R.I.P. Bryan Frost

You might think that travelling down here in Mexico you really detach yourself from whats going on in the states, but thats really not the case. When you have to confront something as tragic as the murder of a friend, it can turn your entire perspective on travelling and the world in general upside down. It still doesn´t seem possible, but I found out just last night that a friend named Bryan Frost was stabbed to death while walking through LA this past Thursday. I didn´t know him that well, but after staying at his place a couple days over the summer, I could tell he was quite kind, generous, and very easy to get along with. The violence of it is most disturbing, and serves as an important message to those of you back home: you´ve got to keep all your wits about you, or you could easily find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brian´s death was the second of two bad omens that have hit close to home recently. Thursday and Friday we were chilling out on the pacific coast of southern baja, camping at a little spot called Pescadero Surf Camp. Walking the board we rented out to the waves on Thursday afternoon, I was surprised to see a boy come running up to me as I reached the water. In a panic, he told me that a man was stuck out in the water, and turned pointing to the rocky area down the beach. I followed him, running at his pace until we arrived down the beach, where there were five or six people all yelling things at me, waving their arms, and pointing out to sea. For a brief moment, I saw the man stuggling to keep his head above water before a wave came crashing ontop of him, sending him even closer to the rocks. He was further out than I had dared to go with the surfboard all day, and seemed to have been sucked out by the riptide that was separating us. I wasn´t sure whether it was the pressure of the panicking people on the rocks bearing down on me, or a burst of courage, but I ran out into the water and started paddling through the waves. As the waves got larger and the water got deeper, whatever courage I had ran dry as I lost sight of the man and struggled to hold on to the surfboard in the crashing and choas of the whitewater. In all the confusion, I saw a man on the rocks just 30 or so feet away, sitting and vigorously putting on what looked like a pair of shoes or flippers. I yelled to him, asking if he could see the man, and telling him to take the board. He jumped into the water towards me, and soon he had the board and was off, leaving me struggling to fight the current. Thankfully I was only about shoulder deep at that point, and was able to swim and walk off to the side in order to get out of the riptide. I was met onshore by Joel and the Aussies with whom we were surfing and hanging out (more on them later), and after seeing that the two others had made it out of the riptide, comments abounded about my Hasselhoff-esque assist in saving this man´s life. Both this story and Brians go to show that no matter where you are you can find yourself in a life and death situation, and you cant put too much faith into your being able to make it out unscathed.