South Dakotans and Sharks.

I was sitting in the sand, on the Isle of Palms, complaining about my dry sandwich. I had just finished boogie-boarding some "gnarly waves" and my eight-year-old self was wiped out, literally and figuratively. Then, out of nowhere, my dad ran towards my mom and I with an obvious look of shock on his face. My six-year-old sister, Beth, was close behind, dragging a boogie board in her wake. She was almost in tears. "What happened?" my mom and I asked, practically in unison.

"There was a shark," Beth whimpered, "and I was on top of it."

My jaw dropped. We were just off the coast of South Carolina, on a heavily populated island beach. We were vacationers from South Dakota, so sharks were more a myth to us than a reality. Back in the Midwest, the main predators that people were concerned about were coyotes and bobcats. Even then, my family lived in the suburbs of a mid-sized city, so we didn't interact with wildlife often. Therefore, to us the idea of seeing a shark was like seeing the loch ness monster.

Before my mom and I could bombard my sister with a million questions, my dad began to explain: "Beth and I were trying to find the next wave. We saw a good one ahead, so I sent her to boogie board it. Right as she was about to ride the wave, I saw what looked like a dead seagull around 20 yards ahead of her. But before I could tell Beth, she was riding the wave, straight towards the seagull. I expected her to be shocked and a little disgusted when she went over it, but when she started screaming with terror, I knew something was up. I ran to her and saw her gliding into the beach, right on top of a shark. The shark was completely out of control, rolling around like crazy. It was a huge one!"

At this point in my dad's retelling, he spread out his arms, doing the "my fish was this big" type of action. His arms were around four feet apart. My little eight-year-old mind was absolutely blown. The only times I had seen sharks was when I watched the first ten minutes of Jaws and saw a PBS Kids episode about lemon sharks.

"Is the shark still there?" I asked.

I was contemplating going and trying to find it, just for fun.

"No, it regained control and swam away. But, we did let that lifeguard know," my dad replied, pointing at a teenager in red swim trunks.

None of us knew how to carry on at that point. Were we supposed to just carry on with our beach day? Were we supposed to leave and never come back? I didn't care what happened because for all knew, I had just witnessed a phenomenon of nature.

Just as my family finally recouped from the incident, which took around ten minutes, a pair of surfers hopped out of the ocean and started running towards the lifeguard. "Shark! We just saw a shark!", they yelled.

The poor lifeguard looked exhausted. Ten minutes later, animal control showed up with multiple trucks, sirens, and megaphones. There was no point. The shark was gone and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

At this point, other beach goers began to figure out what was happening. Word got out that my dad and sister had seen "the shark". My family and I just looked at each other and I proceeded to eat my dry sandwich, without complaining. We were South Dakotans and we had just seen a shark.