Straddling his board, rising and falling, riding the swell like a horseman in the sea, majestic on his steed, soothed Sharkey almost as much as catching a wave. He sat watching the other two surfers until, as he guessed would happen, the bigger of the two misjudged the distance and dismounted too late and wound up struggling in the foaming rock pools beneath the black cliffs.

The second surfer dithered and called out to his friend, whose board had dinged the rock, snapping off its fin. Then both were foundering, slapping the incoming waves, kicking themselves away from the cliffs, until they managed to edge toward the beach about sixty feet away and the more forgiving sand. One man was injured, the other one helping him out of the water, the boards tumbling after them. They sat on the dazzling sand above the tidemark and conferred, and then climbed higher up the beach, the first man limping.

They’ll be fine, Sharkey thought, glad to see them go. And if they’re scared they’ll never come back.

With the surf to himself, Sharkey sat on his board and waited for a wave, and when he saw one rising behind him he lifted his board into the froth, paddling like mad, and leaped onto the board and stood and braced, his arms out, and rode it, twisting beneath the overhang, then cutting back to ride the whole smooth sculpted hollow of the wave’s face, spanking the glissade with his board. The wave was his, the whole cove too; the others wouldn’t return. Someone should have told them to be careful here—there was no beach for the waves to break upon, only the scabbed edges of the low cliffs and the black fangs and sharp talons of the eroded lava rock.

Paddling back to where the waves were rising from the incoming swell, he remembered another story attributed to him, how he’d kept paddling one day until he’d found himself five miles offshore, among the late whales of April, and drifted with the cows and the calves on the southwesterly rip current, the Waimea Express, all the way to Kaena Point, and come ashore where the albatrosses nested.

“Is it true?” people had once asked.

“Just a story,” he said. They weren’t convinced, yet no one had asked lately.

Anyone who did not surf had no idea how even the most basic maneuver took such strength and balance; how for long periods in a pounding shore break he was still driven by anxiety; how so many of his good friends had died—drowned in a hold-down, got hit by their board and knocked unconscious, got caught by their snagged leash. But it all looked so simple from shore, people invented improbable feats and heroics. They did not understand that simply to ride a big wave was a miracle of poise and strength.