Poseidon’s Revenge

Describe a positive thing a family member has done for you

The sun was setting quickly over the island and from my vantage place 50 yards offshore, I had to shield the glare with my hand to see the beach. As I rose up and down on my board with the swell, I thought about how much I liked Carolina Beach. 

CB…as it’s known to the locals…is tucked away in the southeast corner of North Carolina on a barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River. There are several good beach breaks and on a clean day, dozens of surfers are in the line up.

CB offers free music and outdoor movies in the summer and is home to the 761-acre Carolina Beach State Park, one of the few places in the US where Venus Flytraps grow wild. There are a lot of chill beach bars, and sunsets on the Cape Fear are not to be missed.

But on this particular day, I had little time for such ruminations; the tide was right, the offshore wind perfect, the waves just the right texture and height. I had enough light left for one or two more rides before calling it quits and lugging my board down the darkening beach for home.

At least, that was the plan.

The youngest kid sometimes gets a raw deal. 

The old joke is that if the oldest kid drops a pacifier on the floor, it gets boiled. For the second kid, it gets run under the warm tap for a few seconds. For the third, a quick wipe on the pants is good enough.

Growing up, it was just me and my older brother Doug; so while I didn’t get the full third-kid treatment, I distinctly felt the ho-hum reaction at times. Also, Mom and Pop had figured out what things had worked well for the oldest…and which had cratered…and consequently I was denied the opportunity of, say, racing the Jon boat down the canal and ramming into a rock outcropping.

So I was mindful of this and when the Good Lord blessed Sue and I with three kids, I tried to treat them all the same. But in retrospect, I might have tipped the scales a bit overly far in favor of the youngest, my daughter Kari.

She and I have covered a lot of ground together. Archery lessons, guitar lessons, nine years of outdoor fun in the YMCA Indian Princess program. Saturday mornings at Home Depot, building stuff together at their kids’ workshops. Surf lessons.

She’s my confidant, cheerleader and constant companion.

And on this particular day, she had a far more important role.

I saw a wave coming; you can tell by the telltale hump before it gets into shallow water and rears up into a break. I hesitated. It looked a lot bigger than the waves I usually took. Oh well. I turned and paddled.

I realized too late that this rogue wave was indeed huge, probably double overhead. I fell off the board going down the face and had a split-second look at the sun dipping below the trees on the empty beach. The wipeout was so rough it tore the leash off my ankle, and the wave carried my board all the way to the beach. I emerged from the foamy, sandy maelstrom and saw it far off, washing back and forth in the surf. Time to call it quits.

I’m a good swimmer, and after about minute or two of effort, I looked up, expecting to be almost to shore. 

Hmm, interesting. I hadn’t moved at all.

OK, I guess I need a little patience. I rolled on my back and after five minutes of backstroking, flipped over—to see the same thing. Not a yard of progress. In fact, it looked like I was a little farther out.

A mildly interesting situation became concerning, then alarming, then panicky as I began to tire. Sidestroke, dog paddle, crawl…and, except for arms and legs that became like lead, zero change. I looked up and down the empty beach that was growing darker by the minute. I kicked myself. I had violated the cardinal rule of surfing: never surf alone.

My fatigued brain didn’t register that I was caught in a rip current. All I needed to do was to swim parallel to shore for a bit and then I could have headed in; but there were no tell-tale ripples, no debris floating past me. I was 50-60 yards away from safety in a rapidly darkening ocean. I understood now why the danger is often unnoticed until it’s too late.

I saw someone heading in my direction. Kari. She saw my board and I could see her cupping her eyes and looking up and down the beach for me. I’m not sure how she spotted me, but when she did, she flew down the beach, turned my board around, and pushed it in my direction.

The power of the current was now all too evident; the board bobbed like a paper boat in a storm drain and made it out to me in an astonishingly short time. With the last of my strength, I climbed aboard and laid for several moments with my face planted on the waxy fiberglass, gasping and thanking God.

That night, a subtle family dynamic was evident as Kari’s portion of dessert was roughly twice that of her siblings and she got to choose the movie. 

Sue, of course, was a mixture of concern and exasperation and her sisters looked at me with open mouths as Kari recounted the tale in excitement for the third time.

As she spoke, I looked out the sliding glass window at the now-dark ocean. Far out to sea, a ship’s lights were faintly visible. I shuddered to think that if it hadn’t been for Kari, I might be halfway to that ship, tumbling along the ocean floor with the outgoing tide.

Psalm 116:6 says “The Lord protects the simple; I was brought low and he saved me.” 

That day, it was in the form of my youngest daughter 😎

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