At last the day came when Uncle Sunshine said, “Today you surf,” and handed him a board.

Head-high waves tumbled in looping rollers toward Magic Island from the distant ocean, where the sun flashed from behind a cloud and blinded him on the way out. “Find you feet,” Uncle Sunshine had said, and walked away to deal with the tourists and his friends. “I see you bym-bye.” He turned his back on Sharkey and swam across the Ala Wai Harbor entrance to his stand on the beach at Waikiki.

Released to surf, to plunge into the incoming waves, flat on his board, paddling out, Sharkey was liberated from land, from the plodding and the push-ups, the hot hard earth and the sour trampled grass. He was weightless in the water, slipping under the faces of the waves, and he paddled with such gusto that he forgot he’d intended to surf and instead rode past the surf zone to the bluer ocean and bellying swells, the widening water that gave the illusion of being a dome of liquid that lifted him to show him how far he was from shore, and then dropped him into a trough where he was lost, seeing nothing but the sloping walls of the swell.

He was in his element, a waterman, dwarfed by the ocean and buoyant, splashing onward into the golden path the low sun had fretted on the surface of the water. An overwhelming sense of freedom enlarged him, as though he had been launched into the air, was experiencing flight, with no prospect of falling, only soaring toward the flat seam ahead where the sky met the sea.

On that first day, his reentry to the water, he was possessed by the thought that the farther he swam, the more he would change, of the transforming effects of the sea, its health-giving properties, its mothering power to strengthen and purify him. Stepping on earth stunned and aged him, but surfing was a cleansing and the slap of waves a blessing. He fought the urge to turn back to shore.

An hour of this, or more—no one visible on the beach, or on the protrusion of Magic Island—until he was a speck on the ocean, stroking toward the shipping lanes and black freighters piled three layers high with orange containers.

Then he slipped sideways on his board and rode the swells for a mile into the surf zone and the break at Bomboras and swam onto the back of a wave, staying with it until it rose under him and he was teetering on the boil. He scrambled up now, steadying the board, then got to his feet and sped slantwise down the face, braced upright, surfing again, whooping with joy, reborn.