“You have to get to the point where the board stay like part of you body, attach to you feet, and you feel the wave power through the board. You not riding on the board. You and the board one ting, walking on water. That what the great Duke say to me.” And saying so, he smiled at the muscular man.

Later, to avoid Uncle Sunshine’s scrutiny, Sharkey surfed off Magic Island, paddling from Waikiki through a succession of breaks, and across the Ala Wai Harbor entrance to Bomboras. But the idea had been Uncle Sunshine’s: to learn the variations of one break, to master it and know its moods.

“Know what the big man say to me?” Uncle Sunshine said to Sharkey one day. “Duke see you swimming from break to break on your board and say, ‘Ilio holo i ka uaua—he the dog that run in rough water.’”

“He said I’m a dog?”

“Water dog,” Uncle Sunshine said. “He say you a monk seal. He see something in you. Some people he say, ‘She a surf bunny’ or ‘He a malihini.’ But to the big man you a monk seal. I cannot say nothing more better.”

Like the smile, like the shaka, another blessing.

Swimming sustained him; he swam in his dreams, buoyant in the world, or braced on his board, sliding through barrels at Bomboras. He could not run in his dreams, or cry out, or hurry, but he could swim, and he swam in the effortless tumbling way of a seal. Even on his worst day at school—the mumbled threats, the spitballs, “I was sitting here, haole!” and the attempted shakedowns in the schoolyard—he was heartened by the thought that as soon as the school bell rang he would be on his way to the beach and the freedom of the sea—the blue limitless ocean.

Water was a promise of pleasure, and the bigger the waves, the more space he had to swim and surf, because only the better surfers attempted them, and no one swam for pleasure in any breakers. His sense of weightlessness in the waves; the propulsion of his stroke, water filling his cupped hands; the solitude that enveloped him, and then upright, alone on his board—all of it gave him happiness and hope and the conviction that nothing else mattered. It was as if in surfing he was carving his name in water, invisibly, joyously. He knew now that all the other surfers felt the same—Harry Ho and Uncle Sunshine and Duke—though they never spoke about it and probably did not have the words to describe it, because really there were no words, only the action mattered, the ritual of it all, which was a ritual of purification.

You couldn’t puzzle it out or learn how in books; no logical description fitted it. It was a rush, a feeling, a dance.