All this time he was a student, first at Radford with the other army brats, then—with their move to Manoa Valley—at Punahou, where he was intelligent enough to do little work and still manage to pass but was soon expelled for smoking pakalolo and finally sent to Roosevelt, where he was one of the few haoles, failing in his studies and bullied by the tough local boys. Hating school, he escaped to the beach, surfed most days, and longed to go away, to be free of his mother. He dropped out of Roosevelt and devoted all his days to surfing. He traveled to the mainland, and at Mavericks he saw his first epic waves—sixty-footers—and later added Jaws on Maui and Cortes Bank to these monsters, and still searched for a hundred-foot wave to ride.

By then he was on the world tour and had his first tattoos. He traveled—to Portugal and Spain, and Bali, his mother saying that she wanted to follow him; but the effort was too great, the flights too long. He managed to exhaust her. She stayed home, like a wife abandoned, and welcomed the attention of men. She queened it with her suitors, amused by their promises and flattery, and in this ideal situation fell into a casual decadence, drinking too much, indulging herself, encouraging the men just so far and then rejecting them, reverting to a sudden iciness that was itself perverse.

Sharkey traveled the world, wherever there was surf—and there was surf on almost every coast, at the edge of every continent, on most Pacific islands. You could not be a big-wave surfer, or surf year-round, without being a traveler.

And when he began to make money, in contests and from endorsements and appearances—he was still in his twenties—he became defiant; and his mother knew her hold on him was weakening. The money was modest, but it pleased him that it came so easily. Being away from her made him independent, and she objected; she wanted her boy back, not realizing that in her stubbornness she had made him succeed; her selfishness had kept him away, and being away from her had made him a man.

His mother complained of obscure aches and pains, which Sharkey disbelieved, regarding her complaints as attention-seeking. In what seemed like an act of revenge his mother broke her hip, became an invalid, and died. He inherited everything his mother owned—money, property, the investments, the stock portfolio. And he knew a greater freedom, more travel, continuing success as a surfer, more latitude in his search for the hundred-foot wave. He had always guessed that he would not be wholly free until his mother was dead. He was released, to fall in love, but the feeling that he had wished his mother dead—that had he believed her in her misery, he might have lengthened her life—this guilt never left him. That, and something else he could not undo.