Shocked to be Alive

The world divides most lives into two parts: the before and the after, the pre and the post. Marriages, graduations, childbirth, wars, first waves, first cars, first trips to the Islands—these things cut our lives into halves. Few among us have had our lives divided as dramatically as Michael Scott Moore. Prior to 2012, Moore was known primarily for his acclaimed book Sweetness and Blood, which chronicles the globalization of surfing in places like Cuba, Morocco, Gaza, and Indonesia. After 2012, Moore became famous for something else entirely. While on a magazine assignment in Somalia, Moore was kidnapped by pirates and spent 977 days in captivity, an ordeal he describes in his latest book, The Desert and the Sea.

I’d known Moore glancingly before his capture. We’d met by email, introduced by mutual writer friends. I’d looked over some pages of a novel he’d sent me about the Iraq War, a subject that I know well from my work as a war correspondent. In the summer of 2011, I sent him a copy of the grant I’d written for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which helped me get to Morocco for a story. Six months later on a similar Pulitzer grant, Moore was picked up by a professional kidnapping outfit near Galkayo, Somalia.

I’ll be honest: when I got the news of his capture, part of me immediately wrote him off for dead. Somalia was—and still is—the most dangerous country on the planet. I’d met a couple former hostages in Iraq and I knew the terms of the deal: once you were captured, it took a herculean effort and certain stars to align to get you free. If you
were lucky and the Pentagon decided you were worth it, then a SEAL team raid might spring you, but such “in extremis hostage rescue” operations, as they are known, fail far more often than is reported in the press. If you were unlucky, then your family would get to watch you be beheaded on the Internet, à la Daniel Pearl.

Then the terms came through and I knew Moore was truly fucked. His captors were asking for 20 million dollars, a gargantuan sum that no government or family had ever before paid in ransom. By that point, I had been to Iraq three times and was mulling a trip to Afghanistan. There was a desire to touch death again, to see if I could hold my own in a different heart of darkness. After learning about Moore’s ransom, I emailed the editor who’d asked me to go to Afghanistan and told him to forget it. Part of me understood Moore’s trip to Somalia to be a fool’s errand, but another part of me knew that if I didn’t watch myself, I could easily end up in his shoes in Afghanistan.

Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. In September 2014, after an extended campaign involving the FBI, the German government, the Pulitzer Center, a retired British army officer living in Nairobi, and the heroic efforts of his mother, Moore walked free, his captors 1.5 million dollars richer.

DM: Why did you go to Somalia?

MSM: Because I had an excellent idea for a book about Somali pirates. I’m a writer, which means I’m vain about my ideas. It’s catastrophic.

DM: I understand that, similar to the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, you wrote extensively while in captivity. How did you do this?

MSM: I wrote in notebooks when I had them. Otherwise I wrote in my head. The pirates confiscated my notebooks twice—three times if you count the kidnapping itself—which represents over a hundred pages of notes, probably close to two hundred. That’s a disaster, given the way I work. I went at least a year and a half with no paper, and during that period I thought about incarcerated writers like Thiong’o or [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn or Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I interviewed Pramoedya for Sweetness and Blood—he was an Indonesian novelist who spent ten years on the island of Buru as a political prisoner. He kept himself sane by telling stories to other prisoners. Eventually the jailers gave him a typewriter, and he wrote the stories down. When Solzhenitsyn sat in the gulag, he composed stories in his head. I learned to revise my books in my head—passages of half-written books, which I knew needed work, or opening paragraphs of books I still wanted to write. I composed and memorized each sentence. Then I made a morning routine of running through whole paragraphs quietly, like an actor rehearsing lines.

DM: You’ve mentioned to me in our earlier conversations that during your captivity you saw hope of repatriation to be a dangerous line of thinking. Please explain this.

MSM: Hope of any kind became dangerous, because it was like a drug. It lofted your mood for a while, but afterwards you felt much worse—just emotionally destitute. I learned not to trust pirate rumors of ransom negotiations, because the guards would tell wild stories about millions of dollars coming to Somalia within “two weeks” or “two months.” All bullshit. They threatened to sell me to al-Shabaab. That was also bullshit, but not outside the realm of possibility. I half-wished for a SEAL raid, but my chances of survival then would have been maybe fifty percent. Lots of things could have gone wrong, so for my own psychological protection I assumed I would die, and learned to live one day at a time, rather than hoping for freedom.

“Hope of any kind became dangerous, because it was like a drug. It lofted your mood for a while, but afterwards you felt much worse—just emotionally destitute. I learned not to trust pirate rumors of ransom negotiations, because the guards would tell wild stories about millions of dollars coming to Somalia within ‘two weeks’ or ‘two months.’ All bullshit.”

DM: As a reporter, you’ve staked at least part of your reputation on going and surfing in countries where most people would never go, places like Gaza, Cuba, and Somalia. Now that you are free, how has your confrontation with your own mortality changed your concept of risk and adventure?

MSM: Well, for Sweetness and Blood, I also went to Britain. The point wasn’t seeking risk. The point was contending with danger when necessary. The path I took through Somalia was well-worn by other journalists, so it wasn’t daring in a Somali context. An alternative idea to the pirate book, that I contemplated in 2011, was a book about a Mexican border wall, and I decided against it because reporters were getting killed in northern Mexico, not just kidnapped. This was before the Trump campaign. Don’t ask how I feel about that decision now. Movement and exploration are more important to me than danger, and I think of Sweetness and Blood as a travel book, not a sports or thrill-seeking book. I’ll probably write more travel books.

DM: When we met in San Diego, you mentioned that one of the reasons you chose to relocate from Berlin back to your childhood home in California was the nostalgia for it that gripped you when you were in captivity. Can you talk specifically about these dreams or visions or sense memories or whatever you might call them?

MSM: I love Berlin, but you’re right, for some reason those sense-memories were all about California. I don’t know why. The ocean and the light? I remembered parts of the coast from the South Bay to Ventura, to Big Sur and Ocean Beach, with a sick and painful nostalgia. Part of it was a desire to surf, part of it was memories of childhood, part of it was a conviction I might die. California isn’t the same now, of course—it’s not as simple as it used to be—but the pull felt almost physical. Now that I’ve moved back, my nostalgia is all for Berlin.

DM: What was the most shocking thing about your re-entry into the world after being repatriated? Was there a strong “Rip Van Winkle” effect?

MSM: The most shocking thing was that I was alive. The next shocking thing was that my grandmother had died. I’d suspected I might lose some people while I sat in Somalia, and I had a strange inkling about my grandmother, but it still bulldozed me. The pirates gave me a shortwave radio during my last year, and an hour a day of the BBC’s World Service is not a bad way to keep informed. But I still had about eighteen months of news to fill in, from the spring of 2012 to the fall of 2013—a great black news hole before I got that radio. Which meant learning the names and faces of a new French president, a new Pope, and so on. It was weird. I’m still hearing mysterious things from the news hole, titles of unknown movies and strange events. Benghazi was one of them. When the Republicans ran Hillary through the dirt, I didn’t quite get their problem.

DM: Does the apparent meaninglessness and frivolity of surfing change after you’ve lived so close to death? 

MSM: What? No. TV is frivolous, not surfing. One reason I moved back to California is that surfing is therapeutic. Absolutely essential. While I recovered after Somalia, a few days of surf could make me stronger in a way that didn’t fade, mentally or physically.

DM: Many long-term prisoners of war, people like John McCain, have spoken of the positive effects of their ordeal, that it changed their lives for the better. Have you found any lessons in your own captivity?

MSM: The most important effect is a sense of gratitude, a notion that I’m not alive because of my own intelligence or will. It’s humbling. The essay on Stoicism by James Stockdale, “Courage Under Fire,” also did a lot to shore up my thinking about what it meant to survive. Stockdale had an experience like McCain’s, but carried some classical scholarship into the torture room. I arrived at some of those same ideas, but without being tortured, without being any sort of classical scholar. The mental realignment in Stoicism is crucial, like the realignment in Buddhism. The principle of detachment is the same. It’s important to understand that we suffer by our own consent.

DM: What has been the best part of being free?

msm: Obviously seeing my family and friends.

DM: Do you have dreams or nightmares related to your captivity? Is there a part of your mind feel that remains in captivity? 

MSM: You could say I survived because my mind was never fully in captivity, so in that sense the answer is no. But I compartmentalize well, which means I’m sitting on a lot of emotion from that period, including anger. It’ll take some time to burn it up. I haven’t had nightmares since my first year out of Somalia. During that first year, I had maybe half a dozen. Rolly Tambara, the Seychellois fisherman I spent time with in my first months as a hostage, says he doesn’t have nightmares anymore, either. I guess it has something to do with family support.

DM: How has your experience in Somalia changed your perception of America? 

MSM: Life is so much simpler in almost every other part of the world, including Berlin. The layers of wealth and material nonsense you find in California seem pompous and redundant. It’s gotten worse since I was a kid. Why do people need self-driving cars? Or lives ruled by artificial intelligence, or the “Internet of things?” In Berlin I lived without a car altogether. In Somalia I showered using a little jerry can of water every afternoon—about one and a half gallons. Captivity pared back my needs in a severe way, and although I wouldn’t want to go back to that kind of squalor, I do try to keep things simple.

DM: Where are you headed next? Any hope for a Kenyan surf expedition?

MSM: I will go to Africa this year, now that you mention it. But it’s a private trip, and I don’t know if we’ll have time to surf in Kenya. Would the Seychelles count? They don’t have consistent surf in the Seychelles.