Where the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean meet the shallower waters of the Columbia River, the waves, the wind and the current combine to make what is often a very hazardous situation. More than 2,000 vessels and 700 lives have been lost at the Columbia Bar, and many more in the surrounding area, known as ‘The Graveyard of the Pacific.’ Christopher D’Amelio is one of a select few people who have qualified as surfmen for the U.S. Coast Guard. Surfmen pilot rescue boats over sometimes huge waves and help keep boaters safe. D’Amelio’s book about his time on the Columbia is called “Life and Death at Cape Disappointment.”
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Where the mighty Columbia surges into the even mightier Pacific, the waves, the wind, the currents, and the shifting sandbars create what is often a very hazardous situation. More than 2,000 vessels and 700 lives have been lost at the Columbia Bar. Many more have died in the surrounding area. That is how you get a nickname like “The Graveyard of the Pacific.” When recreational boaters or commercial fishermen get in trouble in these waters, highly trained members of the US Coast Guard are sent out to do search and rescue. They’re stationed at Cape Disappointment in Ilwaco, Washington. Christopher D’Amelio spent more than seven years there, eventually becoming a surfman, a qualification reserved for exceedingly talented rescue boat operators. D’Amelio has written a new book about that time and the rest of his 22-year coast guard career. It’s called “Life and Death at Cape Disappointment.” And he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Christopher D’Amelio: Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Thanks very much for joining us. So in your prologue, you had one of your lifelong friends, a guy named Dave Hopkins, write it. And he says that when you and he were growing up you were both interested in surfing. And one day you went out to go surfing but it was too cold, there were no big waves. And so he said “let’s call today, let’s go in.” And you said “no, I’m going out, you can wait in the car if you want.” And he says you just went out past where the small waves were breaking and just sat in the water and stared out at the Pacific - you grew up in California - for like an hour and a half. Do you remember that day? And I’m just curious if you remember what you were looking at?
D’Amelio: I don’t remember that specific day. But I surfed a lot by myself. I love the ocean. All I think about is the ocean. I love being in the ocean. I love surfing. I used to surf by myself up in Washington and Oregon. I don’t remember that day, but that was not an uncommon thing.
Miller: What would have been in your mind, do you think, as you were just looking out at it? Because it’s one thing to love surfing, it’s another to love the ocean so much that you could just get lost in it, staring out at it. What would be in your mind?
D’Amelio: So I kind of feel like being in the ocean and surfing is the only time where I don’t really have a whole lot of thoughts.
Miller: It’s the opposite of my question then, isn’t it?
D’Amelio: Yeah. My mind’s always scrambling, thinking about something, something I need to do. But when I’m surfing, I don’t have a lot of thought. It’s just kind of at peace. The ocean’s kind of mental and physical therapy, for me at least. I love it. It’s very peaceful. Even if it’s big and scary, it’s very peaceful to me.
Miller: Well that’s pretty ironic, because you took something that was this peaceful place for your mind, and you turned it into a job where you had to have, if you were going to be successful, 100 things on your mind to keep yourself safe, your crew safe, and to actually be able to save people who very likely without your help could have died. You turned a place of peace into a very tumultuous job.
D’Amelio: I did. I was lucky. When I entered the Coast Guard, I had no idea what surfmen were. I knew I wanted to do search and rescue. And I got the opportunity to go up to Cape D, and that was for me. I loved it. I wouldn’t take back that time for anything.
Miller: Cape D, that’s the name for the Cape Disappointment Station there. What did people who weren’t at Cape D know about it? What was the reputation?
D’Amelio: Well, they have the motor lifeboat school there, so they do a lot of training. But the station, which is operational, we respond to cases, it’s kind of the Mecca of search and rescue, not just on the West Coast, but all of the Coast Guard. There’s surf stations up and down the Oregon and Washington coast. You got Grays Harbor, Yaquina Base, Siuslaw, Umpqua. But the Columbia River is massive. You take North Jetty to South Jetty at the mouth of the river, it’s two-and-a-half miles wide. If anybody ever gets a chance to go up to the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse or the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, it’s about 220 ft up in the air, kind of overlooking the bar. It’s super impressive.
But everybody knows about Cape D a lot because of the name. You don’t forget the name Cape Disappointment. I remember when my detailer called and asked if I wanted to go there, I thought he was joking. I’m like “there’s no place called Cape Disappointment.” It was an eye opener.
Miller: Do you remember the first time you actually went out in those waters?
D’Amelio: So when I got there, I was kind of a low man on the totem pole. You gotta train, become a boat crewman, then a coxswain. Most people don’t get qualified to become a surfman. So I don’t remember the first time. I do remember the first time I was there and I went up to the tower, and I saw everything. And it was big, it was about 15ft. And I was like “this is definitely the place for me.”
Miller: You wanted the challenge. Is that why?
D’Amelio: Yes, absolutely.
Miller: What does it mean to be a surfman?
D’Amelio: That’s a good question. It’s a rare and unique job. It’s really dangerous. The Coast Guard was a chapter in my life. We kind of move on, but it’s something I hold in high regard for sure.
Miller: What about technically? What does a surfman actually do?
D’Amelio: The most important thing is decision-making. Being able to drive is super important. But being able to drive and make decisions under pressure when you got a million things going on and make sound decisions - usually when people have adrenaline flowing, they don’t make the best decisions. It’s hard to think clearly.
Miller: You said being able to drive, meaning being able to drive, say, a 47-foot lifeboat through enormous waves, up and down the waves, and going sideways or forwards.
D’Amelio: So you’re taking a 40,000 lb boat and you’re hitting anywhere from 12- to 25-foot waves, you have to be smooth or you’re gonna get hurt. It’s like doing a full sprint and running into a brick wall. So everything has to be smooth and calculated when you do it. People say slow is smooth, smooth is fast. That’s definitely true for boat driving in the surf.
Miller: You got some advice from a mentor at one point, he said “every night when you have duty or when you’re just lying in bed, think up different scenarios, different situations, try imagining the worst thing that can happen, and then the worst thing that can happen after that, and try to imagine how you will respond.” Did you take that advice?
D’Amelio: Absolutely. It was great advice. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a lot of sleep.
No, it was great advice. You always have to be ready. It’s kind of like being at a fire station. In the winter time when it’s big and nasty and it’s mostly commercial fishermen, those guys are smart. But people can get in trouble. So the cases are far and few between. We might get 40 or 50 cases in a three month period, or might only get like 15 one year in a three month period. It doesn’t happen every night. Some surfmen go their entire career and don’t do surf cases. Always ready, it’s the motto of the Coast Guard. But you gotta be prepared for sure.
Miller: What would happen in your body and in your brain when the search and rescue alarm would go off?
D’Amelio: Excitement. There’s nothing like going and saving people. Excitement, adrenaline, wanting to go help.
Miller: It does remind me there is a line in your book where you said there was the Christmas holidays you’d been with your family or your wife’s family, and then you came back to Cape Disappointment and a couple of weeks after you got back, a fishing boat capsized in the middle of January. And you said it felt like Christmas came a couple weeks late. I feel like sometimes people in search and rescue are less honest about that. You look forward to these, even if you know that it could be terrifying, that things could go wrong, that there is still something that you actually look forward to about getting the opportunity to respond. Is that a fair way to put it?
D’Amelio: It’s all about opportunity. You don’t want to see anything bad happen to people. That’s not where I’m going there. It’s all about the opportunity to do good and save people. Like I said, fishermen, that’s their livelihood. They’re out there, they’re doing a job. Things happen on the ocean, it’s an unforgiving place, especially up in the Pacific Northwest. So just the opportunity to go help- and usually, when it’s big and nasty outside, it’s dark, the adrenaline’s flowing even more.
Miller: Do you miss that adrenaline?
D’Amelio: Absolutely. 100%. I was in Florence, Oregon, Siuslaw River and Umpqua. I miss the surf community. I miss the small towns. I miss the cohesiveness. I miss all of it. I wish I would have gone back.
Miller: You got a lot of media attention and even an award for a rescue that became known as the Peacock Spit Case. Three boaters were rescued, one died. These were three members of the same family, a couple different generations in one family. Do you mind telling us that story?
D’Amelio: Sure. That was a tough day. It was September 2, 2001. That weekend was busy, I think around 30 or 40 cases. That day we went out, in the morning, there was actually a boat that capsized. Two guys passed away. We couldn’t get to them. They were getting washed up on the beach. And it was big, especially for September. It was 20-foot-plus, it was huge.
And a boat, up by the North Head Lighthouse - sometimes when you’re coming in the Columbia River and it’s big, you can’t really line up the Cape D Lighthouse - so they lined up the wrong lighthouse and came in at Peacock Spit. They called and then cut out. So we automatically got underway, rounded the North Jetty, and got extremely lucky spotting them. There was a helicopter that just got on scene, we got to them right before the helicopter did. Once we got on scene, they were taking big breaks, it was 20-foot-plus. And one wave actually blew one of the family members off of the boat, and he wasn’t wearing a life jacket. We tried to coax the three other guys to kind of jump off the boat and swim about 10 yards, and they weren’t having it, which I totally understand. The problem was the way we were set up, if we were to just kind of crash boats and pick them up, they could have got pinned between the boats. And then we had a helicopter above us who was blowing us away from the boat, and I tried to communicate with them, but their priority was the rescue swimmer. So it was kind of logistically challenging. It was unfortunate. One of the guys didn’t make it. He’s the only one that didn’t have a life jacket on.
Miller: You got a major award for this call because of the three lives that were saved. You write that you’ve been focusing on in the months that followed, maybe to this day, on the one life that you couldn’t save. What was it like for you to get that award, given the way you look at what you did accomplish and what your team was not able to accomplish?
D’Amelio: I had mixed feelings on it. You could save 100 people and lose one person and it’s probably in my mind not successful. It was a challenging case. I couldn’t have done it without the crew. They were awesome. But I still have mixed feelings about it.
One of the reasons it was a high profile case was because the air station was involved. There was a lot going on that day, there was a lot of news. But yeah, I kind of feel like I’m not sure it’s award worthy, just because we lost somebody. The conditions maybe called for it because it was so big and crazy. But I don’t know, just losing somebody and getting an award for it just doesn’t really sit that well, I guess.
Miller: I have to say when I read the book, I wondered if you could do anything in terms of this job that would make you feel like you deserved an award. It sort of seems like you are allergic to that kind of praise.
D’Amelio: Yeah, I think most people in the surf community, it’s very selfless. People do amazing things all the time without any recognition are totally fine with it.
Miller: So what does it mean to you to call somebody a hero or to call somebody courageous? These are words that get used to describe the work that you do.
D’Amelio: Having a heroic job doesn’t make you a hero. Doing something heroic, putting your life on the line when others wouldn’t do it. I’ll just use a scenario of someone’s out on the beach and they’re surfing, they get in trouble, and there’s 100 people staring at them watching and then one guy goes out and saves them, that’s pretty heroic.
Miller: But if it’s your job to do it, it’s less heroic. Is that the distinction?
D’Amelio: Yeah, that’s kind of how I feel. I use the fireman analogy a lot. When you have a mass amount of wildfires, everybody says “you guys are heroes.” Well, it’s really their job, right? Same with us. It’s just a job.
Miller: There was a really striking, I think it’s the shortest chapter in the book, and you write about getting in the habit of putting helmets on the heads of people whose bodies you’ve recovered, meaning putting helmets on dead people. Why did you start doing that?
D’Amelio: So, this didn’t happen very often. One time we picked up a guy that was south of Seaside, and it was rough. His boat had capsized, he didn’t have a life jacket on, passed away. We picked him up, put him on the boat. I hate to say this, but he got beat up a little bit. Those boats are moving around. So I got in a little bit of trouble, but you gotta take care of people. You treat them as if they were alive. It wasn’t our intention to have the guy flopping around on the deck. But things happen, it is rough. You want to take care of people dead or alive the best you can.
Miller: Unlike someone who’s, say, in the military in combat overseas and they have their tour of duty and then eventually they come home and that tour is over, you would deal with whatever happened over the course of sometimes many hours of sometimes traumatic service, and then that shift was over and you’d go home. What was that transition like?
D’Amelio: I handled it pretty good. It was like a switch for me. Work was work, off was off. I didn’t bring work home. I didn’t talk to my wife about work. She might know if I had a bad day, someone would call, “hey, Chris had a bad day today.” It was hard to decompress a little bit. But I never brought work home. I kind of felt like work is work, home is home, leave it at that. It probably helped that my wife absolutely hates the ocean. So she didn’t know what I was talking about half the time, which was great. I look back and I kind of feel like I did a pretty good job of separating the two.
Miller: So you didn’t wish to have somebody to confide in, to talk about what you had seen or to help you process what you’d been dealing with?
D’Amelio: No. You do a case, and it’s kind of on to the next. You never really find out what happens to the person. If you load them in an ambulance, you never really find out what happens. It’s kind of on to the next, on to the next, on to the next. The Coast Guard does provide what’s called critical incident stress management. So if you have a critical situation where there’s death, something traumatic, they have facilitators come in and you can openly talk, if you would like, to people.
I will say that writing the book was fairly therapeutic for me, because I didn’t talk about a lot of this stuff. People know that I worked with, and they had similar situations. But you don’t really talk about it a whole lot. And I don’t know why that is.
Miller: How did the job of being in the Coast Guard change after 9/11?
D’Amelio: Oh, big time. Cape D, it was 80% search and rescue to 20% law enforcement. And that flipped, we were doing security zones, security escorts, checking on critical infrastructure. Everything was law enforcement based. I mean, the whole nation was like that. We didn’t know what was going on. But it changed. And I wasn’t a huge fan of law enforcement. I really liked search and rescue. The whole Coast Guard changed, like I said, everything changed.
Miller: You are very clear in the book that you were not a fan of that change. You said you felt like you were a “maritime mall cop.” It’s a great phrase. But so what were you actually doing? And do you think that it was worthwhile?
D’Amelio: No, not necessarily. We would do boardings on big container ships. We would grab three or four guys from the station. And in order to do a thorough inspection of a container ship, it would take days. Those things are massive. So we would hop on board at the mouth of the river, we would check the crew manifest, run names, kind of look around, and call it good. There was no playbook for it. It was all about numbers at the time. We did the best that we could with the people that we had. We didn’t have a lot of people. We had two boat crews at all times and that was really it. I guess I wouldn’t want to say it wasn’t beneficial. The public and the maritime industry knew that we were out there doing these kind of things. So maybe it was more beneficial than I think.
Right after 9/11, they wanted us to go check the Astoria-Megler Bridge. I don’t know if you’ve ever been out there, but there’s thousands and thousands of pilings. They were saying, hey, check for anything that looks out of the ordinary, maybe a bomb. We don’t know what a bomb looks like. And half of the bridge you can’t get to because it’s too shallow. All of it was a knee jerk reaction. That was a terrible time.
Miller: Do you mind telling us about one more attempted rescue? It’s the story that you start the book with and it became a kind of turning point in your career.
D’Amelio: Yeah, that was a bummer. So I had done a lot. I’d run a ton of cases. I don’t wanna say that you get the feeling of being invincible. I kind of felt that way, and this particular case was like a slow motion death by 1,000 paper cuts. It was no fun. To this day, I still think about it a little bit. Not from the outcome, but just from the point of, maybe I should have done something different. I’m not sure what that would have been. But I think any time a kid’s involved it kind of ratchets up the emotions. And then not being able to do anything. It’s a very helpless feeling.
Miller: And just for people who haven’t yet read the book, it was I think a 13-year old girl who you were unable to save, you say it was too dangerous for you to get the boat closer to her, and her brother did survive.
D’Amelio: He was 13 and she was 9.
Miller: Your kids were all pretty young when you were working at Cape Disappointment, and you’re really clear that you wrote this book so they would have some understanding, a better understanding, of what you were doing when you weren’t there, of what your job entailed. What do you most want them to know about what you used to do?
D’Amelio: So, people have no idea what surfmen do in the Coast Guard. Even people in the Coast Guard don’t know what surfmen do. So, it’s a really unique, rare, dangerous job. And like you said, my kids were young. I didn’t really have a whole lot of motivation to write a book. Some people kind of suggested it because I ran some high profile cases. And then I had a medical issue come up. And I wanted to show them what I used to do. They just know they just remember us living there. They had no idea what I did. So hopefully they can look back and, you know, someday be proud.
Miller: You do talk about the medical issue near the end of the book and you say “I might not get to experience the rest of what is considered a long and happy life.” Is that diagnosis part of why you wanted to write this book?
D’Amelio: Yeah, 100%. Like I said, I wasn’t super into writing a book. But then that happened and it was like, well, my kids and the family don’t really know what I used to do. So here’s an opportunity, instead of just telling them, they can’t understand. So yeah, 100%.
Miller: At the very beginning, we talked about how you loved the ocean, but you didn’t say loved. You said love, present tense. Do you still just go out and spend time in it?
D’Amelio: So I actually live in Louisiana right now.
Miller: There’s water there!
D’Amelio: Yeah…
Miller: Not an open ocean.
D’Amelio: No. So, I’m from a little town, Aptos, California, it’s in Santa Cruz. I go home twice a year and that’s all I do is surf. And then I come here and I think about going home and surfing. So I spend as much time as possible in the water. We take vacations down to Pensacola, Florida, and I spend some time in the water. But I think about being in the ocean all the time.
Miller: Well, may you have more time in the ocean instead of just thinking about it. Chris D’Amelio, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for this book.
D’Amelio: Appreciate it. Thank you.
Miller: That’s Chris D’Amelio. He had a 22-year Coast Guard career, including more than seven years at Cape Disappointment. His new book, largely about that time in Washington and Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River, is called “Life and Death at Cape Disappointment.”
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