It’s a pas de deux with Mother Ocean at her most girlish and playful. Quickly Tashi gets into a rhythm, the interval between crests is known to his body more than his eyes, and sometimes he takes off on a wave without even looking at it. He wonders if the blind could surf, concludes it would be possible.

Well. Of course waves are variable; like snowflakes, there are no two the same. And in the dark they bring a lot of surprises, sudden wall-offs, unexpected bowls, backwash ripples and so forth, which catch Tash off guard and knock him down. No big deal, it’s interesting, a challenge. But the neat thing is that about the time he is getting tired of the unexpected variable dumping him, the stars in the east dim, and the sky grows blue. The water is quick to soak up the sky’s color, as always. Tash finds himself skimming over a velvet blue like the sky in Jim’s orange crate posters, a pure, intense, glossy, rich, blue blue. Wow. And he can see a lot more of the wave’s surface. It’s so glassy that he looks at one smooth wall about to crunch him and decides he must need a haircut: wild-haired guy grinning back at him like an Oriental Neptune, surfing inside the wave like the dolphins do. Who knows, maybe it was Neptune.

The best part of the day. A renewable miracle: always so astonishing, this power of the ocean to resist humans. Here he lives in one of the most densely populated places in the world, and all he has to do is swim a hundred yards offshore and he’s in a pure wilderness, the city nothing but a peculiar backdrop. Wildlife refuge, and him the wildlife.

Not only that, but the tide is going out and the waves are getting hollower and hollower, little four-foot tubes tossed into existence for the five seconds necessary to stall back into them, so that he can clip along in a spinning blue cylinder that provides swirling floor walls and roof, with a waterfall fringe at the open end, leading back out into the world. Might as well be in a different dimension when you’re in the tube, it is such a wonderful feeling. Tubed, man! How tubular!

Ah, but good times are like tubes, here briefly and then gone forever. There’s enough light now for anyone to surf; and within half an hour or so, just about anyone is surfing.

Little clumps of bright wetsuits up and down off each groin.

Scattered surfers between the clumps, hoping for anomalous waves.

Spectrum bands, magenta, green, orange, yellow, violet, pink:

Solids and stripes: wetsuits and boards.

Rising and falling.

The concept of play is either bourgeois or primitive, but does that matter?

Looks like a child’s plastic bead necklace, thrown on the water.

The glassy blue water, the waves.