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.