And he went on gabbling as Eddie Aikau tried not to smile. What excited Sharkey was that he was looking at someone roughly his own age—his own size, though obviously stronger in the shoulders, a boy like him, someone who excelled at the only activity in the world Sharkey cared about—not his equal but superior in skill, a winner, the boy he wanted to be.

Sharkey was still talking, but only to fill the silence and to disguise the eager gaze of his admiration.

“I go out every day,” Eddie said softly. “Even if no got waves I paddle to Hale‘iwa, five, six miles. If got waves, I surf all day.”

“That’s it?”

“I don’t do nothing else. Surfing is life, brah.”

“Yeah.”

“One thing more you need”—and here he tapped his chest.

“Heart,” Sharkey said.

“Heart, yeah. But other ting. Mana‘o.”

Uncle Sunshine had used the word, but Sharkey had been too shy to ask the old man its meaning. Yet with this easygoing boy he said, “What is that?”

“Mana‘o something inside you tell you what’s right or wrong,” he said, the fingers of his free hand resting on his chest.

“Gut feeling,” Sharkey said.

“Eh,” Eddie said in acknowledgment. Then, farther down the road, “Gas, grass, or ass—no one rides for free,” and Sharkey gave him a dollar.

Years later, reliving this experience, describing the ride to people, Sharkey said that it was more of his luck—pure chance—two surfers at the beginning of their careers, riding in the old pickup truck after a big day at the beach. Two young warriors, heroism ahead of them.

The moment was made magical by the passage of time—taking on a glow, a piece of personal history enlarged and given glamour in retrospect, another life-changing encounter, a memory that moved him whenever he remembered it and described it to the people who asked, “What was your first big wave?”

“It was a boy like me in an old truck, who gave me a lift on the road.”

He did not mention wiping out on the monster wave, being gashed by the fin of his board and lacerated on the rocks of the reef, or being choked by the second wave hold-down, or, back in his car afterward, sobbing, his face splashed with tears, amazed and frightened by his own whinnying and the sight of his pitiful face in the mirror. None of that.

He spoke of being dumped by a huge wave, and then, undaunted, paddling out and surfing until he’d gotten six good rides, returning the following day to surf again, and finally standing at the bus stop at sundown with his board, and the pickup truck slowing down—no other vehicle on the lonely road, and only one streetlight illuminating the encounter, the two boys meeting for the first time, the haole and the Hawaiian, and riding into the record books.