As proof of this, I offer Norman Ollestad's book, Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
Norman was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about his book, his journey, his theories on parenting, and lots more. Enjoy...
Behind The Book:
I think that people, regardless of their age, have a tendency to idealize their childhood, so I want to give you a chance to do that. What was it like growing up on Topanga Beach?
Norman Ollestad:
Topanga Beach was a great learning ground for the chaos, the unpredictability, the rawness, and the wide range of people and events and ideas that are out there in the world. It was all like a microcosm just boiling together. In some ways it was uniquely Californian and different than anything else, but mostly it was a 24/7 carnival in many ways.
BTB:
That’s how it came across.
Ollestad:
It was really great and heavy. It was an adult world, though. Everybody was living like adolescents, but it was a very adult world. There were not that many kids.
BTB:
That’s interesting. If everyone was living like adolescents, was it adults who were kind of sinking as their children were rising to that common mean?
Ollestad:
Yeah, right. They were both kind of living in that middle ground. A lot of acting out. A lot of beautiful things, too. A lot of passion. Not just sexual, but just passion. Ideas. Kind of a bon vivant thing. It was great. And everybody had a weird animal, like a wild boar or a llama, people had horses on the beach. Charles Manson used to hang out there – that was when I was really young. But that element was always around. There was always a kind of darker element mixing in with everything. And I saw it. By the time I was nine or ten years old I knew about bad acid trips, I’d seen people overdose on drugs, so I had no romantic ideas about that sort of thing. And that helped me a lot, actually. When I went through adolescence I was just like, oh yeah, I know what that is. I think it was this little tiny world that we lived in, and in some ways it exposed me to so many things, but it also sheltered me. It was kind of like the waves were right out your front door, and everybody was kind of there, and there were no rules – that’s not real! [Laughing.]
BTB:
This is obviously later in your story, but one thing I thought was really significant was when you talked about later on when you moved up to Pacific Palisades and it was like culture shock. It’s not geographically that far away, but it’s worlds apart.
Ollestad:
Worlds apart. And I was the weirdo. I was this untamed kid, and I learned quickly that I was totally different. I swore, and I talked about totally different things. I didn’t sit around talking about Starsky and Hutch. Very quickly I was ostracized and not part of the group. So I tried to figure out how to be, which is normal, because everybody wants to fit in, especially at that age. And eventually I sort of did. I was pretty athletic, so that helped me. If you can kick the ball or catch it, they want you on their team. So I hung in there.
BTB:
The bigger event is the plane crash, but I think you’ll probably agree that this book is more really about your relationship with your father.
Ollestad:
Yeah.
BTB:
So what was it like? What was it like growing up as Norman Ollestad’s son?
Ollestad:
He never made me feel that I was in his shadow. I felt that kind of on my own when I was about twenty-one, which is sort of a part of my next book. And he never talked about being in movies. When I say never, I mean it came up here and there because I would see him on TV, and I’d ask a question, he’d answer the question, that’s it. He made me feel so loved, and he included me in his life and really gave me a lot of attention. I resented having to get up early in the morning and hike around in a storm, and go surfing in cold weather, the big waves, all that stuff. But he didn’t do it as, “You gotta be good! You gotta be the best!” It was more like, “This is great. I know you don’t want to do it, and I know it’s a pain in the ass right now, but you’re gonna thank me, and it’s gonna be worth it, so you just gotta do it. Get your ass out there, you gotta do it.” And he was right. He was absolutely right.
BTB:
So you had that dynamic with your father, and then you obviously had your mother and her boyfriend. He’s not technically your step-father, but he was that figure in your life. So how did that balance?
Ollestad:
It was like they were opposites in so many ways. My dad was very outgoing and would engage whoever, however, and was not into heavy drinking or drugs or anything like that. But my mom and her boyfriend were kind of in that scene in Topanga, the heavy partying scene. My father loved the waves and the girls and the lifestyle of playing poker on the beach and picking up a surf board and listening to music and dancing. He loved all that, but he wasn’t into the drugs and the drinking part of it, so it was nice for me. It was a good counterpoint to the scene on the beach and what was going in that house with my mom. And it gave me great perspective. I could be in it without being “of” it. In those eleven years with my father, he gave me so many wonderful gems of wisdom. Not by sitting down and telling me, just by example. Just bringing me in and watching it unfold, and watching how he dealt with it.
BTB:
You touched on this a little bit earlier, but there were many times in the book where you were talking about how at five in the morning you would have rather stayed in bed than go surfing. You’d rather go out with your friends. Were there times in the moment when you appreciated what was going on? When you let yourself say, yeah, this really is great?
Ollestad:
When we would get a good ride, or we would get some good powder. I knew it was good. But the moment it was over, the moment we got down to the bottom of the run, or I rode in to the beach, or got off the wave… If I looked up and there was a big set coming, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to bash my way through it. At that age you really don’t want to do the struggle for the reward. It’s really hard to learn that. You want it to just come to you. I don’t even think my dad knew it was a struggle for me, because he was so focused on the prize that he just dealt with it.
BTB:
Really? You don’t think there was any kind of method? You think this was just who he was? This is a beautiful day, let’s go surfing…
Ollestad:
I don’t think he was conscious of it like we are today. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t, “Well, let’s see. Would it be good for Norman to not get up sometimes?” There was never a question. There was never that dialogue. It was just, the better he gets, the more he’ll be able to enjoy it. He’ll have this. So that’s what we’re doing. That was it. I can’t be in his head, but I don’t think he was conscious of how valuable the lessons really were. They were valuable because it was a good way to live, not because he thought he was passing something along.
BTB:
It’s interesting because this is something that, as parents, I think a lot of us struggle with. My daughter is nine years old. She plays basketball, and she has played for quite a while. She enjoys it, I enjoy coaching her. The battle we’re having right now is that I think she can be a lot better than she is. I think she has potential long term to be a good player, and like you said, to enjoy it because she’s good at it. So you wonder, do you push her, and maybe turn her off to it, or do you let her just go out there and play if she likes it. Does she have to be good at it? Where do you draw that line as a parent?
Ollestad:
It’s a completely imperfect science. I don’t think anybody knows. Some people talk about it all the time and write books about it, but that’s a joke. Nobody knows how to do anything. You don’t know. You’ve gotta go on instinct, you’ve gotta go on how your child is reacting to it. I think part of the advantage my father had is he wasn’t thinking about that stuff. He just assumed it was good, because ultimately it was good. It was healthy. As I got better, I did start to enjoy it more, and he knew I would. I don’t think he contemplated it. He was a 50s guy, born in ’35.
BTB:
They didn’t think about their parenting.
Ollestad:
They just did it. And luckily, as opposed to the other male figure, who wasn’t thinking about it either, luckily my father had a loving presentation, a loving natural way. He was always kissing me, very affectionate. He was always telling me I could do it. He never once said, oh, you gotta win, or you gotta be the best. That never came up. That was his whole trip. It wasn’t about that. It was just about doing it. Get out there! Things will happen, you’ll find out about yourself. Not that succinctly thought out, but that’s, I think, underneath what he was getting at.
BTB:
So that leads to the plane crash. One of the things that’s interesting to me is that I’m guessing this was the biggest moment of your life, but still it was thirty years ago. What do you remember from that day, getting on the plane. Anything in particular?
Ollestad:
I had a lot of vivid memories. The first process I did, I got a notebook and I would write down the memory. And as I was writing, all these connected memories would start, and I couldn’t even finish. I spent months just following these trails. And then I read the NTSB report. Finally got the sheriff’s report, which took me like a year to get. I went back to the mountain and hiked it. I had a friend who flew the same route by using the NTSB report with the transmissions. And it was amazing how most of those research things I did just basically gave me confidence and cross-checked all these scribblings I had written down. I was like, oh, I was never sure about that one, but there it is. Because you can start to second-guess yourself. So it was really important for me to do that research to sort of bolster my confidence in my memories. And little things happened that were funny along the way, that kind of scared me. At first I’d think, oh, no, I was totally wrong! And then someone would say, oh, there was a fire, that’s why those trees aren’t there. There were so many things like that, where I’d think the project was over, I’d gone off the deep end. So that’s how I did it, and that’s how I was able to write in the moment in detail what was going on.
BTB:
And how did you make the decision to tell it in those two parallel narratives that eventually align?
Ollestad:
I wrote every draft chronologically, and then in the eleventh hour, right before I went to go look for an agent, I still wasn’t happy. The intention was to share my father, and in order to do that I realized I had to tell the airplane crash story, because that was where my father’s stuff, his wisdom and our life together had to mature and come to fruition.
BTB:
Immediately.
Ollestad:
Immediately. Forced. And that has to be in there. When I would read these drafts… The idea was not to tell how I survived the airplane crash; that’s boring to me. I don’t give a shit. People survive all kinds of bigger things than that. It was, what was I going through? What was it about? What was that journey about psychologically, emotionally? And then the physicality of it is all connected to the psychology, and that’s what I thought was interesting. My father was there. But when it’s chronological, they’re totally separated, and it didn’t reflect the experience. When I was up there, my whole life was up there with me. It was dovetailed. I had thought about it before, but thought it was too cinematic, so I just kind of started cutting and pasting randomly, and all of sudden I realized, oh, wow, this is it. So then I tried to figure out where to cut, where to measure it out, and a few days later I had it.
BTB:
For me, it really worked well. I would be reading one side of the story, one branch of the narrative, and whenever I’d finish that chapter, my initial reaction was that I didn’t want to go back to the other side, I wanted to continue here. And then I’d get into that one, and wouldn’t want to give up that branch. So it just worked really well. And then obviously as the narratives started to converge… I thought it was really well done, and I liked that aspect of the book.
Ollestad:
Thank you. The toughest chapter was the last chapter, because I wanted to show some of the aftermath, because that’s important. That’s really, maybe, what I was trying to get to the whole time. And yet the crash was over, and my life with my dad was over. The good stuff, from a writer’s point of view. So why was anybody gonna keep reading? Why would they give a shit? So I worked my butt off on that last chapter. I wanted it to be in the book, and I knew that was the first thing a publisher or editor or agent would go after, so I wanted to make sure it was so good that they wouldn’t be able to get rid of it.
BTB:
Well, I liked it, definitely. So then the crash happens, and you’re on the side of this mountain. What I kept thinking as I was reading it is that you were eleven years old. How did you not just curl up into a ball? Your father had instilled all of this in you, but your father was right there, and on some level you knew that he was dead. How did you keep going like that?
Ollestad:
Well, that’s what’s interesting about life… narrative… story. In the end, we are defined by our choices, and it’s cliché, but I had a choice. For whatever reason, whatever was built into me from my dad, I believe, a kind of confidence. He always gave me license to not be chained to him or to some false bullshit comforting idea. “Oh, if I’m dead, then you’re fucked… No, if I’m dead, you just keep going.” He wasn’t god, even though I thought he was. He always sort of let me know that, in a way. He gave me license. I was always gonna be able to go on. I went into an instinctual mode, maybe because I was young enough, close enough to the raw self. We get real comfortable as we get older. We get more afraid of death. Even my son, who’s nine, he doesn’t quite understand death. It’s like a game. So maybe there was enough of that still in me when I was eleven, that I was able to twist it around. The ramifications didn’t shut me down.
BTB:
I think the frustration in dealing with children and adolescents is that they don’t see the long-term consequences, and maybe that was a benefit to you. You weren’t looking at the long term. If I crash into a mountain today, I’ve got thirty-nine years that are telling me that the odds of my survival are pretty slim. Whereas an eleven year old, what do you know about plane crashes?
Ollestad:
And my dad, all he ever did was tell me I could do it. In anything I was doing, I was always little like I am now, so I had to gut it out. You just had to will yourself to be better than the other guys, and that was it. I didn’t have the strength, I didn’t really have the talent. I was agile, but that was it. I just had more will. And that was enough in me that I just turned into some kind of an animal up there on the mountain. I was just focused. And I thought about all those other things. I knew. I could have been freaking out, I could have been shutting down. It was all there, but it never happened. I insulated myself from that. I was dealing with the ice, I had lost all my skin on one hand. It’s interesting, I was in Washington, DC, reading at the beginning of my book tour, and Glen Farmer stepped out to meet me. I had only interviewed him, I hadn’t seen him in thirty years, so he introduced himself. He said, “Hi, Norman, I’m Glen Farmer.” The first thing he did is he grabbed my hands. He looked at them and said, “Oh, good they healed.” It’s interesting how in his mind, that was the thing that stained him a bit, you know, because it was ugly. Bare bones sticking out, right? And that stuck with him.
BTB:
Glen Farmer was the kid…
Ollestad:
The kid who picked me up on the road. He was the first person to see me. That really threw me because a lot of this for me, for years, was just a dream that happened to somebody else and wasn’t that big of a deal. I don’t know why I positioned it like that, but as I started to research it, it started to kind of catch up with me a little bit. I remember returning to the mountain the first time. I still ski a lot, I charge, I go for it. But when I looked at that slope, I was like, “Oh, shit, it’s steep. It’s steep here.” And then when I started talking to the rescue crews, they said, “Oh, yeah, this is one of the steepest places ever. We have rescues all the time.” I’m not gonna be able to play that down. It was liberating for me to be sympathetic with myself, which is sort of a weird thing. I was not sympathetic for a long time.
BTB:
Afterwards you went through a lot as you were getting into your teens. How much of that was just the stuff that a lot of teens go through, and how much of that was because of all the other shit, losing your father…
Ollestad:
It was a combination of it. I don’t know exactly. It was a little bit weird for me. It was afterwards that I just wanted to hide away into a shell, like a delayed reaction, and I really had to fight through that. That was a tough time. I mean, I really was conscious of the fact I could just fade away and sort of go off the deep end. I just wouldn’t let myself. It was almost like hanging on. And then getting back into surfing, my confidence came back, and it tapped me back into my dad. But then later on, this other thing comes out, as you would know, the adolescent male. That’s a radical thing, and there’s a lot of energy and natural anger, kind of aggressive. And that was coming out, and it was mixed with this idea that I was supposed to be tough because of what I had been through. That played with me a little bit. I didn’t necessarily make it worse, but it just added a little fuel to the fire. People expected me to be tough.
BTB:
Because you were a hero.
Ollestad:
Yeah. But I never talked about this stuff. I just knew people knew. I could just tell the way they looked at me.
BTB:
You’re that kid.
Ollestad:
Yeah. But they wouldn’t even say it, I just knew. So there was that factor. So now I’d say, “Hit me three times. Watch, I won’t fall down.” I sounds so stupid now, but it’s the truth. That’s what happened.
BTB:
When you’re that age, you don’t want to be different, but also you find yourself growing into other people’s perceptions of who you are, or who they think you are.
Ollestad:
Right.
BTB:
Another thing I thought was interesting was your mother’s boyfriend. He’s an interesting character through the narrative.
Ollestad:
Really fascinating.
BTB:
At the beginning he was just the jackass stepfather. But I thought it was really great how he changed. Can you talk about that a little bit, about that relationship and how important he was to you?
Ollestad:
I understood, I don’t know why, but I understood underneath it he was trying to do good. He was trying to help me. He was trying to protect me, guide me. I always sort of appreciated that from him, and I feel that I conveyed that in the book.
BTB:
Yeah, I think it was a really honest portrayal, not just of him, but I think you did a good job of capturing your adolescent self’s feelings about him and how that changed. At no point did you say, “Wow, he’s a great guy,” but it was sort of a begrudging admission that he was looking out for you.
Ollestad:
He’s a very perceptive guy. He understood what I was going through in a way. He’s a fascinating character. He did have good intentions, and did some good things for me. I hope I portrayed that in the book.
BTB:
I think you definitely did.
Ollestad:
I find him endlessly fascinating. I’m still fascinated by him.
BTB:
Do you still have a relationship with him?
Ollestad:
Well, I did as of about a month ago. He’s kind of resorted to his old ways.
BTB:
I’m sorry to hear that. I have a couple of general questions for you. As you describe in the book, while you were growing up you had a great deal of freedom, and not just freedom but also free time. What are your feelings about how kids are raised today, where things are so structured. I used to ride my bike all over the place when I was seven, eight, nine years old. I can’t imagine my nine-year-old biking any place. I can’t imagine her wanting to – and she loves riding her bike -- and I can’t imagine being comfortable telling her, “Why don’t you ride your bike three miles to your friend’s house? What are our kids losing because they’re not doing things like that?
Ollestad:
I don’t know how to do it all that differently. I do find myself letting my son kind of go off somewhere, and in the middle of it I’ll tell myself, you can’t let him do that, it’s really dangerous. You know? We were in Hawai’i staying with friends and he’d get up, walk out of the house, and walk three-quarters of a mile away. Three-quarters of a mile in that environment seems like twenty miles. He’s gone at some beach body surfing. What if he drowns? I don’t know. I could be sitting on the beach and he could drown. We talk about it. He’s been out in the water surfing with me a million times. Hey, I learned my best lessons when I was in Mexico roaming around free and got myself into some stuff and got myself out. I just think you’ve gotta go out there. What’s gonna happen if it’s shelter, shelter, shelter, and then one day – here’s the world. It doesn’t seem like it’s great preparation. But I can’t make this argument, and then some kid gets hit or abducted or something, so I have no idea. I just appreciate the freedom that we had. Because as you saw in the book, I ran completely free. I never thought twice about jumping off something that was too big because it might hurt me. I don’t think my son would do that. He’s very cautious. Maybe if he wasn’t cautious and seemed kind of reckless or something, I might worry about him. But he’s a kid, and he forgets sometimes.
BTB:
That’s why I really enjoyed your epilogue a lot, where you talked about your experiences with your father and what he taught you and how that’s informed your parenting of your son. Where do you draw that line? It seems like you’re not pushing quite as hard as your father did, but you still push.
Ollestad:
I think it’s in the air. I think my son knows just by what he observes and watches being around all his friends and all these people. He knows that he gets to negotiate, he gets to choose. That’s not the world we’re living in. It would seem extreme and kind of abrasive to go over a certain line, although there are times when I’m watching him for the third or fourth time get in his own way with his own made up fears, and I just take the bull by the horns and I say, “We’re going. You can cry your way down, but I don’t care.” And it’s very interesting. He’ll stop, kind of take a deep breath – metaphorically – and just do it. And then he’s happy and he wants to keep going. Every once in a while a kid needs that boundary there. No, you don’t get to freak out and make up some craziness and bail out. Right now the new boundary is, “Your fear doesn’t get to win this time.” I don’t do that every time, but I do step in, and I’m happy when I’ve done it.
BTB:
You’re doing things like your father did – surfing, skiing – things that have a higher risk involved. Do you think you could give your son these same things if you were just playing soccer or going on play dates?
Ollestad:
Yes. Yes. I don’t think anything my father did was necessarily exclusive to surfing or skiing – or even sports. If I had a passion for playing the cello, and I was teaching my son how to play the cello and he had to take on Bach, or something, the equivalents are there. It’s scary, it’s impossible, it’s overwhelming, it’s all those things.
BTB:
So it’s the pushing to get to that reward.
Ollestad:
You’ve gotta push, and you’ve gotta practice, and you’ve gotta do it when you don’t wanna do it, when your fingers are hurting – or whatever that is. It could be math, anything. I don’t think it really matters. My dad was devoted to me, he was paying attention to me, and he included me in healthy things that he was passionate about. And that’s it. I felt that, and it gave me self-confidence. So I don’t think it has to be sports. It just so happens that sports are beautiful metaphors and microcosms for life and the human condition.
BTB:
You get instant feedback.
Ollestad:
Right, and you really find out about yourself when you’re out there trying to do it. And I played a lot of team sports, too. I don’t know how much is left in the book, but I played football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. I think that’s really important. I’ve gravitated towards individual sports. It’s something about my personality.
BTB:
So you mentioned earlier that you had another book on the way. Where are you in that process?
Ollestad:
I’m in between drafts, and this book, and publication, and the book tour, I’m doing a lot of notes. A lot of notes, and a lot of thinking.
BTB:
It’s still a memoir of sorts?
Ollestad:
Yeah, I think I have the stuff to make a compelling memoir. If it turns out that it’s not compelling enough, then it’s incredible fodder for a novel. I could novelize it. Part of me wants to novelize it anyway, because what comes with this is not all that great sometimes. You get a lot of grief because…
BTB:
From the people who are involved, the people on the page?
Ollestad:
It’s only two people, but it’s enough to kind of turn you off from the whole thing. But I’ll get over it. I want to try to do another memoir. When I was twenty-one I went to San Anton, Austria, where I had gone with my father when I was four and five. I showed up there alone, completely lost…
BTB:
Metaphorically lost?
Ollestad:
Just lost. This is how weird it was. I went to Saint Anton, and when I got there is when I realized, “Oh, I chose here because I used to come here with my dad.” That’s how “twenty-one-year-old guy” I was. I didn’t even know why I was going. And all of a sudden a lot of people in town remembered me and my father, and I remember the first night I got there I knocked on Haus Blomberg door where I had stayed with my father. The proprietor opened the door and poured me some schnapps right away and took me down to the basement and there’s my dad’s guitar and an old rabbit suit that I used to wear when I was four and five because it was always Easter time when we were there. It was just sitting there. And I realized, oh, that’s why I came back. There’s all this stuff. And that’s where I had a renaissance. I learned I wanted to be a writer, and I invented myself. I had a romance, I fell on my face, I tried to fit in with the ski bums. I hiked glaciers, guys that I knew got killed right in front of me… it was a heavy time. Everything – love, sex, death – the whole thing was there. If that’s not enough, I traveled for ten years and came out of that as a writer. I may connect all that with having my son and some heavy decisions I made during that and what happened afterward. We’ll see if it’s two books or one. Again, you never know till you get there. I don’t have another airplane crash, you know what I mean? My dad will be strung into this next phase because there’s a lot that isn’t told in this book. As I got older and gained a new point of view, I tried to keep that point of view. I sort of saw new things as I got older, revisiting the same places I’d been with him.
BTB:
So even now, how much is your dad a part of your daily life?
Ollestad:
Well, my son’s on the Mammoth Ski Team, and I take him surfing, sometimes before school, and on the weekends. In the winter we still surf, but it gets cold. So I’m kind of in all the same places with my son as my dad was with me, so it’s there. I don’t sit there and go, “Oh, Dad!” It’s just there, sort of like how we live. I’m living the arc that he set me on.
I think that people, regardless of their age, have a tendency to idealize their childhood, so I want to give you a chance to do that. What was it like growing up on Topanga Beach?
Norman Ollestad:
Topanga Beach was a great learning ground for the chaos, the unpredictability, the rawness, and the wide range of people and events and ideas that are out there in the world. It was all like a microcosm just boiling together. In some ways it was uniquely Californian and different than anything else, but mostly it was a 24/7 carnival in many ways.
BTB:
That’s how it came across.
Ollestad:
It was really great and heavy. It was an adult world, though. Everybody was living like adolescents, but it was a very adult world. There were not that many kids.
BTB:
That’s interesting. If everyone was living like adolescents, was it adults who were kind of sinking as their children were rising to that common mean?
Ollestad:
Yeah, right. They were both kind of living in that middle ground. A lot of acting out. A lot of beautiful things, too. A lot of passion. Not just sexual, but just passion. Ideas. Kind of a bon vivant thing. It was great. And everybody had a weird animal, like a wild boar or a llama, people had horses on the beach. Charles Manson used to hang out there – that was when I was really young. But that element was always around. There was always a kind of darker element mixing in with everything. And I saw it. By the time I was nine or ten years old I knew about bad acid trips, I’d seen people overdose on drugs, so I had no romantic ideas about that sort of thing. And that helped me a lot, actually. When I went through adolescence I was just like, oh yeah, I know what that is. I think it was this little tiny world that we lived in, and in some ways it exposed me to so many things, but it also sheltered me. It was kind of like the waves were right out your front door, and everybody was kind of there, and there were no rules – that’s not real! [Laughing.]
BTB:
This is obviously later in your story, but one thing I thought was really significant was when you talked about later on when you moved up to Pacific Palisades and it was like culture shock. It’s not geographically that far away, but it’s worlds apart.
Ollestad:
Worlds apart. And I was the weirdo. I was this untamed kid, and I learned quickly that I was totally different. I swore, and I talked about totally different things. I didn’t sit around talking about Starsky and Hutch. Very quickly I was ostracized and not part of the group. So I tried to figure out how to be, which is normal, because everybody wants to fit in, especially at that age. And eventually I sort of did. I was pretty athletic, so that helped me. If you can kick the ball or catch it, they want you on their team. So I hung in there.
BTB:
The bigger event is the plane crash, but I think you’ll probably agree that this book is more really about your relationship with your father.
Ollestad:
Yeah.
BTB:
So what was it like? What was it like growing up as Norman Ollestad’s son?
Ollestad:
He never made me feel that I was in his shadow. I felt that kind of on my own when I was about twenty-one, which is sort of a part of my next book. And he never talked about being in movies. When I say never, I mean it came up here and there because I would see him on TV, and I’d ask a question, he’d answer the question, that’s it. He made me feel so loved, and he included me in his life and really gave me a lot of attention. I resented having to get up early in the morning and hike around in a storm, and go surfing in cold weather, the big waves, all that stuff. But he didn’t do it as, “You gotta be good! You gotta be the best!” It was more like, “This is great. I know you don’t want to do it, and I know it’s a pain in the ass right now, but you’re gonna thank me, and it’s gonna be worth it, so you just gotta do it. Get your ass out there, you gotta do it.” And he was right. He was absolutely right.
BTB:
So you had that dynamic with your father, and then you obviously had your mother and her boyfriend. He’s not technically your step-father, but he was that figure in your life. So how did that balance?
Ollestad:
It was like they were opposites in so many ways. My dad was very outgoing and would engage whoever, however, and was not into heavy drinking or drugs or anything like that. But my mom and her boyfriend were kind of in that scene in Topanga, the heavy partying scene. My father loved the waves and the girls and the lifestyle of playing poker on the beach and picking up a surf board and listening to music and dancing. He loved all that, but he wasn’t into the drugs and the drinking part of it, so it was nice for me. It was a good counterpoint to the scene on the beach and what was going in that house with my mom. And it gave me great perspective. I could be in it without being “of” it. In those eleven years with my father, he gave me so many wonderful gems of wisdom. Not by sitting down and telling me, just by example. Just bringing me in and watching it unfold, and watching how he dealt with it.
BTB:
You touched on this a little bit earlier, but there were many times in the book where you were talking about how at five in the morning you would have rather stayed in bed than go surfing. You’d rather go out with your friends. Were there times in the moment when you appreciated what was going on? When you let yourself say, yeah, this really is great?
Ollestad:
When we would get a good ride, or we would get some good powder. I knew it was good. But the moment it was over, the moment we got down to the bottom of the run, or I rode in to the beach, or got off the wave… If I looked up and there was a big set coming, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to bash my way through it. At that age you really don’t want to do the struggle for the reward. It’s really hard to learn that. You want it to just come to you. I don’t even think my dad knew it was a struggle for me, because he was so focused on the prize that he just dealt with it.
BTB:
Really? You don’t think there was any kind of method? You think this was just who he was? This is a beautiful day, let’s go surfing…
Ollestad:
I don’t think he was conscious of it like we are today. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t, “Well, let’s see. Would it be good for Norman to not get up sometimes?” There was never a question. There was never that dialogue. It was just, the better he gets, the more he’ll be able to enjoy it. He’ll have this. So that’s what we’re doing. That was it. I can’t be in his head, but I don’t think he was conscious of how valuable the lessons really were. They were valuable because it was a good way to live, not because he thought he was passing something along.
BTB:
It’s interesting because this is something that, as parents, I think a lot of us struggle with. My daughter is nine years old. She plays basketball, and she has played for quite a while. She enjoys it, I enjoy coaching her. The battle we’re having right now is that I think she can be a lot better than she is. I think she has potential long term to be a good player, and like you said, to enjoy it because she’s good at it. So you wonder, do you push her, and maybe turn her off to it, or do you let her just go out there and play if she likes it. Does she have to be good at it? Where do you draw that line as a parent?
Ollestad:
It’s a completely imperfect science. I don’t think anybody knows. Some people talk about it all the time and write books about it, but that’s a joke. Nobody knows how to do anything. You don’t know. You’ve gotta go on instinct, you’ve gotta go on how your child is reacting to it. I think part of the advantage my father had is he wasn’t thinking about that stuff. He just assumed it was good, because ultimately it was good. It was healthy. As I got better, I did start to enjoy it more, and he knew I would. I don’t think he contemplated it. He was a 50s guy, born in ’35.
BTB:
They didn’t think about their parenting.
Ollestad:
They just did it. And luckily, as opposed to the other male figure, who wasn’t thinking about it either, luckily my father had a loving presentation, a loving natural way. He was always kissing me, very affectionate. He was always telling me I could do it. He never once said, oh, you gotta win, or you gotta be the best. That never came up. That was his whole trip. It wasn’t about that. It was just about doing it. Get out there! Things will happen, you’ll find out about yourself. Not that succinctly thought out, but that’s, I think, underneath what he was getting at.
BTB:
So that leads to the plane crash. One of the things that’s interesting to me is that I’m guessing this was the biggest moment of your life, but still it was thirty years ago. What do you remember from that day, getting on the plane. Anything in particular?
Ollestad:
I had a lot of vivid memories. The first process I did, I got a notebook and I would write down the memory. And as I was writing, all these connected memories would start, and I couldn’t even finish. I spent months just following these trails. And then I read the NTSB report. Finally got the sheriff’s report, which took me like a year to get. I went back to the mountain and hiked it. I had a friend who flew the same route by using the NTSB report with the transmissions. And it was amazing how most of those research things I did just basically gave me confidence and cross-checked all these scribblings I had written down. I was like, oh, I was never sure about that one, but there it is. Because you can start to second-guess yourself. So it was really important for me to do that research to sort of bolster my confidence in my memories. And little things happened that were funny along the way, that kind of scared me. At first I’d think, oh, no, I was totally wrong! And then someone would say, oh, there was a fire, that’s why those trees aren’t there. There were so many things like that, where I’d think the project was over, I’d gone off the deep end. So that’s how I did it, and that’s how I was able to write in the moment in detail what was going on.
BTB:
And how did you make the decision to tell it in those two parallel narratives that eventually align?
Ollestad:
I wrote every draft chronologically, and then in the eleventh hour, right before I went to go look for an agent, I still wasn’t happy. The intention was to share my father, and in order to do that I realized I had to tell the airplane crash story, because that was where my father’s stuff, his wisdom and our life together had to mature and come to fruition.
BTB:
Immediately.
Ollestad:
Immediately. Forced. And that has to be in there. When I would read these drafts… The idea was not to tell how I survived the airplane crash; that’s boring to me. I don’t give a shit. People survive all kinds of bigger things than that. It was, what was I going through? What was it about? What was that journey about psychologically, emotionally? And then the physicality of it is all connected to the psychology, and that’s what I thought was interesting. My father was there. But when it’s chronological, they’re totally separated, and it didn’t reflect the experience. When I was up there, my whole life was up there with me. It was dovetailed. I had thought about it before, but thought it was too cinematic, so I just kind of started cutting and pasting randomly, and all of sudden I realized, oh, wow, this is it. So then I tried to figure out where to cut, where to measure it out, and a few days later I had it.
BTB:
For me, it really worked well. I would be reading one side of the story, one branch of the narrative, and whenever I’d finish that chapter, my initial reaction was that I didn’t want to go back to the other side, I wanted to continue here. And then I’d get into that one, and wouldn’t want to give up that branch. So it just worked really well. And then obviously as the narratives started to converge… I thought it was really well done, and I liked that aspect of the book.
Ollestad:
Thank you. The toughest chapter was the last chapter, because I wanted to show some of the aftermath, because that’s important. That’s really, maybe, what I was trying to get to the whole time. And yet the crash was over, and my life with my dad was over. The good stuff, from a writer’s point of view. So why was anybody gonna keep reading? Why would they give a shit? So I worked my butt off on that last chapter. I wanted it to be in the book, and I knew that was the first thing a publisher or editor or agent would go after, so I wanted to make sure it was so good that they wouldn’t be able to get rid of it.
BTB:
Well, I liked it, definitely. So then the crash happens, and you’re on the side of this mountain. What I kept thinking as I was reading it is that you were eleven years old. How did you not just curl up into a ball? Your father had instilled all of this in you, but your father was right there, and on some level you knew that he was dead. How did you keep going like that?
Ollestad:
Well, that’s what’s interesting about life… narrative… story. In the end, we are defined by our choices, and it’s cliché, but I had a choice. For whatever reason, whatever was built into me from my dad, I believe, a kind of confidence. He always gave me license to not be chained to him or to some false bullshit comforting idea. “Oh, if I’m dead, then you’re fucked… No, if I’m dead, you just keep going.” He wasn’t god, even though I thought he was. He always sort of let me know that, in a way. He gave me license. I was always gonna be able to go on. I went into an instinctual mode, maybe because I was young enough, close enough to the raw self. We get real comfortable as we get older. We get more afraid of death. Even my son, who’s nine, he doesn’t quite understand death. It’s like a game. So maybe there was enough of that still in me when I was eleven, that I was able to twist it around. The ramifications didn’t shut me down.
BTB:
I think the frustration in dealing with children and adolescents is that they don’t see the long-term consequences, and maybe that was a benefit to you. You weren’t looking at the long term. If I crash into a mountain today, I’ve got thirty-nine years that are telling me that the odds of my survival are pretty slim. Whereas an eleven year old, what do you know about plane crashes?
Ollestad:
And my dad, all he ever did was tell me I could do it. In anything I was doing, I was always little like I am now, so I had to gut it out. You just had to will yourself to be better than the other guys, and that was it. I didn’t have the strength, I didn’t really have the talent. I was agile, but that was it. I just had more will. And that was enough in me that I just turned into some kind of an animal up there on the mountain. I was just focused. And I thought about all those other things. I knew. I could have been freaking out, I could have been shutting down. It was all there, but it never happened. I insulated myself from that. I was dealing with the ice, I had lost all my skin on one hand. It’s interesting, I was in Washington, DC, reading at the beginning of my book tour, and Glen Farmer stepped out to meet me. I had only interviewed him, I hadn’t seen him in thirty years, so he introduced himself. He said, “Hi, Norman, I’m Glen Farmer.” The first thing he did is he grabbed my hands. He looked at them and said, “Oh, good they healed.” It’s interesting how in his mind, that was the thing that stained him a bit, you know, because it was ugly. Bare bones sticking out, right? And that stuck with him.
BTB:
Glen Farmer was the kid…
Ollestad:
The kid who picked me up on the road. He was the first person to see me. That really threw me because a lot of this for me, for years, was just a dream that happened to somebody else and wasn’t that big of a deal. I don’t know why I positioned it like that, but as I started to research it, it started to kind of catch up with me a little bit. I remember returning to the mountain the first time. I still ski a lot, I charge, I go for it. But when I looked at that slope, I was like, “Oh, shit, it’s steep. It’s steep here.” And then when I started talking to the rescue crews, they said, “Oh, yeah, this is one of the steepest places ever. We have rescues all the time.” I’m not gonna be able to play that down. It was liberating for me to be sympathetic with myself, which is sort of a weird thing. I was not sympathetic for a long time.
BTB:
Afterwards you went through a lot as you were getting into your teens. How much of that was just the stuff that a lot of teens go through, and how much of that was because of all the other shit, losing your father…
Ollestad:
It was a combination of it. I don’t know exactly. It was a little bit weird for me. It was afterwards that I just wanted to hide away into a shell, like a delayed reaction, and I really had to fight through that. That was a tough time. I mean, I really was conscious of the fact I could just fade away and sort of go off the deep end. I just wouldn’t let myself. It was almost like hanging on. And then getting back into surfing, my confidence came back, and it tapped me back into my dad. But then later on, this other thing comes out, as you would know, the adolescent male. That’s a radical thing, and there’s a lot of energy and natural anger, kind of aggressive. And that was coming out, and it was mixed with this idea that I was supposed to be tough because of what I had been through. That played with me a little bit. I didn’t necessarily make it worse, but it just added a little fuel to the fire. People expected me to be tough.
BTB:
Because you were a hero.
Ollestad:
Yeah. But I never talked about this stuff. I just knew people knew. I could just tell the way they looked at me.
BTB:
You’re that kid.
Ollestad:
Yeah. But they wouldn’t even say it, I just knew. So there was that factor. So now I’d say, “Hit me three times. Watch, I won’t fall down.” I sounds so stupid now, but it’s the truth. That’s what happened.
BTB:
When you’re that age, you don’t want to be different, but also you find yourself growing into other people’s perceptions of who you are, or who they think you are.
Ollestad:
Right.
BTB:
Another thing I thought was interesting was your mother’s boyfriend. He’s an interesting character through the narrative.
Ollestad:
Really fascinating.
BTB:
At the beginning he was just the jackass stepfather. But I thought it was really great how he changed. Can you talk about that a little bit, about that relationship and how important he was to you?
Ollestad:
I understood, I don’t know why, but I understood underneath it he was trying to do good. He was trying to help me. He was trying to protect me, guide me. I always sort of appreciated that from him, and I feel that I conveyed that in the book.
BTB:
Yeah, I think it was a really honest portrayal, not just of him, but I think you did a good job of capturing your adolescent self’s feelings about him and how that changed. At no point did you say, “Wow, he’s a great guy,” but it was sort of a begrudging admission that he was looking out for you.
Ollestad:
He’s a very perceptive guy. He understood what I was going through in a way. He’s a fascinating character. He did have good intentions, and did some good things for me. I hope I portrayed that in the book.
BTB:
I think you definitely did.
Ollestad:
I find him endlessly fascinating. I’m still fascinated by him.
BTB:
Do you still have a relationship with him?
Ollestad:
Well, I did as of about a month ago. He’s kind of resorted to his old ways.
BTB:
I’m sorry to hear that. I have a couple of general questions for you. As you describe in the book, while you were growing up you had a great deal of freedom, and not just freedom but also free time. What are your feelings about how kids are raised today, where things are so structured. I used to ride my bike all over the place when I was seven, eight, nine years old. I can’t imagine my nine-year-old biking any place. I can’t imagine her wanting to – and she loves riding her bike -- and I can’t imagine being comfortable telling her, “Why don’t you ride your bike three miles to your friend’s house? What are our kids losing because they’re not doing things like that?
Ollestad:
I don’t know how to do it all that differently. I do find myself letting my son kind of go off somewhere, and in the middle of it I’ll tell myself, you can’t let him do that, it’s really dangerous. You know? We were in Hawai’i staying with friends and he’d get up, walk out of the house, and walk three-quarters of a mile away. Three-quarters of a mile in that environment seems like twenty miles. He’s gone at some beach body surfing. What if he drowns? I don’t know. I could be sitting on the beach and he could drown. We talk about it. He’s been out in the water surfing with me a million times. Hey, I learned my best lessons when I was in Mexico roaming around free and got myself into some stuff and got myself out. I just think you’ve gotta go out there. What’s gonna happen if it’s shelter, shelter, shelter, and then one day – here’s the world. It doesn’t seem like it’s great preparation. But I can’t make this argument, and then some kid gets hit or abducted or something, so I have no idea. I just appreciate the freedom that we had. Because as you saw in the book, I ran completely free. I never thought twice about jumping off something that was too big because it might hurt me. I don’t think my son would do that. He’s very cautious. Maybe if he wasn’t cautious and seemed kind of reckless or something, I might worry about him. But he’s a kid, and he forgets sometimes.
BTB:
That’s why I really enjoyed your epilogue a lot, where you talked about your experiences with your father and what he taught you and how that’s informed your parenting of your son. Where do you draw that line? It seems like you’re not pushing quite as hard as your father did, but you still push.
Ollestad:
I think it’s in the air. I think my son knows just by what he observes and watches being around all his friends and all these people. He knows that he gets to negotiate, he gets to choose. That’s not the world we’re living in. It would seem extreme and kind of abrasive to go over a certain line, although there are times when I’m watching him for the third or fourth time get in his own way with his own made up fears, and I just take the bull by the horns and I say, “We’re going. You can cry your way down, but I don’t care.” And it’s very interesting. He’ll stop, kind of take a deep breath – metaphorically – and just do it. And then he’s happy and he wants to keep going. Every once in a while a kid needs that boundary there. No, you don’t get to freak out and make up some craziness and bail out. Right now the new boundary is, “Your fear doesn’t get to win this time.” I don’t do that every time, but I do step in, and I’m happy when I’ve done it.
BTB:
You’re doing things like your father did – surfing, skiing – things that have a higher risk involved. Do you think you could give your son these same things if you were just playing soccer or going on play dates?
Ollestad:
Yes. Yes. I don’t think anything my father did was necessarily exclusive to surfing or skiing – or even sports. If I had a passion for playing the cello, and I was teaching my son how to play the cello and he had to take on Bach, or something, the equivalents are there. It’s scary, it’s impossible, it’s overwhelming, it’s all those things.
BTB:
So it’s the pushing to get to that reward.
Ollestad:
You’ve gotta push, and you’ve gotta practice, and you’ve gotta do it when you don’t wanna do it, when your fingers are hurting – or whatever that is. It could be math, anything. I don’t think it really matters. My dad was devoted to me, he was paying attention to me, and he included me in healthy things that he was passionate about. And that’s it. I felt that, and it gave me self-confidence. So I don’t think it has to be sports. It just so happens that sports are beautiful metaphors and microcosms for life and the human condition.
BTB:
You get instant feedback.
Ollestad:
Right, and you really find out about yourself when you’re out there trying to do it. And I played a lot of team sports, too. I don’t know how much is left in the book, but I played football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. I think that’s really important. I’ve gravitated towards individual sports. It’s something about my personality.
BTB:
So you mentioned earlier that you had another book on the way. Where are you in that process?
Ollestad:
I’m in between drafts, and this book, and publication, and the book tour, I’m doing a lot of notes. A lot of notes, and a lot of thinking.
BTB:
It’s still a memoir of sorts?
Ollestad:
Yeah, I think I have the stuff to make a compelling memoir. If it turns out that it’s not compelling enough, then it’s incredible fodder for a novel. I could novelize it. Part of me wants to novelize it anyway, because what comes with this is not all that great sometimes. You get a lot of grief because…
BTB:
From the people who are involved, the people on the page?
Ollestad:
It’s only two people, but it’s enough to kind of turn you off from the whole thing. But I’ll get over it. I want to try to do another memoir. When I was twenty-one I went to San Anton, Austria, where I had gone with my father when I was four and five. I showed up there alone, completely lost…
BTB:
Metaphorically lost?
Ollestad:
Just lost. This is how weird it was. I went to Saint Anton, and when I got there is when I realized, “Oh, I chose here because I used to come here with my dad.” That’s how “twenty-one-year-old guy” I was. I didn’t even know why I was going. And all of a sudden a lot of people in town remembered me and my father, and I remember the first night I got there I knocked on Haus Blomberg door where I had stayed with my father. The proprietor opened the door and poured me some schnapps right away and took me down to the basement and there’s my dad’s guitar and an old rabbit suit that I used to wear when I was four and five because it was always Easter time when we were there. It was just sitting there. And I realized, oh, that’s why I came back. There’s all this stuff. And that’s where I had a renaissance. I learned I wanted to be a writer, and I invented myself. I had a romance, I fell on my face, I tried to fit in with the ski bums. I hiked glaciers, guys that I knew got killed right in front of me… it was a heavy time. Everything – love, sex, death – the whole thing was there. If that’s not enough, I traveled for ten years and came out of that as a writer. I may connect all that with having my son and some heavy decisions I made during that and what happened afterward. We’ll see if it’s two books or one. Again, you never know till you get there. I don’t have another airplane crash, you know what I mean? My dad will be strung into this next phase because there’s a lot that isn’t told in this book. As I got older and gained a new point of view, I tried to keep that point of view. I sort of saw new things as I got older, revisiting the same places I’d been with him.
BTB:
So even now, how much is your dad a part of your daily life?
Ollestad:
Well, my son’s on the Mammoth Ski Team, and I take him surfing, sometimes before school, and on the weekends. In the winter we still surf, but it gets cold. So I’m kind of in all the same places with my son as my dad was with me, so it’s there. I don’t sit there and go, “Oh, Dad!” It’s just there, sort of like how we live. I’m living the arc that he set me on.
It's amazing how he survived a plane crash, he's the line survivor, right?
Posted by: plane crash attornet | 04/20/2012 at 07:21 AM