Blue Antidote

One morning, I watched an Army vet named Aaron paddle out in Manhattan Beach with a group of 15 other men from the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center Domiciliary. The domiciliary first opened in the 1880s, as an “old soldiers’ home” for disabled or homeless veterans. Now it’s a rehabilitation center for vets who need a bed, help with drug abuse, help with post-traumatic stress, or all three. The men in the water were tattooed, scarred, sullen, unsure how to surf. Most of them had never tried it before.

They talked trash in the water. They masked their edginess with insults. Aaron was Black and built like a football player. He was there for “ocean therapy” with a local group called the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation. When he finished riding his first wave, he did a funny thing: He ran straight onto the beach for an end-zone dance. Anthony Vela, the group’s surf coach that day, was so tickled that he retold the story during a pep talk afterward—imitating Aaron running with his arms outstretched, punching the sky, followed by a strut with two hands on his rear end like a rooster’s tail feathers. “That was one of the highlights of all time,” Vela said. “You didn’t have to ask him how he felt.”

Jimmy Miller committed suicide in 2004, at the age of 35. He was a golden boy, a talented Manhattan Beach surfer who worked as an LA lifeguard and traveled the world for waves (“living the life,” as his brother Jeff puts it) until a torn labrum in his shoulder kept him out of the water. “All that time, we never saw any signs of mental illness,” Jeff says. “But in a quick time it went from ‘there’s something kinda strange with Jim’ to depression, to time spent in mental facilities. Six months later, he took his own life.”

His family started the foundation as a way to help people recovering from trauma and mental illness. Ocean therapy works well with vets in particular, and the Marine Corps has worked surfing into its combat-stress recovery program since 2007, when Jimmy Miller volunteers started hauling boards and equipment down the coast to Camp Pendleton to host daylong surf and safety lessons on the base’s recreational beach. 

Retired Col. Greg Martin, who was a commander of the Wounded Warrior Battalion-West during its formative years at the base, from 2008 to 2011, lobbied the Pentagon for a surf component early in his tenure. “In all of our Marines’ recovery,” he told me in 2010, “what we’ve been going for is the whole mind-body-spirit-family approach. Surfing can encompass all of those things.”

Nancy Miller, a surprisingly cheerful woman with a grief-tempered smile, is Jimmy’s mother. She told me with boosterish enthusiasm that a steep decline in suicides among Pendleton vets had been attributed by Marine commanders to the surf sessions. When I asked him about this claim, Martin softened it by saying suicides in the program had certainly declined in those formative years, but he wasn’t sure surfing was the main reason. “Surfing’s definitely one of the things that helped improve their outlook,” he said, but other sports fell into the whole-Marine category too. “Long-distance cycling’s been great, and horse programs have been really good as well.”

Today, the Foundation teaches therapeutic surfing to people up and down Southern California—and something about the sport wakes up a sense of metaphor. Aaron the Army vet, who did the touchdown dance after his first ride, told the group assembled around him how it felt: “I just looked straight ahead. I didn’t look left or right. I didn’t worry about where my feet were on the board. And I can do the same thing in my life, you know? Don’t look back. ”

•

I took to ocean therapy after a stint as a hostage in Somalia. In 2012, during a research trip to East Africa, a gang of pirates kidnapped me on a dusty road between the central Somali town of Galkayo and its local airport. Slate ran a hot take maintaining I wasn’t technically captured by pirates because they had nabbed me on land. 

For the first three months, I lived in prison houses and field camps around the pirate town of Hobyo, on the coast, until seagoing pirates in the same criminal gang hijacked a tuna vessel on the Indian Ocean and forced it to anchor off Hobyo. For a while, we could see the vessel’s sharp lights from where we slept in the concrete shambles of a prison house. But within three weeks, the pirates had placed me and one other hostage onboard the 164-foot ship, maybe to save money on guard wages, and I don’t think Slate ever ran a correction.

The ship was a tuna long-liner from Asia called the Naham 3. I spent a total of 32 hideous and sweltering months as a hostage, but the five or six months on the ship in the summer of 2012 was almost a respite. I made friends with the hostage crew. We had decent food from the ship’s mess—frozen meat and vegetables—and we could pull up fresh fish on hand lines. The breeze off the water wasn’t bad. There were no mosquitos or flies, and a daily waver on the rocking swells that rolled toward Hobyo was fairly wonderful compared to a concrete prison floor.

But any stint as a hostage is appalling, and I came home in 2014 feeling cadaverous and atrophied from a diet of pasta and beans. One thing I noticed was that a surf session could make me feel healthier overnight: clearer in the head, stronger in the core, and less nervous overall.

Post-traumatic stress responds to exercise, so maybe it’s no shock that exertion in the water will ease anxiety and depression. The Jimmy Miller people talk about it as a near-mystical cure. Mike Shurley, a surf coach for the foundation until his death in 2020, had seen the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. “When you’re in the water,” he told me when we first met, “it’s immediate. I mean, we as surfers know that. But I happen to be a pretty religious guy, and to me there’s something about the ocean that’s spiritual.”

Shurley had white hair, but he was youthful and slightly beatific. “The other day, when I saw you on the beach,” he told me after Somalia, in 2015, “I saw the look in your eye, and I immediately knew. Someone had told me [about Somalia], but we just talked about general stuff. Then I saw your eyes, and Michael, I knew. That’s all I can tell you.”

I’ve been a friend of the foundation since about 2010. In those days I worked as a journalist for Spiegel Online, in Berlin, but in 2017, after the Somalia ordeal, I moved back to California. Volunteering for the foundation felt natural: Teaching wounded or traumatized Marines to surf was a way for me to give back to service members, since a rotating team of American special operators, based in East Africa, was prepared throughout my ordeal to suit up on presidential orders and haul my sorry ass out of Somalia.

Why does it work? For a surfer the question may sound redundant, but anyone who’s managed to paddle out and wait for a wave will also know how the ocean can be punishing. The fear and thrill it can create is essential: You feel a quick jolt of nerves when a wave starts to rise. You turn and aim your board and, even before you spring to your feet, you can feel a quiet sense of flight, a quickening in your blood that’s no different in middle age than when you were 10 or 14. You lift your head like a hunter. The wave shows you a curving underbelly. The sheer force of thousands of miles of wind and current, concentrated into a curl, has arrived at the edge of its element and, even if it happens every day, in a thousand permutations, along every shore, each wave is a crisis, a chance at renewal. Water spits along the edge of your board.

•

Long before “surf therapy” existed as a label, I had already discovered it as a cure for pain. I arrived in the Manhattan Beach school district at the age of 12, in 1981, after my father committed suicide. Exiled from home because of his drinking, Dad had spent about nine months in a bachelor apartment on Reseda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. I remember the location of his new place across from our neighborhood Catholic church more as a coincidence than a pious intention on Dad’s part to go straight. But he was in rehab, so he returned to church on Sundays. He lived for the rest of the week like an unsteady, hard-bitten divorcé, with ashtrays, a parakeet, and a weekend bowling habit.

His career at Lockheed had stalled. He was an accomplished electrical engineer, but he felt sidelined by his boss. He complained about his job, and one day he just failed to show up. A small team of friends from the office in Burbank paid a visit to his apartment and found him dead, presumably in a mess of blood, since he had shot himself in the chest. Mom came home early from her own job and told me he had died of a heart attack. It served as a cushioning lie for us both, I suppose. 

We lived in a ranch-style home near a great brushy field, by then a construction site for the 118 freeway, which had started life in my earliest memories as a dusty, fragrant lemon grove. We moved to the beach at the end of the year. Mom didn’t want to live in that house anymore. She was allergic to the pollen and dust on the hot inland air, and she found a new job in the South Bay, where some family friends had moved. So, as an awkward and grief-stunned preadolescent, I changed schools in the middle of seventh grade, during one of the worst years on record to move anywhere at all from the San Fernando Valley. Frank Zappa and his daughter, Moon Unit, had just scored a hit with their jeering song “Valley Girl.” To be a Val near the beach in that rancid atmosphere was easily the worst embarrassment on planet Earth for a 12-year-old. 

I hung out first with metalheads. I didn’t smoke their pot, because my father’s alcoholism had put the fear of God into me about most recreational drugs. But we listened to Van Halen and Mötley Crüe and tried to play guitar. On my first day of school, I also met an odd kid named Marc Levy, who was not a metalhead but a talented writer and cartoonist with stringy black hair and pale skin. He stopped in his tracks when he saw me at my desk by the door on the first day of the second semester of biology with Mr. Russell. He held up his hand. “Welcome to the class,” he said in a stiff but pleasant way that everyone who knows Marc, whenever I retell this story, finds hilarious. He marched to his seat at the rear of the room, where I noticed his wiseacre voice murmuring now and then under the steady current of Mr. Russell’s lectures. It would crack up a small circle of kids. Soon we were excellent friends.

Other kids despised me. They were surfers or punks. As a Val, I was beneath contempt. I wore glasses that were too small for my face. I was gangly, unathletic, unusual, and shy. I had no clue how to relate to this more fashionable yet tough group of kids who competed for a new and mysterious form of cachet (“beach cool”) that never existed in the Valley. Worse than anything, of course, was my emotional life—the cramped heart, the drizzling pain, the shock of a tragedy I had yet to understand. The surf kids wondered if I was gay. The social cliques at Foster A. Begg Middle School were as distinct as gangs in a prison yard, so I never thought of myself as a surfer, but I did like to pedal my bike to the beach with a boogie board strapped to my back and ride waves in the 2-foot slop at the base of the Manhattan Beach Pier. Within a year, I’d bought a used surfboard. It was bulky, waterlogged, front-heavy, and not long enough for my size, but it cost only $65 at ET Surf. 

With the metalheads, I learned to play Zeppelin and Van Halen on an acoustic guitar. With Marc, I honed my wits and sense of humor and learned to write. But with Stefan, another kid from the Valley, I learned to surf in the summer of 1983. I woke up at dawn and rode to the beach on a 10-speed with my board under one arm for the brief, eye-opening thrill of a wave. I could wade into the water feeling jumbled, mixed up, tired, or depressed but wrestle with the ocean for an hour and come out feeling realigned, like a lion after a feast. 

The realignment was the point. Dorian Paskowitz, a Jewish doctor who surfed in Depression-era California and pioneered the sport in 1950s Israel, put it memorably: “I have gone into the water literally ready to blow my brains out,” he said in the 2007 movie Surfwise, “and come back out of the water a warrior.”

•

Jimmy was one of the surf kids. He wasn’t a bully or someone I knew from junior high. In my honors classes at Mira Costa High School he was a stylish, loose-limbed, easygoing athlete who would stroll to class with a single book in his hand, apparently untroubled by assignments or tests. A shock of bleached bangs in his brown hair combined with his dark eyes to make him look soulful and Pacific, almost Hawaiian—but he was Jewish through his mom and Irish-Catholic through his dad. He was handsome, privileged, smart, well-liked. Jimmy and I got along; he just ran with a clique of athletes I could never touch, lifelong beach rats who were so talented in the water that some of them had to decide between college and the pro tour. 

Jimmy planned to be a lawyer. He went to Berkeley and worked every summer as a lifeguard while he earned a history B.A. After college, his life took a turn: Instead of pursuing law school, he became a “soul surfer,” roaming in search of waves from Peru to Indonesia, trying to make it pay. He married a young model and surfer from Santa Cruz, now famous as Marisa Miller. He bought and transformed a surf school for kids in Manhattan Beach and changed the name to CampSurf.

His parents, Nancy and Jim, both believe surfing functioned as a psychological rudder for their son. By late high school, this aspect of his personality may have been so obvious that it vanished into the foreground. His father says he believes a latent mental illness was held off by sessions in the water. Jimmy’s life after college, however, must have been confusing. Like a lot of California lives, it became an experiment in self-contradiction. 

Marisa belonged to a born-again family from Northern California, and Jimmy joined her church. “Mom, I bet you didn’t even know I got baptized” is how Nancy remembers her half-Jewish son breaking the news. The couple separated after a few years, but Jimmy remained in the faith and found a born-again congregation in Redondo Beach. 

His mom thinks the church set up a deep inner tension. “He was being pulled two ways a lot,” she told me. “And if his mind was in a mess earlier than we thought it was, then all of this was cognitive dissonance,” she added, meaning the surf lifestyle, Jimmy’s promiscuous youth, his sudden adoption of religion, and Marisa’s modeling breakthrough, which consisted of a topless editorial series in the magazine Perfect 10. 

Marisa, who went on to forge a successful fashion career with publications like Vogue and Sports Illustrated and brands like Victoria’s Secret, among many others, didn’t respond to requests for comment on this piece. But a lifelong friend of Jimmy’s named Chris Johnson thinks the problem was a creeping schizophrenia, “partially brought on” by hallucinogens. “Acid, mushrooms,” he told me. “Jimmy did that quite a bit [in his twenties], especially when he was in Peru.” 

Johnson is also a surfer who went to high school with both of us and knew Jimmy from childhood. Though not a psychologist, he now works as a doctor, directing the emergency room at Community Memorial Hospital of Ventura. He says Jimmy mentioned spontaneous hallucinations: “He started seeing things, like a seal that talked to him in the water. He had different visions. And he started to feel like, ‘This is all God’s doing.’” Johnson believes the mental illness developed early enough to doom the marriage to Marisa.

She and Jimmy separated in 2001. His parents learned about it on September 11. “I said, ‘Oh my God, Marisa’s in New York for Fashion Week. Is she okay?’ And [Jimmy] said, ‘I don’t know.’” Nancy smiled, ironically, as she recounted this story to me, because her son was trying not to break the news on 9/11, of all days. “It was not a good separation,” she added. “It broke his heart.”

In the summer of 2003, Jimmy wiped out on a wave at his home break in Manhattan Beach and tore the labrum in his right shoulder. A labrum provides cushioning and support to the ball joint, and a torn one debilitates the whole rotator cuff. Jimmy could surf afterward, but he was in constant pain, and he tended to avoid the beach. His father, Jim, said that when he did surf, he surfed well: “Even one-handed, he was stronger than anyone in the water. But his arm was just limp.”

The relationship between trauma and sports is not one-dimensional. It’s not as simple as moving your body and feeling good. Professional athletes and high-level amateurs mold their identities around a sport, so just watching a crack-up on the field, never mind suffering one, can cause panic. “He was contemplating surgery,” Jim said with a wince. “Just to think that he was in so much pain over things that were imaginary—that’s where it gets you. I mean, a bad shoulder? We get Marines down at Pendleton who don’t even have a right arm. Bethany Hamilton had her arm bitten off by a tiger shark when she was 13 years old. She surfs really well!”

Jimmy grew paranoid. Tendencies that were obscured before the injury became hard to miss. His mom remembers a call from him in the late ’90s, when he lived with Marisa in El Porto, near Manhattan Beach. He rang his parents’ phone one night and said, “‘[I] just can’t take it anymore,’” his mother recalled. “‘Everything’s so difficult for me. I need you to help.’” Nancy and Jim drove over at around 10 p.m. and found the couple downstairs, waiting on the sidewalk.

“Everything’s fine,” they said. “No problem.”

“But you just called and asked for help,” said Nancy.

“I know,” said Jimmy with a shrug.

“It was such an odd…happening,” Nancy recalled. “He wasn’t being our Jimmy. He was being born-again Jimmy.”

So, even before the injury there was an evident rupture between the surface cool and the struggling, conflicted self. Later, in the spring of 2004, a new girlfriend made a similar phone call from a different apartment in El Porto. She told his parents that he “wouldn’t stop pacing” and thought garbage collectors were rummaging through his trash, looking for old videotapes he’d made with Marisa or to spy on him and threaten the future of CampSurf. His parents hurried over. 

This time it was clear he’d suffered a psychotic break. “He just looked at us, and it wasn’t Jimmy,” his mother said. “His face was blank.” He was lucid enough to understand he needed help, so they drove to UCLA. After an eight-hour wait in the emergency room and a handful of questions, Nancy said, a resident physician prescribed a powerful antipsychotic to get him through the weekend. “It was just like, ‘Take two Risperdal and call me in the morning,’” she added with a measure of bitterness.

The failure of formal psychiatry, like the failure of Jimmy’s church, still incenses his parents. These twin treatments were useless to address what had shaped up as either schizophrenia or a severe bipolar disorder. By mid-2004, they wanted to find a doctor who could talk to Jimmy as well as write prescriptions, “but he was such a born-again Christian, he wanted a born-again psychiatrist,” said Nancy. “We went, ‘Do you know how hard it is to find one of those?’ They almost don’t exist.”

They did find a Christian psychologist in Torrance, but Nancy additionally drove her son to a psychiatrist who could write prescriptions in Beverly Hills. Around the end of May, there was another phone call from the apartment. Jimmy’s father found him raving in bed about the end of days, believing he was close to death. The Beverly Hills psychiatrist had a connection to a famous clinic at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and “we needed an in,” said Nancy, so Jimmy checked in there and stayed for two weeks. He left under his own power, on a strict regimen of psychopharmaceuticals. 

“The head of psychiatry at Cedars-Sinai was just totally gobsmacked” at Jimmy’s apparent progress, Nancy said, but it was an illusion. “He could tell them what they wanted to hear. This psychiatrist—this famous psychiatrist [at Cedars-Sinai]—said to us afterwards, ‘I didn’t understand the surfer’s part. I didn’t understand this connection to the surf, or the fact that he hadn’t surfed in months.’ He realized [too late] that surfing was the stabilizing part of his life.” (This lacuna in Jimmy’s treatment is the reason for the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation. Ocean therapy, as a formal idea, didn’t exist yet, at least not in the popular mind.)

On a Saturday in August 2004, the Millers were invited to a dinner in Playa del Rey, north of Manhattan Beach. After a visit to his friend Dr. Chris Johnson, in Carpinteria, Jimmy arrived late to the family home and said he would drive to the meal by himself. Jim says his son seemed at peace and was smiling, but after less than an hour in Playa del Rey, Jimmy failed to show up, and his parents started to worry. “I said, ‘Something’s wrong,’” Nancy remembered. They returned and found him hanging from the top balustrade of a spiral staircase. Jim had to cut him down. They called the police, and the paramedics and an ambulance drove him to the hospital.

Jimmy couldn’t be revived. Neither parent can talk about it now, two decades later, without tears. But Jim finds resonance in the idea that scratching the surface of any life in Manhattan Beach can reveal some kind of tragic secret that runs contrary to the slick image of this well-to-do California town. The Millers have been open and public about Jimmy’s death, and in the meantime the number of people who have told them similar stories—about suicide, above all—surprises him. “People find shame in suicide,” he said with an edge of sarcasm about the town’s self-image, “because we live in Manhattan Beach, and this is Manhattan Beach, and look at all these wonderful lives.”

•

Jimmy had attended King’s Harbor Church, a newish institution with a glass façade and a business-park lawn in Torrance, California. It’s named after King Harbor, about 15 minutes up the road in Redondo Beach, and the play on “king” is intentional. “We believe that the Bible is the Word of God,” reads the church’s website, “fully inspired and without error in the original manuscripts, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and that it has supreme authority in all matters of faith, and conduct.”
The vibe in the congregation is wide-eyed, beach-casual, open, and young. It’s not your Alabama cliché of lace-wearing Baptist ladies and a fulminating pastor behind a pulpit wired for terrible sound. But it is a fundamentalist church.

“Almost all fundamentalist churches are run by one leader, or a very small group of leaders,” says the author Michelle Dowd, who grew up in a hardscrabble born-again cult of her own, led by her grandfather, an experience she later detailed in her memoir, Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult. “Fundamentalists say they interpret the Bible as the literal word of God, but who decides what ‘literal’ is? It’s always one person, or a small group of people that one person basically controls—and then it’s really at the mercy of a person’s temper.”

Chris Cannon was a senior pastor and the leader of a men’s group that Jimmy belonged to at King’s. He’d moved from Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach a few years earlier. (Hope Chapel is also a fundamentalist church, with some minor doctrinal differences.) Cannon guided Jimmy’s understanding of Scripture. “He was like the Messiah to Jimmy,” said Nancy. “Anything anyone told [Jimmy]—when he’d go to men’s groups or church and listen to the songs or anything the ministers said—it was the word of God. He took the Bible literally. He would say, ‘I’m a sinner, because I’ve fornicated with people, I’ve done this, I’ve done that.’”

Jimmy indeed had a sexual past—and a certain male personality type needs to ruminate for months and years over a psychic wound, especially if it’s a hard rejection. Rage and guilt may also be comfortable emotions for men because they’re socially acceptable. In either case, Jimmy wanted to understand his divorce and the visions in his head, and the word of God gave him plenty to brood about. “That whole Christianity thing really fed into his obsessions—of the bad, of evil, and all those things,” Nancy said. “He would open up his Bible. We found it afterwards underlined with everything wrong—‘Hell hath no fury’ and so on.”

“Everything he had done wrong,” I suggested.

“Right.”

“I think what you’re saying is that the guilt drove some of the mental illness.”

“And the mental illness drove the guilt,” she said. “The undiagnosed mental illness [led to] an obsession over some of these things. Anything he had ever worried about, anything that had ever crossed his mind,” not just in his personal life, but also in the day-to-day operations of CampSurf, “became this giant obsession.”

Guilt on its own can be productive. I say that as a long-lapsed Catholic. It can correct your foolishness and shatter your selfish mind. It can open you to the lives of other people. But the extreme, self-inflicted guilt Nancy described in Jimmy can split the self. It can also be a symptom of a disintegrating mind.

“[Jimmy] was listening to every sermon this minister gave, and it was just hell and brimstone,” said Nancy. “I finally called [Cannon] and said, ‘Look, he’s had a psychotic break. Could you help us out, because whatever you say, he takes it literally, and we’re afraid he’s gonna hurt himself.’ The minister said, ‘Well, it’s God’s word.’ He said, ‘I don’t know Jim that well, but he seems like a well-adjusted guy.’ I said, ‘No, he’s in crisis right now! Jimmy’s beginning to really fail. He trusts you. And one thing I might ask of you is to encourage him to check into a program.’ He said, ‘I can’t do that.’”

Cannon remembers those months differently. He recalls Jimmy as a brooding, soft-spoken young man, “poetic,” with a habit of “catastrophizing”—a surf prince who’d started to lose his way. “It always felt like there was a war going on, like there were voices [in Jimmy’s head],” Cannon said, “and the voices weren’t maybe schizophrenia as much as conflicting thoughts: ‘I’m hearing this, I’m experiencing this, I’m having these new emotions that are in conflict with what I may have grown up with.’”

But Cannon did not see the need for massive clinical intervention. “I was a psychology major in college,” he said. “I know there’s a place for medicine, and I know there’s a place for counseling. I just felt like we hadn’t gone up the ladder of care.…I felt like, ‘Let’s start something a little less invasive than that.’” He still believes the clinic and the drugs were too massive and sudden. “When he came out, Jimmy was not himself.”

Cannon has since left King’s Harbor because of a scandal: He cheated on his wife and refers to himself now as a recovering sex addict. “It’ll be 10 years of sobriety March 10,” he told me in early 2024. His own approach to the war of flesh and spirit has changed in the meantime. “So much of what I’ve learned about my own recovery is that acceptance is the answer to everything. And if I can practice it for myself,” he said, “I can practice it for others.” Jimmy’s self-induced pressure to live up to his own golden image may have combined poorly, Cannon admitted, with a sudden set of Scriptural admonitions.

Cannon came to the beach memorial after Jimmy’s suicide. Almost a thousand people crowded the sand near Fourth Street in Manhattan Beach, including a huge contingent of the LA County lifeguards. People Jimmy had met anywhere from South Africa to Latin America turned up, and the Millers say about 500 people paddled into the water for a floating memorial. “His mother made it clear that I was not welcome,” said Cannon. “That was very painful.” The lead psychiatrist at Cedars-Sinai was in attendance too, and this was where he told the family, on the beach, that he had missed the surf variable in Jimmy’s equation, the role of the ocean as a balancing force.

Cannon wrote an apologetic letter to the Millers afterward, and he said Nancy wrote back to reconcile. But the relationship is cold. “He said, ‘I’m so sorry. I gave Jimmy the wrong advice,’” Nancy recalled. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, no kidding.’”

The whole purpose of the Foundation’s gentle ocean-therapy regimen is to offer traumatized people a different path, an angle of recovery between the shibboleths of old-time religion and the dangerous haze of psychotropic drugs. “I had these two men who were knowledge leaders, people I depended on to help him,” said Nancy, “who did the opposite of helping him.”

•

Losing a close relative to suicide is worse than being held hostage by Somali pirates. I’m in a rare position to say that. The avalanche of my summer before seventh grade in Northridge left me with a chronic sense of helplessness and fear. There was no movement in my family to see a therapist. My mom had lost her own mother to cancer in 1959, when she was still a young woman, and the midcentury German idea was to stiffen up and muddle through. (Never mind that Freud and Jung both wrote in German.)
I wasn’t suicidal, but I also didn’t realize that suicide was part of the equation. I was 10,000 miles from understanding the nature of the shock.

Did I have PTSD? The answer is that I had nothing. I had less than before. I’d lost something unfathomable. My body reacted with a deep strain of grief and alarm, combined with guilt over latent wish fulfillment—that angry man was finally gone—and, of course, shame, because what kind of kid lost his dad?

PTSD researchers might say my junior-high paralysis belonged to a fight-or-flight response, that the flood of cortisol to the brain created a primal panic not so different from mortal fear. A third, often unmentioned alternative for the panicked animal is, of course, to freeze, and I froze. It took years to unfreeze. Religion was not the answer. In fact, it was so far from being the answer that I still find it painful to think about Jimmy’s fundamentalist arc. 

The Catholicism I had inherited in the suburbs of Southern California was a dry-bone system of rules, and I drifted from it after my father died because of its unquestioned traditions, including the idea of a personal afterlife, which many Americans seem to absorb one way or another. Heaven is the reward, like a dessert; hell, the stinking punishment. If you study this system of belief you notice that the contraption of incentives is an egoistic trap, not because the myths are absurd—I like Jung too much to hate a good myth—but because if the ego is driven by desire and fear, how do you liberate a human soul using more desire or more fear?

My father’s sudden absence had caused a profound and furious pain that nothing in my Catholic training could address. So I did other things: I read. I played guitar. I made new friends in my new town. Surfing helped, even if I wasn’t so good. I paddled out with a keen sense of helplessness and victimhood on a yellowed fiberglass board with a flat, awkward nose, which tended to bury itself in the water when I tried to catch a wave. I learned the surf term for this behavior: “pearling,” as in “diving for pearls.” When I complained about it to Stefan, my surf buddy during the first year, his face lit up.

“Your board pearls?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re saying it’s the board’s fault?”

Other surfers were in the water, so he played to the gallery.

“I’m saying the board does it more than it should,” I said.

“Oh, I’m really bummed,” he said with gleeful sarcasm. “My board doesn’t surf right. And my pencil makes mistakes on my tests.”

The other surfers laughed.

“Fuck you, Stefan.”

I spent the rest of the summer trying to master my piece-of-shit board. It wasn’t a complete waste of time. But after a while I started to surf with a new friend, Tim, who was a math whiz with stringy hair and an enthusiasm for fluid mechanics. He sold me his short, squirrelly Becker twin-fin. It had a generous rocker curve in the nose that ended the pearling. So my first problem vanished, but the new board was thin and unstable, like a leaf, and I had a new set of problems. 

It’s easy to look back on this halting, clumsy process now with nostalgia. Before the age of YouTube tutorials, high school surf teams, surf-and-yoga retreats, and personal coaches, it was what we called “learning to surf.” It was also a wholesome distraction. My talents in the water never posed a threat to the world tour, but it became an Ariadne’s thread out of my labyrinth of grief. Month by month, year by year, I quit feeling so victimized and sullen.

•

The sea brings a sense of vastness, of magnificence as well as freedom, and the powers visible in the coastal zone, where the water beats the shore, can ignite a cleansing fear. “The term ‘blue mind’ describes the mildly meditative state we fall into when near, in, on, or under water,” Wallace J. Nichols, the author and marine biologist who coined the term in 2014, told an interviewer. “It’s the antidote to what we refer to as ‘red mind,’ which is the anxious, over-connected, and over-stimulated state that defines the new normal of modern life.”

“The term ‘blue mind’ describes the mildly meditative state we fall into when near, in, on, or under water. It’s the antidote to ‘red mind.’”

Nichols argues that nature of any sort is good for the brain, because we evolved to absorb our senses in it. Something in our minds runs out across the open sand like a dog let go from a leash, yes. But he goes on to argue that any natural view that includes a body of water—let’s say a valley with a stream, or a grassland with a lake—also eases the human mind because it’s less dangerous to a primate than a thick forest since we can see predators coming for miles. Around freshwater we also know we can find a drink and maybe a supply of food. So the ocean, for Nichols, combines these instincts. We can survey the water all the way to the horizon, and even if we can’t drink it, we know it’s full of crustaceans and fish.

Arguments about early man are easy to form and hard to refute. But they’re cocktail-party ideas—all you can do is nod. My problem with blue-mind theory is its near-cultish boosterism. I don’t need convincing that the sea is good. I could talk about it all day long. What I need is a counterargument. Some people hate salt water. Others can’t stand the beach. Westerners, in fact, had a thousand other therapies before they discovered “beach culture” in the 1900s. (The American and European waterfront in those days belonged to fishermen, romantic poets, weirdos, sailors, and natives of tropical countries.) 

So in what sense is water special? For me, a throbbing, blinking city has the same effect as the sight of Nichols’ primeval lake and field. Put me in LA, New York, or Berlin, and I know I can drink, eat well, find a mate, and gather my tribe for high councils and ritual discussions. I feel at ease in the rush-hour crush of strangers on a sidewalk, and I like the rhythm of screeching trains. But I still feel re-centered, scoured clean, after a good surf.

So let’s start by admitting that immersion in nature is therapeutic, because everyone knows that hiking to the top of a hill can clear your head. Let’s add that exercise is good, because the body needs to flush its cortisol and move. Swimming in freshwater is terrific because it requires the use of your whole body, and, in the bargain, it rinses you off. Immersion in any water also will improve your circulation. The heart works harder, and blood vessels expand to counteract the pressure. “One of the hormones that regulates arterial function is catecholamine, and catecholamines are part of the body’s response to stress,” writes Nichols in Blue Mind. He quotes an aquatic-sports expert named Bruce E. Becker: “During immersion, the body sends out a signal to alter the balance of catecholamines in a manner that is similar to the balance found during relaxation or meditation.”

So immersion in water can bring on a mild meditative state. But the turbulence of the ocean is also an important factor. Mike Shurley, the white-haired Vietnam vet, told beginning surfers at Camp Pendleton to embrace the turbulence. “It’s like combat,” he said. “In combat, it’s chaos. You don’t always know what’s goin’ on, and if you make a mistake, you might get fuckin’ killed. In the surf, it’s chaos—but it’s with a smile.”

Jimmy’s psychiatrist told the family that he had missed the surf variable in Jimmy’s equation, the role of the ocean as a balancing force.

Struggling through the waves also will indicate who’s in charge: not the surfer. You have to work with focus and will in the water, but you also have to submit. This aspect of surfing turns out to be one of the most important for healing post-traumatic stress. Carly Rogers is an occupational therapist from Manhattan Beach who, in a PhD thesis, developed the theory of ocean therapy that undergirds the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation’s surf sessions. She told me the turbulence was good for psychologically paralyzed Marines. “In this dynamic environment [of the ocean], where they’re broken down to nothing,” she said, once they learn to have fun, “they can learn to be self-sufficient in other areas.”

Her ideas are based on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory, which holds that humans can find a state of energized or effortless attention not just in sports but in yoga, meditation, any kind of art, or in challenging, concentrated work—which will rebuild neural pathways. Flow isn’t just an aspect of high performance. It can also help a person heal. Surfing in particular demands a flow state, because the act of standing on a wave and riding forward needs a calm and critical focus, a sort of moving meditation. If you fail to sweep the clamoring thoughts about the future and the past from your mind, as well as any fixed ideas about the wave, you’ll fall.

Exercise in general can wash cortisol out of your body and release it from that sense of constriction and cramp, but surfing also dramatizes the process, because once you learn to balance and turn on a wave, you lift yourself up, physically, from the turbulent whitewash and feel the sudden excitement of flight. And the rush of riding a wave is not just an addictive high. It mimics a chemical high in the brain, with a similar mixture of dopamine, endorphins, and adrenaline, which may be one reason surfing and drugs become intertwined.

The author Thad Ziolkowski points this out in his excellent memoir The Drop, where he argues that two elements of addiction—“the pleasure of the hunt,” or finding the fix in the first place, and “the pleasure of the feast”—can be found in surfing. You have the hard paddle, the long wait, the jostle for entry, and (finally) the consummation. This neurological mirror image of chemical addiction may set up a young surfer’s brain for drugs, if the surfer’s so inclined. But it can also provide a path out of addiction, as a natural methadone, for a surfer who’s tired of the lifestyle. A good wave can mimic industrial euphoria just as the chaos of the impact zone can stir up battlefield adrenaline. In either case, it’s not life threatening, and surf therapy works for people in recovery as well as for people with PTSD.

For some people, of course, it’s no use at all. Most tourists on the beach don’t want to get their ankles wet. They run back and forth like sandpipers, because the human fear of shorebreak, rip currents, sharks, even jellyfish—ultimately, a fear of the unknown—is genuine and universal. Challenging those fears, for some people, can transform a person from a victim of chaotic emotions into a master of turbulence. For others, I might suggest rock climbing.

It’s also worth pointing out the near-miraculous effect that surfing can have on the minds of autistic people, who suffer from overstimulation and cognitive overload in the ordinary, dry-land world. Immersion, or hydrostatic pressure on the body, will focus and calm a person on the spectrum. “Once they are on the beach, you can’t tell a kid with autism from any other child,” Dave Rossman, who works with autistic children, tells Nichols in Blue Mind. 

The most eloquent description of autism and its relationship to surfing comes from the 13-year-old Japanese author of a memoir called The Reason I Jump. Naoki Higashida was a young savant, a brilliant child with autism who referred to the difference between water and dry land in terms of time:

Nobody hassles us in the water, and it’s as if we’ve got all the time in the world. Whether we stay in one place or whether we’re swimming about, when we’re in the water we can really be at one with the pulse of time. Outside of the water there’s always too much stimulation for our eyes and our ears, and it’s impossible for us to guess how long one second is or how long an hour takes.…We are outside the normal flow of time, we can’t express ourselves, and our bodies are hurtling us through life.

Autistic people feel overwhelmed, if not victimized, by the jangling mess of demands on their attention. But the ocean suggests a deeper rhythm. I understand that. Everyday life makes me a little nervous too. I seem to move to a metronome that’s deeper and slower than the regular world, and the ocean puts me at one with its pulse.

•

The beach at Pendleton was called Del Mar, like the town near San Diego, but instead of palm trees and expensive cafés it consisted of arid cinder-block buildings and fake Polynesian thatch for occasional shade. It was a military R&R spot, not established with surf in mind. But Pendleton’s western edge happens to lie among the most storied stretch of surf breaks in California. So when the beaches at Swami’s and Trestles start to fire, the same waves wrap around a breakwater at Del Mar Beach, and the surf at Pendleton can be intense. 

Some Marines from Wounded Warrior Battalion-West must have no idea how good they have it. Some have never surfed before. Sometimes the water scares them, and before a session they’ll sit on the beach in silence, fidgeting. The Jimmy Miller program leads surfers through a “conscious recovery” program, which involves talking about their moods and states of mind both before and after a surf. Nancy said Marine commanders initially resisted the idea of group chats: “They said, ‘Don’t expect ’em to get all soft and kumbaya on you,’” which explains the phrase “kumbaya sessions,” repeated over and over (and now retired) by people at the foundation. The COs were wrong, though. The Marines wanted to talk. “Those guys opened up like you wouldn’t believe,” said Nancy.

Sherlynn Quintanilla-Slao was a tough young Marine sergeant from Guam, with dark hair and pale skin drawn with scars as well as some remarkable tattoos. When I met her on the beach at Pendleton, her mind seemed hyperfocused, almost tightfisted, but she was frank and specific about surf therapy. “About the time I was getting introduced to Jimmy Miller, I was going on a downhill slope,” she said. “I was like, ‘You know what? Why be positive? What is there to be positive about anymore?’…Then I started surfing and I was like, ‘It’s not so bad. I got thrashed today, and it’s not that bad. Life goes on. And tomorrow there’ll be waves, hopefully, and tomorrow there’ll be the ocean.’”

I’ve tried to imagine how the months and years after my father’s suicide would have been different if I had put myself through a conscious-recovery program on the beach. What would I have said? What could I have said, at the age of 12? I was probably too closed up, too young.

I can see now that my problem in the aftermath of Dad’s death was a near-constant sense of emotional claustrophobia. I remember the constriction and the pain would close in like a bank of clouds and lift, as far as I could tell, whenever they wanted. I was their victim. Surfing could scatter them for a while, because some aspect of depression lives in the muscles and nerves like a cramp. Other Ariadne’s threads, like music, also helped—but a real and lasting recovery would not begin until I learned to read and concentrate with honesty on both my inner and outer worlds. 

In high school I discovered Death of a Salesman as an early draft of my father’s decline, and for the first time the violence of Dad’s temper and the tragedy of his alcoholism connected to something besides his own bad habits. He belonged to an American pattern, a tradition of dysfunction, which could be resisted.

That’s important. If conscious detachment from the wretchedness of my emotions was a measure of my growth as a teenager, I also had to distance myself from the signals my own society delivered, brainlessly, every day, like static on TV. The terms of existence I’d been raised with—a hustling, status-conscious materialism in the airless LA suburbs—was not the only world. So I learned orneriness, resistance, and (eventually) a cheerful skepticism. By the time I became a hostage in Somalia, I could approach misunderstandings and bad luck with detachment, irony, and a sense of humor.

Paul Swanson was a lieutenant colonel I met at Camp Pendleton—a short, intense man about the shape of a bullet, who wore glasses and looked like a regulation Marine except for a bracelet of wooden beads on his wrist. I sat in his bungalow office one afternoon with Jim Miller, Jimmy’s dad. Swanson wanted to emphasize that surfing was an original part of Wounded Warrior Battalion-West. “We had these folks here before we were very established as a battalion,” he said, nodding at Jim. “They’re one of the founding ‘things’ here, one of the first programs.”

“Paul’s been certified as a yoga teacher,” said Jim.

“Really?” I said, thinking the beads on his wrist made more sense. “What kind of yoga?”

“Vinyasa flow, mainly. We use some Bikram poses, too.”

Physical exertion, he said, is not all you need. The body may keep the score, but trauma lives in many places at once. His interest in alternative therapies started with Deepak Chopra, whose books he read on active duty. I’m not a Chopra fan, but in that sun-shot Pendleton office the lieutenant colonel mentioned a typically Hindu notion that would prove as important to me as it would to his work at the battalion. He said, “Thoughts are like clouds.…They might be big or small, but they always pass. And they’re not the sky. That was such an important idea for me. The thoughts are not you. You have a soul.”

The age-old observation that the human mind can witness itself, that feelings and thoughts can be observed, belongs to no single author—not to Chopra, not to Hinduism, not to Buddhism, not to the ancient Greeks. It has many names, but this rudiment of self-awareness needs to be discovered individually, one person at a time. 

Without some notion in Somalia about the quiet magic of detachment from circumstance, or from emotion and thought, I would have been hopelessly victimized by sorrow and rage. Forgiveness, it turns out, is a form of detachment too, not that my Catholic teachers ever wielded such words. 

Surfing—or anything that induces flow—may help in the same direction, because flow frees the body and mind from habitual patterns. If PTSD is a physiological attachment to the past or to a wound, the state induced by surfing is a bone-level release. “I feel finally alive,” one Marine vet said to Carly Rogers in the first years of the Jimmy Miller ocean-therapy program. “I feel like this could save my life.”

If PTSD is a physiological attachment to the past or to a wound, the state induced by surfing is a bone-level release.

My adolescent break with the church and everything that did me no good as a kid was the start of a long metamorphosis, a spiritual re-education, and the insight Swanson referred to was a lot more subtle and sublime than it sounded. It was the opposite of underlining hell-and-brimstone verses in a holy book, and it was the flip side of obsessive guilt—the reverse of everything Jimmy must have absorbed at his fundamentalist church.

“You see how a Marine Corps officer can think outside the box?” Jim told me at Pendleton with a smile. 

Swanson laughed.

“Oh, hell,” he said, waving the wooden beads on his wrist. “They never liked me anyway.”