Today’s big local news story has been about a shark attack, but it’s really about loss.

Sara Rubin here, writing less about news today than about grief, because this story to me is personal. It is about a friend, and a community she created around a sincere passion for doing what she loved, and an effortless way of sharing that with others.

Twenty years ago, Erica Fox and a friend started swimming every Sunday at Lovers Point in Pacific Grove. Since then, multiple books have been written about the science of swimming and what it does for our brains. But Erica never needed a book to tell her what she knew through experience: Swimming in the ocean is a balm for body and mind, an adventure as much as a meditation. She developed a deeply intimate relationship with the Pacific Ocean not by studying it or by looking at it, but by getting into it—again and again and again, on choppy days and gloriously calm days, logging what I can only guess are thousands of miles. 

Through experience she became an expert on the changes both subtle and big that mean the ocean is never the same place twice—differences in swell and current, turbidity and visibility, temperature, salinity. The ocean is ever-changing, something I have learned as much from hearing Erica talk about it as experiencing it myself through swimming with the Kelp Krawlers, on and off for 15 years. 

Yesterday morning we were out for a swim, in clear conditions with good visibility, a beautiful day in the water. There were about 15 of us, swimming around the rocky promontory of Lovers Point and into Otter Cove to the west, then back. 

Like the other swimmers, I was unaware that a tragedy was happening, with only the sounds of my own strokes splashing. A harbor seal swam under me for close to a minute as I approached the beach, one of those wildlife-human interactions that we cherish. 

I got out of the water to greet my fellow swimmers who’d already returned to shore, surprised to see a gaggle of fluorescent-vested firefighters standing among them. They were responding to a report of a shark sighting just off Lovers Point, and wanted to be sure everyone was accounted for. 

We quickly realized that everyone was not accounted for. 

Before today, if I was trying to make sense of a senseless loss of life in the ocean, I would have called Erica Fox to talk it through. She would be calm and reasoned; she understood the risk of swimming in an ocean habitat that is home to white sharks, and she understood the risk in context. I think she would be horrified to see the frenzied news coverage of this incident. 

She would also certainly object to framing this as an attack, and she would urge us to instead call it an incident—an animal’s behavior is just that. I have found myself searching for something to be angry at in facing this loss, and then feeling a little confused when I can come up with nothing—it is unreasonable to be angry at a shark. In the absence of anyone or anything to direct anger toward, I’m left just with sadness. 

Erica was a bright light of a person who was quick to laugh and seemed to be always smiling. There’s a feeling of shock to lose someone so vital, and a grief resonating through the community of swimmers she helped create. My heart aches for everyone who knew Erica, including everyone who she helped learn to love the ocean.