PREVIOUSLY

• A Shark May Have Bit a Surfer at Moonstone Beach Yesterday

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A little less than three years after Eric Gurney was born, Jaws came out. It’s still a special effects masterpiece, even if the prop shark looks a little cheesy now. It often malfunctioned, and Spielberg didn’t end up giving it all that much screen time. He created the film’s atmosphere by using cinematic tricks that forced viewers to assume the shark was nearby: a dorsal fin gliding uninhibited through glassy ocean water, buoyant yellow barrels dragged over the surface — a swimmer, one second there, the next, gone. The duh-duns. Less is more. The movie was better for it. Spielberg ended up being grateful for the shark’s wonky idiosyncrasies.

The film grossed $475 million and Universal greenlit another, Jaws 2, which wasn’t nearly as good. Didn’t matter. Eric can’t remember how he wound up in the theater watching it, sometime around when he turned six years old, and it terrified him. He quit swimming, even in pools. Soon after, the nightmares started. Eric would see he and his brother sleeping in their beds, and the viewpoint would pan around the room. Water would start gushing out of a pool drain in between their beds and the room would fill up. Cue the duh-duns — and WHAM the shark crashes through the door, and Eric is forced to swim for safety, to the basement, to a closet, maybe to a cupboard. 

The shark was always a metaphor for something scaring him, Eric had long ago decided. It often changed forms: sometimes the shark had two dorsal fins, or no head. Trauma became a shark. Loved ones dying became a shark. After escaping so many sharks in dreamland, Eric began to think he’d someday have to deal with a real one. A surfer for decades, all the time he spent in the water didn’t dissolve that impression.

Probably millions of people watched Jaws and lost the ability to swim without thinking about killers underneath them, convinced that if they went into the ocean a shark would nab them, and pretty much all of them have been wrong. Eric wasn’t.

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Eric hadn’t eaten breakfast yet when he and a friend paddled out last Sunday morning. They were out a little later than they’d planned to be; finding a beach with the right surf had taken about an hour or so, and they wound up at Moonstone Beach at around 8:30. The waves weren’t huge, but the lineup was full. Eric recognized several of the other surfers out there, some by name, some just by their face. 

He’s been surfing for around four decades, but he’s now in his 50s, and if he’s out longer than an hour or so it starts to hurt. He wears a watch to keep track of time, and he saw it’d been close to an hour and a half. All right, he thought, one more and I’m going in. Eric waited for another set to roll in, sitting on his bodyboard, a surfboard about the length of his torso. It doesn’t have any fins on the bottom; for extra propulsion, he wore a pair of flippers on his feet. He didn’t have much on his mind. 

Fifteen minutes before, he and his friend, Tony, had noticed a few seals hanging out further asea. They liked seeing seals when they surf, Eric told the Outpost during an interview earlier this week. The seals make them feel comfortable, “because they’re lovely,” he said, “and because that’s what sharks like to eat. They’re not gonna go for me.”

The seals disappeared, and Tony said he saw a strange splash. It didn’t look like a seal’s; it was larger than the kind of splashes seals make, and besides, seals are so graceful they hardly splash at all. 

“I said, ‘Dude, it’s July. Don’t worry about sharks,’” Eric said. They’re usually more of a threat during colder months, when they migrate back towards the coast from the open ocean. “‘They never — that’s not ‘til the fall.’”

They got back to it. Eric waited. The water was placid and dark, the sky grey and the sun hidden. The board started to vibrate, rock back and forth — Eric was confused. Am I sitting on a rock? he wondered. It stopped, abruptly, and Eric pushed himself up to see what was happening. His legs dangled in the ocean, his head careened over it. He saw a silhouette. All black. It came into view, and he could see the whole body, top-down, swimming six feet beneath him, tail fin, dorsal, snout, turning in a long arc back towards him — a shark, 10 feet long. The upper half of its tail fin was folded over, and Eric watched it snap to attention, like a sail unfurling in the wind, and begin to ascend. 

It’s coming up around my right, he thought, and he moved as far left as he could, the left half of his body hanging off of the board in the sea. Eric had only his right hand keeping hold of the board as the shark rose, cutting a sharp angle perpendicular to his board, just underneath it, and it breached the surface. He saw its back to the left of his board; he didn’t look at the head on his right. Something told him not to. Eric shifted. The shark curled upwards and bit — Eric put his free hand on its back, balancing, the follow in a dance no human has ever led. It jerked the board, got a mouthful of foam with a dash of wetsuit polypropylene, released the board, thrashed away from him, and disappeared. 

It felt like a salmon, Eric said. He knew that texture. It calmed him. He was calm for no time at all before he completely understood what had happened in the last 10 seconds, and he started swimming for shore, overwhelmed with panic, arms and legs churning the water, still still. If it comes back, he thought, I have no more leverage. I’m totally in the water. If it comes back to bite, I’m going to get bit. He made it to the beach, and the other freaked-out half-dozen surfers who had seen the incident came in too. They hit the beach almost simultaneously.

He was fine. The board had a perfect negative of a shark’s mouth in it, about 10 inches in diameter; his wetsuit, a small tear. None of its teeth broke his skin. Eric and Tony hung out for another half-hour or so on the beach. People wanted to tell him they were glad he was OK. And they wanted photos of the board. He met a guy who claimed he was with the Coast Guard, who took a few and said he’d report the incident. (Eric later contacted the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who sent him a lengthy incident report to fill out.) 

They left and went to eat breakfast in McKinleyville, but before that they stood in the parking lot for a minute. 

“Yeah,” Tony said. “July, huh?”

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Eric made his peace with the incident quickly. He and Tony talked it out over breakfast, and then he saw his girlfriend and hashed it out some more. He went back home, to Eureka, later.

So far as almost getting mauled goes, it was a pretty great experience, he said. He’s glad he didn’t look at its face when it made its move on his board. He has several friends who have had similar experiences; one of them described what he saw as a trash barrel full of teeth with water pouring into it right next to him. “I mean, if I saw that next to me,” he said, “how would you — how would you go to sleep then?!” 

Eric is proud of how he reacted, staying calm, moving to the right place out of harm’s way without hesitation. Decades of surfing made moving around the board a simple instinct. A newbie maybe would have frozen, he said, put their weight in the wrong place and fallen off. He said he’s heard some people have survived their shark encounters by fighting, jabbing their fingers in its eyeballs, punching its sensitive snout. He’s just glad he avoided being injured. His friend who saw the toothy trash can didn’t get bit, but another acquaintance of his, Scott Stephens, survived a serious one in 2012. The shark raked its teeth along his torso, but it avoided his arteries. He still surfs. If Eric had had an experience more like Scott’s, he said, he would be in the hospital rueing his response. Only a tiny handful of people to ever live have gone through what Eric did, and he’s grateful to experience the privilege, but only because he was uninjured. He doesn’t want to experience that again.

He harbors no ill will towards that shark nor its cousins at-large. It was just doing what it was designed to do, he said, exploring for a potential meal with its mouth. It didn’t make him feel like a prey animal, he said. 

“It’s a situation where you are reminded of what we don’t want to be reminded of,” Eric said. “In that moment, you don’t have an ego, you don’t have a name, you don’t have a number. You’re not really a member of civilization. You’re just a biological organism. You’re just a creature in the wild, with other creatures who are a lot bigger and stronger than you are, and that’s our situation on Earth. It’s just that we cover it up with civilization.”

He’s always wanted to touch a shark — preferably from a boat while it feeds on a whale carcass or something, but this will do. It was “spiritual,” he said, and he was surprised by its similarity to a fish. A friend told him if he’d stroked it the other way, it would have felt rough. But he got the smooth side and it kept him calm. He doesn’t fish much anymore, but he used to frequently. “I have nothing but positive associations with fish,” Eric said. “…And that touch, what was being communicated through that touch, was really powerful too. At the time, I wouldn’t — I didn’t have any words, right? But just the thought, of fish, and all of the positive associations with that, and it just gave this current, of ‘Ah, it’s okay to be calm.’ Like, ‘This is a fish. It’s a really, really big fish, but it’s not going to hurt you. You’re going to be okay.’” 

All of that, of course, he came up with later. The feeling was there; the words were not. Eric is a writer, and clarifying an experience by assigning words to it is a process he’s carried out many times. “When I’m telling, like, describing it all, it’s a little bit, um, it’s a little bit false,” Eric said, “because I’m putting all these words to this after the fact, and in the moment, it was just, like — it was just something that happened so immediately. And there’s no words.”

“But that’s what we do,” he continued. “We’re human beings. We tell stories to ourselves and to each other. That’s who we are. So that’s my story right now. It could change, but it feels right.”

The shark had done him a favor. Eric had been certain for so long that he’d one day have to deal with a real shark, in a real ocean, not a psychological monster lurking as a metaphor. Now, he said, the loop had been closed. He didn’t have a shark dream all week.