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Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
By Norman Ollestad.Ecco. 272pages. $25.99.
Little boys like to play at adventure and dream of danger in faraway places. But what 11-year-old Norman Ollestad endured atop a California mountain in 1979 was a nightmare.
A wiz on the slopes, the young Ollestad, his father and his father's girlfriend, Sandra, were flying to a ski championship ceremony that February when their Cessna charter slammed into a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains. As a blizzard raged, Ollestad, banged up and sporting little more than Vans sneakers and a light sweater, faced almost certain death.
Ollestad alone survived, and the story he tells is incredible. How did he manage?
“Crazy for the Storm” is also a memoir of boyhood and growing up in Southern California in the '70s. Ollestad cuts between a gripping account of the crash and his portrait of a youth spent surfing and skiing. Ollestad's dad looms large. The elder Ollestad was a daredevil who goaded his son to take on big waves in summer and barrel down steep slopes in the winter. After one particularly harrowing turn in some treacherous powder, young Norman complains to his father, “That's why we shouldn't have come here. It's too deep.” But dad isn't having it: “It's never too deep, Ollestad.”
That metaphor extends throughout “Crazy for the Storm.” Where does risk become recklessness?
The line was often blurred for Ollestad, as he struggled to earn his father's respect, while trying not to break his neck.
But such goading prepared Ollestad for a trial greater than any wave he ever surfed, and here is the root of the grit and determination Ollestad would have to muster as he faced down calamity.
The crash left Ollestad stunned: “My head was light, eyes blurry. I had no idea where I was. Eyes began to close and I surrendered.” But over the nine hours he was on the mountain, his resourcefulness never deserted him. For that he credits his father: “And I knew – I knew that what he had put me through saved my life.”
