Darren “Daz” Longbottom hadn’t thought much about death until 2008, when he found himself stranded in the middle of an Indonesian jungle, with a broken neck.
Chanting in an unfamiliar dialect, Mentawai Island locals gathered around the Australian surfer, who was in dire need of medical attention.
Just hours earlier, Longbottom and his mates were on a jet ski, laughing together and whipping into the magnificent West Sumatran waves.
Years later — and after considerable encouragement from friends and family — he took himself outside, sat in the sun and started writing about his journey.
Beyond The Break is the result, a “no-BS” memoir which details his nailbiting rescue mission and recovery.
A million things were running through my mind. The big one was that I could die here. I’m on the ground and can’t communicate with anyone
“I was born into surfing,” Longbottom, 46, laughs.
“I was thrown into the water from an age that I can’t even remember. I just felt that I was a surfer and it was going to be something I was going to do forever.”
The sport was in Longbottom’s blood. His father Rossco is a well-known surfboard maker and his brother Dylan a famous big-wave specialist.
“You’ve got an invisible ball of energy running through the ocean creating waves. You’re in nature, the sun’s beaming on you … it’s like oxygen, you just need it to live,” Longbottom says.
This passion paved the way for a successful career in the surf industry, and Longbottom opened his own surf shop in Kiama, where he and wife Aimee lived with their one-year-old daughter Bowie.
A trip to Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands was on his bucketlist,
“I’d been surfing pretty much everywhere else in the world, so it was time to get there,” he says.
It was on this trip of a lifetime, surfing bombies in shallow water, that Longbottom broke his neck. He fell off a wave and hit his head on his surfboard. The impact was so great, it snapped the board in half.
“I had no idea what was happening, I really thought I was swimming,” he says. “In my mind, I was kicking my legs and doing everything I’d normally be doing in that sort of situation.”
Longbottom’s mates quickly pulled him onto the jet ski, and 15 minutes later he realised he couldn’t feel a thing.
“I was just trying to focus on staying calm. I knew in the back of my head that something was really serious,” he says. “I knew we had to get help.”
Strapped to his surfboard and unable to move, Longbottom drifted in and out of consciousness while his friends frantically radioed around to get help.
They connected with a helicopter pilot who was volunteering nearby and who agreed to fly Longbottom to hospital in Sumatra.
The pair took off, but without the required licence and aircraft registration they were forced to make an emergency landing in the Pandang jungle and leave Longbottom to find help.
“A million things were running through my mind. The big one was that I could die here. I’m on the ground and can’t communicate with anyone,” Longbottom says.
“You don’t think of the physical end of dying, you think more of the friends and family you’re not going to see again. Your mind constantly flips … you try to go to a happy place and think about the ones you love but then reality bites back.”
Eventually the helicopter returned and Longbottom was whisked to hospital.
“We kept hitting road blocks and every block built frustration and tension,” Longbottom says.
“We had to get me to hospital as quick as possible to stop maybe what was a blood clot in my neck.”
An incredible 22 hours after the accident, Longbottom made it to a Singapore hospital and underwent multiple surgeries.
In Singapore, he wore an oxygen mask 24 hours a day and needed “assisted coughing” — someone had to push hard on his chest, replicating the muscle movement of a cough, in order to clear his lungs of mucus and fluid.
Motivated to reunite with Bowie, Longbottom grew strong enough to return to Australia, where he adjusted to life as a quadriplegic.
“The little things created the most frustration, like, sitting in a wheelchair your pants tend to slide down, and I couldn’t pull them up,” he says. “It was also hard socially. Before, I was always standing tall and could throw my voice over a crowd. Suddenly I was sitting low and, because I’ve lost half my lung capacity, I couldn’t raise my voice. Talking in a crowd drained me immensely.
“You can’t sit in a corner and cry … you need to roll up your sleeves and get on with it,” Longbottom says.
Beyond The Break by Darren Longbottom, Ebury Australia,
RRP: $34.99