Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival

I'm also going to reprint the small paragraph on the cover. It grabbed me and I'm sure it will do the same to you.

"On February 19, 1979, I was in a plane crash with my father, his girlfriend Sandra and the pilot of our chartered Cessna. Sandra was 30 years old. My dad was 43. I was 11. Just after sunrise, we slammed into a rugged 8,600-foot mountain engulfed in a blizzard. by the end of our nine-hour ordeal I was the only survivor."

Hooked? This is a stunning, yet heartbreaking memoir. Knowing the outcome of Crazy for the Storm in no way detracts from the enjoyment of the book.

Norman Ollestad had an unusual childhood. He literally grew up on the beaches of Topanga Beach in California, part of a surfing community. He also excelled at show more competitive skiing and most other areas he attempted. Behind him, encouraging him, driving him was his father, also named Norman Ollestad. The senior Ollestad was a child actor, appearing in the original "Cheaper by the Dozen" movie. He was an FBI agent, under Herbert Hoover, but quit after a year and exposed the dirty secrets of that administration in a book called Inside the FBI. He was also a successful lawyer. Ollestad himself describes his father as 'larger than life'. But he was what most people would see as a risk taker, living in and for the moment. He pushes his son to do the same.

This new release from Harper Collins Canada is told in alternating chapters. It opens with the horrendous crash and the realization of their plight. It then abruptly switches to the author's childhood. At first I found this disconcerting as I was caught up in one story or the other. But I quickly realized that this dual story telling leads us the climax, where both stories collide on the top of a mountain.

The author had what would be seen by many as an idyllic childhood. But after his parents divorced, his mother's boyfriend moved in. This man was physically and mentally abusive to both Norman and his mother, but his mother chose Nick many times over her son. Luckily young Norman has a surrogate mother in a family friend - Eleanor.

Author Norman has a difficult relationship with his father at times. He laments that he wants to be a 'normal' kid sometimes, hanging out in a neighbourhood with friends. His father instead encourages him to excel and that step beyond in surfing and skiing. It is on the way to a ski competition that the plane crashes. Some of the childhood tales are incredible. On the way to Mexico to deliver a washing machine to his grandparents, they are chased and shot at by federales. They end up living in a remote village with locals for a bit before rescuing the vehicle and continuing.

To me, this memoir seemed to be a way of honouring and making peace with his father and the loss of him after many years. It is a personal journey that we are privileged enough to share.

As an adult and parent Ollestad physically revisits his childhood home, the crash site and the people involved. He realizes that without his father pushing him all those years, he never would have survived the crash. And he can see what his father wanted him to see.

"Off the point at Topanga Beach I stared into the eye of a distant wave. Somewhere in the oval opening I grasped what Dad had always tried to make me see. There is more to life than just surviving it. Inside each turbulence there is a calm - a sliver of light buried in the darkness."

There are colour photographs included with the book - arresting images of his father and candid shots of the family.

This is a memoir of survival - not just a plane crash, but of his life. A totally arresting read. show less

There is a line near the beginning of “Crazy for the Storm” that I think is very telling about the whole book.

“He had taught me to ride big waves, had pulled me from tree wells and fished me out of suffocating powder. Now it was my turn to save him.”

The author, Norman Ollestad, says this about his father (also Norman Ollestad), after the plane crash that took his father’s life and stranded him on a mountain, alone.

The reason I find it telling, is that as I read through the book, I found far more places where the son is saving the father, or at least living the life the father had wanted for himself. Norman’s father exposed him to so many dangerous situations (many that these days he’d probably get arrested for, per the show more author) but by doing so, also gave him the tools and the inner strength to survive.

“We stared at each other. I saw him so clearly. The cranium shelf rising off his forehead bumpy and uneven, the cluster of diamonds in the blue of his eyes fragile cracked windows, and I saw someone younger and full of grand ambitions and I thought about how he had wanted to be a professional basketball player. He looked at me as if into a mirror, studying me, like I was holding something that he admired, even desired.”

The author does a good job balancing the voice of his younger self, often angry at his father for making him live a different life, making him ski and surf and take risks that he didn’t want to…with the admiration he now feels for his father. Though Ollestad is making different choices now with his own son, Noah, the lessons taught to him as a child have taken deep root.

His father’s voice is always in the background…not only in the decisions he makes regarding his own son, but all throughout the book.

“All I care about is that you keep going, Boy Wonder. Don’t get stuck on how you finished last time or the turn you just made. Go after the next one with all you’ve got.”

Moments like that were the strongest part of this book. Though I thought I’d be more drawn to the crash itself and the miracle that an 11-year old boy was the only survivor and managed to get down a mountain in the winter by himself…it was the father/son relationships that were more powerful. The crash details (and some of the descriptions of surfing and skiing) that got too technical for me since I am unfamiliar with those worlds.

The writing was at times very choppy…short, staccato sentences that broke up the flow of other, very lyrical passages.

Agree or disagree with a father making his son take incredible risks, living a different life than the son wanted to at the time, in the end the author lets go of the right or wrong of his life. He maintains his love for his father, appreciates the gifts that came from the way he was raised, and has a wealth of experience, good and bad, with which to guide his own son. In the end, he has the memory of his father and the reality of his son.

“I guessed that at some point during his run, Noah had broken through the storm and locked into the bliss of his victory, the bliss of his connection to the ineffable – that sacred place unveiled to me, and now to my son, by the man with the sunshine in his eyes. There are few joys in life that can compare to that.” show less

Young Norman Ollestad shared a tight bond with his reckless, charismatic father, a man who pushed his son to excel in dangerous sports such as surfing and skiing. When a terrible small-engine plane crash results in 11-year-old Norman being stranded on the side of a California mountain, the survival skills his father taught him serve him well.

Crazy for the Storm is not the easiest book to read. The chronology jumps around and the narrative is sprinkled with jargon from skateboarding, surfing and skiing. I had a hard time picturing the action, and in the scenes that take place after the plane crash, young Ollestad doesn't come across as an eleven-year-old boy at all, but as an adult man. Even in such an extreme situation, he has an show more implausible knowledge of what to do next. Despite these reservations, however, I found this tribute to an unusually strong father-son relationship unexpectedly moving. show less

A well-paced father/son memoir, it contains engaging characters that defy the cliched categories of hero/villain that I find in childhood memoirs -- I'm no fan of annoyingly precocious kids waxing philosophical, but Ollestad is a very restrained writer with only a moment or two where I felt like the characters had some memoir-affectation that disrupted the "reality" of the story. Not that you have to believe every detail in any memoir, this one or others -- but usually I find memoirs to have a lot of those shifts from dead-on accurate storytelling that rings true (e.g. age-appropriate and believable like "Freaks and Geeks") to fanciful, ornate, and fairy-tale-false (e.g. 90210/Gossip Girl), and I prefer the former. Ollestad's book does show more a remarkable job of allowing us to believe, anyway, that his memoir is not discolored (too much) by the intervening years or the desire to manipulate what is supposed to be non-fiction. show less

This book was really interesting; I read it all in one sitting. At first the chapters switching between the plane crash and the author's childhood leading up to that point annoyed me because I wanted to know the survival story right away. I began to also get sucked into the background story though and in the end, I found the alternating format very instrumental to the overall memoir. It's an amazing thing that the author survived such an ordeal at the age of eleven but he at least had the knowledge of all the previous dangerous experiences that his father had pushed him into at an even earlier age.

This book has been getting scads of publicity and lots of raves recently. I read it before all the reviews came out and I'm still baffled by the over the top plaudits it has received because I thought it was a decent read but not an overwhelming wow. Is it thrilling? Yes. Will it keep you reading? Probably. But there was something missing in it for me.

The story of little Norman Ollestad's amazing survival after a plane crash that ultimately killed everyone else on board, including Norman's father, and left him stranded on a mountain during a terribly snow storm, this is also the story of the early years of Norman's life as his father pushed him to become a surfer and a skier who pushed the envelope. The memoir alternates chapters show more between the life he shared with his mother, her boyfriend, and his father and the hours, moments leading up to and after the crash as he fights for survival. As Norman has drawn his childhood (the crash happened when he was only 11), I felt only anger and annoyance towards his parents.

His mother seemed to put her abusive boyfriend ahead of her son and his father was more interested in creating a "boy wonder" who excelled at his father's chosen sports than about the emotional well-being of a young child. Ollestad's love for these flawed parents is there in the book but what really stood out for me was that he spent a lot of time unhappy or terrified or neglected when with either of his parents. Of course, ultimately, his father's child-rearing method (push said child hard and relentlessly until the child attempts whatever simply to avoid being called a coward) helped Norman muster up the strength to make it down the mountain to safety, knowing his father and the pilot were dead and after seeing his father's girlfriend slide to her death too. So perhaps I am being too harsh in judging the scenes Ollestad has chosen to write about here. But I do know that I would have been pretty darn resentful of my parents for their treatment of me had the book been mine, rather than his.

As far as the story itself goes, it is pretty thrilling, edge of your pants. The alternating chapters are written differently, evoking either the feeling of a descriptive and haphazard childhood or the short, stacato adreneline bursts of the crash and its aftermath. And sending the reader from one extreme of writing to another just with the turn of the page helped to amp up the thrill factor. It is a story that no one should have had to live but Ollestad's writing has captured some of the dislocation and terror that he must have felt coming down that mountain. And I appreciated the final chapter, detailing his return to the crash site and his own handling of his young son with fair reflections on his father's parenting of him. I felt there was something destructive, intense and controlling in the daredevil father he's captured in these pages, something that made his death at a relatively young age inevitable. But not liking many (all?) of the people who made up his early life, I had a hard time caring too much about their terrible fates, a failing that is even more callous given that these are not characters but real people. I don't know whether the fault for this lack of connection is in the writing or in me personally. Did I read on avidly, despite knowing the outcome of the crash before even opening the first page (it's given away on the cover)? Yes. Did I feel gutted and drained when I finished reading it? No, I just felt detached and relieved to be finished. Adventure junkies will likely thrive on the adreneline rush this book provides while the more sedentary (or cowardly like me) might find themselves dismayed by the interpersonal relationships as presented here and wish for a bit more than the book delivered. show less

What a fascinating survival story told in a fascinating way: The chapters vacillate between the survival and the upbringing that informed his survival. Additionally, once the tale is told, the coda of the rigors of growing into one's own is told with incredible passion and detail and nostalgia. There are no quotes around the spoken words in this book, which helps to convey the closeness the author feels to everyone in his book, as if he's fused with humanity, especially his father. A wonderful, powerful mesmerizing read.