It was too far to paddle to the wave, so, looking for access, Sharkey walked along the irregular edge of the lagoon, slapping at branches and stumbling on the rubble of broken coral. But even an hour of walking brought him no closer, and his walking convinced him that the wave was inaccessible from this side of the atoll. He knew the deception of sea distances, and even if he reached the promontory ahead, it was a mile or more paddle to the wave—too far. And so he picked some passionfruit from stringy vines that were twined on the spindly saltbush branches, and that was his lunch. He dozed for a while but was woken by flies on his face, and then—taking care—made his way back to the pocket beach and the beaten trail and his little camp.

Telling himself it was wrong to hurry, he decided to spend another night, and again he gloried in the wildness of the place, the scrape of the palm fronds, the nameless birds that squawked in the night, the slosh that carried from the lagoon’s edge, and he congratulated himself: surfing was not only the search for a great wave or a shore break; it was in its essence the discovery of a place like this.

After his early start the following morning he saw, with surprise and pleasure, something he had missed before—a profusion of rusted machinery, old tractors and dump trucks and bulldozers, their paint peeled off, falling to pieces in the jungle beside the road, disintegrating into heaps of reddish flakes, becoming part of the planet again.

But he could see they had been serious machines, perhaps the equipment of the coconut plantation, used for clearing and plowing the land. Some had metal tanklike treads rather than rubber tires. And as though defying their decay, the palms were heavy with clusters of unpicked nuts, and the fallen ones darkened the floor of the groves, some of them newly sprouted.

He drove on, satisfied that he had seen the wave and identified it as rideable. It was too hard to access from the inner shore beyond the camp he’d made, but it seemed approachable from the village on the far side of the harbor mouth. With this in mind he drove for another hour, past the airport and the hotel and some roadside settlements that might have been villages, and saw that he had rounded the atoll. This side was inhabited, with flimsy huts and fences, a few scrawny dogs sleeping in the road, chickens pecking under the palms, and children playing.