Author Norman Ollestad on Crazy for the Storm

TreeHugger: The relationship that you have with your father, that you recount in the book, is one that really pivots around a relationship with nature. You talk about how the things that you and your dad did together in a way, unknowingly, was preparation for surviving this ordeal that might have taken the life of any other 11 year old. What was it that you two did together that created this bond around the outdoors and nature?

Ollestad: Yeah, it was the glue that really brought us together and made for a beautiful relationship with my father. I grew up on Topanga Beach, born in '67, so the '70s was when I was really doing my thing down there.

My grandparents lived in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, so we would go surfing down there and sometimes take long road trips down the Baja Peninsula, across the Sea of Cortez on a ferry, drive mainland Mexico and surf the spots, and hang out down by Sayulita and Punta Mita, which are very fun intermediate surf spots down by Puerto Vallarta. In those days it was just dirt roads and nobody knew about them. We surfed alone. Now it's heavily populated.

But also I was back country skiing from a very young age. I started skiing when I was three and by the time I was four I was going in the back country with my father. He took me all over the western United States and to Europe skiing and he was all about nature.
Our goal was to totally lose ourselves in nature, to try to lock into harmony with it and mine its treasures, like beautiful powder snow in the trees, or good waves that are spinning off some hurricane or from some storm somewhere.

And it was all about that harmony. That's where we got our greatest satisfactions. Our greatest thrills came from our interaction with nature. When I woke up from the plane crash I was in a blizzard. I had been in a blizzard since I was three years old with my dad, many, many times. That would normally be scary or disorienting to an 11 year old, but I was quite comfortable there.

It did not faze me that it was a blizzard. It didn't really faze me all that much that it was kind of a white out, because the fog was mixed in, too. I just understood that you had to find things to orient yourself. Just get real close to the snow, feel the snow, there's a lot of instinctual stuff that I just can't necessarily explain.

Then another factor: we were on a steep, icy, 45-degree chute. I was able to determine that right away just by the way the chute rose up next to my shoulder and head. “OK, I'm on a steep chute.” I moved and a piece of the plane shot away as if through a trap door, OK.

Now I've skied ice many times as part of training for ski racing. Now I know I can't afford to slip. So if somebody doesn't get that, they sit up and think, "Oh!" And they topple over and go shooting down this ice slide, and they're dead. I knew right away where I was, what the situation was in terms of that I was in a chute, that there was a blizzard, and that these were all things I was familiar with, and that I had enjoyed to some degree in the past.

So it was not necessarily associated with something that was daunting. I think most importantly, even more important than the specific skills and orientations to nature, was this idea that I could read it. When I made my way down those nine hours, it was all about reading the terrain.

Instinctually, when there was that break in the storm, I looked down. And I saw where these canyons flowed. And I said, "OK. If I was in the back country with my dad, we would act like water. We would want to go follow these little gulches and find our way through these ridgelines."

It seemed like you would have to hike over it, but I learned from back country skiing that there's always a little way through it, even if you can't see it. It's around that little bulge of rock or something. I also understood not to get on the wrong side of some of the bigger ridgelines, because often if you got on the wrong side, you never recovered and stayed high enough.

And so I knew where the cabin was, and I just made sure I would always err on the eastern/north eastern side of these ridges. That's not something my dad sat me down and taught me, I just learned it through doing, and I really became in harmony with nature, even though I was fighting it.

Night was coming, it was ten degrees, it was hard to see the terrain even when it wasn't a 45 degree pitch and icy. It was pretty steep and a lot of times there was broken rock sticking through. Just hard to negotiate. Lower down, I was falling through the snow up to my neck. Again, I just had to work with what I had.

Sometimes it was just a matter of will of mind, keeping an optimistic attitude, and somewhere back there knowing that I was, in many ways, with a friend. Nature was sort of a friend and that, in the end, I'd experienced nature as a friend. And so I think it really helped me during those nine hours, because you can spend and waste a lot of energy pitting yourself against nature, when in fact, you don't have to do that. You just have to reframe it and try to embrace it.

TreeHugger: This intimate relationship comes through in the book very clearly. Your description of a harrowing experience reveals somebody who knows the elements well: knows how ice and snow behave, how fog behaves, and how waves and mountains behave. This is something that you continue to explore with your own son now, is that right?

Ollestad: Yes, absolutely. He's on the men's ski team, and we started skiing and surfing together when he was four. And I find it just of the utmost importance, one of the most important things I could do besides show him that I love him and express love.

One of the ways I do that is by going into nature with him and interacting with nature and having to navigate it. Sometimes you get your butt kicked by nature, but we all need to know that. That's nature is ultimately the one in charge. And then most of the time along the way, we get a lot of pleasure from it. So, yes, I'm a big proponent of getting right out there with your kids into nature.