Surfing Movie Bethany Hamilton and the Teeth of the Tiger

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• Publié par: normancoy1989
• Publié le: 01 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• Licence : En savoir +
  Paternité, partage des conditions initiales à l'identique
• Langue: English

Extrait

Surfing Movie Bethany Hamilton and the Teeth of the Tiger

Red Water: Bethany Hamilton as well as the Teeth of the Tiger

MATT GEORGE

Ha’ena, Kauai, Hawaii—October 31, 2003.

She’d been leading a daredevil life for weeks at this time. And from the end, she had no idea of the trouble she was getting herself into. Swimming beneath the moon, swimming beneath the radar, still swimming. Always swimming. Hungry for life, for survival. Starving with call for. Patrolling the reefs for opportunity, for flesh. Swinging her enormous model with the regularity of a metronome, propelling her 14 feet of girth with the uncomplicated pull and intent of a heavily forces shewarrior. With her ragged, 14-inch dorsal fin breaking the surface, she’d been bumping into surfers for weeks at present. Testing them, feeling their fear, waiting for her time. They seemed such effortless prey. Slow, awkward, lounging on the surface like something sick. And now it was in her path. It was time. Another was here, apart inside the trip. Alone and frail, and this one looked so small and weak. She approached her prey inside side, taking her time, timing the strokes of the thin, pale arm that dipped off the surfboard in a slow rhythm of bubbles. Twenty feet . . . ten feet . . . five feet . . . and with one last savage kick of her big tail she opened her jaws in a ragged yawn. Taking the thin pale arm in her mouth, she clamped down with over sixteen tons of sawing pressure. As her teeth met, she effortlessly plucked the thing among the body that once owned it.

The bite was so clean and painless that Bethany Hamilton, 13, noticed that the sea had turned red before she realized that her arm was gone at the shoulder. A strange serenity came over her, a warmth, as her body began to scream its outrage. Spurting a deep, colorful, burgundy-colored blood, she struggled over to her basic friend, Alana Blanchard, also thirteen, and could solitary manage the words, I think a shark just attacked me. Alana told her to not even joke of such matters. Then Alana eyes saw something that her mind couldn’t grasp. The bleeding stump where her crucial friend’s left arm used to be. Alana’s stomach revolted and purged twice before she called for her father and her brother who were paddling for a nearby wave.

Imagine the dilemma of Holt Blanchard, 45, who was now nearly a half mile offshore with his son and his lass and a profusely bleeding and seriously injured Bethany Hamilton and a fat, dangerous shark somewhere below. After struggling to apply a tourniquet with his rash guard, he now had an impossible decision to make. Should he send his kids on ahead, across the deep lagoon, to keep them away from a bleeding Bethany? And if so, how could he protect them? Should he keep them close? And if so, could he put himself between them and the shark if it returned? For one brief moment he even concentration of slitting his own wrists on the ragged edge of Bethany’s board and slipping into the sea to await his fate while the other three made for shore. He had no time to deliberate. He made his decision on instinct. Keep the family close, expression the danger at once. He instructed his daughter to keep talking to a quickly fading Bethany while he and his son rigged her leash and began dragging her to shore.

Cheri Hamilton, mother of Bethany, was driving so fast behind the ambulance that the cops pulled her over. She hadn’t seen Bethany conversely, and had no idea about her condition. Frantic, it wasn’t until the ambulance driver called back to cops with a walkie-talkie that they let Cheri travel. As she mashed the accelerator to the floor, a call came in on her cell phone. It was Holt Blanchard. Cheri asked him how badly Bethany was hurt. The conversation went like this:

Holt: You shameful you don’t know?

Cheri: Be on familiar terms with what?

Holt: Cheri . . . her arm is gone.

Cheri: (long pause) Gone where?

Tom Hamilton, Bethany’s father, was practically to be put under for a knee operation at the small local hospital when he was informed that the doctors compulsory the table he was on for an emergency. There had been a shark harass on a immature teenager at Makua Beach. His center sank. He knew he had solitary a fifty-fifty chance, since Bethany and Alana were the individual juvenile girls on the island with enough guts to surf the place. He got up and stood inside hallway as the victim was wheeled into the hospital. He held his breath. He would know in a second. Alana had dark brown hair; Bethany’s was just about white blonde. As the gurney turned the corner all the look went out of his chest. The hair was blonde.

It has been widely stated that the tiger shark’s characteristic serrated tooth shape and grotesquely controlling jaws have evolved for skilled feeding on fat sea turtles, whose shells cannot be split with an axe. Called the hyena of the sea, the tiger shark strikes

with a sawing motion of its bottom jaw against the razor blades of the finest jaw. Bethany’s arm was removed so cleanly, with such precision and efficiency, that the operating doctor was confused when he first saw the wound. He wanted to be on familiar terms with who the son-ofa- bitch was that had amputated without his permission.

The next day, after word had spread through the islands, Laird Hamilton (no relation to Bethany) called his father, the legendary surfer/fisherman Billy Hamilton and told him if he didn’t travel out and kill this fucking shark, he was going to do it himself. Fourteen days succeeding, much to the outrage of the indigenous Hawaiian population, Billy Hamilton and Ralph Childish hauled to the beach a 14-foot tiger shark with a ragged dorsal fin. It took a gutted 5-foot gray shark as bait and a barbed hook the size of dinner plate. Butchering it offshore away from prying eyes, they found no evidence of Bethany’s arm or her watch or the 18-inch semi-circle of surfboard that the shark had taken with it. The shark would have long before regurgitated the irritating fiberglass and foam and probably the arm with it. Yet, removing the jaws and matching them to Bethany’s board revealed a ideal forensic in good physical shape to within two micrometers. Aside inside the jaws, the only other part of the shark that was saved was a section of its dusky, striped skin. This skin was vacant to Boy Akana, a local Kahuna, who would fashion it into a ceremonial drum to call on the ancient spirits to calm the seas. Governor Lingle would law in a citizens statement that the theme was currently closed and that the tourist industry should “just purchase back to normal.”

Seven days consequent, Bethany Hamilton pays a visit to Ralph Youthful’s many with Billy Hamilton and her father Tom. She is there to visit the jaws that took her arm. Crouching beside the bloody things among the heart of the lawn, they come up to her shoulder. For long moments the guys stand around uncomfortably as she curiously pokes at the razor sharp teeth one by one. Then she looks up at Billy Hamilton and asks if she can have some of the teeth for a necklace she would like to make—an amulet to protect her within the future. The men are so stunned that nobody speaks.

Bethany Hamilton, 200 yards within the spot where the shark that attacked her was caught. Hanalei Bay Pier, November 2004. (Photo, Matt George)

Upon leaving the various with her Father, Bethany is heard saying to herself, I hope I don’t have dreams.

On the way domicile, with a sleeping Bethany next to him inside car, Tom Hamilton begins to hum a tune he hasn’t heard or sung since he was within the U.S. Navy as a childish gunner’s mate. His lips journey slightly as he recalls the words of the Navy hymn:

Eternal Father, vigorous to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

Driving on through the rain, the windshield wipers beating monotonously, these are the only words Tom Hamilton can remember. He reaches out to softly take his teenager’s hand in his, on the other hand it is not there.