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“It’s my first birthday. I peer over his shoulder as we glide the sea. Sun glare and blue ripple together. The surfboard rail engraves the arcing wave and spits of sunflecked ocean tumble over his toes. I can fly.”

Topanga Beach in Malibu in the ‘70s became Ollestad’s childhood playground.

“The beach I grew up on was a nude beach,” he said, in a video made to promote his 2009 memoir. “It was also a beach where some of the best surfers in California lived, and a whole host of really interesting characters.”

Among those characters was his father, an aggressive attorney who served in the FBI, but quit it to write a tell-all book, (“Inside the FBI”) detailing his disillusionment. A fearless skier and surfer and social adventurer — who divorced Norman’s mother when Norman was a boy — Ollestad’s irrepressible father pushed Norman into taking risks on the slopes, on the swells, and at the rink. By four, Norman was skiing the steepest and most dangerous black diamond slopes at Mammoth. Before long he began competing in junior races. At 11 he was on a ski team, working with a coach, and competing for top prizes in races, aiming to qualify for the Junior Olympics, despite being smaller than most of his rivals.

At times he resented his father for pushing him, but often too, he admired him for the relentless pursuit of risk he championed — and demanded.

Ollestad writes in “Crazy for the Storm,” recounting how he crouched on the beach, feeling the sand under his feet, looking at big swells at Topanga, and thinking of surfing with his father.

“Off the point at Topanga Beach I stared into the eye of a distant wave. Somewhere in the oval opening I grasped what Dad had always tried to make me see. There is more to life than just surviving it. Inside each turbulence there is a calm — a sliver of light buried in the darkness.”

The ability to find that calm inside the turbulence of fear and desperation probably saved Ollestad’s life. In 1979, after competing and winning a ski race at Snow Summit in the Big Bear mountains, and driving back home to the beach with his father and his father’s girlfriend — so that Norman could compete in a scheduled hockey game — the three flew from Santa Monica back to the Big Bear area early the next day in a small plane to pick up his trophy.

The blithely confident pilot did not check the weather or file a flight plan. He planned to fly without instruments under the clouds to the Big Bear airport at about 7,000 feet, but before long lost his bearings in the clouds, and crashed into a jagged ridge high in the precipitous San Gabriel mountains.The pilot was killed instantly, and Ollestad’s father, badly injured, soon succumbed, slumped over in the snow. The girlfriend Sandra had injured her arm in the crash, and a scratched-up Ollestad huddled with her for a time in the half-shelter of a wing in the snow.

The wreckage of the plane had come to rest on a ridge thousands of feet above a wooded canyon. Norman, convinced they would not survive long in the freezing wind and snow, set out in his sneakers, jeans, and windbreaker to walk down to safety, leading Sandra. Despite his best efforts to support her, she slipped and fell to her death. Somehow 11-year-old Ollestad stayed upright in the snow and ice — and although frostbit on his fingers and toes — scrambled and stumbled down the rock and snow and ice to be rescued. He was the sole survivor.

In Ojai at the cafe, Ollestad still looks a bit like the stereotypical Southern California surfer, youthful despite his 50-odd years, blond, in forgettably nondescript clothes, with strong hands, a muscular chest, and a calm, steady gaze. He brings the family Golden Retriever, named Bullit along, and Bullit lies placidly beneath the table as Ollestad talks about his life and his work.

In his second memoir, “Gravity,” published in 2015, he writes about his adventures in his twenties skiing terrifyingly steep powder slopes in the Alps, all the while trying to fit in with the intimidatingly caustic ski bums scrapping by in St. Anton, one of the world’s biggest and best ski resorts. Ollestad recounts being challenged by a scornful and athletic German skier. Hearing that Ollestand grew up in Malibu, the German derisively asked if he was “a surfer dude.”

The freedom to venture wherever and whenever he wished in the wide world meant nearly everything to his father, and seemingly to young Ollestad too. After a tumultuous youth — often fighting with his fellow students as well coming into conflict with the hard-drinking man his mother took up with after splitting from his father — Ollestad went to UCLA Film school and began to write screenplays. But he never stopped having adventures, and admits that as a young man, testing himself on the slopes mattered more to him than a career.

“From the time I was 15 or so, I just wanted to do my thing,” he recounted. “After school I was like — what’s that over there? I think I’m going to go live in Austria and ski. I’ll figure out later how to make some money.”

In 2009, Ollestad published his first memoir. “Crazy for the Storm” became a worldwide success, was optioned by Warner Brothers, and for a time seemed headed for film production, with Josh Brolin slated to play Ollestad’s late father, and Sean Penn to direct, following the success of Penn’s “Into the Wild.”

In the end, the movie was never produced. Ollestad continued to write in a variety of forms, including screenplays, novels, memoirs, and journalism. He published two novels, first “Driftwood” and then an edgy thriller with strong sexual overtones, called “French Girl with Mother.” Today he forthrightly admits that although he admires some contemporary and prize-winning wordsmiths, such as Jhumpa Lahiri — and in particular the iconic Cormac McCarthy — for him writing is about more than just choosing the right word.

“I’m into words and I use them, but it’s a little more kinetic for me,” he said. “I like the motion of words, the cadence, and sometimes I find myself using what is slightly the wrong word because I like the sound of it in the action.”

Recently Ollestad pitched and sold an “Audible Original” called “Formentera,” about a screenwriter who has been hired to write a big sexy movie for a powerful and manipulative European producer. In order to extract from the writer the daring script that the producer wants, he draws both the writer and his beautiful — and somewhat estranged — wife into a high stakes psychosexual drama on the gorgeous island of Formentera, off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean.

Ollestad had heard about this legendary free-spirited island from a French buddy who had surfed the world. After one surfing vacation in the Pacific nearly ended in disaster, Ollestad, with his family, has returned to Formentera every summer (save one for the COVID lockdown) for six years in a row.

“There’s something about this place — it’s a unique vibe, and it’s something I’ve always wanted to capture,” he said. “And from my own experience, having been in many relationships, there’s a dynamic between men and women involving money, and it’s maybe not a popular truth, and it’s not what we’re hearing in the media, but beneath that ideology some heavy, primal shit goes on, and that’s what I’m interested in.”

“

I just instinctively thought, if it’s going to be audible, perfect. We’ll have the husband and the wife, alternating [narrating in the first person] and you’ll get that rub between them. The juxtaposition will say what needs to be said, and it was also fun to write from the woman’s point of view without deconstructing her thought processes.”

Ollestad said that the producers at Audible accepted it “without saying a thing” and hired two actors to play the husband and wife. The Audible Original story was released in September of 2021 to immediate success. Ollestad said that the finished version was pitched to two major stars (whom he could not name) as a movie, and said they were on the verge of committing, but at the last second, the woman decided she couldn’t do it.

“It’s a very intimate story,” Ollestad said, seemingly understanding her perspective. “It’s more than the sexuality, it’s just very intimate.”

The story takes us to the depths of both of these characters, far beneath their conventional exteriors, showing us how they understand each other and how they don’t, and how they are both in turn being manipulated by a powerfully amoral film producer, seemingly intent on pushing them into a nefarious game. Loosely inspired by the Jean-Luc Godard film “Contempt,” it’s the most enthralling Audible production this reporter has ever heard, and by a good margin. Ollestad compares it to a short story, by a Paul Bowles or an equally sophisticated storyteller, and seems pleased but unsurprised to hear how well it plays.

He says he has a meeting that afternoon with a prominent agent from UTA, a big firm. The agent apparently wants to talk about an intellectual property sale of Ollestad’s work. A quick handshake and the soft-spoken and unpretentious adventurer and writer is off, the shaggy Bullit — a deer-chaser, “a dog with a wild hair,” he says — at his side.

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