When the money he got from the ticket ran out, he worked on the docks for a while, and surfed almost every waking minute when he wasn’t working. Before long, he didn’t need to take lessons any more. Before much longer, he was giving them. By the time winter came, he was as good as men who’d been riding the waves as long as he’d been alive.

That was what he thought, anyway, till he followed the Outrigger Club members’ winter migration to the north shore of Oahu. There he found waves like none he’d seen, like none he’d imagined, near Honolulu. They rolled down across the North Pacific all the way from Alaska. And when they came ashore at Waimea and some of the other spots the club members knew, some of them were as tall as a three-story building.

Riding waves like that wasn’t just sport. If it went wrong, it was like falling off a cliff-except then the cliff fell on you. More than once, he came to the surface gasping and gouged and scraped from a tumble against the sand. He lost two front teeth when somebody else’s surfboard hit him in the face. That was, if anything, a membership pin. Half the really accomplished surfers at the Outrigger Club sported either bridgework or a space where their incisors had been.

He never did go back to northern California. His family wrote anguished letters for a while. He assured them he was fine. After a while, they gave up and stopped writing. He dropped them little notes every so often-whenever he happened to think of it. He was a good-natured fellow. As time went by, though, he thought about anything outside of Oahu less and less often.

He acquired a nickname: Smooth Oscar. He acquired a scar on his leg from a jagged chunk of coral. He acquired a series of lady friends from among the tourists who came from Seattle or St. Louis or Savannah to learn to ride the surf. The lessons were intimate enough to start with, and often got more so after the sun went down. The ladies, almost all of them, went home happy. Oscar smiled a lot.