Book #57: Crazy for the Storm

Title: Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
Author: Norman Ollestad

In February 1979, a small plane crashed in the San Gabriel Mountains of California. The pilot and two passengers died. Several hours later, an eleven year-old boy walked into the village at the bottom of the slope, the lone survivor. How did he survive? Was it good luck? What kind of eleven-year-old can make it down the practically-vertical face of a snow-covered mountain by himself? Ollestad tells his story, both how he survived, and how his father (who died in the crash) prepared him, with a childhood of adrenaline-charged experiences, for the fight of his life.

The memoir follows a fairly common format: one chapter describing his fight for survival on the mountain, followed by a chapter focusing on the backstory, repeated many times. While I sort of hate to say it, the survival chapters seemed kind of thin-- the was only on the mountain for a span of hours, so each of those chapters was relatively short-- a page or two, while the chapters about his childhood leading up to the accident were rich, and so extreme that they were almost unbelievable. Ollestad and his father were en route to a ski awards ceremony in Northern California at the time of the accident, and Ollestad would have been named the best (one of the best?) skiers in California. But it wasn't just skiing at which he excelled-- he was also a standout at surfing, skateboarding, football and hockey, primarily because his father allowed him no fear and pushed him to (and sometimes even beyond) the limits of what a little boy could handle. As a mother of a similarly-aged (although much less-awarded) boy, I can see that what Ollestad's father provided him with allowed him to escape with his life, but how much of the struggles he faced as a teenager after the accident came because he missed his father or resented his mother and how much were a result of missing his childhood?