They reached the bay at last. Foster pretended to wake her and Irene pretended to wake. She made a show of rubbing her eyes like a baby, and Foster laughed. The air had begun to lighten. She saw the stubble on his jaw, the blond disarray of his hair, the creases along his eyes and cheeks. He was wearing his own bathing costume, well used. He untied something from the roof of the car, and that turned out to be a surfboard. It was enormous and ungainly, so heavy (Irene grabbed one end of it to help her father carry it down the beach) it couldn’t possibly float. But it did. Foster explained how he had carved it himself from a local redwood, under the instruction of a Hawaiian fellow who had come to California for surfing demonstrations a few years ago. He’d gone to watch—did Irene remember that afternoon?—and thought it looked so grand, he ended up trying it himself. That was Hank Foster for you.

They found the edge of the ocean. Even in later years, Irene still remembered the rough sand on the soles of her bare feet, and the chill salt mist that rolled off the sea. She remembered how frigid the water was, how it squeezed the breath from her lungs. She didn’t remember the surfing itself. Probably she never quite made it to her feet on that ungainly board that first morning. But she remembered her father’s strong arm, she remembered the wildness of the surf, the freedom, the understanding that they were doing something forbidden, that Mrs. Foster would be furious when they got home.

But Irene also remembered the drive back north. The morning sunshine dried her wet skin and Foster told her about the Hawaiian princes who attended boarding school in San Mateo twenty years earlier and used to come down to surf at Santa Cruz. How surfing wasn’t just a sport or a hobby, it was like a religion for them, a ritual of kingship. You couldn’t rule over other men unless you could master the giant waves of Waikiki and Kahalu’u. To test yourself against the ocean was to test the essence of your human spirit.

They didn’t go surfing every morning, Irene and her father. But they went often enough that Irene soon needed her own surfboard, and the muscle to manage it on the Santa Cruz coastline, both of which she acquired pretty quickly. Irene was tall and athletic, a natural at surfing and pretty much any sport, really. But mostly she had human spirit. That was it, Foster used to say, as they drove north from Santa Cruz toward home, damp and exhausted. That was what made Irene such a natural. She yearned to be free of the earth.