In Pernambuco one evening after his knee surgery, Sharkey had seen a surfer sitting alone, having a beer on the veranda of a bar, and joined him. They talked of waves and travels—the out-of-the-way breaks. Sharkey mentioned that he’d surfed Cortes Bank but that it had been a bust—a long trip out to the wave and a disappointing swell when they got there, bobbing in the water a hundred miles from shore.

“We got a big one in my country,” the man said.

“Where is it?”

“Place called Nazaré.”

“How big?”

“Too big. You never seen one so big. Thirty meters sometimes.”

Sharkey thought, I’ve heard that too many times to believe it. He said, “Who’s ridden it?”

“So far, no one.”

But I’ve never heard that, Sharkey thought: a big wave that has never been ridden.

“And not one,” the man was saying, “but maybe four or five separate waves, breaking right and left.”

“Why don’t you ride it?”

“If I could ride it I wouldn’t be telling you about it. I’d keep it for myself,” the man said. “But this one has killed so many fishermen.”

“Where did you hear about it?”

“I don’t hear,” the man said. “I see it.”

His name was João Roque de Oliveira, he came from the city of Coimbra, sixty miles north of the bay of Nazaré, and the town Sitio on the cliff, above where the wave broke. It was a sad story, João said. Sitio and Nazaré were impoverished fishing villages, made poor because of the wave, which had swamped incoming boats and drowned so many men that the shore was known as a place of death. The stigma had doomed the villages, fishing had declined; the wave dominated its fate, looming over the place, threatening with death anyone who faced it.

“Wicked wave, bad wave,” João said.

Sharkey laughed. “No. The wave is just a liquid, rising and falling, then gone forever. It has no character except its size and shape—and that’s temporary. It has no morality. It’s water, formed by the rocks beneath it and the wind behind it.”

“But dangerous.”

“Only if you’re not prepared for it,” Sharkey said. “If you fall off a mountain, it’s not the mountain’s fault. I’ve been surfing for many years and what I’ve learned is, never blame the wave. Look, I blew out my knee on Cacimba do Padre. Whose fault is that?”

“But I think,” João said, becoming thoughtful, “if someone manage to ride the wave at Nazaré, he can bring luck to the village, and maybe tourists.” He nodded. “Maybe money.”