, his race results soared. He almost always won or finished second in his age group, but the camaraderie was his real reward. Not only did he have a new girlfriend, Jan, who had taken over his veterinary practice, but he also had a bevy of new triathlete friends, scattered all over the city. They all belonged to the Triathlon Club of San Diego, and, one of them, Solana Beach local Ken Flagg, would send out e-mails promoting a weekly Friday morning swim at Fletcher Cove, a compact beach just a couple of side-streets away from Dave’s bungalow.
The group’s Friday routine was to swim three-quarters of a mile north to Tabletops, Dave’s neighborhood reef. Then, as soon as they’d get even with the stairs, they’d turn around and swim back to Fletcher Cove. In other words, Dave would be swimming to and from his home beach, where he knew all the lifeguards by name, and all the lifeguards knew him.
So, he became a Friday regular. They’d do the swim, rinse off and then eat together at a local breakfast joint, the Naked Café. Dave found the company, the conversation and the food rejuvenating. He’d often tell his son Jeff — who lived across the street from him — to join in, if only for the workout and the Fuzzy Monkey pancakes made of grain and banana. But Jeff was now a commercial pilot with Alaska Airlines and a father of three boys, and he never could fit in the Friday swim. Dave told him: “Your loss.”
Dave, 66 by then, was so hooked on his Friday ritual –and his triathlete friends — that when he developed skin cancer on his cheekbone in early 2008 and couldn’t wear goggles, he still attended the breakfasts. He talked about getting back in the water by spring and racing in Half Ironmans by summer. To whip himself back into shape, he planned to take Jeff and Jeff’s three sons to Mexico in mid-April.
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