"Okay, cowabungas. Big rhinos out der. We gonna bus' 'em out big time," he said, glancing up from the watch to the incoming sets, speaking in that strange-sounding Hawaiian pidgin that he sometimes used when we were surfing. "We pack large dis morning. Catch us one big homaliah wave, stay out of de tumbler and it be all tits and gravy, bruddah."

He grinned, kneeling in the sand wearing his Katin trunks, displaying the surfer knots on the tops of his feet and knees-little calcium deposits caused by a lifetime of paddling to catch up to what Pop called the wall of glass.

Pop was a tall, stringy, blue-eyed guy with long blond hair just beginning to streak with gray. He was about forty then, but he seemed much younger.

There was an Igloo cooler with juice and rolls in the sand before us, packed by Walter's wife, Elizabeth, for after surfing. We'd take our clean-up set at around seven thirty, come in and shower by the lifeguard station, eat, and change clothes in the van. Then we would pack up and Walt would drop us at school by eight thirty.

Pop had been born on the North Shore of Hawaii, which he said made him "kamaaina to da max." His parents had taught school there and he'd ended up in L. A. after the army. That was pretty much all I knew about him. I was too caught up with my own problems to worry about much else.

Because he'd been raised on the North Shore and taught to surf by the old-timers there, Pop was a throwback surfer, what the Hawaiians called a logger. His stick was a nine-foot-long board with no fins and a square tail-very old school. On the nose, he had painted his own crescent symbol, an inch-high breaking curl with the words "Tap the Source" in script underneath. Pop said the source was that place in the center of the ocean where Kahuna, the god of the waves, made "da big poundahs"-double overhead haymakers with sphincter factor.