It didn’t seem like too much to ask, but for several years I was stuck with the bay, so I kept a library card handy and took my books to an empty stretch of beach where I could look up from the pages now and again and pretend what I was seeing was a quiet day at Banzai, or some undiscovered paradise off the coast of West Sumatra.Ĭome summer, the old habit tends to resurface. I wanted a storm-born swell that rolled for a thousand miles and broke over coral, and I wanted to see somebody, preferably a Hawaiian, ride the thing like he was taking communion. I couldn’t imagine a world without saltwater, but that water ought to have some life to it, I thought, and I didn’t want to hear about scallops and steamers. As a teenager I began to read surf books. A rough day meant the waves broke over your shins instead of your ankles. The beaches were protected from the North Atlantic by two hundred square miles of bay, twenty islands, a few thousand islets and ledges, and a dredged harbor with a controlling depth of fourteen feet. I grew up in an old fishing village in Massachusetts, which is nothing to complain about, I know, but the water there was so goddamn still it could drive you crazy.
