At the hotel Sharkey said, “Is there a bus back to Cape Town?”

“The night bus. It is slow. They will charge you extra for your board. You will not like it.”

“I’m not taking it,” Sharkey said. “You are,” and put out his hand. But when Murad went to shake it, Sharkey said, “Keys.”

A full week on the wave that was later called Boneyards: Africans gathered at the far end of the beach to watch him, but no other surfers showed up. “They’ll come in the holidays,” the owner of the hotel assured him—a man who also said, “You’re putting on quite a show for the kaffirs.”

“I guess that’s a good thing,” Sharkey said with a smile.

He took some pictures of the break, but without a telephoto lens it was impossible to do justice to the size of the waves, which had risen to twenty feet by the end of the week. From the beach they were like Sunset on a good day; on the break itself it was a huge and fickle wave, and his news was that it broke left and right.

What he remembered were the red roads and the cliffs, the syrupy gum-tree smell of woodsmoke from the cooking fires in the ramshackle village of round huts and their circular roofs at the back of the town, cigarettes sold in cans, the aroma of grilled fish, the dense flocks of shorebirds, the wide sky and the sunsets. He got cautious looks from Africans, their odd salutes and sidelong glances, their acknowledging grunts as he passed, and their rags—sensational rags, wool hats, torn trousers, and the malnourished faces of the children running on the stony paths on bare feet.

Travel in Africa made him feel small, it shook him, the rattle in his head affecting his balance; he longed to be home. After that journey he was glad to be back in Hawaii, and happiest on the North Shore, enclosed by the arms of the great bay. Everywhere else, even in Honolulu, the unpredictable happened, not necessarily bad but sometimes impossible to understand, because away from Waimea, he was among strangers.

An odd episode occurred the evening he visited a surfer friend, Trey, who’d begun to work in town at the Hotel Honolulu, at the seedy street-hooker edge of Waikiki. Trey supplied Sharkey with bags of Big Island pakalolo he called “killer buds,” usually meeting him in Hale‘iwa. But one day he said he needed to meet Sharkey at the hotel bar, Paradise Lost, at a specific time. Sharkey laughed at Trey’s absurd insistence on being punctual, the stoner actually using that word. But he wanted the pakalolo, so he was on time.

“Meet Eddie Alfanta,” Trey said when Sharkey arrived. “He’s my Big Island guy.”