David and the Shark Essay
This class essay was where my healing really started.
I was 24 years old, in graduate school at USC Columbia studying Media Arts, and I wanted to take a writing class.
It was "an elective," meaning I was not required to take it, but I was trying new things.
The final assignment was to write a personal essay, and I knew I needed to get this story out of my system.
It was a tough one to write. My emotions around the death of my friend were still raw. I had a lot of guilt. And a lot of questions as to why he would kill himself.
Somehow, the image of him towing the headless carcass of that shark back to sea had struck me.
This essay was my first attempt of many to find out why.
December 13, 1993
English 460
Dr. Carolyn Matalene
David and the Shark
In dreams I float back to the warm salty waters of my youth to a place called North Inlet. To a place where waves roll between two sand islands into a small bay, that links with creeks that link to rivers that flow near my home, Georgetown, SC. I came to know it with my father who would take me there to bait the trap for minnows and fish in the channel for flounder. This was the place that I first saw an osprey, making rounds from the nest to the inlet mouth in its never ending search for fish. This was where I learned the locations of the sandbars, learning they had no place, but they moved in swirls, pushed by waves and tides along the inlet floor. This is the place, if I had to choose a spot on Earth, that feels most like paradise.
In the summer of 1993 I returned to North inlet with my friend David during the last summer we were to spend at home. We each had one year left of college, both glad to have a final chance to do the things we had done every summer. David went off to boarding school in the ninth grade. I was glad to have him home every summer so we could go to the beach together, wind surf in the ocean together, and go camping at North Inlet together. We did a lot but I mostly enjoyed his company because he loved to argue.
It wasn’t that he liked to argue in the sense of conflict; he didn’t like conflict at all. What he liked was discussion. We would discuss to the point that seemed like we were arguing because the best discussions are those that have opposing points of view. He picked he the view opposite of mine so he could flex his rationalization skills. I, on the other hand, believed in instinct.
He liked to think and invent and was obsessive about it. Once he tried for hours to get a fire started by rubbing two sticks together. He couldn’t get it to work so he finally up the idea and decided it was impossible. Anyone who believed it could be done believed a lie. This was typical of his obsessions.
When we got to the inlet David had a plan in which I would inevitably be included. He wanted to catch a shark on a trap that he had invented. I didn’t mind going in on the plan at first because we shared similar views about sharks. We hated them. Having grown up on the coast we learned to fear them. While wind surfing off of Pawley’s Island we would hurriedly scramble back onto our boards after we fell off, being careful not to dangle any body parts in the water. My fear of them stemmed from the time I was sailing towards a teeming school of fish. A six footer jumped out of the midst of the school, spun sideways and landed on its back. It was feeding. I was so scared I could barely sail back in. Catching a shark in a trap was one way to get rid of a menace to our enjoyment of all salt water.
The trap began with a hook the size of a man’s index finger and thumb. That was attached to three feet of stainless steel leader wire, which was attached to six feet of chain the size you might see locking a large gate. The weight of all this metal was meant to be suspended in the water for a shark to find, so ten feet of nylon rope was attached to the chain on one end and a car’s inner tube on the other. The anchor for the whole contraption was a twenty pound cinder block that was to sit on the ocean floor while the hook, lifted slightly by the tide, suspended nearby, enticing a shark with a bloody scrap of fish bait. The trap was simple and effective. “I’ll check it in the morning,” David said.
Including myself in the plan, I followed David’s lead through the inlet. I was in my own boat, tracing the line he had made at dusk the day before by aligning two landmarks on the shore. After a mile of riding we stopped. We couldn’t find it.
We asked two shrimpers who were nearby if they had seen an inner tube anywhere. One of them yelled , “We saw somthin’ about two hundred yards south,” pointing behind the wake of their small boat. I was the first to veer left and just as my eyes were glad to be out of the morning glare they spotted something odd on the water. The inner tube I expected to see would be sitting flat on the surface of the water, but this one was standing straight up, like a black pair of sideways, swollen lips. Immediately after I spotted the tube it jerked below the surface of the water, my stomach dropping behind it. The feeling overcame me that we were going to have a big ordeal on our hands and the rest of the day would be consumed by time spent tending to the shark.
The animal on the end of that line was big. Big enough to leave alone, to let survive, threat or no threat to our enjoyment of all that was salt water.
David was soon leaning over the edge of the boat, pulling on the rope, hand over hand, pulling the shark getting closer and closer to the surface, closer to his head. I began to fear that something would happen to us, a mile out in the ocean, with a shark on our hands. I imagined the shark thrusting its mouth out of the water, and biting his head off. My fears came from the images in my mind of catching sharks on fishing lines. I expected thrashing, water splashing our faces, beating with clubs, and confusion. None of that happened. All I saw was a swirl and a mound of water under David’s face. The beast was barely alive after dragging the cinder block all over the ocean floor for eleven hours.
I yelled over to David to ask how big it was.
“I can’t tell exactly, but it’s over ten feet.” “I’m going to tow it in.”
He tied the rope to a cleat at the back of his boat and started the long haul back to shore. I began to feel guilty about how the shark was going to die. We would have to pull it up to the beach and wait for it to suffocate as the tide dropped. My father told me when I was six how to kill a wounded bird by wringing its neck. This seemed cruel at the time, but I learned it was right. Put it out of its misery was holding out to be true even in this case, even with a shark. I couldn’t believe I wanted to set it free. All of the hatred that lived in me for so long died, and pity resurrected itself in its place.
In spite of my feelings, I didn’t mention to David that we shouldn’t kill it. When a knight finally reaches his dragon, he doesn’t let it go, he slays it. And besides, the quest would not have been complete without the jaws, the trophy, of that shark.
There on the beach I saw the largest shark I had ever seen. It was as long as our boats, fourteen feet. Its belly was as wide as that of a full grown horse, with dark bands wrapping down its sides from the top of the spine. We later learned the teeth that fed this belly were sharp enough to cut the hairs on the back of our hands. The teeth, the stripes, and the attitude gave this Goliath its name: tiger shark. Its eye, as big as a baseball, watched us watching it for hours. Finally it died.
I didn’t stay on the beach for long after that. Four hours had already passed by and I had had enough. I went fishing for a while, but came back soon to find out what David planned to do with the shark now that it was dead.
When I got there David was gone. The gray, conical head was lying in the sand next to the flow of the outgoing tide. Standing there alone next to it, I felt left out. It was if I missed the funeral. David was in the inlet. He was about midway through, at the threshold between land and sea when I saw him. He was standing behind the steering wheel so he could see the waves before him over the high bow. The weight of the rest of the shark was invisible beneath the surface but I could see its weight straining the outboard motor, making the bow rise upwards. Something struck me about what I saw, but all I could think about was the size of the shark that would find the sunken carcass.
Three months later I found out that David had created another apparatus: another trap. This one began with a simple garden hose taped to the exhaust pipe of his car. It ran into a slightly rolled down window that was also taped shut. The vents inside the car were also taped so no air could get out, or in. This trap also worked, unfortunately. Once again, David tediously followed a plan through to its completion.
In dreams I float back to the warm salty waters of my youth.
The image of David and the shark in the inlet struck me when I saw it, but now it strikes me even more. It’s a picture of a meaningful place, a place that stands out strong in my memory. It’s a picture of rhythms, of cycles, of movement and change. I have tried to find answers to my questions about David’s death. As of yet, I feel there are no answers, but the image of him in the inlet tells me something. It doesn’t give me answers but it gives me enough.
This essay gave me chills.