Nick Haverland, I Remember You

When I moved to Ventura, I met a guy named Nick.

I hadn’t seen him in close to five years when I heard he’d been killed by a drunk driver on May 11, 2011.

I was devastated.  Nick had been one of my first friends in this city.  While we had only spent short amounts of time together, he moved something in me with his uncommon kindness, his superior intellect, his patience and his love of animals.

Around Christmas, boat owners bedeck their vessels in lights and glide through the Ventura Keys and the Harbor in winter celebration.  I think I was 7 or maybe 8 when Nick came to my house to watch the Parade of Lights.  His mom and my mom knew each other somehow.  Nick and his brother, Griffin, strode out onto my deck.  Nick made a beeline for the ramp to the boat dock, running his hand down the white light-wrapped rail.

Ventura, CA

“Do you ever catch crabs?” he asked me.

“What?”

“You know… put meat on a string and try to catch crabs.  They come pretty easy if you let them nibble on the meat for a while then you can put them in a bucket and play with them.”

I was stunned and surprisingly happy this older guy was talking to me.  Shaking my head, I followed him onto the ramp.

Even though it was getting dark, he swung down from the ramp, landing lightly on the rocks several feet below.

“Come on,” he said, holding his hand out to me.

I took it, still happy and slightly confused.  He helped me down and knelt near the waterline, his eyes darting back and forth across the rocks, searching.

In a blur, his hand flashed forward and he held a small red and green crab .  Sandwiched, the crab’s belly was pressed against his thumb and its back trapped by his forefinger.

“Hold them like this, so he can’t pinch you,” he grinned, holding the crustacean out to me.  I eyed it warily and slowly extended my arm, taking the crab gingerly between my fingers.  It was cold and hard and a little bit slippery.

Looking up I said, “I thought you needed meat and a string.”

Nick laughed, “Not if you’re fast,” and winked.  He took the crab from me and put it back in the water.

He asked me if I studied all the marine life on my dock.  I told him I didn’t.  He offered to teach me and I happily agreed.

The sky was black by the time we got together the stuff we needed.  A flashlight, a lemonade pitcher, a red plastic cup, and a magnifying glass sat beside us as we leaned over the side of the dock, our arms deep in the cold green water and our hair dripping in our faces.

Nick poked around at tendrils of flowing, filmy algae, seeking the creatures that surely lived among them.

“Ouch!” He exclaimed, pulling his hand up sharply.

“WHAT?!” I practically yelled.  He laughed again,” Just kidding.”

He opened his hand to show me a small, pinkish-beige worm with a creepy fringe all over its body.  “It’s a ragworm,” he explained, “they’re kind of like fire worms but they hurt a lot less when you touch them.”

He told me to hold the flashlight over the water.

“The fish like the light,” he said.

And he was right.

Dozens of shiny fish, no more than slivers of silver darted and flashed beneath the halogen beam.  They jerked and turned as if running into invisible walls, swimming around and around, creating a tiny whirlpool on the surface of the water.

Not quite knowing what to say, I said, “Weird.”

Nick looked back at me, still hanging off the side of the dock.

“Weird is better than ordinary.  Weird can be fantastic.  I’d rather be weird than normal.  Normal is boring.  I think it’s much better to be fantastic.  Don’t forget that,” he said.

I still haven’t.

He showed me a few other things, barnacles encrusted on the cement, a hard tubular thing I can’t remember the name of and a few fish.  But it had gotten dark and it was time to get out of the water.

After he left that night, we had several other educational excursions.

I took up crab fishing or “crab catching” as he liked to call it.  My record was 5 straight hours of crab catching, just sitting below my ramp with a ball of yarn, a pack of turkey meat, that same blue plastic lemonade pitcher and a Capri Sun.

I find it amazing that he was so willing to teach and hang out with a little girl he didn’t even know.  He was exceptionally eloquent when teaching, charismatic and tolerant.  I never got the impression that I irritated him.

To me, you will always be the marvelous, incredible person I met all those years ago.

Nick Haverland, I remember you.

A Tropical Adventure (Continued)

As I was saying, Costa Rica was an eventful trip.  We went to Manuel Antonio National Park.  It has this beautiful beach that’s right on the jungle.  We were already wearing our bathing suits so we went swimming and my dad took a picture of me spitting water at my waterproof Olympus Stylus 7.1

He’s been obsessed with motion water pictures ever since.  I used to be really into horseback riding.  I rode English in California but in Manuel Antonio, the only place we could find with horses rode Western.  It was tricky, trying to ride with one hand and the saddle was a little different.  It had a pommel, which I liked.  I could hold onto it and it was the perfect size for my hand.  My horse was really nice too, but the best part was the ride.  We rode alone along the deserted beach for hours.  It was foggy and cool, late in the afternoon.  The light was beautiful, calm and glowing.  I had never been on a better ride, and even though I quit riding 2 years later, I still never have.

My favorite thing we saw was the bottle-cap crab.  We were on the beach late one night and the sun was just starting to set when we packed up to go back to the house.  My sister looked down and pointed at the ground screeching, “LOOK, LOOK!”  We knelt down to see what she was pointing at and were surprised to see a crab with a clear, plastic shell scuttling across the sand.

We saw some great insects and creepy crawlies.  There was this little animal preserve we visited and we walked though a bug exhibit.  There were frogs and butterflies, lizards and something that looked like a honey-colored ferret.

Finally we came face to face with the beasts that lived in the Croc Pot.  On the way back from the animal preserve we passed over a bridge and looked down to see dozens of 12 foot long crocodiles chilling out in the mud.

We drove back to San José that night.  Jerry the bus driver picked us up at 5:30 and dropped us off at a little hotel near the airport.  It had the most beautiful tiled floors.  I took this picture right before we left the next morning:

Well that was my trip to Costa Rica.  A shortened version anyway.  We ended up getting delayed again.  This time in Miami and I got to miss the first day of school back from break; I was elated.  I hope to go back there some day.  It was an adventure.