Raising A Soul Surfer (5 page)

Mike went on to get a photography degree at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California. In the film, he plays the part of a photographer shooting Loraine Nicholson, who is playing Alana in the beach photo shoot scene in
Soul Surfer
.

Mike and Bethany’s stories are similar: Each was given a choice whether to be defeated or to come back stronger. These days, Mike keeps busy as a professional surf and lifestyle photographer, as well as speaking in defense of sharks from destructive fishing habits such as “finning” (cutting off the fin for food consumption and medical uses, and discarding the rest of the fish, often alive).

Still young, adventurous and full of energy, Mike and another buddy, Miguel, towed the rotting carcass of a wild boar out into the ocean with a jet ski. Miguel waited, finger on the ignition, as Mike lowered a video camera strapped to a long paddle. It wasn’t too long before a 16-foot tiger shark appeared and snatched the pig down in one gulp!

There is a lot of down time while scenes are being set up, but everyone seemed to make use of that time to catch up on endless cell phone calls. Sadly, this diminished the opportunity to get to know and interact with others on the set. Turning off all of those phones was critical during each scene take.

With the strong trade winds and saltwater, the hairdressers were at their wits’ end. So you won’t see your favorite hairdo in
Soul Surfer
! When you’re surfing, you don’t care how your hair looks. Actually you may care, but there isn’t too much you can do about it while getting tossed and turned by the waves. It was an unending task keeping the actors looking like movie stars.

Just being able to have our friends and family involved with us on this amazing project gave us a deeper sense of connection to the incredible fact that a movie was being made about us . . . about how a terrifying event on an October morning didn’t destroy us, but instead became a mighty outpouring of unprecedented blessing in our lives and in the lives of others.

A tsunami came to the Hawaiian Islands on February 27, 2010, during the movie production. An 8.8 magnitude earthquake had struck in faraway Chile. Immediately, seismologists warned that a possible 3- to 7-foot tidal wave would race from one end of the Pacific to the other.

Hawaii was right in its path.

Years ago, in the 1950s, our next-door neighbors told us they had lost their oceanfront house in a tsunami but survived by immediately climbing the hill behind their house when they noticed the receding waters in the bay. I realized that tsunamis are something to take seriously. So when the air raid sirens started blaring at 6:00
A.M
. on February 27, Sean disrupted our filming schedule and had everyone seek safety. The Turtle Bay Resort had rooms that were three stories high where they recommended the guests, actors and producers retreat.

We stayed put as the phone book tsunami inundation map showed we were high enough on the hill to avoid the surge. We
could look out of our window and watch as the neighbors packed up their barbecues, surfboards and jet skis.

We had packed up a car more than once for tsunami alerts in the past. They have all hit but were too small to be of real concern. I researched and knew nothing would endanger us, so we figured this would be an opportunity to catch a few un-crowded waves!

We loaded the car with surfboards and the camera after we saw the report that no tsunami was hitting other Pacific island locations in the path from Chile. The kids had a great surf session until the coast guard helicopter hovered and harassed them to leave the water. I have done intensive research on tsunamis and we have lived through so many false alarms that we were sure this one would have no impact. We have experienced so many really huge surf days that a three-foot surge among the regular waves is not going to keep us up on a hill.

Later, sitting on the beach, I realized that God was showing me a metaphor not only for the film we were making, but also for what has happened in our lives. The event that could have been a tsunami of destruction and fear has turned out to be a wave of blessing. God has always had a plan for us, and He only used the perceived tragedy to advance His plan and embrace the world with a tsunami of love. It was the fulfillment of Jeremiah 29:11 in our lives.

We were in the middle of God’s plan and we saw how He was using our lives to draw people to faith in Him. I could see that God has always kept us in His care. He was preparing Tom and me before we even knew Him personally and intimately.

The event that rocked our family didn’t send out destruction; it sent out a wave of hope and love in the form of a story of triumph over adversity through our trust in God. The tsunami of God’s impact in our lives has not run out of energy. In the
telling of our story, people are still being swept off their feet by God’s love.

Our journey to this place began long before that shark attacked Bethany. It began far away from the lush tropical beaches of Hawaii. It began with a New Jersey boy in thick square-framed glasses, and an athletic blonde California girl in San Diego.

1.
Laura Sheahen, “‘It’s All God’: Interview with Dennis Quaid,” Beliefnet.
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2005/11/Its-All-God-Interview-With-Dennis-Quaid.aspx
.

2
. “Hilo Hawaii’s Noah Johnson Wins the Quicksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau,” HoloHolo Hawai’i, January 1, 1999.
http://holoholo.org/quikeddy/q990101.html
.

The L
ORD
will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O L
ORD
,
endures forever—do not abandon the work of your hands
.
PSALM 138:8,
NIV

Tom was 13 years old
when he discovered the joy of surfing.

Does New Jersey strike you as a likely place for a thriving surf culture? News spreads fast and even faster in the surfing world. In August 1888, the cover of a magazine called the
National Police Gazette
, a New Jersey publication, featured a female surfer riding on a wave. This piece of East Coast history is documented by Skipper Funderburg and is part of the Surfing Heritage Foundation collection.

Fast track to 1963, when the Beach Boys had a mega hit song with “Surfing USA.” With the help of music, it seemed as if surf fever was catching on everywhere—including the barrier island resort town of Ocean City, New Jersey.

Tom’s dad moved the family there from central New Jersey when Tom was a toddler. Tom’s dad was a dentist, and I guess he figured he could fix teeth anywhere, so it might as well be close to the beach. So Tom, the youngest, and his two brothers, Mike
and Bob, and sister Pat, found themselves in quaint and family friendly Ocean City, a small town of around 8,000 people that swelled in number every summer. When summer rolled around, Ocean City’s famous boardwalks were crowded to bursting with a great view of friendly, rideable waves.

During that summer of 1963, the only thing that mattered to Tom and his best friend, Monk, were the waves peeling across the water off the jam-packed beach—waves that suddenly had a new meaning: Surfing!

For most Americans, surfing was just another novelty fad like the hula-hoop or 3D movies. Surfers were daredevils riding monstrous waves in Hawaii, or hanging 10 in bikini-clad California—both faraway places from Tom and Monk’s everyday world.

With his strong swimming background, it was a natural course of events that Tom found something to pursue outside of the pool. Of all his siblings, he was the rowdy one, the restless one, the “Trickster,” as his surf crew named him. His nickname came not because he was mischievous, although that was true as well, but because he could do some tricky things with a pool stick.

Tom got booted out of parochial school for pelting one of the sisters with an eraser. You can imagine that his good Irish Catholic parents might have thought they had their hands full with their fourth child, especially since they only meant to have three children.

Tom’s parents were steadfast, and like many in their generation, they made sure everyone was off to Mass each Sunday. It was more than just what they did; it was part of who they were as a classic Irish Catholic family.

As much trouble as Tom caused the poor nuns, and for all his complaining about those boring church services, if you asked my husband about it now, Tom knew that the seeds of the gospel
were planted in his heart because of the consistency and devotion his parents demonstrated in their faith.

Church wasn’t the only activity that was important to them. The Hamiltons were an athletic family, and the ocean was a big part of their life. They were all strong swimmers, including Tom’s mother. His parents actually met in a swimming pool on an ocean liner going to Ireland. Each was in college and already engaged to another but fell in love—hook, line and sinker—on the Atlantic Ocean. Tom’s brother Mike received swim scholarships and became a teacher at Atlantic City High School. He also became the school’s swim coach, and he was a lifeguard at the beach every summer until his retirement.

Like his brother, Tom also was a swimmer throughout high school, but it was surfing that truly grabbed his heart and soul. Right there at the end of Ocean City High School, across the crowded boardwalk, clean rideable waves came racing out of the Atlantic to curl along the sand bar next to the Music Pier. If you wanted to surf, you needed to have the right equipment to enjoy riding the waves.

With youthful determination, Tom’s best friend, Monk, got his hands on a surfboard. The’60s era surfboards, or tankers, as they were nicknamed, were clunky, oversized boards and weighed almost as much as your typical 13-year-old. The board was too heavy to carry alone.

The waves kept enticing from the end of the boardwalk, but there was no way that Monk could haul the board down to the beach. It might as well have been across the country. So the two boys came up with a plan. They would share the board and carry it together to and from the beach.

All that summer the two of them could be seen lugging around that giant board, Tom clutching the nose and Monk the tail, as they made their way across town. They learned to surf
in shifts, taking turns on the one board they had between them.

There was another serious hurdle Tom had to overcome in order to improve in his surfing. He was (and still is) very nearsighted—so much so that he wore thick black-rimmed glasses, not something you can wear in the saltwater and breaking waves. Without glasses, he was lost and disoriented in the water. Tom could not see the waves coming until they were right on top of him.

So Tom learned to rely on the feel of the water as it shifted and to anticipate the movement of other surfers around him. He knew that when everyone else suddenly paddled off toward the horizon, a set of waves was coming in. He learned to surf in an instinctively sensitive technique.

Years later, in Hawaii, Tom had his late takeoffs wired. He was known for surfing one particularly harrowing surf spot—a reef break where he’d drop into the waves with wild abandon, taking off at the last second. I said something about how crazy he was to take such late hairy drops, as if he lived for thrills. Usually, when surfers see a big set coming, everyone paddles hard to pick up speed to drop into a wave. If it is too late to drop in, you can have a very nasty wipeout, especially when the waves have some size. Tom confessed to me that his bravado came from his poor eyesight. He could never really see just how late his takeoff was, so he perfected his instincts and learned to drop into the biggest and gnarliest waves somewhat blindly. Amazingly, he made the drop most of the time.