Then he was glad that he had passed the Fort Shafter exit and the off-ramp to Tripler and was heading north, detouring through Waihawa and the pineapple fields and, on the crest of the hill, the cane fields sloping to the shore, to the left the chimney of the sugar mill at Waialua, a plume of smoke borne seaward on the trade winds, and the sight of the sea beaten to foam at Hale‘iwa, and the ocean thickened as far as he could see, to Waimea and beyond, to the mass of clouds over Kauai. As the surf report had promised, a big day.

Getting out of his car at the parking lot at Sunset, he heard the loud rollers booming on the shore, and it was like a welcome. He unslung his board from the pads strapped on the roof and carried it on his head to the beach, where a crowd of people watched surfers taking the waves. But their voices were smothered by the waves tipping forward into a noisy boil and riding to the sand with a continuous rub and hush, the ocean brimming against the beach.

There Sharkey sat, marveling at the small figures breaking out of the froth at the top of the waves and scrambling to their feet and making white trails in the blue as they raced sideways down the face of the wave, some of them to be swallowed, enclosed in the foam, others outracing it, braced upright as the wave diminished. At intervals between sets the sea flattened so completely it was a great blue puddle dotted with bodies, bobbing there like survivors of a sinking—and then the sets began rising again and the bodies were tossed into their troughs, and soon surfers standing on boards exploded through the foamy brow of the waves and raced down their slopes.

Sharkey studied the posture of the surfers, the way they steered and cut back and slowed, dismounting to paddle through the waves again to ride another. They were all movement, and buoyant, a breed of aquatic creatures, and the best of them rode through foam to the clearer curve of the wave, exulting as they flew toward the beach. One agile surfer in a red wetsuit—a woman, he could see—seemed more resourceful in her bounce than the others, and slimmer—a human sliver—confident on her board in ride after ride, back and forth on the waves, until at last she rode in, nearer the beach, steering her board through a low moving shelf of foaming water that carried her all the way to the sand. And he saw that she was young, a girl, about his own age, yet at a distance, when she’d been on a wave, he’d taken her to be much older and majestic.