Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
Norman Ollestad, 2009
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061766787
Summary
From the age of three, Norman Ollestad was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing by the charismatic father he both idolized and resented. These exhilarating tests of skill prepared "Boy Wonder," as his father called him, to become a fearless champion—and ultimately saved his life.
Flying to a ski championship ceremony in February 1979, the chartered Cessna carrying Norman and his father crashed into the San Gabriel Mountains. "Dad and I were a team, and he was Superman," Ollestad writes. But now Norman's father was dead, and the devastated eleven-year-old had to descend the treacherous, icy mountain alone.
Set amid the spontaneous, uninhibited surf culture of Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s, this riveting memoir, written in crisp Hemingwayesque prose, recalls Ollestad's childhood and the magnetic man whose determination and love infuriated and inspired him—and also taught him to overcome the indomitable. As it illuminates the complicated bond between an extraordinary father and his son, Ollestad's powerful and unforgettable true story offers remarkable insight for us all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 30, 1967
• Raised—Malibu, California, USA
• Education—University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• Currently—Venice, California
Norman Ollestad studied creative writing at UCLA and attended UCLA Film School. He grew up on Topanga Beach in Malibu and now lives in Venice, California. He is the father of an eight-year-old son. (From the publisher.)
More
Ollestad is an American author of contemporary fiction and non-fiction. Ollestad is also an avid surfer and skier. On February 19, 1979, he was in a plane crash with his father; his father's girlfriend, Sandra; and the pilot of a chartered Cessna. Sandra was 30. Norman's father was 43. Norman was 11. By the end of the 9-hour ordeal, Norman was the only survivor. He wrote about the tragedy in his 2009 bestseller Crazy For The Storm: A Memoir Of Survival. He has also written a novel, Driftwood, released in 2006.
He was raised in the raw and uninhibited surfside community of Topanga Beach, in Malibu, California. He was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing at a very young age by the father he idolized. Often paralyzed by fear, young Norman resented losing his childhood to his father’s reckless and demanding adventures, even as he began to reap the rewards of his training. He rode his first wave at just a year old, via a makeshift papoose strapped to his father’s back. Years later he would prove a talented and competitive hockey player and skier, winning the Southern California Slalom Skiing Championship at age 11.
Then, in February 1979, a chartered Cessna carrying 11-year old Norman, his father, his father’s girlfriend and the pilot, crashed into Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains. Norman’s father—a man who was both his coach and hero— was dead, his girlfriend soon to follow. Suspended at over 8,000 feet and engulfed in a blizzard, the grief-stricken boy descended the icy mountain alone. Putting his father’s passionate lessons to work, Norman defied the elements and made it through alive—the sole survivor of the crash. As he told the Los Angeles Times after his ordeal, “My dad told me never to give up.”
As an adolescent, and young adult, Norman resumed the pursuit of the passions that fueled his father’s adventure-seeking nature. Traveling to St. Anton in the Austrian Alps, he re-discovered a love for fresh backcountry powder—an appreciation that had once been imposed upon him by his father. It was during his time living in European ski resorts that Ollestad decided to become a writer. He returned to Los Angeles and enrolled in UCLA Film School where he also studied creative writing.
In 2006 Ollestad began the process of returning to the painful memories of the event that claimed his father’s life in preparation for writing Crazy For The Storm. Returning to the steep mountainside of the crash site, Ollestad found pieces of wreckage, and reconnected with the family who gave him shelter after he emerged from his long struggle to safety.
Ollestad calls the Crazy For The Storm a tribute to his gregarious and charismatic father. Norman Ollestad Sr. had been a child actor, appearing in the movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Later he joined the FBI, but soon grew disillusioned with J. Edgar Hoover's petty diktats and wrote a book exposing them called Inside The FBI, which did not endear him to his former employers. He later retreated to the hippie enclave of Topanga Beach, at the south end of Malibu, where he surfed and earned a desultory living as a lawyer.
Ollestad sketches life at Topanga as nearly idyllic: Surfing just outside the front door, naked people on the beach, a cluster of simple houses on the sand (now long gone, bulldozed to make way for movie-star mansions). Crazy for the Storm opens with a photo of his father taking Norman surfing, in a baby carrier.
It is his father who towers over the story, with his hunger for life and new experiences of all kinds, good and bad—pushing Norman, whom he dubs "Boy Wonder," into all sorts of situations that seem reckless now.
Crazy For the Storm quickly became one of a talked about book, cracking both the top ten bestseller lists for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The memoir was also selected as a Starbucks June 2009 book selection, iTunes picked it as one of the best summer reads. and it was chosen by Amazon as one of the Best Books of the Year.
Ollestad continues to travel far and wide to find uncrowded, high-quality waves. His latest adventures include mainland Mexico, Central America and atolls off Timor in Indonesia. Skiing remains an equal passion to surfing—taking his son, who is on the Mammoth Ski Team, into the wilderness when the powder is good. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Tragic and exotic.... The inventiveness that saved this brave boy from snowy oblivion doesn’t help shape the narrative he writes.... Mr. Ollestad falls back on the conventional format of cross-cutting, so that chapters about his pre-catastrophe childhood alternate with short, crisp, impressionistic glimpses of the plane crash and its aftermath.... At least Mr. Ollestad is very clear about the overall point that he wants to make. “There is more to life than just surviving it,” he writes. “Inside each turbulence there is a calm—a sliver of light buried in the darkness.”
Janet Maslin - New York Times
This book is not perfect: Some of the descriptive passages are difficult to follow, and perhaps less precise than they could be, so that we get lost in the fog on the mountain, just as we sometimes flounder in the author's own inchoate emotions around this traumatic and defining moment of his life. But these are minor complaints. A portrait of a father's consuming love for his son, Crazy for the Storm will keep you up late into the night.
Bill Gifford - Washington Post Book World
Cinematic and personal...Ollestad's insights into growing up in a broken home and adolescence in southern California are as engrossing as the story of his trip down the mountain.
Chicago Tribune
Never a dull moment....[Ollestad has] written a beautiful story about a thrill-loving father—"the man with the sunshine in his eyes"—who taught his boy not just how to live, but how to thrive.
Houston Chronicle
The memoir is as much about a father-son relationship as it is a survival story...Ollestad says his father's life philosophy about surfing and skiing—"knowing there's always a place to go and find peace, clear your mind"—got him down the mountain and through life.
USA Today
Ollestad's memoir intersperses his harrowing childhood trauma as the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed his father with his coming of age in the '70s West Coast culture of surfing, skiing and skateboarding. A competent and engaging narrator, Ollestad evokes emotional intensity without descending into sentimentality and creates memorable portraits of his heroic father and his mother's abusive boyfriend. Granted, Ollestad presents his 11-year-old self as a tad more introspective and worldly wise than one might expect, but as the adult Ollestad reflects on how he was shaped by the hard-living, extreme sports culture of his family and community, the essence of a young man forced to grow up too quickly rings true.
Publishers Weekly
An engrossing story of adventure, survival and psychological exploration. Ollestad hits several notes that should make his memoir irresistible to those looking for page-turning but thought-provoking summer reading along the lines of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997). In the winter of 1979, the 11-year-old Ollestad survived a plane crash in which his father and his father's girlfriend were killed. Alternating with young Norman's nine-hour trek to safety are scenes from the year preceding the crash, when the boy took a surfing trip with his father through the jungle along Mexico's Pacific coast. The flashbacks sections are the most fascinating parts of the book, and Ollestad ably captures the contrast between his charismatically cool father, Norman Sr., and his bullying stepfather-to-be, Nick. A photo of the elder Ollestad surfing with his one-year-old son strapped to his back captures the essence of the author's relationship with Norman Sr. He is convinced that his father's gentle but unyielding insistence that young Norman develop a sense of mastery over physical, emotional and mental challenges helped him survive the crash. The chapters that follow also suggest that his subtler ordeals with Nick were similarly important in the building of his character. Though some of the minutely detailed descriptions of his journey down the mountain read like creative-writing assignments gone awry, Ollestad presents a captivating account of high-altitude disaster that nicely dovetails with his coming-of-age story in '70s California. Deep and resonant.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the various ways to interpret the book's title, "Crazy for the Storm"? How did this perspective/attitude shape young Norman's personality and life? Did it help save his life?
2. Was Norman's father too demanding of his son? How has parenting changed since the era of the book, the 1970's? How is the father-son relationship like or unlike your own relationship with your own father?
3. On that fateful day of the crash, little Norman was forced to draw from all the tools and lessons his father had instilled in him from birth. Discuss the connections between what his father exposed him to and when he had to put those experiences to quick use on the mountain.
4. Have you been faced with a seemingly insurmountable situation that forced you to reach deep down inside yourself in order to make it through?
5. What sports, activities or hobbies give you the most satisfaction? Discuss the role your favorite sport, activity or hobby plays in your life? Could you cope without it?
6. Have you had early childhood experiences forced upon you that at first you resisted and rejected, but later became a most favored or treasured experience, skill or pastime?
7. Empowering messages were engrained in Norman, the "Boy Wonder," from an early age such as "Never Give Up" and "We can do it all." These words fueled Norman to keep moving forward each time he weakened or seemed about to succumb. What words and thoughts wield significant power to you?
8. How does the tone from the beginning of the book compare to the end? Does Norman seem to have reconciled the tension generated by his father's insistence to push beyond the limits of the comfort zone? At the conclusion of the book, is the author softened, resolved or conflicted?
9. In contrast to his father's risk-taking nature, young Norman seemed to possess an inherent sense of reserve and caution. Throughout the story, when do we see Norman first begin to emerge from his fears and begin to embrace the joy of the thrill seeking his father craved?
10. There were a few important women that influenced Norman early in his life, including Patricia Chapman who had provided the warm, safe haven when he finally made it down the mountain. How did each relationship impact him and shape him? Did they offer a counterbalance to the dominant male personalities in his life?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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