“El Fin” Means “The End”

It was the summer of 1988. I was visiting my family in Daytona Beach. My cousin Marty and I had spent the entire afternoon skimboarding…well—he was, I was trying. Some people ask, “What is skimboarding?” Essentially, a skimboard looks like a cross between a boogie board and a surf board.

I like to call it a “fiberglass razor of death”. How do you use it? Simple: you hold it in your hands, run with it, throw it down, jump on it and hydroplane on an inch of moving water above sand. Easy. No problem. Obviously, this is all theoretical horseshit. It only works if you have the natural athletic aptitude of an Olympian. Unfortunately, I have the natural aptitude of a paralympian. What they forget to tell you is that when the water washes out, the board stops but you don’t. Your momentum launches you into a painful trajectory that only ends when you roll to a stop in the hard-packed wet sand. It’s the equivalent of getting in the back of a pick-up truck on a beach, giving the thumbs up signal to your buddy, wait until he has picked up some speed and walk off the bed of the truck. Doesn’t sound that inviting but for some reason I did that over and over for hours. My body was begging me to stop. My back was bleeding from the sand abrasions. I learned quickly that sand fucking hurts. As I lay in the shallow water bleeding to death, the Sun glistened on the wet sand and made it sparkle. I had an epiphany: If glass was made of sand, then the reciprocal of that is—sand is made of crushed glass. That’s when I decided I had enough. I wasn’t going to continue rolling around in crushed glass for pleasure.

So I decided to abandon this foolhardy attempt to be an extreme messiah and levitate on water. I grabbed my Morey slick-bottom bodyboard and headed into the ocean. My cousin followed suit and got his surfboard. My wounds hissed as the salt water made contact. I felt like a vampire being bathed in holy water. Once the pain subsided, I relished in the moment and realized the conditions were fantastic. Even though dusk was fast approaching, the water temperature was not too cold and the waves were perfect. However, another set of conditions were also perfect which wasn’t desirable: our proximity to the pier (chum, bait, etc…), visible shrimp boats, and my bleeding back—A classic recipe for a shark attack.

We were fearless immortals trapped in teenager bodies. As we were facing the beach and waiting for the next set of waves, we heard screams to the right (north) of us coming from a dozen tourists. They were screaming, “Shark! Shark!” and swimming furiously to land. To a non-Native, this would be extremely alarming but as a townie this was an everyday occurrence. Nine times out of ten it turns out to be a school of bluefish or a dolphin. The key factor in telling the differences between a dolphin and a shark is the fin and the way it moves. Sharks have a triangle and dolphins have a curve. Dolphins go up-and-down and sharks go side-to-side. Basic marine biology.

Marty and I were not going to throw in the towel just because some hillbillies from Kentucky thought Flipper was Jaws. My cousin was closer to the “shark”. He was north-east of me about thirty yards away. We made eye contact and laughed at the idiot tourists who frantically fled for their lives. Marty’s attention went back to the upcoming waves. He laid on his stomach and looked over his left shoulder ignoring the chaos to the north.

I was going to do the same but I still had to swim farther west. About a minute later, I saw the infamous fin that created the terror. Just as I suspected it was rising up like a dolphin, not side-to-side, but it was weird because the small fin never went down, it just went up. Then I realized it was only the tip of the fin that was moving up. It was only the periscope of a nuclear submarine. Once the entire fin had surface, I was staring at a very large triangle that was moving side-to-side. Holy Christ! The hillbillies were right. It was a shark! My synapses and neurons were trying to get the word, “Shark!” out at a volume loud enough for Marty to hear. At the same time, the waves we were waiting for came in. Relentlessly, pounding me away from my cousin. I tried to yell out the monosyllable word but my brain misfired and spat out, “F..fi…fin! Big fin!” My cousin barely heard me over the roar of the surf. “What?” he screamed. I autistically kept rattling off, “Fin, big fin, fin…” “I can’t hear you”, he said annoyed and waved me off as he devoted his attention to the wave that was upon him. I looked to the left and saw the fin speeding in his direction and slipped beneath the surface. With a last ditch effort, I reached within and belted out one more warning, “Fiiiiiiinnnnn!” He looked at me confused, confidently paddled his arms, fluidly hopped up on his board and surfed to the beach with ease.

By Poseidon’s Trident and Odin’s Balls, he did it. He had escaped the jaws of an ancient creature designed with the only purpose to kill. I nearly cried in the joy of his salvation but before I could celebrate, my own sense of mortality overwhelmed me. There was only twenty-five yards between a very disappointed, hungry shark and my bleeding back. The foreboding fin resurfaced where Marty once was. I was petrified. My arms and legs involuntarily started to quiver as if I were being mildly electrocuted. Then the million-year-old cartilage and teeth of death submarine submerged for another attempt at supper. My brain finally regained control of my motor skills and it commanded every molecule in my body to head west towards the beach.

I floundered and thrashed. The waves were tirelessly hammering me. Somehow my one year of varsity training as a swimmer left me and I couldn’t catch a wave with bodyboard. So I detached the Velcro wrist strap and attached it to my ankle. In hindsight, I should have just let the stupid board go but I paid a hundred dollars for the board and I only made $3.35 as a bag boy. Fuck that. So know that I freed my arms, I unleashed two gangly windmills and swam ferociously to shore. I didn’t lift me head to breath nor to see where I was going. I let my intuition and fear drive me in. In fact, I didn’t stop until I felt sand. I practically “swam” twenty yards in the sand. I grabbed a double handful of sand and kissed it. I was immediately surrounded by a circle of hillbillies and I remember hearing them say in a southern twang, “Man, you were lucky. There was a dang shark out there boy.” No shit.

My family still makes fun of me for crying out, “Fin!” They hope that I’m never in a burning building because I would be quivering in the corner screaming, “Heat! Heat! It’s very smoky!”