Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn

out of the ocean in rolling lines, as they normally did. These seemed to come in off the horizon, as if they had marched the whole breadth of the Pacific to pound this stretch of beach. The surface was angry, gray and black, streaked with white. Paddling out appeared an impossibility. The first fifty yards of water looked as if it had been poured from a washing machine. Flecks of foam lay across the wet sand like snowdrifts. As he ran onto the boardwalk, the whole structure seemed to shudder beneath him with each new wave.
    He was alone with the swell. Far down the beach he could see the yellow Jeep of the lifeguards. The morning was still and gray, the sun wrapped in a heavy overcast. He walked farther out onto the pier, and that was when he saw them; he wasn’t alone after all. At first he couldn’t believe it; no one could have gotten outside in this kind of surf. He ran farther. He lost track of them, then found them again. There was no doubt about it. He picked out one, then two more, a fourth and a fifth. The size of the swell made them hard to see. At times they disappeared completely behind the waves. He gripped the rail, damp with spray beneath his hands. They were out there, but as yet, he was pretty sure there had been no rides.
    He was nearly even with them now and could see them more clearly: six surfers on the south side of the pier. They stayed together, darting about like a school of fish, apparently trying to get themselves set up amid the huge swells. Occasionally one of them would look as if he were going to take off, only to pull back at the last moment, allowing the wave to peak and pour over, to thunder on through the pier and toward the beach unridden.
    The surfers seemed to be having a hard time getting themselves in position. Wave after wave passed them, lifted them and hid them, threw curtains of spray twenty feet in the air as it wrapped around the pilings. And each new set seemed to come from farther outside, forcing them to paddle out farther. Ike was wondering if any of them would be able to take off at all when he noticed one surfer paddling again just ahead of a mountain of gray water. He was paddling hard. The board began to rise, lifted on the wave. And suddenly the surfer was on his feet. It was hard to say how high the waves actually were, but the crest of this one was well over the surfer’s head.
    The rider sped down the face, drove off the bottom in a powerful turn that sent water spraying in a wide arc from the tail of his board. He drove back up into the face, was nearly covered by a rapidly peeling section. Then he was out of the tunnel, high on the lip, working his board in small rapid turns, racing the wave toward the pier. And then it was over, he had driven through the lip at the last second, just before it met the piling. For a moment Ike lost him in the spray and then he saw him again, flat on his board, paddling hard for the horizon.
    •   •   •
    By the time the sun had burnt its way through the overcast, there were maybe another half-dozen surfers in the water. They made it outside by staying on the north side of the pier, using the pilings to help shield them from the swell that was moving in from the south. Still, it was risky and Ike saw more than one surfer turned back, more than one board broken on the pilings.
    Though few went into the water, many came to watch, and soon the railings were lined with a noisy cheering crowd. The people hooted and cheered for rides. Ike soon found himself cheering along with them. There were cameras set up along the pier now too, a dozen of them, some manned by crews in matching T-shirts that advertised various surf shops and board manufacturers. There were more cameras on the beach, and more spectators, more yellow Jeeps, so that by late morning a kind of circus atmosphere had taken over that strip of the town which huddled about the pier and lined the white strip of sand.
    Ike saw the blond-haired surfer, the same he’d seen