The Summer of the Shark | The Lincoln Logue

We're addicted to catastrophe and the MSM is our dealer.

It was about 8 in the morning. The shadows had begun their long stretch into the fall. In Minneapolis, where I lived with my fiancé, you try to squeeze out every last drop of warmth and sunshine before winter drops the hammer. When I lived there, I’d mark the moment every year when I felt winter. It was usually in October, right after the sun went down and the wind changed. It wasn’t like a shift in direction. It was a shift in quality, security. You could feel the bite of winter and it was dark.

Anyway. It was still warm, and the light was dusky golden, and it had been a good summer.

I was driving to work in Plymouth, pretty much parked on Highway 100, listening to Morning Edition. I don’t remember who the host was, but they interrupted an interview with some breaking news. I need to, uh, break in here for a sec. We’ve got reports that an airplane has crashed into one of the Twin Towers.

I turned the radio up.

Whoever the guest was, they sorta chuckled. I can’t forget that. They said something like, Wow. I know the Empire State Building has been crashed into before, right?

I reached for my Nokia and dialed up my fiancé. We were both breaking news junkies, and I knew she was probably still asleep. I felt giddy about dropping something new on her.

By the time I pulled into the parking lot at work, of course, the world had changed.

The Summer of the Shark

That summer, the country had been in a panic about sharks. Just after the 4th of July, an 8-year-old boy named Jessie Arbogast was severely injured by a bull shark around Pensacola. His arm was bitten off and later retrieved and reattached.

Network news went wild.

Any run-in with sharks after that spun up the machine. A surfer not far from where Arbogast was mulled got a nip on the foot, and the country exploded into hysteria.

Panels were empanneled. Discussion groups discussed. Each and every shark incident was approached with the kind of internal heat and focus you’d find at a train derailment.

Then, on Labor Day weekend, a ten-year-old named David Peltier was killed in the waters around Virginia Beach. Off Cape Hatteras, a 26-year-old named Sergei Zaloukaev was attacked and killed, and his girlfriend, Natalia Slobodskaya, lost a leg.

What the hell was going on with these sharks? Have they finally had enough?!