Tashi waxes his board, steps down to the water. He arrived in his wetsuit, so sweat reduces by a fraction the room for seawater. Still, wading in and strapping the board’s leash onto his ankle, the soup surges up his legs and gives him the familiar shock. Cold! Lovely salt stimulation. He shoves the board into a broken wave, jumps chest first onto it and paddles out, puffing walruslike at the rush of chill water down the wetsuit’s neck. Pull of the backwash, the rise into a wave almost breaking, slap of water into his face, the clean cold salt taste of it; he takes in a big mouthful of ocean, sloshes it around in his mouth till the taste fills him. Swallows some to get it down his throat. He’s back in Mother Ocean, the original medium, the evolutionary home of the ancient ancestor species that he now feels cheering wildly, down there in his brainstem. Yeah!

Outside the break, paddling with smooth lazy strokes. Pretty much directly out from the 44th Street groin, his favorite. Newport Beach now seems a long strip of white sand backed by hundreds of toy blocks. As usual there’s no wind, and the water is perfectly glassy, like dawn glass only better. A liquid heavier than water.

Seeing the waves. It is a bit of a problem, naturally. But the moon’s millions of squiggled reflections rise and fall on the swells outside, making a pattern. And close up the black wall of a wave is hard to miss. It’s a good sharp left tonight, lips pitching out and dropping over with clean reports as they hit.

Tashi digs the board in, paddles to match the speed of a point about to break, pushes up and stands in one fluid thoughtless motion. Now he’s propelled along without further effort, it’s merely a matter of balancing his weight in a way that will keep him moving ahead of the break. There’s a kind of religious rapture in feeling this movement: as the universe is an interlocking network of wave motions, hitting the stride of this particular wave seems to click him into the universal rhythm. Nothing but gravitational effects, slinging him along. Tuning fork buzzing, after a tap of God’s fingernail.

A wall in the wave that Tash doesn’t see knocks him over, however, and it’s underwater night soup time, an eerie experience of cold wet zero-gee tumbling, up to the roiling moonwhite surface, where a million bubbles are hissing out their lives and popping a fine salt rain into the air just above the water. Tug on leash, grab board, get on, paddle hard to get over the next wave before it breaks. Success, barely. Back over to the point off the groin. Try another one.