Red Water: Bethany Hamilton and also the Teeth of the Tiger
MATT GEORGE
Ha’ena, Kauai, Hawaii—October 31, 2003.
She’d been prime a daredevil life for weeks currently. And while in the end, she had no idea of the trouble she was getting herself into. Swimming beneath the moon, swimming beneath the radar, in spite of this swimming. Always swimming. Hungry for life, for survival. Starving with necessitate. Patrolling the reefs for opportunity, for flesh. Swinging her huge head with the regularity of a metronome, propelling her 14 feet of girth with the trouble-free leverage and intent of a heavily services shewarrior. With her ragged, 14-inch dorsal fin breaking the surface, she’d been bumping into surfers for weeks at present. Testing them, feeling their fear, waiting for her time. They seemed such easy prey. Slow, awkward, lounging on the surface like something sick. And presently it was in her path. It was time. Another was here, apart while in the escape. Alone and feeble, and this one looked so small and feeble. She approached her prey among the side, taking her time, timing the strokes of the thin, pale arm that dipped off the surfboard in a slow rhythm of bubbles. Twenty feet . . . ten feet . . . five feet . . . and with one last savage kick of her great tail she opened her jaws in a ragged yawn. Taking the thin pale arm in her mouth, she clamped down with over sixteen tons of sawing pressure. As her teeth met, she effortlessly plucked the thing within the body that once owned it.
The bite was so clean and painless that Bethany Hamilton, 13, noticed that the sea had turned red before she realized that her arm was gone at the shoulder. A strange serenity came over her, a warmth, as her body began to scream its outrage. Spurting a deep, vivid, burgundy-colored blood, she struggled over to her greatest friend, Alana Blanchard, also thirteen, and could solitary manage the words, I think a shark just attacked me. Alana told her to not even joke of such matters. Then Alana eyes saw something that her mind couldn’t grasp. The bleeding stump where her crucial friend’s left arm used to be. Alana’s stomach revolted and purged twice before she called for her father and her brother who were paddling for a nearby wave.
Imagine the dilemma of Holt Blanchard, 45, who was presently nearly a half mile offshore with his son and his girl and a profusely bleeding and acutely injured Bethany Hamilton and a fat, dangerous shark somewhere below. After struggling to apply a tourniquet with his rash guard, he now had an impossible decision to make. Should he send his children on ahead, across the deep lagoon, to keep them away from a bleeding Bethany? And if so, how could he protect them? Should he keep them close? And if so, could he put himself between them and also the shark if it returned? For one brief moment he even thought of slitting his own wrists on the ragged edge of Bethany’s board and slipping into the sea to await his fate while the other three made for shore. He had no time to deliberate. He made his decision on instinct. Keep the family close, air the danger mutually. He instructed his daughter to keep talking to a quickly fading Bethany while he and his son rigged her leash and began dragging her to shore.
Cheri Hamilton, mother of Bethany, was driving so fast behind the ambulance that the law pulled her over. She hadn’t seen Bethany then again, and had no idea about her condition. Frantic, it wasn’t until the ambulance driver called back to law enforcement with a walkie-talkie that they let Cheri tour. As she mashed the accelerator to the floor, a call came in on her cell phone. It was Holt Blanchard. Cheri asked him how badly Bethany was hurt. The conversation went like this:
Holt: You mean you don’t know?
Cheri: Identify what?
Holt: Cheri . . . her arm is gone.
Cheri: (long pause) Gone where?
Tom Hamilton, Bethany’s father, was practically to be put under for a knee operation at the small local hospital when he was informed that the doctors vital the table he was on for an emergency. There had been a shark bother on a little girl at Makua Beach. His middle sank. He knew he had only a fifty-fifty chance, since Bethany and Alana were the only little ladies on the island with enough guts to surf the place. He got up and stood in the hallway as the victim was wheeled into the hospital. He held his breath. He would be familiar with in a second. Alana had dark brown hair; Bethany’s was all but white blonde. As the gurney turned the corner all the look went out of his chest. The hair was blonde.
It has been widely stated that the tiger shark’s characteristic serrated tooth shape and grotesquely commanding jaws have evolved for trained feeding on great sea turtles, whose shells cannot be split with an axe. Called the hyena of the sea, the tiger shark strikes with a sawing motion of its bottom jaw against the razor blades of the excellent jaw. Bethany’s arm was removed so cleanly, with such precision and efficiency, that the operating doctor was confused when he first saw the wound. He wanted to recognize who the son-ofa- bitch was that had amputated without his permission.
The next day, after word had spread through the islands, Laird Hamilton (no relation to Bethany) called his father, the legendary surfer/fisherman Billy Hamilton and told him if he didn’t journey out and kill this fucking shark, he was going to do it himself. Fourteen days ensuing, much to the outrage of the indigenous Hawaiian population, Billy Hamilton and Ralph Little hauled to the beach a 14-foot tiger shark with a ragged dorsal fin. It took a gutted 5-foot gray shark as bait and a barbed hook the size of dinner plate. Butchering it offshore away from prying eyes, they found no evidence of Bethany’s arm or her watch or the 18-inch semi-circle of surfboard that the shark had taken with it. The shark would have long before regurgitated the irritating fiberglass and foam and probably the arm with it. Yet, removing the jaws and matching them to Bethany’s board revealed a model forensic fit to within two micrometers. Aside in the jaws, the single other part of the shark that was saved was a section of its dusky, striped skin. This skin was to be had to Boy Akana, a local Kahuna, who would fashion it into a ceremonial drum to call on the ancient spirits to calm the seas. Governor Lingle would decree in a people statement that the business was now closed and that the tourist industry should “just buy back to normal.”
Seven days consequent, Bethany Hamilton pays a visit to Ralph Immature’s multiple with Billy Hamilton and her father Tom. She is there to visit the jaws that took her arm. Crouching beside the bloody things inside the center of the lawn, they come up to her shoulder. For long moments the gentlemen stand around uncomfortably as she curiously pokes at the razor sharp teeth one by one. Then she looks up at Billy Hamilton and asks if she can have some of the teeth for a necklace she would like to make—an amulet to protect her within the future. The males are so stunned that nobody speaks.
Bethany Hamilton, 200 yards inside the spot where the shark that attacked her was caught. Hanalei Bay Pier, November 2004. (Photo, Matt George)
Upon leaving the many with her Father, Bethany is heard saying to herself, I hope I don’t have dreams.
On the way dwelling, with a sleeping Bethany next to him while in the car, Tom Hamilton begins to hum a tune he hasn’t heard or sung since he was from the U.S. Navy as a adolescent gunner’s mate. His lips travel slightly as he recalls the words of the Navy hymn:
Eternal Father, well to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
Driving on through the rain, the windshield wipers beating monotonously, these are the single words Tom Hamilton can remember. He reaches out to softly take his schoolgirl’s hand in his, in spite of this it is not there.
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