“It is the wave,” he was saying. “And this is not the biggest day.”

Sharkey said nothing for a long time, watching more sets rise and roll in and break.

“It closes out so near to shore,” he finally said.

“Is a problem,” João said.

“The problem,” Sharkey said, and then watched more waves before he spoke again.

The problem was not in riding it, he considered—though that would be a long steep descent and maybe wiping out against the rocks. But more than that was the difficulty of paddling up this mountainside of the swell and setting up on its forbidding summit.

He said so to João.

“Sometimes we ride jet skis around the back of it,” João said. “You know about towing?”

Sharkey nodded, still studying the wave, which, while he watched, parted in the middle, one wave breaking right and steeply, another portion breaking left in a barrel, and in the distance a swelling mound of gray ocean becoming bluer as it rose up, lifting and forming into a distant shapely hill and growing to a craggy cliffside before it rolled onward past the other waves and swelled and tipped and broke—and in a matter of seconds this stupendous work of nature was gone, collapsed, tumbled flat in a slosh of froth. Sharkey saw himself fighting his way to the sand, dragging his board behind him.

“I don’t like the idea of being towed into a wave,” he said.

“No other way to do it,” João said.

“You know Mount Haleakalā?” Sharkey asked him. “On Maui?”

“I hear about it.”

Sharkey doubted him, but said, “High mountain. Ten thousand feet. I saw it when I was surfing Jaws, and my buddy says, ‘Let’s go up the mountain some morning and see the sunrise.’ So we got woken up at an ungodly hour in the dark and were picked up by a van. Then a long ride up a mountain road, and by the time we reached the top, dawn had started to break. We stood watching it.”

João’s face registered incomprehension, a wan smile, a slight squint, a twitch of impatience.

The sunrise in Sharkey’s memory, impossible to describe to João, was an ocean of thick clouds whitening with silver light, the blown-open cheeks of the clouds defining themselves like the spindrift of waves, then pierced with shafts of gold—flames of it, blades of it, a gilded sea for minutes, and rosy light pricking it, an exploded ocean of billows filling the sky—big waves at last—and dispelling the darkness and warming his face.

“Awesome,” he said, because he had no words for it. He was silent for a while and then said, “We’d brought bikes in the van. When dawn had fully broken we got on the bikes and rode downhill all the way to Paia—thirty-five miles, without pedaling.”

“Nice,” João said.