Raising A Soul Surfer

by Cheri Hamilton

  That is the thing: Who deserves tragedy or any circumstance, good or bad? Aren’t we all just sinners saved by grace? Waters rise and storms rage; life is full of unavoidable crises. Only God can still the raging storm and keep us in the palm of His hand.

  Tom didn’t have much time to analyze his anguish and despair. There was a hospital full of caring friends who just wanted to put their arms around him and our family and let him know how much they cared.

  Little did we know that there was a full-on media circus heading to Kauai to get the scoop on this gripping story that would unfurl on news channels for days: a young up-and-coming teen surfer mauled by a shark . . . who lives to tell about it. But the wave of head-spinning insanity hadn’t yet descended on us, and at that moment, in that hospital room, breathing in the sweet aroma of arriving flowers and staring at the huge bandage covering the empty space where Bethany’s left arm should have been, all I could say was, Thank You, God, for saving her life.

  Our journey to this place had begun long ago; but from this moment on, it was about to go down a wildly different path than any of us could have ever foreseen, and bring us hope in the darkness.

  CHAPTER

  10

  The Shark with a Ragged Fin

  Can you pull in the leviathan with a fishhook or

  tie down his tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through

  his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?

  JOB 41:1-2

  He has made me his target.

  JOB 16:12

  The sun was setting when our week spent in the hospital ended. Tom and I were finalizing our exit when Billy Hamilton, Tom’s former roommate, came to the hospital room to give his aloha to Bethany. Billy is considered one of the most well-known and influential surfers in the world. He approached Tom and said in a quiet tone, “I think the shark that attacked Bethany is the same one that has been spotted roaming around the North Shore surf breaks. This shark went after a few other surfers in several different locations. It is acting vicious and appears to be a rogue shark. It won’t be long before it will hurt someone else.”

  “How can you be sure it’s the same one, Bill?”

  “It has a really distinctive ragged fin,” Bill replied. “It swam right through the lineup in Hanalei, harassed a diver and surfers.” His voice was firm. “And, Tom, the lifeguards at Tunnels were searching for the shark on their jet skis along with a big cooler of ice in case they found her arm. They said they saw the shark, with its ragged fin, just after the attack. The beast had dry-docked itself upon the reef and then wriggled off. Tom, I think there’s something seriously wrong with that animal. Would you be okay if we hunted it down?”

  Tom knew that Bill Hamilton wasn’t over-reacting. Bill was an accomplished waterman, fisherman, surfboard maker and pioneering surf legend the world over. Bill is father to the world-renowned big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton and his brother, Lyon. Laird actually introduced his mother to Bill, and they ended up marrying soon after. Laird noticed Bill while watching him surf in the waves on the North Shore of Oahu.

  In the movies, sharks are often portrayed as attacking everything and anything, particularly humans. In reality, sharks are just predatory fish that usually do not go out of their way to attack people when there is such an abundance of their natural prey. Animals will sometimes attack when threatened, but a shark that consistently goes after surfers isn’t feeling threatened; it’s moved beyond being a normal predator to a rogue.

  To anyone not from a beach culture and, in particular, to anyone not from Hawaii, it might seem like a non-issue to hunt down a shark that was going after people at popular surf or swimming areas. But every surfer knows that encountering sharks is an inherent risk to the sport. A rogue shark, however, is a little different. This big fish is going out of its way to harass humans.

  There was another possible objection. In Hawaii, there are those who have kept the embers of the ancient Hawaiian culture alive. The shark, or mano, was an aumakua, or family god, to be protected from harm. In ancient times it was believed that a departed family member would turn into a shark or that a departed spirit would possess a shark. Often a particular shark was believed to be a specific dead relative, and the creature might even be fed and cared for by the family. Although many Hawaiians do not hold to these old animist beliefs, there has been a resurgence of these ideas among some groups.

  Tom weighed these considerations before replying. Then he said, “You would make my day . . . in fact, you would make my year if you were able to get that monster. I never want another family to go through what we’re going through.”

  After talking about it together, Tom, Bill and I agreed that if we did go after it, we would have to do it right. Bill teamed up with another local legend for the shark hunt. He was a leathery skinned, white-bearded sea dog and professional fisherman named Ralph Young. Ralph, for many decades, was one of the best longboarders on Kauai. In the local annual Pine Trees surf competitions, Ralph and Billy were usually neck and neck for first place wins.

  In Hawaii, it is important to show respect; the community is too small and tightly knit to ride roughshod without considering others. They talked to key members of the Hawaiian community, many of them surfers themselves. After hearing the evidence for a rogue shark with a distinct ragged fin, the majority gave their thumbs-up.

  The hunt was on for the ragged-finned shark!

  From the many sightings and the size of the shark bite in Bethany’s surfboard, Bill Hamilton and Ralph Young estimated the shark to be 12 to 15 feet long. Catching it wouldn’t be easy.

  Ralph knew of an underwater spring near a popular surf break where the shark had been frequently sighted. According to him, the place seemed to attract sharks that were spawning their young—something that happened near that time of year.

  Bill and Ralph decided they would set the bait at night because attracting sharks in the day could endanger those surfing nearby. They used a steel cable, anchoring their bait on a large hook connected to a buoy. A 15-foot tiger shark can weigh close to 2,000 pounds, and its jaws have enough force to snap anything less substantial. At first light, the two fishermen returned to see if anything had paid a visit overnight. At the break of dawn Ralph found the bait half gone.

  The following morning the bait was gone, and to their astonishment the hook was completely straight! Something big was lurking around the spring.

  “Well,” said Ralph when he saw the undoing, “I’ve got to get a little more serious.”

  The next night, they used a massive hook that Ralph had brought home from New Zealand for hunting this kind of huge animal. As bait they used a Galapagos shark, one of the most abundant species of sharks in island waters. Over the next few days they baited huge hooks and anchored them deep in the bay.

  On the fifth day, Ralph went out to check and saw that the lines and buoys had become tangled. He put on a dive mask and leaned over the boat. There on the bottom, firmly caught on the cable, was a massive Tiger shark with a distinctive ragged dorsal fin.

  The two men hoisted up the shark and towed it to the beach where a backhoe was enlisted to get the shark out of the water. The 14-and-a-half-foot shark began to attract a crowd on the beach, and Ralph and Bill didn’t want to cause a scene. They used their two small boats to haul the shark out to sea so they could cut the stomach open to examine the contents.

  The stomach was empty.

  Ralph had seen this before. As he explained to us later, sharks (particularly Tiger sharks) will fill their bellies with so much inedible garbage, including rocks, cans and trash, that they will actually turn their stomachs inside out to regurgitate the contents. And, if he were correct, the large chunk of surfboard made of fiberglass and foam, which the shark had eaten (along with our daughter’s arm and her wristwatch), would cause the shark to disgorge its stomach. Not just because it was inedible, he said, but also because it could have seriously disrupted the shark’s buoyancy.

  It was the ragged fin that told the
m they’d gotten the shark that had been hunting surfers. It correlated to the many other eyewitness accounts, including that of the Tunnels’ lifeguards. But was it for sure the one that attacked Bethany?

  Ralph and Bill carefully took the tender stomach skin to give to a Hawaiian drum maker and then loaded the giant carcass with rocks and sent it back into the ocean, but not before cutting out the huge jaw. There was one last test before knowing for sure whether the hunt had been a success.

  Tom and Bethany took her mutilated surfboard down to Ralph’s hale. They carefully matched the gaping jaws with the shape of the crescent torn out of the red, white and blue board. It was a perfect match! They had found the rogue shark.

  While we certainly don’t celebrate the destruction of one of God’s creatures, I have to admit that it made all of us feel very good to know this particular animal would not be preying on any other surfers, divers or swimmers. Tom, in particular, was extremely thankful that through the determined efforts of his friends Ralph and Bill, the shark that had caused us such grief would not go on to cause an even greater tragedy for another family.

  Months later, Ralph gave each member of the family a tooth from the jaws. To Tom’s surprise, Bethany tentatively smiled as she received hers. This ceremonial gesture brought closure to this traumatic chapter in our lives.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Fearless Passion

  No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived

  what God has prepared for those who love him.

  1 CORINTHIANS 2:8-1 0, NIV

  Cast your cares on the LORD and He will sustain you;

  He will never let the righteous be shaken.

  PSALM 55:22, TNIV

  We spent five nights in the hospital.

  Our emotions continued to be raw and would sometimes burst through the dam of self-control, stunning us. Tom was numb with a sense of disbelief that he couldn’t shake, but I believed that we were completely in God’s hands.

  Tom recalls that when he drove home to get us all some fresh clothes and check on Hana, our dog, he melted down in tears, pulling over to the side of the road until he could compose himself. I told Tom about the conversation and prayer Bethany and I had shared when we asked God to use her surfing for His glory. I told him how we had asked God to let her be a light for Him in the world of surfing. The apparent unreasonableness of God to take away his daughter’s dreams needled Tom, and anger quietly simmered inside of him.

  Holt, too, was struggling. He blamed himself for what happened, even though we saw him as the hero who saved our daughter’s life. He felt that he should not have encouraged the girls to go surfing that day. The waves had been small, not even worth it. He kept going over why he hadn’t just said never mind and driven them all safely home.

  Tom found himself encouraging Holt over and over that he shouldn’t feel responsible in any way for the attack. Every surfer knows there is a risk of sharks, improbable though it is; but the passion for surfing outweighs common sense and they still choose to paddle out. He told Holt how much we all appreciated what he had done to save Bethany—without him she would have died.

  The memory of that Halloween morning kept rising up in Holt’s mind like an incoming tide. At the same time, Holt was trying to bolster Tom’s warring emotions with hope-filled words. He knew how much Bethany’s surfing successes meant to her and to all of us. While Bethany was still in the hospital, Holt would describe possible scenarios for her continuing surf career, “She could probably still compete as a long boarder.”

  Our internal and emotional struggles were not the only things with which we were wrestling. News of the shark attack spread like wildfire through the coconut wireless alongside the growing media as news outlets picked up on the story and sent their reporters to Kauai. I had stayed in the hospital room with Bethany to manage the flow of visiting friends and well-wishers, but Tom found himself having to juggle a growing crowd and camera crews in the lobby. The reporters’ endless questions were wearing on him. He couldn’t turn them away, but his mind and heart were with Bethany.

  One of Tom’s old surf buddies from Oahu, Steve Cranston, jumped in to put a buffer between our family and the press, helping to make some sense out of the chaos. With his help, we picked one reporter, Guy Hagi, a newscaster and surfer from Oahu, to give an exclusive television interview. Steve and the hospital staff, especially Lani Yukimura, went to great lengths to insulate us from the growing chaos as everyone, it seemed, was trying to get an interview with Bethany.

  Sarah Hill, more than anyone else outside the family, was present during those long days at Wilcox Hospital. Sarah took a week off from work, arriving in the morning and staying until late at night. Shortly after Bethany came out of surgery, Sarah was on hand. Thirteen-year-old Bethany’s words struck her: “Sarah, I just prayed and prayed the whole way to the beach. I’m glad this happened to me and not to Alana. I don’t know if her faith is ready to handle this kind of thing.” Sarah marveled at Bethany’s heart and resilience, and it was with Sarah that Bethany first brought up the possibility of a return to surfing.

  In a quiet, intimate moment when visitors and family weren’t crowding the room, Bethany said to Sarah in a voice of resignation, “Maybe I could be a professional soccer player or photographer, or something.”

  Sarah encouraged her, “If you ask me, God gave you the gift of surfing, and I don’t think He has taken it away from you.”

  I will admit that none of us were as bold or reckless in our imagination as that. We were confident that Bethany would at least be able to enjoy swimming. Tim even bought her a pair of fins with the suggestion that she could now join him catching waves on a body board; but as for her dream of being a professional surfer, it seemed to be shattered.

  But Sarah didn’t give up! She ministered hope to us as well and shared the Jeremiah 29:11 passage that God had brought to her mind as she raced to the hospital with Noah. Hearing those words, hearing her fervent trust in what God could do, we became aware that God Himself had stepped into the midst of a tragic situation and flooded it with hope and promise.

  Meanwhile, in the hospital room overflowing with flowers and stuffed animals, Bethany was quickly healing, getting stronger and starting to become restless. More and more, Bethany’s indomitable spirit led her to find an excuse to get out of bed. One day she grabbed a couple of balloons and took them out to the hallway to bat them around like any rambunctious, slightly bored kid might do. She was smiling and having a grand old time, never mind that her left arm had been mauled off days before. I saw the look on her face; and at that moment, I could see hope.

  The visitors continued to stream in. Next came the whole lifeguard crew from the North Shore. On Sunday, the youth pastor brought church to Bethany in the form of the youth group and some guitars, and there were plenty of visitors from the other churches—pastors, elders and kids. Mike Coots, who I mentioned before as having lost his leg in a shark attack in 1998, was particularly helpful, as he understood exactly what Bethany was going through.

  By the end of our time in the hospital, we were ready to go home.

  We needed some quiet time to heal. Thankfully, some friends managed to find us a secluded beach home outside a little town called Anahola, and we escaped the hospital by the back door. Bethany jumped in Sarah’s car because it had tinted windows and was not as recognizable as our blue beast of a van.

  The beach house turned out to be a wonderful gift.

  The home had enough bedrooms for each of us, a hot tub and, best of all, the ocean right outside the back door. Only a few people knew where we were, so we could spend time sorting out our emotions privately. To be honest, Tom and I often took turns crying alone in our room that week.

  Near the end of our stay, the late Andy Irons stopped by. Andy was a North Shore boy whose surfing ability had flung him into a battle for the world championship. We’d known him since he was a kid and watched him and his brother Bruce grow up into surf champions
. He’d known the girls, too, though they were much younger and somewhat mischievous (because he lived near Alana, the girls would sometimes play doorbell ditch at his house).

  Andy was on his way to surf the Pipe Masters on Oahu, but he brought a huge teddy bear with him.

  “I wish I could stay longer,” he told Bethany, choking up when he saw her bandaged arm, “but the contest is tomorrow.”

  “Win it for me,” she said to him.

  And he did.

  While we stayed at that beach house, our family attempted to decompress the recent events that had bowled us over. We talked a lot, hung out in the hot tub, read, prayed and walked along the beach. Tim brought down a stack of body boarding videos for us, knowing that Bethany might not want to watch stand-up surfing just yet, the loss of her dream so fresh.

  But there were times when we got bored with just hanging around the house. We were active people. We needed adventure, or something!

  One day, Bethany, Alana and Sarah decided to go to the local market to rent a video. They thought it would be fun to disguise Bethany in a wig, a hat and sunglasses so she wouldn’t be recognized. Tim even made her an arm out of paper towel rolls and stuffed her into a long-sleeved shirt.

  It worked! No one recognized them until they were on their way out of the store and they passed surfing legend Titus Kinimaka. He looked at her strange getup and just said, “Hey, Bethany.”

  Our time at this house was an emotional watershed for our whole family, but we had more things than just our inner hearts to consider. Would Bethany need a prosthetic arm? Rehabilitation? The weight of imagined bills pressed on us.

  Prosthetics had come a long way in assisting an amputee to have a semblance of normalcy. But some suggestions were just counterproductive, such as a treatment to extend the bone remnant and then attach rods and electronics to interface with a robotic arm. Water combined with electricity? If Bethany were ever going to get back in the ocean, anything electronic would be useless. The dollar amounts tossed around for even the simplest of prosthetic devices could be staggering.