Surfers don't look like other people. Their bodies--whether adolescent, statuesque, or carnivalesque--reflect the work they do, becoming mostly sets of paddling arms and shoulders, with strong backs from arching up while prone. Likewise, the way surfers carry themselves: even huge men acquire a litheness that only water athletes ever get, a loose nimbleness from so much dancing on a surging medium. And their faces carry traces of what they've seen.

You get to itch for a little daily time in which the shore and all its busy human concerns fall away, time in which the mere possibility of a wave keeps your eyes fixed on a wild, silent space where you'll never see anything but the products of storm and sea and sky. Even when someone finally catches a wave, and you're floating nearby, you watch him carve a small wall under so much space that the world seems, if only for a moment, big enough for all of us; the surfer's arcing motions--and so, by extension, all human endeavor--seem small undulations in a world consumed by unimaginably larger ones.