Surfers aren’t just talking, they’re asking, “What happened?” It’s instinctual, really. We want to know because the unknown is always a little bit scarier. We’re not looking for the gory details; we just want enough to role play. When we hear the guy got caught in the rocks at Sunset Cliffs, we tell each other, “I know exactly where that is. In serious swells, there’re a couple bad spots.”

When we hear he was surfing alone, we add, “That’s why, in bigger surf, I paddle out with a buddy, and if not, I chat it up in the water so if I disappear, people notice.”

And when we hear he screamed for help and that an onlooker jumped into the water after him, we breathe a little easier, because we all want to think someone will hear our cries.

“Was he just inexperienced?” A student asked me, as if that were the only logical explanation. I tell him, like I tell everybody that thinks drowning and ignorance, stupidity, and inexperience are married, the story of Mark Foo, the big wave rider and phenomenal waterman who drowned up in northern California at Mavericks. His death shook the surfing world and heralded the rip-away leash.

But for all the people who were talking about it, some hadn’t even heard about the tragedy.

A friend of mine passed me after she got out of the water Thursday morning. “Dude, I just got so worked. I almost drowned twice.” She smiled.

I gave her an odd look.

Her smile disappeared. “What?”

After I told her, she said, “I’m almost glad I didn’t know that. That’s all I would have thought about when I was in the water.”

One surfer did just that. “I kept thinking about it out there today,” said a guy staring at the peaking swell. “The paddle out was a bitch. The waves are pitching and slamming. Every time I got caught inside, I kept thinking about what it must have been like for him.” He paused and shook his head. “The horror when he realized that…” He shook his head again.

But in case you’re thinking surfers are pensive or soft, we have the token imbeciles who make comments like, “Yeah, that sucked,...but what a way to go."

I don’t know what this guy thinks drowning is like but it’s not supposed to be as peaceful as he’s thinking. Most drowning victims don’t just figure, “oh well, I was done with life anyway.” They actually spend their final minutes or moments fighting for their lives while the thought of imminent death terrorizes them. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who’s come close to drowning—or even thought they’ve come close to drowning. Any surfer who’s ever been caught inside or held down will recount the event with vehement passion, even years after the fact.

But even worse than a cavalier comment is the cold hearted one: “It’s bad, but it’s not like I knew the guy, so I’m not going to get all teary-eyed.”

“Think about it,” another instructor said to me as we hung up soaked wetsuits. “He was just going for a surf. Something we do every day.” She tucked another hanger into another suit. “Every day, we tell people not to panic. Every day, we tell them we’re there to take care of them. Every day, we tell them surfing is all about just having fun.”

As for me, I had surfed that morning and felt the swell building. When I went for a run that evening and saw the surf far rowdier than hours ago, I felt glad that I wasn’t out there in that big messiness. Little did I know that a half hour later a half mile away a man lost his life.

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Elisabeth Gause is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Vyuz.