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Basketball, Football, Baseball are all very popular sports across the globe. As a kid, all I wanted to do was play sports and be part of a team when I grew up. Many young boys have the dream of becoming a professional athlete. When you finally get o

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The Maui surfer girls love each other's hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it-yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits. Not long ago I was on the beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean, and each girl took the hair of the girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and crisscrossed it into braids.

The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, 14 or so-they love that wild, knotty, bright hair, as big and stiff as carpet, the most un-straight, un-sleek, un-ordinary hair you could imagine, and they can love it, I suppose, because when you are young and on top of the world you can love anything you want, and just the fact that you love it makes it cool and fabulous. A Maui surfer girl named Gloria Madden has that kind of hair-thick red corkscrews striped orange and silver from the sun, hair that if you weren't beautiful and fearless you'd consider an affliction that you would try to iron flat or stuff under a hat.

One afternoon I was driving two of the girls to Blockbuster Video in Kahului. It was the day before a surfing competition, and the girls were going to spend the night at their coach's house up the coast so they'd be ready for the contest at dawn. On contest nights, they fill their time by eating a lot of food and watching hours of surf videos, but on this particular occasion they decided they needed to rent a movie, too, in case they found themselves with 10 or 20 seconds of unoccupied time. On our way to the video store, the girls told me they admired my rental car and said that they thought rental cars totally ripped and that they each wanted to get one. My car, which until then I had sort of hated, suddenly took on a glow. I asked what else they would have if they could have anything in the world. They thought for a moment, and then the girl in the backseat said, "A moped and thousands of new clothes. You know, stuff like thousands of bathing suits and thousands of new board shorts."

"I'd want a Baby-G watch and new flip-flops, and one of those cool sports bras like the one Iris just got," the other said. She was in the front passenger seat, barefoot, sand-caked, twirling her hair into a French knot. It was a half-cloudy day with weird light that made the green Hawaiian hills look black and the ocean look like zinc. It was also, in fact, a school day, but these were the luckiest of all the surfer girls because they are home-schooled so that they can surf any time at all.

The girl making the French knot stopped knotting. "Oh, and also," she said, "I'd really definitely want crazy hair like Gloria's."

The girl in the backseat leaned forward and said, "Yeah, and hair like Gloria's, for sure."

A lot of the Maui surfer girls live in Hana, the little town at the end of the Hana Highway, a fraying thread of a road that winds from Kahului, Maui's primary city, over a dozen deep gulches and dead-drop waterfalls and around the backside of the Haleakala Crater to the village. Hana is far away and feels even farther. It is only 55 miles from Kahului, but the biggest maniac in the world couldn't make the drive in less than two hours.

There is nothing much to do in Hana except wander through the screw pines and the candlenut trees or go surfing. There is no mall in Hana, no Starbucks, no shoe store, no Hello Kitty store, no movie theater-just trees, bushes, flowers, and gnarly surf that breaks rough at the bottom of the rocky beach. Before women were encouraged to surf, the girls in Hana must have been unbelievably bored. Lucky for these Hana girls, surfing has changed. In the '60s, Joyce Hoffman became one of the first female surf aces, and she was followed by Rell Sunn and Jericho Poppler in the seventies and Frieda Zamba in the '80s and Lisa Andersen in this decade, and thousands of girls and women followed by example. In fact, the surfer girls of this generation have never known a time in their lives when some woman champion wasn't ripping surf.

The Hana girls dominate Maui surfing these days. Theory has it that they grow up riding such mangy waves that they're ready for anything. Also, they are exposed to few distractions and can practically live in the water. Crazy-haired Gloria is not one of the Hana girls. She grew up near the city, in Haiku, where there were high-school race riots-Samoans beating on Filipinos, Hawaiians beating on Anglos-and the mighty pull of the mall at Kaahumanu Center. By contrast, a Hana girl can have herself an almost pure surf adolescence.

One afternoon I went to Hana to meet Theresa McGregor, one of the best surfers in town. I missed our rendezvous and was despairing because Theresa lived with her mother, two brothers, and sister in a one-room shack with no phone and I couldn't think of how I'd find her. There is one store in Hana, amazingly enough called the General Store, where you can buy milk and barbecue sauce and snack bags of dried cuttlefish; once I realized I'd missed Theresa I went into the store because there was no other place to go. The cashier looked kindly, so I asked whether by any wild chance she knew a surfer girl named Theresa McGregor. I had not yet come to appreciate what a small town Hana really was. "She was just in here a minute ago," the cashier said. "Usually around this time of the day she's on her way to the beach to go surfing." She dialed the McGregors's neighbor-she knew the number by heart-to find out which beach Theresa had gone to. A customer overheard the cashier talking to me, and she came over and added that she'd just seen Theresa down at Ko'ki beach and that Theresa's mom, Angie, was there too, and that some of the other Hana surfer girls would probably be down any minute but they had a History Day project due at the end of the week so they might not be done yet at school.

I went down to Ko'ki. Angie McGregor was indeed there, and she pointed out Theresa bobbing in the swells. There were about a dozen other people in the water, kids mostly. A few other surfer parents were up on the grass with Angie-fathers with hairy chests and ponytails and saddle-leather sandals, and mothers wearing board shorts and bikini tops, passing around snacks of unpeeled carrots and whole-wheat cookies and sour cream Pringles-and even as they spoke to one another, they had their eyes fixed on the ocean, watching their kids, who seemed like they were a thousand miles away, taking quick rides on the tattered waves.

After a few minutes, Theresa appeared up on dry land. She was a big, broad-shouldered girl, 16 years old, fierce-faced, somewhat feline, and quite beautiful. Water was streaming off of her, out of her shorts, out of her long hair, which was plastered to her shoulders. The water made it look inky, but you could still tell that an inch from her scalp her hair had been stripped of all color by the sun.

In Haiku, where the McGregors lived until four years ago, Theresa had been a superstar soccer player, but Hana was too small to support a soccer league, so after they moved Theresa first devoted herself to becoming something of a juvenile delinquent and then gave that up for surfing. Her first triumph came right away, in 1996, when she won the open women's division at the Maui Hana Mango competition. She was one of the few fortunate amateur surfer girls who had sponsors. She got free boards from Matt Kinoshita, her coach, who owns and designs Kazuma Surfboards; clothes from Honolua Surf Company; board leashes and bags from Da Kine Hawaii; skateboards from Flexdex. Boys who surfed got a lot more for free.

Even a little bit of sponsorship made the difference between surfing and not surfing. As rich a life as it seemed, among the bougainvillea and the green hills and the passionflowers of Hana, there was hardly any money. In the past few years the Hawaiian economy had sagged terribly, and Hana had never had much of an economy to begin with. Last year, the surfer moms in town held a fund-raiser bake sale to send Theresa and two Hana boys to the national surfing competition in California.

Theresa said she was done surfing for the day. "The waves totally suck now," she said to Angie. "They're just real trash." They talked for a moment and agreed that Theresa should leave in the morning and spend the next day or two with her coach Matt at his house in Haiku, to prepare for the Hawaiian Amateur Surf Association contest that weekend at Ho'okipa Beach near Kahului.

Logistics became the topic. One of the biggest riddles facing a surfer girl, especially a surfer girl in far-removed Hana, is how to get from point A to point B, particularly when carrying a large surfboard. The legal driving age in Hawaii is 15, but the probable car-ownership age, unless you're rich, is much beyond that; also, it seemed that nearly every surfer kid I met in Maui lived in a single-parent, single- or no-car household in which spare drivers and vehicles were rare. I was planning to go back around the volcano anyway to see the contest, so I said I'd take Theresa and another surfer, Lilia Boerner, with me, and someone else would make it from Hana to Haiku with their boards.

That night I met Theresa, Angie, and Lilia and a few of their surfer friends at a take-out shop in town, and then I went to the room I'd rented at Joe's Rooming House. I stayed up late reading about how Christian missionaries had banned surfing when they got to Hawaii in the late 1800s, but how by 1908 general longing for the sport overrode spiritual censure and surfing resumed. I dozed off with the history book in my lap and the hotel television tuned to a Sprint ad showing a Hawaiian man and his granddaughter running hand-in-hand into the waves.

The next morning I met Lilia and Theresa at Ko'ki beach at 8:00, after they'd had a short session on the waves. When I arrived they were standing under a monkeypod tree beside a stack of backpacks. Both of them were soaking wet, and I realized then that a surfer is always in one of two conditions: wet or about to be wet. Also, they are almost always dressed in something that can go directly into the water: halter tops, board shorts, bikini tops, jeans.

Lilia was 12 and a squirt, with a sweet, powdery face and round hazel eyes and golden fuzz on her arms and legs. She was younger and much smaller than Theresa, less plainly athletic but very game. Like Theresa, she was home-schooled, so she could surf all the time. So far Lilia was sponsored by a surf shop and by Matt Kinoshita's Kazuma surfboards. She had a twin brother who was also a crafty surfer, but a year ago the two of them came upon their grandfather after he suffered a fatal tractor accident, and the boy hadn't competed since. Their family owned a large and prosperous organic fruit farm in Hana. I once asked Lilia if it was fun to live on a farm. "No," she said abruptly. "Too much fruit."

We took a back road from Hana to Haiku, as if the main road weren't bad enough. The road edged around the back of the volcano, through sere yellow hills. The girls talked about surfing and about one surfer girl's mom, whom they described as a full bitch, and a surfer's dad, who according to Theresa "was a freak and a half because he took too much acid and he tweaked." I wondered if they had any other hobbies besides surfing. Lilia said she used to study hula.

"Is it fun?"

"Not if you have a witch for a teacher, like I did," she said. "Just screaming and yelling at us all the time. I'll never do hula again. Surfing's cooler, anyway."

"You're the man, Lilia," Theresa said, tartly. "Hey, how close are we to Grandma's Coffee Shop? I'm starving." Surfers are always starving. They had eaten breakfast before they surfed; it was now only an hour or two later, and they were hungry again. They favor breakfast cereal, teriyaki chicken, french fries, rice, ice cream, candy, and a Hawaiian specialty called Spam Masubi, which is a rice ball topped with a hunk of Spam and seaweed. If they suffered from the typical teenage girl obsession with their weight, they didn't talk about it and they didn't act like it. They were so active that whatever they ate probably melted away.

"We love staying at Matt's," Lilia said, "because he always takes us to Taco Bell." We came around the side of a long hill and stopped at Grandma's. Lilia ordered a garden burger and Theresa had an "I'm Hungry" sandwich with turkey, ham, and avocado. It was 10:30 a.m. As she was eating, Lilia said, "You know, the Olympics are going to have surfing, either in the year 2000 or 2004, for sure."

"I'm so on that, dude," Theresa said. "If I can do well in the nationals this year, then ..." She swallowed the last of her sandwich. She told me that eventually she wanted to become an ambulance driver, and I could picture her doing it, riding on dry land the same waves of adrenaline that she rides now.

I spent a lot of time trying to picture where these girls might be in 10 years. Hardly any are likely to make it as pro surfers-even though women have made a place for themselves in pro surfing, the number who really make it is still small, and even though the Hana girls rule Maui surfing, the island's soft-shell waves and easygoing competitions have produced very few world-class surfers in recent years.

It doesn't seem to matter to them. At various cultural moments, surfing has appeared as the embodiment of everything cool and wild and free; this is one of those moments. To be a girl surfer is even cooler, wilder, and more modern than being a guy surfer: Surfing has always been such a male sport that for a man to do it doesn't defy any received ideas; to be a girl surfer is to be all that surfing represents, plus the extra charge of being a girl in a tough guy's domain. To be a surfer girl in a cool place like Hawaii is perhaps the apogee of all that is cool and wild and modern and sexy and defiant. The Hana girls, therefore, exist at that highest point-the point where being brave, tan, capable, and independent, and having a real reason to wear all those surf-inspired clothes that other girls wear for fashion, is what matters completely.

It is, though, just a moment. It must be hard to imagine an ordinary future and something other than a lunar calendar to consider if you've grown up in a small town in Hawaii, surfing all day and night, spending half your time on sand, thinking in terms of point breaks and barrels and roundhouse cutbacks. Or maybe they don't think about it at all. Maybe these girls are still young enough and in love enough with their lives that they have no special foreboding about their futures, no uneasy presentiment that the kind of life they are leading now might eventually have to end.

Matt Kinoshita lives in a fresh, sunny ranch at the top of a hill in Haiku. The house has a big living room with a fold-out couch and plenty of floor space. Often, one or two or 10 surfer girls camp in his living room because they are in a competition that starts at 7:00 the next morning, or because they are practicing intensively and it is too far to go back and forth from Hana, or because they want to plow through Matt's stacks of surfing magazines and Matt's library of surfing videos and Matt's piles of water-sports clothing catalogs. Many of the surfer girls I met didn't live with their fathers, or in some cases didn't even have relationships with their fathers, so sometimes, maybe, they stayed at Matt's just because they were in the mood to be around a concerned older male.

Matt was in his late twenties. As a surfer he was talented enough to compete on the world tour but had decided to skip it in favor of an actual life with his wife, Annie, and their baby son, Chaz. Now he was one of the best surfboard shapers on Maui, a coach, and head of a construction company with his dad. He sponsored a few grown-up surfers and still competed himself, but his preoccupation was with kids. Surfing magazine once asked him what he liked most about being a surfboard shaper, and he answered, "Always being around stoked groms!" He coached a stoked-grom boys' team as well as a stoked-grom girls' team. The girls' team was an innovation. There had been no girls' surfing team on Maui before Matt established his three years ago. There was no money in it for him-it actually cost him many thousands of dollars each year-but he loved to do it. He thought the girls were the greatest. The girls thought he was the greatest, too.

In build, Matt looked a lot like the men in those old Hawaiian surfing prints-small, chesty, gravity-bound. He had perfect features and hair as shiny as an otter's. When he listened to the girls he kept his head tilted, eyebrows slightly raised, jaw set in a grin. Not like a brother, exactly-more like the cutest, nicest teacher at school, who could say stern, urgent things without them stinging. When I pulled into the driveway with the girls, Matt was in the yard loading surfboards into a pickup. "Hey, dudes," he called to Lilia and Theresa. "Where are your boards?"

"Someone's going to bring them tonight from Hana," Theresa said. She jiggled her foot. "Matt, come on, let's go surfing already."

"Hey, Lilia," Matt said. He squeezed her shoulders. "How're you doing, champ? Is your dad going to surf in the contest this weekend?"

Lilia shrugged and looked up at him solemnly. "Come on, Matt," she said. "Let's go surfing already."

They went down to surf at Ho'okipa, to a section that is called Pavilles because it is across from the concrete picnic pavilions on the beach. Ho'okipa is not a lot like Hana. People with drinking problems like to hang out in the pavilions. Windsurfers abound. Cars park up to the edge of the sand. The landing pattern for the Kahului Airport is immediately overhead. The next break over, the beach is prettier; the water there is called Girlie Bowls, because the waves get cut down by the reef and are more manageable, presumably, for girlies.

A few years ago, some of the Hana surfer girls met their idol Lisa Andersen when she was on Maui. She was very shy and hardly said a word to them, they told me, except to suggest they go surf Girlie Bowls. I thought it sounded mildly insulting, but they weren't exactly sure what she was implying and they didn't brood about it. They hardly talked about her. She was like some unassailable force.

We walked past the pavilions. "The men at this beach are so sexist," Lilia said, glaring at a guy swinging a boombox. "It's really different from Hana. Here they're always, you know, staring, and saying, 'Oh, here come the giiiirls,' and 'Oh, hello, ladies,' and stuff. For us white girls, us haoles, I think they really like to be gross. So gross. I'm serious."

"Hey, the waves look pretty sick," Theresa said. She watched a man drop in on one and then whip around against it. She whistled and said, "Whoooa, look at that sick snap! That was so rad, dude! That was the sickest snap I've seen in ages! Did you see that?"

They were gone in an instant. A moment later, two blond heads popped up in the black swells, and then they were up on their boards and away.
Dinner at Matt's: tons of barbecued chicken, loaves of garlic bread, more loaves of garlic bread. Annie Kinoshita brought four quarts of ice cream out of the freezer, lined them up on the kitchen counter, and watched them disappear. Annie was fair, fine-boned, and imperturbable. She used to be a surfer "with hair down to her frickin' butt," according to Theresa. Now she was busy with her baby and with overseeing the open-door policy she and Matt maintained in their house.

That night, another surfer girl, Elise Garrigue, and a 14-year-old boy, Cheyne Magnusson, had come over for dinner and were going to sleep over, too. Cheyne was one of the best young surfers on the island. His father, Tony, was a professional skateboarder. Cheyne was the only boy who regularly crashed at Matt and Annie's. He and the girls had the Platonic ideal of a Platonic relationship. "Hell, these wenches are virgins," Annie said to me, cracking up. "These wenches don't want anything to do with that kind of nastiness."

"Shut up, haole," Theresa said.

"I was going to show these virgins a picture of Chaz's head coming out when I was in labor," Annie yelled, "and they're all, 'No, no, no, don't!'"

"Yeah, she's all, 'Look at this grossness!'" Theresa said. "And we're all, 'Shut up, fool.'"

"Duh," Lilia said. "Like we'd even want to see a picture like that."

The next day was the preliminary round of the Quicksilver HASA Competition, the fourth of eight HASA competitions on Maui leading to the state championships and then the nationals. It was a two-day competition-preliminaries on Saturday, finals on Sunday.

In theory, the girls should have gone to bed early because they had to get up at five, but that was just a theory. They pillow-fought for an hour, watched "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch" and "Boy Meets World" and another episode of "Sabrina," then watched a couple of Kelly Slater surfing videos, had another pillow fight, ate a few bowls of cereal, then watched Fear of a Black Hat, a movie spoofing the rap-music world that they had seen so many times that they could recite most of the dialogue by heart. Only Elise fell asleep at a decent hour. She happened to be French and perhaps had overdosed on American pop culture earlier than the rest.

Elise sort of blew in to Hawaii with the trade winds: She and her mother had left France and were planning to move to Tahiti, stopped on Maui en route, and never left. It was a classic Hawaiian tale. No one comes here for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways. They run away to Maui from places like Maryland or Nevada or anyplace they picture themselves earthbound, landlocked, stuck. They live in salvaged boxcars or huts or sagging shacks just to be near the waves. Here, they can see watery boundlessness everywhere they turn, and all things are fluid and impermanent.

I don't know what time it was when the kids finally went to sleep because I was on the living room floor with my jacket over my head for insulation. When I woke up a few hours later, the girls were dressed for the water, eating bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honey Bunches of Oats, and watching Fear of a Black Hat again. It was a lovely morning and they were definitely ready to show Hana surfing to the world. Theresa was the first to head out the door. "Hey, losers," she yelled over her shoulder, "let's go."
The first heats of the contest had right-handed waves, three or four feet high, silky but soft on the ends so that they collapsed into whitewash as they broke. You couldn't make much of an impression riding something like that, and one after another the Hana girls came out of the water scowling. "I couldn't get any kind of footing," Theresa said to Matt. "I was, like, so on it, but I looked like some kind of kook sliding around."

"My last wave was a full-out closeout," Lilia said. She looked exasperated. "Hey, someone bust me a towel." She blotted her face. "I really blew it," she groaned. "I'm lucky if I even got five waves."

Hana is far away and feels even farther. There is no mall, no Starbucks, no Hello Kitty store, no movie theater. Which means that a Hana girl is exposed to few distractions and can practically live in the water. She can have herself an almost pure surf adolescence.

The girls were on the beach below the judges' stand, under Matt's cabana, along with Matt's boys' team and a number of kids he didn't sponsor but who liked hanging out with him more than with their own sponsors. The kids spun like atoms. They ran up and down the beach and stuffed sand in each others' shorts and fought over pieces of last night's chicken that Annie had packed for them in a cooler.

During a break between heats, Gloria with the crazy hair strolled over and suddenly the incessant motion paused. This was like an imperial visitation. After all, Gloria was a seasoned-seeming 19-year-old who had just spent the year surfing the monstrous waves on Oahu's North Shore, plus she did occasional work for Rodney Kilborn, the contest promoter, plus she had a sea turtle tattooed on her ankle, and most important, according to the Hana girls, she was an absolutely dauntless bodyboarder who would paddle out into wall-size waves, even farther out than a lot of guys would go.

"Hey, haoles!" Gloria called out. She hopped into the shade of the cabana. That day, her famous hair was woven into a long red braid that hung over her left shoulder. Even with her hair tamed, Gloria was an amazing-looking person. She had a hardy build, melon-colored skin, and a wide, round face speckled with light-brown freckles. Her voice was light and tinkly, and had that arched, rising-up, quizzical inflection that made everything she said sound like a jokey, good-natured question.

"Hey, Theresa?" she said. "Hey, girl, you got it going on? You've got great wave strategy? Just keep it up, yeah? Oh, Elise? You should paddle out harder? OK? You're doing great, yeah? And Christie?" She looked around for a surfer girl named Christie Wickey, who got a ride in at four that morning from Hana. "Hey, Christie?" Gloria said when she spotted her. "You should go out further, yeah? That way you'll be in better position for your wave, OK? You guys are the greatest, seriously? You rule, yeah? You totally rule, yeah?"

At last the junior women's division preliminary results were posted. Theresa, Elise, and two other girls on Matt's team made the cut, as well as a girl whom Matt knew but didn't coach. Lilia had not made it. As soon as she heard, she tucked her blond head in the crook of her elbow and cried. Matt sat with her and talked quietly for a while, and then one by one the other girls drifted up to her and murmured consoling things, but she was inconsolable. She hardly spoke for the rest of the afternoon until the open men's division, which Matt had entered. When his heat was announced, she lifted her head and brushed her hand across her swollen eyes. "Hey, Matt!" she called as he headed for the water. "Rip it for the girls!"

That night, a whole pack of them slept at Matt's-Theresa, Lilia, Christie, Elise, Monica Cardoza from Lahaina, and sisters from Hana named Iris Moon and Lily Morningstar, who had arrived too late to surf in the junior women's preliminaries. There hadn't been enough entrants in the open women's division to require preliminaries, so the competition was going to be held entirely on Sunday and Iris would be able to enter. Lily wasn't planning to surf at all, but as long as she was able to get a ride out of Hana she took it.

This added up to too many girls at Matt's for Cheyne's liking, so he had fled to another boy's house for the night. Lilia was still blue. She was quiet through dinner, and then as soon as she finished she slid into her sleeping bag and pulled it over her head. The other girls stayed up for hours, watching videos and slamming each other with pillows and talking about the contest. At some point someone asked where Lilia was. Theresa shot a glance at her sleeping bag and said quietly, "Did you guys see how upset she got today? I'm like, 'Take it easy, Lilia!' and she's all 'Leave me alone, bitch.' So I'm like, 'Whatever.'"

They whispered for a while about how sensitive Lilia was, about how hard she took it if she didn't win, about how she thought one of them had wrecked a bathing suit she'd loaned her, about how funny it was that she even cared since she had so many bathing suits and for that matter always had money for snacks, which most of them did not.

When I said a Hana girl could have a pure surfing adolescence, I knew it was part daydream, because no matter how sweet the position of a beautiful, groovy Hawaiian teenager might be in the world of perceptions, the mean measures of the human world don't ever go away. There would always be something else to want and be denied. More snack money, even.

Lilia hadn't been sleeping. Suddenly she bolted out of her sleeping bag and screamed, "Fuck you, I hate you stupid bitches!" and stormed toward the bathroom, slugging Theresa on the way.

The waves on Sunday came from the left, and they were stiff and smallish, with crisp, curling lips. The men's and boys' heats were narrated over the PA system, but during the girls' and women's heats the announcer was silent, and the biggest racket was the cheering of Matt's team. Lilia had toughened up since last night. Now she seemed grudgeless but remote. Her composure made her look more grown-up than 12. When I first got down to the beach she was staring out at the waves, chewing a hunk of dried papaya and sucking on a candy pacifier.

A few of the girls were far off to the right of the break where the beach disappeared and lustrous black rocks stretched into the water. Christie told me later that they hated being bored more than anything in the world and between heats they were afraid they might be getting a little weary, so they decided to perk themselves up by playing on the rocks. It had worked. They charged back from the rocks shrieking and panting. "We got all dangerous," she said. "We jumped off this huge rock into the water. We almost got killed, which was great."

Sometimes watching them I couldn't believe that they could head out so offhandedly into the ocean-this ocean, which had rolls of white water coming in as fast as you could count them, and had a razor-blade reef hidden just below the surface, and was full of sharks. The girls, on the other hand, couldn't believe I'd never surfed-never ridden a wave standing up or lying down, never cut back across the whitewash and sent up a lacy veil of spray, never felt a longboard slip out from under me and then felt myself pitched forward and under for that immaculate, quiet, black instant when all the weight in the world presses you down toward the ocean bottom until the moment passes and you get spat up on the beach.

I explained I'd grown up in Ohio, where there is no surf, but that didn't satisfy them; what I didn't say was that I'm not sure that at 15 I had the abandon or the indomitable sense of myself that you seem to need in order to look at this wild water and think, I will glide on top of those waves. Theresa made me promise I'd try to surf at least once someday. I promised, but this Sunday was not going to be that day. I wanted to sit on the sand and watch the end of the contest, to see the Hana girls take their divisions, including Lilia, who placed third in the open women's division, and Theresa, who won the open women's and the junior women's division that day. Even if it was just a moment, it was a perfect one, and who wouldn't choose it over never having the moment at all? When I left Maui that afternoon, my plane circled over Ho'okipa, and I wanted to believe I could still see them down there and always would see them down there, snapping back and forth across the waves.

This article appeared in the Fall 1998 edition of Women Outside.

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To be a surfer girl in Maui is to be the luckiest of creatures. It means you're beautiful and tan and ready to rip. It means you've caught the perfect dappled wave and are on a ride that can't possibly end.

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by Ishmael Beah

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Ishmael Beah comes to New York as a teenager after years of fighting as a child soldier in Sierra Leone and gets a second chance at childhood.

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Listen to an interview with Trevor Noah, and/or scroll down to read an excerpt from Born a Crime.

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Trevor Noah thinks we should all be young readers.

The comedian and "Daily Show" host's new book " It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" - a young adult adaptation of his 2016 autobiography - isn't watered down for younger bookworms.

Noah says besides tweaking some of the language and simplifying some of the stories told in the original, his memoir for young adults is largely the same.

"All I changed in the book was just how I described certain concepts, but I didn't try to talk down to younger readers because I didn't like being talked down to when I was young," he tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson.

Noah's young adult book aims to provide American kids with an intimate view of what it was like growing up in apartheid South Africa - and to present a deeply personal perspective of how racism shaped the way he saw himself.

He says he hopes American kids reading the book will understand that racism is "an all-too-common idea or a common theme that happens all around the world."

"I think sometimes it's nice to have perspective on these issues, just so that you understand that it's not a unique problem that one country deals with, but rather an idea that society as a whole deals with across borders," Noah says.

His childhood during and after apartheid South Africa shows how as a kid, Noah was grappling with coming to terms with who he was and who he wanted to become. Born to a black South African mother and a white European father, Noah says he felt defined by the government - "it was interesting being in a country where the law defined me as one race" - and by how others labeled him.

Noah says his book serves as a lesson to young readers: There's liberation in defining who you are on your own terms.

"For so long people wanted to define me as whatever they wanted to define me as. I think that clarity for me came from understanding my existence and then looking at the world around me," he says.
On why he thinks American kids should know about apartheid
"One thing I enjoyed when I was growing up in South Africa was in our schools, we learned about world history, so we learned about American history. We learned about French history. We learned about what happened in Russia. We learned about Europe. We learned about Africa. We learned about South Africa. And so for me, I think learning about history gives you some context. It gives you an idea of what the world was like. It also gives you an idea of where the world has gone to in comparison to the past. And so for me, if you read stories from South Africa, if you read about apartheid, you come to realize that racism or oppression aren't unique ideas to America."
On racism in America today
"I think it's unfortunately part of the fabric of the country. South Africa and America have very similar histories in that fundamentally, the beginnings of the countries as we know them, came from a place and a time when people had certain views about people of a different skin color. And so that has traveled through time and that has translated into laws and policies that have affected black people in America [and] black people in South Africa. So for me, what's always interesting is seeing what similarities there are, but then also noticing what differences there are.

"For me, the big difference in the past, you know, we have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and that's, in many ways, quelled any ideas that [apartheid] never happened or it wasn't as bad as it was laid out to be or was presented as. I think that does something for a nation. It puts you in a place where you can't be gaslighted at anymore, whereas in America, it does feel like this conversation about is there racism, as opposed to how do you begin moving forward as a nation to get rid of the racism that has in many ways defined how people react with one another across racial barriers in the U.S."
On whether racism in the U.S. has gotten worse over time
"I think some people will think it's gotten worse and I'm careful to jump to that assumption. I think we've gotten more access to information and so, you know, sometimes the curves of facts versus information can go against each other. I definitely think America has gotten better over time. For anybody to say that 2019's racism is as bad as 1960's racism, I think it is being a little disingenuous.

"I do think however, social media, camera phones, etc., have given us so much more access to these stories. Now you can watch a video of someone being berated by their boss and their bosses using the N-word in the office. You'd see an unarmed person being shot by a police officer. You would never see that before. It was a story where the police could present the facts however they wished and that would probably be the end of the conversation. So I think we live in a world where now we're getting information on a different scale and processing that information can often mean that even though the world may have gotten better gradually over time, we're now inundated with information that tells us otherwise."
On finding clarity on who he is
"I think as human beings we're always trying to find out who we are. I think sometimes the simplest distinctions to make of those that run along color lines because they fundamentally set you with the group and then you can go from there.

"It was just me understanding where I belonged and who I was, because in South Africa many people were faced with a choice. They could choose to aspire to a racial group that we were told was better than maybe the one we were. I think it was liberating for myself to realize that although the government had tried to define me as one race, I comfortably identified with and was a black person. It seems like an obvious thing maybe, but when you grow up in South Africa, you realize how complicated it could actually be."
On where he is now, personally and professionally, given his upbringing
"I like to think that I am the product of a world of impossibilities. You know, my mother is where she should have never been. I think my mother made greater leaps than I have ever made. It's just that her leaps were made within her world and so maybe don't seem as grand. But I think my family, myself, my country, we come from a place where we have achieved the impossible - a bloodless revolution, a shifting of power from a minority to a majority without there being a mass bloodletting - I think is a really impossible story to tell [and] one that hasn't really been replicated anywhere else. I've come from a world where anything is possible and so for myself, I never ever thought I'd be here because I didn't even know what here is. But I was lucky enough to grow up in a space where I was always told about what was possible. There's a beautiful quote that I read the other day which was, 'Would you rather know what is real or would you rather know what is possible?' And I think for me the latter informed how I lived my life."
On his responsibility to inform people through his Comedy Central late-night talk show, "The Daily Show"
"I think I have a responsibility to my audience as much as I have a responsibility to myself. And that's really how I try and create 'The Daily Show' is I try and be as informed as possible as a human being. And then the show would hopefully be a manifestation of that information.

"Also I live in a world where I'm lucky that I'm surrounded by so many individuals who are smarter than myself and so many individuals who push me to think beyond just what I know. When creating 'The Daily Show,' it's that. We're creating, what do we enjoy? We're creating a show that we want to talk about. It's not like in the office we're having conversations that aren't about what's on the air. We talk about politics. We talk about Trump. We talk about what's in the news. We talk about Brexit. We also talk about pop culture. We're talking about Nicki Minaj and then we'll talk about, you know, boxing fights and the NBA Finals. And for me, 'The Daily Show' should represent that. It should represent a conversation that people are having and hopefully we find an audience that shares all or some of those interests with us.

"And so for me, the obligation I have to my audience is to provide a show to them that I think is interesting, and for me, the news is interesting. Politics is interesting and it also has a lot of fodder to make comedy from. So it's the perfect space for us to be in."
by Trevor Noah
I grew up in South Africa during apartheid, which was awkward because I was raised in a mixed family, with me being the mixed one in the family. My mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, is black. My father, Robert, is white. Swiss German, to be precise. During apartheid, one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race. Needless to say, my parents committed that crime.

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix- and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.

There were mixed kids in South Africa nine months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach in Table Bay. Just like in America, the colonists here had their way with the native women, as colonists so often do. Unlike in America, where anyone with one drop of black blood automatically became black, in South Africa mixed people came to be classified as their own separate group, neither black nor white but what we call "colored." Colored people, black people, white people, and Indian people were forced to register their race with the government. Based on those classifications, millions of people were uprooted and relocated. Indian areas were segregated from colored areas, which were segregated from black areas-all of them segregated from white areas and separated from one another by buffer zones of empty land. Laws were passed prohibiting sex between Europeans and natives, laws that were later amended to prohibit sex between whites and all nonwhites.

The government went to insane lengths to try to enforce these new laws. The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison. If an interracial couple got caught, God help them. The police would kick down the door, drag the couple out, beat them, and arrest them. At least, that's what they did to the black person.

If you ask my mother whether she ever considered the ramifications of having a mixed child under apartheid, she will say no. She had a level of fearlessness that you have to possess to take on something like she did. If you stop to consider the ramifications, you'll never do anything. Still, it was a crazy, reckless thing to do. A million things had to go right for us to slip through the cracks the way we did for as long as we did.

Under apartheid, if you were a black man you worked on a farm or in a factory or in a mine. If you were a black woman, you worked in a factory or as a maid. Those were pretty much your only options. My mother didn't want to work in a factory. She was a horrible cook and never would have stood for some white lady telling her what to do all day. So, true to her nature, she found an option that was not among the ones presented to her: she took a secretarial course, a typing class. At the time, a black woman learning how to type was like a blind person learning how to drive. It's an admirable effort, but you're unlikely to ever be called upon to execute the task. By law, white-collar jobs and skilled-labor jobs were reserved for whites. Black people didn't work in offices. My mom, however, was a rebel, and, fortunately for her, her rebellion came along at the right moment.

In the early 1980s, the South African government began making minor reforms in an attempt to quell international protest over the atrocities and human rights abuses of apartheid. Among those reforms was the token hiring of black workers in low-level white-collar jobs. Like typists. Through an employment agency my mom got a job as a secretary at ICI, a multinational pharmaceutical company in Braamfontein, a suburb of Johannesburg.

When my mom started working, she still lived with my grandmother in Soweto, the township where the government had relocated my family decades before. But my mother was unhappy at home, and when she was twenty-two she ran away to live in downtown Johannesburg. There was only one problem: it was illegal for black people to live there.

The ultimate goal of apartheid was to make South Africa a white country, with every black person stripped of his or her citizenship and relocated to live in the homelands, the Bantustans, semisovereign black territories that were in reality puppet states of the government in Pretoria. But this so-called white country could not function without black labor to produce its wealth, which meant black people had to be allowed to live near white areas in townships, government-planned ghettos built to house black workers, like Soweto. The township was where you lived, but your status as a laborer was the only thing that permitted you to stay there. If your papers were revoked for any reason, you could be deported back to the homelands.

To leave the township for work in the city, or for any other reason, you had to carry a pass with your ID number; otherwise you could be arrested. There was also a curfew: after a certain hour, blacks had to be back home in the township or risk arrest. My mother didn't care. She was determined to never go home again. So she stayed in town, hiding and sleeping in public restrooms until she learned the rules of navigating the city from the other black women who had contrived to live there.

Many of these women were Xhosa. They spoke my mother's language and showed her how to survive. They taught her how to dress up in a pair of maid's overalls to move around the city without being questioned. They also introduced her to white men who were willing to rent out flats in town. A lot of these men were foreigners, Germans and Portuguese who didn't care about the law. Thanks to her job my mom had money to pay rent. She met a German fellow through one of her friends, and he agreed to let her a flat in his name. She moved in and bought a bunch of maid's overalls to wear. She was caught and arrested many times, for not having her ID on the way home from work, for being in a white area after hours. The penalty for violating the pass laws was thirty days in jail or a fine of fifty rand, nearly half her monthly salary. She would scrape together the money, pay the fine, and go right back about her business.

My mom's secret flat was in a neighborhood called Hillbrow. She lived in number 203. Down the corridor was a tall, brown-haired, brown-eyed Swiss German expat named Robert. He lived in 206. As a former trading colony, South Africa has always had a large expatriate community. People find their way here. Tons of Germans. Lots of Dutch. Hillbrow at the time was the Greenwich Village of South Africa. It was a thriving scene, cosmopolitan and liberal. There were galleries and underground theaters where artists and performers dared to speak up and criticize the government in front of integrated crowds. There were restaurants and nightclubs, a lot of them foreign-owned, that served a mixed clientele, black people who hated the status quo and white people who simply thought it ridiculous. These people would have secret get-togethers, too, usually in someone's flat or in empty basements that had been converted into clubs. Integration by its nature was a political act, but the get-togethers themselves weren't political at all. People would meet up and hang out, have parties.

My mom threw herself into that scene. She was always out at some club, some party, dancing, meeting people. She was a regular at the Hillbrow Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Africa at that time. It had a nightclub with a rotating dance floor on the top floor. It was an exhilarating time but still dangerous. Sometimes the restaurants and clubs would get shut down, sometimes not. Sometimes the performers and patrons would get arrested, sometimes not. It was a roll of the dice. My mother never knew whom to trust, who might turn her in to the police. Neighbors would report on one another.

Living alone in the city, not being trusted and not being able to trust, my mother started spending more and more time in the company of someone with whom she felt safe: the tall Swiss man down the corridor in 206. He was forty-six. She was twenty-four. He was quiet and reserved; she was wild and free. She would stop by his flat to chat; they'd go to underground get-togethers, go dancing at the nightclub with the rotating dance floor. Something clicked.

The fact that this man was prevented by law from having a family with my mother was part of the attraction. She wanted a child, not a man stepping in to run her life. For my father's part, I know that for a long time he kept saying no to fathering a child. Eventually he said yes.

Nine months after that yes, on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations-I was born a crime.
Excerpt copyright © 2019 by Trevor Noah. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Julia Corcoran produced this interview and edited it for broadcast with Kathleen McKenna. Serena McMahon adapted it for the web.

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Trevor Noah's Lesson To Young Readers: It's Freeing To Define Yourself On Your Own Terms

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Trevor Noah, host of "The Daily Show," has recently adapted his 2016 memoir about his childhood in South Africa.

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How one young reader found himself in a different kind of literature.

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The Danger of a Single Story, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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The Danger of a Single Story, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED

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LONE RIDER Ken Bradshaw near his Sunset Beach home, on Oahu's North Shore, a 13-mile stretch of renowned surfing coastline.

Last winter, on the North Shore of Oahu, in Hawaii, the man who is believed to have ridden the biggest wave ever surfed, Ken Bradshaw, fell down the outside stairs of his self-built beach house while rushing to take the garbage out. The stairs do not have a handrail. The house does not seem to have been built to code. It looks like an assembly of beach shacks stacked three stories high. Bradshaw lives in parts of the second and third floors, and rents the rest out to other surfers, for income. He is 58, so no longer young, but he remains athletic and strong. This is obvious on first sight. He stands six feet tall and seems to be built of muscle and jaw. If you punched him hard enough you would break your hand. If you hit him with a bat you might break it too. History shows that he shrugs off greater punishment than that. It also suggests that having hit him you would be wise to step back. I don't mean that Bradshaw is an especially vengeful or violent man. Actually, he is considerate, unpretentious, and polite. He does not drink. He does not eat meat. His neighbors like him a lot. But, after all, you're the one who picked the fight. Your problem now is that Bradshaw has experience in these matters, because on the water there are rules he tries to apply.

The classic rule is the one-surfer-per-wave or, if that cannot be maintained, the no-coming-at-Bradshaw-from-the-side, the no-crowding-Bradshaw, or the no-cutting-off-Bradshaw-when-he's-deep-into-a-ride. Afterward, he paddles up to the offender and warns him. If there is a need for a second warning he paddles up again and says, "O.K., that's two. You will go in on the third one." He means he'll send the man to shore-usually by breaking the fins on his board. To me Bradshaw explained, "Sometimes then it gets ugly. They start into 'Fuck you, asshole!' If they say that to you, what are you going to do about it? A challenge like that. Are you going to back down, or go for it? I've sat on my board saying, 'You get the first swing, dude. Swing away. But as soon as you hit me, I will take you down so hard you will not believe it.' Some swing, some don't."

The problem is that there are too many surfers in the world and too few good waves to ride. This may come as a surprise, given the extent of global coastlines, but most surf is unrideable or uninteresting, and good locations are small. The North Shore, for instance, is only 13 miles long. It contains several dozen renowned surfing spots-particularly the "inside breaks" of Pipeline, Sunset Beach, and Waimea Bay, one after the other, close to the shore-but their takeoff zones are typically just a few yards wide, and they are crowded with surfers vying for advantage. Bradshaw calls this the dark side of surfing. The crowding is compounded by the fact that, even on good days at good breaks, good waves are relatively infrequent, and when one finally arrives, even if it is large, it usually offers enough space for just one good run. What goes on as a consequence Bradshaw calls natural selection. Actually, he calls it Darwinism, and means the same thing. It's not about survival so much as getting the rides. In the minds of people like Bradshaw, the two are related. If you leave a challenge unanswered, the punks will start stealing your waves. There are a lot of punks in surfing. Bradshaw said, "Yeah. I'm not afraid to go for it. I'm not afraid to be underwater for a long time. And I guarantee you I have stood on people." By people he meant men. For some reason this never comes up with women.

I mentioned the options: "You can hit them, hold them underwater, or knock their fins off."

He nodded. He prefers to knock their fins off. There is a technique to it. First you flip over the other man's board and brace it, sometimes by holding it under your arm; then you smash through the fins hard with your fist, striking beyond them in your mind, as in karate. It is only if the punk later persists, or challenges you directly, that you have to resort to more drastic measures. At least that's the way it was before, when scores were settled fast. In recent years the struggle for dominance has become more drawn out, with threats of lawsuits and criminal charges. Bradshaw has been visited by the police several times.

It goes like "There's been another complaint, Ken. Did you hit this guy?"

"No. I knocked his fins off."

Or like "Did you really bite his board, Ken?"

"Why, did you see teeth marks?"

"Well, it could have been a mouth, Ken. Hard to believe it was a mouth. Was it really a mouth, Ken?"

"I was trying to make my point without getting in trouble."

Trouble? Ken, like which kind? This is a man who rides waves so heavy they shake the earth when they break. Who has sacrificed comfort and wealth to do it. Who has willingly suffered the derision of conventional minds for the choices he has made. Who recently married for the first time, and to a much younger woman. Who may give her children. Who knows that she may break his heart. Who accepts that we are all alone when we die. Who rides with a single-mindedness that no one can equal-crouched low on his board in a predatory stance, left foot forward, body coiled, intently assessing the contours ahead, swerving and carving through the salt water. And for what? To do it again without repetition. And why? Because he is an athlete. Because every wave is different.

Last winter was an El Niño winter, and conditions on Oahu were extreme. Most of the inside breaks were trashed. The crowds of pretenders stayed away. Bradshaw reveled in it, taking on giant waves at the outside breaks over volcanic reefs a mile or more offshore. These were huge ocean swells that rolled in from distant storms and reared up to twice their height over the shallows, forming vertical faces that stood 50 feet high before curling and lunging forward with unfathomable force. Fifty-foot waves are five times higher than the highest waves that most surfers ever ride. Bradshaw rode them in obscurity, with no expectation of gain, absorbing the hits and hold-downs, spitting up blood, and continuing on for hours. His subsequent tumble down the stairs seems minor by comparison, though it broke two of his bones. We spoke about it the next day. He described his loss of balance, one foot missing a step and the other stepping into air, and the perception of inevitability that followed. He said that because he is accustomed to falling from heights the tumble seemed to happen in slow motion. He curled to protect his head, rolled in flight, and bounced once hard on landing. I sympathized with him for his injuries, but expressed greater concern for the stairs.

I. Outside Log Cabins

He set the record for the largest wave ever surfed on January 28, 1998, when he was 45 years old and his career as a professional surfer was nearly over. It was during another El Niño winter. Forecasters had predicted giant waves for that day on the North Shore. The California beachwear company Quiksilver had reacted by announcing that it would hold its premier big-wave contest on Waimea Bay. The dividing line between big and small waves is not clear-cut but seems to lie around 15 feet. Small-wave surfing is by far the dominant form of the sport-the place where most of the competitive action lies, and, for the industry, where the money is. Big-wave surfing, by contrast, is small. It can be done only when the ocean cooperates, and is attempted by just a few hundred people worldwide. Nonetheless the big-wave contest at Waimea is perhaps the most famous surfing event anywhere. It is an "invitational" that assembles 28 selected surfers to vie on-camera for a $55,000 first prize. It requires swells of 20 feet or greater (producing wave faces of 40 feet or more), so it is not held every winter. Quiksilver promotes it as something of a spiritual event, named after itself, as in "The Quiksilver," and in memory of Eddie Aikau, a Hawaiian waterman who drowned in 1978. Bradshaw knew and admired Aikau, and has surfed in the contest many times, but he dislikes the event, and he hates the hype. He told me that the contest is actually just about selling beachwear to landlocked dreamers in Iowa. He said that Quiksilver is just another unnecessary brand that came along uninvited, and that it benefited no one but itself by glomming on to big-wave riding and Eddie Aikau's name. I asked if Quiksilver didn't also benefit the surfers whom it sponsors or who compete in the contests it holds. Bradshaw has had both experiences with the company. He said, "Dude, sponsorship is hard on the soul if you think how it goes. And, dude, the surfers who come when Quiksilver calls are like monkeys on a string."

So he was like a monkey in 1998. Now he shuns the contest, but at the time he was broke as usual and still trying to make money by surfing. Whatever resentments he harbored toward commercial interests, he needed to take a crack at that prize. On Tuesday, the day before the event, he stayed home and monitored the weather reports. Local conditions were balmy, but the latest low-pressure system in the distant North Pacific was an especially dramatic one that had aimed unusually powerful swells directly toward Hawaii. At seven p.m., Bradshaw telephoned for the hourly observation from a wave buoy anchored 390 miles to the northwest. It was reporting massive 19-foot swells, measured top to bottom, with extraordinarily long 25-second intervals between successive crests.

Swells are energy pulses, not movements of water. The interval between their crests is a function of their speed. Bradshaw did a rough calculation and concluded that these were traveling at about 60 miles an hour-at least 15 miles an hour faster than the fastest he had experienced before. To top that, over the next few hours the buoy reported swell heights increasing to 22, then 25, then 27 feet-all with the same high-energy interval of 25 seconds in between. Bradshaw had a hard time sleeping that night. The swell could rise to 30 feet and beyond. If it did, the next day might bring the heaviest surfing ever seen. Eighty-foot, 90-foot, 100-foot faces-who knew? A 100-foot wave is the size of a 10-story building. Getting drawn up that face and thrown from the top would be like being thrown from a 10th-floor window and then having the building collapse onto your head. Bradshaw told me that in the darkness that night he did not feel afraid. Of course he didn't. He said he felt the anxiety of anticipation. Of course he did. The entire direction of his life until then-the accumulation of every serious choice he had ever made-meant that he was going to take on those waves. He tried to worry instead about his house getting washed away, but there was no question about the relative importance of surfing in his mind. The location was equally clear. It would be the outer reef known as Outside Log Cabins, more than a mile offshore. That place has its name because it lies outside an inside break called Log Cabins, which itself is named after log cabins that once stood on the shore. The cabins are gone, but Outside Log Cabins remains as Bradshaw's discovery, a reef where mammoth waves continue to break in conditions much larger than those that Waimea Bay can handle.

Waimea Bay is really just a cove. It is famous because of its flanking shoals and its central deepwater channel, which in combination can handle swells of up to 25 feet and turn them into perfectly shaped breakers twice as high-with faces up to 50 feet within easy camera range of spectators on the beach. It does have limits, however, and is overwhelmed on the rare occasions when swells of 30 feet or more come in. When breaks get overwhelmed they are said to "close out." This means that the waves they form no longer peel progressively from their peaks but collapse at once along their entire fronts and are impossible to surf. At Waimea this looks like breakers of 50 feet or more exploding into the confines of the cove, turning the place into a seething bowl of whitewater that Bradshaw calls a cauldron of death. Resting in the darkness, with the buoy readings in mind, Bradshaw expected that Waimea would close out in the morning, and that Quiksilver would have to cancel the contest. He was just as glad. The company would step aside with its proffered prize, and he would head offshore in good conscience.

At dawn he heard, to his surprise, that Quiksilver was insisting on the contest. Wearily, he loaded his boards into his car and drove to Waimea Bay. When he got there the circus was on-in a tangle of police, video crews, Quiksilver publicists and contest organizers, civil-defense officials, all sorts of vendors and tagalong merchants, and crowd-control enthusiasts of various kinds. A least a thousand people milled on the beach. Bradshaw groaned inwardly at the scene. Then he looked out at the bay and saw a close-out set come in.

A set is a cluster of similarly sized swells, typically about a half-dozen strong. These particular ones must have been about 30 feet tall. When they hit the shoals they rose into 60-foot faces and collapsed explosively across the full span of the bay. For some minutes a relatively peaceful interlude ensued, during which 25-foot swells rolled in, which could perhaps have been surfed, but then another close-out set arrived, and others after that, with less and less time between them. After watching the pattern for a while, Bradshaw realized that any competitors who tried to paddle out there to ride in the interludes were going to get crushed before they could even get into position. The hopelessness seemed so obvious to him that he wanted to leave, but a Quiksilver representative advised him to hang around. The man spoke in exclamations. "Ken!" he said. "Don't go anywhere! We're going to run the contest!"

"Are you out of your minds?"

"No, no! We're going to run it!"

Bradshaw walked over to lifeguards from the Hawaiian Water Patrol, a commercial rescue service hired to stand by with specially equipped Jet Skis in case intervention was necessary to keep surfers alive. Bradshaw said, referring to Quiksilver, "Are they serious?"

A lifeguard said, "Man, they are serious. Can you help us talk them out of it?"

He said, "Yeah."

He meant he could try. At that moment another close-out arrived, and people on the beach shouted "Oh my God!" because they had never seen anything so big. Conditions continued to worsen. Two photographers on Jet Skis appeared, having negotiated a passage up the coast and into the bay from the outside. Hardly had they arrived when another giant set came in. Bradshaw was watching, everyone was watching, and no one could believe how big these things were. Seeing what was coming, the photographers on the Jet Skis desperately gunned their machines straight up the enormous faces, taking air across each crest and barely escaping into the ocean beyond. Bradshaw went to the contest organizers and said, "Isn't that proof enough? You can't even rescue people if they get in trouble. Pretty soon you'll be trying to rescue the rescuers. You'll have to send in the helicopters. People can die in these kinds of waves. You need to call this whole thing off."

The organizers said, "Well, if you don't want to be in the contest, Ken, just leave. We'll put in an alternate for you."

Bradshaw thought they were being dicks about it. He said, "O.K., fine, fuck you, I'm out of here," and he headed for his car. But other contestants, who themselves were reluctant to rebel so openly against the power of Quiksilver, asked him to stay and keep up the fight. He did, and endured the attitudes of the contest organizers for another hour. Remembering, he recently said, "It was like 'Even if the surfers are afraid, Quiksilver is ready to go for it!'" But conditions at Waimea continued to worsen, until nearly every wave was collapsing, and Quiksilver had no choice but to cancel the show. It was 10 in the morning, and time had been wasted since dawn. At last Bradshaw could leave. State officials had just declared "Condition Black," a typically superfluous prohibition against dying by entering the waves. Bradshaw got into his car. He was thinking about the deepwater break a mile or so offshore and how he might be able to get to it. A friend asked him where he was headed. He answered, "Where else?"

II. Death at Maverick's

The destination was ordained. Bradshaw was born in 1952, in Houston, Texas, to a middle-class family with a house in a subdivision of similar homes. He was an all-city linebacker with good grades until he resolved to become a surfer instead. By then it was the summer of 1968. He was 15. He had been surfing for two years on the beach breaks of Galveston. He smoked dope there for the first time. For several hours afterward he could not catch the waves. He never smoked dope again. He never drank alcohol. He was incredibly single-minded. He was determined not to let anything interfere with his surfing. That included football. He quit the high-school team, then ran away from his family to make the point clear. This quickly brought his parents to their knees. He went home after a week, turned 16, surfed through a frigid winter, odd-jobbed for cash, drove straight to San Diego for the summer, wrangled friendship from a surf shop in Encinitas, and returned to Houston for barely a month-just long enough to turn 17, drop out of school, and catch a bus back to Southern California.

It was October 1969, at the outset of what turned into the largest El Niño winter anyone had yet seen. The waves were big in Encinitas. The waves were huge in Hawaii. According to Matt Warshaw, author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing, among other excellent works, the surf on Oahu's North Shore smashed 60 houses and washed two people away. Toward the end of that episode a man named Greg Noll surfed the largest wave yet attempted-an impossible, exploding, 35-foot face at Makaha, on Oahu's west side. Noll was an animal. People called him "The Bull." Twelve years earlier, in 1957, he had been the first to take on Waimea Bay. He was as strong and tough as Bradshaw would someday be. He survived Makaha by diving off the back of his board during the wave's collapse. This means he did not technically "make" the wave, but he did ride it for a while, and in these matters courage counts for a lot. Warshaw quotes Noll's memoir, in which he wrote, "That day at big Makaha was like looking over the goddamned edge at the big, black pit. Some of my best friends have said it was a death-wish wave. I didn't think so at the time, but in retrospect I realize it was probably bordering on the edge."

Bradshaw told me about meeting Noll many years later. He said, "Noll asked me, 'Do you ever close your eyes?'

"I said, 'Excuse me?'

"'At the top of the wave.'

"I said, 'No! I always want to know where I'm going!' Then I realized, that's how he did it. He'd get to some point where it was scary, then just close his eyes and keep going. Because his desire was greater than his fear."

But after his big ride Noll's desire seemed to disappear. He drove away from Makaha, dropped out of surfing, and became a commercial fisherman in far-northern California for 20 years, before returning to the industry as a board-maker and nostalgic figure. Bradshaw told me that for the longest while he could not understand what had come over Noll to cause him to quit. But in 1969 he didn't care. Noll was an old man of 32 who was leaving the scene. Bradshaw was a kid of 17 fresh in to Southern California and carving up the waves of an El Niño winter. He thought about larger things-girls, for instance, and the war in Vietnam-but mostly he thought about surfing. Among the important developments in world events at the time was a shortboard revolution that was reducing the length of surfboards and ushering in a new riding style of tight turns and expansive maneuvering, particularly on small or medium-size waves. Bradshaw was all for the new maneuvers. Certainly the old longboard straight-ahead stuff-Hang 10!-was too boring to contemplate. But when he competed in California he did not generally do well. He realized that he was marginally less nimble than others and that because of his size he had some disadvantages on small waves. He also realized, however, that his unusual strength gave him advantages when conditions were large.

He needed big waves. He flew to Hawaii. When he landed there he was 20 years old with $20 to his name. It was 1972. He got a restaurant job, picked up an old car, and eventually rented a shack on the North Shore. Over the following years he worked on and off as a backhoe operator at construction sites, and he devoted his winters to learning the North Shore breaks. It was a huge investment of time, much of it spent just floating around and waiting for waves. The waits were agonizing. If there were other surfers there, some talked stories, some talked shit, and some just stared at the ocean in frustration. Bradshaw got good at shooting water out of his hands. Surfing was only beginning to get commercialized, and the breaks were uncrowded compared with now. The better ones were still partly claimed by locals, some of whom disliked outsiders. Bradshaw grew a beard to look tough. It didn't take much. He was a single-minded all-city-linebacker health-food freak. He stood his ground in fights. He made a few friends. He began to make boards imprinted with his name. The boards did not say Ken Bradshaw from Texas. They said Ken Bradshaw in Hawaii. He had found his place.

He was a moralist. He refused to chase publicity. He equated it with the greed that causes some surfers to steal other surfers' waves. Recognition came to him anyway, in 1978, when the biggest magazine in the business, Surfer, ran a glossy story about him, titled "The New Matador?," drawing attention to his heavyweight style and suggesting that he was the next Greg Noll. Principles aside, Bradshaw did not deny that he was pleased. A bathing-suit company called Sundek offered to sponsor his surfing. The arrangement did not pay well. It required Bradshaw to pose bare-chested in the company's swimsuits-holding his own boards, yes, but exhibiting himself as a man who could be bought. It was demeaning. Nonetheless, combined with the additional earnings from his board-making business, it allowed him to stop working in construction and to make a down payment on a house.

It helped that the world's premier big-wave contest of the time was held every year at Sunset Beach. It was called the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational and was financed and televised by ABC's Wide World of Sports. Bradshaw won it in 1982 on a nasty day with an onshore wind and a riptide running west through bumpy 20-foot faces. He was the best surfer in the worst conditions. He said, "Yeah, it had to be crap before I could win." He was 30. He never won another contest. He was probably too determined in his style. He probably lacked some of the flare necessary to impress the judges. Even so, he was now a star. He set off on the first of many publicity tours in California and up the East Coast from surf shop to surf shop from Florida to Maine.

Back home there were women around. He fell in love with several but in single file. He was not a misogynist. He was a serial monogamist. Somehow the women always left him. It was always sad. He always warned them in advance that he had no time for raising children. He always explained that to catch good rides he needed to be in the water when the good waves arrived. Maybe the women thought they could change him. Love is blind. During a long dry spell for big waves on the North Shore he spent more time in the water, not less. The dry spell ended dramatically in the first few weeks of 1983, during a huge El Niño winter, when Bradshaw surfed Waimea on 23 out of 49 days. Sick. It was so good it was insane. For the first time in memory there were more big waves than volunteers to ride them. That was the craziest part. There were days with to-die-for conditions when the bay looked nearly abandoned.

Actually, it was eerie. Be careful what you wish for. Focus had shifted away from big-wave surfing as the industry concentrated its promotional energies on the much larger markets associated with the use of shortboards in small waves. Now, however, in this huge El Niño winter, the photographic opportunities on the North Shore could not be ignored. Bradshaw himself was one of those who called up the magazines to tell them what they were missing out on. In retrospect it was a mistake-and it certainly violated his principles-but he was caught up in the excitement about the surf, and caught up in a career. The magazines responded. Surfer ran a picture of Waimea on its cover and published celebratory stories, one titled "Whatever Happened to Big-Wave Riding?," which proclaimed the North Shore's return, and another called "Dinner at Charlie's," which made the scene seem fraternal and fun. For the marketing juggernaut of Quiksilver, that was enough. The company needed time to figure out how, but it would soon claim Waimea Bay as its own.

Big-wave surfing was revitalized in popular culture. However complicit Bradshaw was in the commercialization that followed, he was never the whore that industry required. He just wanted to surf. One day in January 1985 he and a few others went out to ride Waimea in swells that rose from 15, to 18, to 22 feet-with wave faces twice those heights. After a while he was the only man left at the break. The sets kept getting larger until the biggest swells surpassed 25 feet, and giant waves began to close out across the bay. Bradshaw surfed in the intervals until he wiped out and lost his board. Now he was swimming. Conditions were so intense that he failed in two attempts to go ashore and had to return to the open ocean outside the breakers for a rest. Tourists on the beach demanded that the lifeguards take action. The lifeguards answered, "Oh, he's fine. That's Ken. He's just resting." Some of the tourists rushed off to a fire station, where they reported that the lifeguards were refusing to save a drowning man. The firemen called for a rescue helicopter. Bradshaw had been swimming for an hour since losing his board, and he guessed he needed to succeed with his next attempt to get ashore. He did succeed-riding the ocean's energy inbound, rolling, and taking repeated poundings until he was able to emerge onto the beach. A lifeguard stood there with a radio. He said, "You're fine, aren't you?"

"Yeah, where's my board?"

The lifeguard radioed, "He's fine. I told you he was going to be fine."

Bradshaw said, "Where's my board?"

They had his board. The rescue helicopter arrived and clattered overhead. The bay was now a mess, offering few if any rides between the close-outs. Bradshaw made the obvious decision to quit for the day. Soon after he did, however, four surfers in two pairs launched from the beach and paddled toward the break. Bradshaw regarded the second pair especially with distaste. One was a man named Alec Cooke, who called himself Ace Cool. Enough said. But the second of them was someone for whom Bradshaw reserved a particular disdain. He was a brash, fast-talking self-promoter named Mark Foo, who had washed out of the professional small-wave circuit and had recently come to the North Shore determined to leverage big-wave surfing into wealth and success. Foo was six years younger than Bradshaw. He was not a bad surfer, but he cared too much about fame. He made pronouncements like "If you want the ultimate thrill, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price." He was constantly hustling the press, mouthing off about his exploits, working deals with photographers, angling to have his picture taken, and getting in the way on the water, stealing Bradshaw's waves. This last was a mistake. Bradshaw believed that, because his motivations were wrong, Foo did not know how to behave. He had no patience with him. He had already held Foo under, and had sent him to the beach just for being Foo. But Foo was irrepressible, and he was obviously up to another of his publicity stunts today. Bradshaw could think of no other reason why a surfer would bother with the waves that by then existed at Waimea Bay.

All four had to be desperate for attention. They managed to paddle to the standard takeoff position just outside the break, and there they floated in the heavy swells waiting for any chance of a surfable wave. Bradshaw and a couple of friends watched from the coastal road overlooking the bay. Two big sets passed under the surfers and closed out at the break. Then suddenly a huge rogue wave arrived. Bradshaw watched in amazement as it broke far out in the ocean and surged violently over the surfers. Mark Foo had attached his board to his ankle with an elastic double-length leash. He popped to the surface in the aftermath, found the board intact, and paddled back into position outside the break. Foo was nothing if not persistent. The other surfers had to quit because they had lost or broken their boards. Ace Cool had to be rescued by helicopter.

Meanwhile, Foo had made his move. Unable to find a wave that could be ridden, he launched over the lip of an impossible 50-foot vertical face and then free-fell to the base without making it to his feet. The wave collapsed on top of him. He survived, and was plucked from the impact zone by the helicopter. That one wave made him famous as a big-wave rider. He had not ridden it. He had attempted it knowing full well that he could not succeed. But a dramatic picture had been taken, which he then promoted as documentation of "the biggest wave surfed" and used to launch his career. Bradshaw still shakes his head at the thought. Recently he said, "Mark was such a marketer. It was a picture of an airdrop going nowhere. It was stupid, right? But that's what we were becoming."

Stupid, or smart. You did what you could to get by. Bradshaw too. In 1986 he signed on with Quiksilver as a sponsored rider specifically to help promote the North Shore scene, and set up the company's first Waimea Bay contest, which was held in February 1987. Bradshaw competed in it and did well enough. The second contest was held three years later, in January 1990. Bradshaw competed in it and totally bombed out, placing 27th. The loss shook him badly. To me he said, "Self-doubt is the worst thing you can have. I know. I spent the next couple of years getting over it."

"Doing less surfing?"

"Doing more."

In 1991, Quiksilver tried to drop him, and he found himself begging for mercy. In 1992, Quiksilver did drop him, and by comparison it was a relief. He kept surfing in the competitions. He rejuvenated his board business. One day, in March 1993, he was surfing with a partner at an outer reef called Outside Alligators. The day was gorgeous, all pretty and clean, with long, glassy, 30-foot breakers coming in. Suddenly Mark Foo showed up. Bradshaw was not happy to see him, but he kept his peace. After a while Bradshaw's partner had to leave to go to work. Foo paddled over to Bradshaw and said, "You staying out?"

"Yeah."

"I thought you might."

They began to surf together. The waves were incredibly consistent. You could just pick them off. Both men had ridden them in and were paddling back out in the channel when Foo said, "This is it, huh? This is as good as it gets, isn't it?"

Bradshaw was surprised. He said, "Yeah? Yeah, Mark, it is."

Foo said, "But, no, no, this is really it, isn't it? Just two guys in the water. Fifteen- to 18-foot swells. Perfect waves. No sections. This is as good as it gets."

Bradshaw said, "Yes, Mark. This is what it's about." A light came on in his head. He thought, Wow, Mark actually does get it. He actually understands why we do this. Bradshaw said, "There's just the two of us in the water. You're riding some of the best waves of your life, and having a great time. How cool is that? No photographers, no cameramen, no nothing-just us."

They paddled to shore and ended up at Foo's house. They talked about nothing much, and for a while it was great. Then the phone rang, and suddenly Foo was saying, Oh, man, you wouldn't believe what I just did! I did this! I did that! Oh yeah, I was out there with Bradshaw! Blah, blah, blah!

Bradshaw looked at him in disbelief. Foo hung up, called a magazine, and started in again. Bradshaw walked over and hung up the phone. He said, "You don't get it after all, do you? Can't you let it go once? Just once in your life? Don't tell anybody? This was our moment. We did it. Isn't that good enough for you?"

"Um, I don't know, Ken. I could try, I guess."

Cautiously, they became friends. The following year, in December 1994, they flew together overnight to San Francisco, to surf the rocky cold-water break called Maverick's, near Half Moon Bay. During the flight Foo was full of talk about his latest publicity scheme. He wanted to team up with Bradshaw to undertake what he was calling the Trifecta-surfing a single Pacific storm over a period of three days at the big-wave breaks of Waimea, Maverick's, and Todos Santos, in Mexico. In the airplane he kept saying, "We can do this, Ken! We can market it!" They could video it, they could whatever it. He wore Bradshaw down. In weariness Bradshaw tentatively gave in. He said, "O.K., Mark, O.K. I guess I gotta make money, too. I'll submit to that." An implausible partnership had been formed.

After landing in San Francisco, they rented a car and kept talking about the plan while driving to the coast. When they got to Maverick's the breakers were not as large as they had hoped for, but still big enough at 30 feet to be worth the effort. Bradshaw and Foo joined others in the water and caught a few rides. Bradshaw had surfed at Maverick's before. Foo had not. Bradshaw asked Foo if he was having a good time. Foo said he was. Both of them tried to take off on the same wave. Bradshaw was in the prime position and should have owned that wave, but he saw the look on Foo's face, as he had seen it many times before, and he knew that Foo was going to take it no matter what. Foo stole the wave. Bradshaw pulled back at the last instant as Foo dropped over the edge.

Foo immediately wiped out. He fell sideways off his board and was sucked up the face and thrown forward over the curl, then pounded deep into the water. After more than an hour he was found floating facedown with his ankle leashed to a fragment of his board. Exactly how he drowned is still not known. He may have hit his head against the reef or been held down by a snared leash. In the parking lot of the harbor nearby, Bradshaw knelt and held him for a moment, finding it hard to accept that this had just happened. Later a funeral was held in Waimea Bay, with a large group of surfers sitting on their boards in a circle. Bradshaw tried to say something, but to his surprise grew too emotional to speak. He still thinks about Foo often. "Death is part of life-I know that," he said to me recently. "But we had just made this turn together, and he ends up dying that same day. It was a tough one in the big picture of what you're chasing, and what you're doing it for."

III. The Monster

But three years later, on the morning of January 28, 1998, when the contest at Waimea Bay was canceled under pressure from the waves, there was no question of where he was headed, or why, when he drove away. He was going to surf the last place standing on the coast, the deep-water break called Outside Log Cabins. Bradshaw had first noticed it a quarter-century before, in the 1970s, when he was new to the North Shore. I asked him about the discovery. He said, "What happens in surfing, as the waves get bigger, the inside breaks become massive areas of white water, just football fields of white water, but as they do, the other opportunities open up in deeper water farther outside. Waves that don't break in a 12-foot swell start breaking in a 20-foot swell, and when those waves start closing out, there's waves that break in a 30-foot swell. Those are the ones you've never even seen before. So it took a few years of living here to realize, Oh my God, that thing that kind of flops over out there, that mushball, it's not a mushball at all, it's a wave. Wait, it's a top-to-bottom-gigantic spitting barrel. It's not possible to ride something like that, is it? Back then, riding those waves was so impossible, it was like thinking about walking on the moon. Like, really? Naw. That's how far-fetched Outside Log Cabins was at the time."

It was far-fetched because surfers need to nearly match the speed of a wave to intercept it at the start of a ride. The problem is that the speed of the wave is (partly) proportional to its size, and those that broke at Outside Log Cabins were too fast for even the strongest paddlers to catch. It turned out that, with rare exceptions, swells larger than 25 feet simply could not be joined. This meant that 50 feet was the maximum face height that surfers would ever ride. It was discouraging. Ambition was no substitute for entry speed.

Then everything changed. It happened in the early 1990s, when a few Hawaiians, including the poster boy of big-wave riding, Laird Hamilton, began strapping their feet onto boards and using Jet Skis to tow one another into high-speed intercepts of fast-moving waves off Oahu and Maui. Doing this required enormous strength, and the ability to endure almost unimaginable punishment when things went wrong, but once the surfers released the towrope and dropped over the edge of the rising faces, they were rewarded with rides that were longer and faster than anyone had experienced before. More fundamentally, because intercept speeds were available up to 60 miles an hour, there was suddenly no limit to the size of the waves that could be ridden. Purists objected to the idea of power-assisted starts, and they deplored the noise and pollution caused by Jet Skis, but the sport of tow-in surfing was born. Bradshaw embraced it from the start, and with a sense of awe at the possibilities it afforded. To me he said, "I remember sitting around with Laird and a couple of other guys saying, 'So how big is big?' and 'How do we ride it?' and 'Do you realize it hasn't even been big yet?' We looked at each other and almost got a spooky feeling. It was, like, Wow, we're really going to have to face it when it comes."

That was in the spring of 1995. As it turned out, they had less than three years to wait. Bradshaw had acquired a Jet Ski and enlisted another big-wave surfer, Dan Moore, to be his tow-in partner. They trained hard, perfected their intercept and recovery techniques, and surfed some 60-foot faces that they would never have caught by paddling in. During the same period they designed and built a series of specialized tow-in boards for their own use, progressively making them shorter and more responsive as their confidence grew. The boards were thin, flat, high-speed hulls of dense fiberglass construction, weighted with steel ballast to smooth their rides. They were also extremely strong. Bradshaw and Moore believed they had to prepare for conditions bigger even than they had hoped for.

Those conditions arrived on the now famous day in January 1998. After the cancellation of the Waimea contest, Bradshaw and Moore drove up the coast to a grassy beachfront lot in a neighborhood called Velzyland, where they kept the Jet Ski. The lot is a prime location for launches, because it overlooks a channel that dives straight away from the beach and is so deep that it allows access to the open ocean even in 30-foot swells, when every other possibility has been overwhelmed. But the situation now was different. By the time they launched their boat through the surf at the beach, at 10:30 in the morning, the swells had risen to 35 or 40 feet, and the channel was succumbing to the pressure about a half-mile out. How big is big? Large waves collapsed over deep water between huge waves breaking across the shallows on both sides. Bradshaw sat in front, doing the driving. Moore sat behind him, hanging on to the board. After repeated attempts, they made it through the maelstrom into the open ocean outside.

It was a beautiful place to be. When Bradshaw and Moore got to Outside Log Cabins they found powerful swells rising into giant, velvety, perfectly formed breakers. The water was warm. The wind was light. The swells were traveling in sets as always. The biggest of them were easily 35 feet high and producing solid 70-foot faces that cascaded from their peaks or pitched forward into tubes, and peeled majestically from left to right, as seen from behind, before smoothly tapering off onto broad shoulders. Moore later said that not a drop was out of place. For half an hour he and Bradshaw studied the waves, pacing the inbound swells, plotting the entry and exit lines, and planning the rescue if things went wrong. While they were doing this, another tow-in team showed up. These guys were loose cannons, Bradshaw thought. No sooner had they arrived than they went for a meager 20-foot swell. He decided to ignore them because they would not get in his way.

Moore assumed the driving, and Bradshaw rolled into the water and strapped onto his board for the first rides. They took off among the inbound swells outside the break, with Bradshaw water-skiing at the end of a 40-foot rope waiting for the right wave. They had worked out hand signals. Two fingers up from Bradshaw meant "Not this one, the next one-maybe." One finger up meant "This one!" Moore's role was to handle the intercept well, driving toward the shore while allowing the swell to approach from behind, and accelerating to match its speed even as it slowed and began to rear up over the reef. At the same time, he would place Bradshaw in the perfect position for the release, known to surfers as "deep," meaning close to the peak, where the break would begin, the high-energy core of the wave. For his first wave Bradshaw caught a 30-footer, and surfed the 60-foot face. It was smooth and fast and a good ride for a starter. Moore circled close around him to give him the rope, and towed him back outside. A third tow-in team arrived and stood aside to watch for a while.

The playing field was large. The biggest sets were coming in about 15 minutes apart. Bradshaw and Moore saw one developing in the distance, and they headed straight out to meet it, skimming fast across the water, with the wind in their ears. These were big swells all right, in the 35-foot range, and, better yet, each one had a bigger one behind. Bradshaw kept signaling, "Next one!" and jacking up the sizes. He passed up the first three. Then came the fourth, an absolute monster of 45 feet, maybe more. People may have seen larger swells before, but no one had ever tried to ride the sort of wave face it was about to become. Ninety feet? One hundred feet? Who could know? Bradshaw wasn't thinking about making history. He was shouting into the wind and signaling, "This one, this one!" Moore turned the Jet Ski around and headed toward the shore, chased by the monster approaching fast from behind. Bradshaw signaled, "Faster, faster!" The boat was running wide open and doing about 40 miles an hour, but it was just too slow. They were going to lose the intercept. The swell was going to pass under them and leave them behind. Bradshaw kept shouting, "Come on!," for all the good it could do.

Then suddenly they were inside Outside Log Cabins, and the monster was rising directly beneath them, drawing water up its face and steepening into an enormous wave. Bradshaw was thinking, This has got to be the biggest thing I've ever seen. This is definitely the biggest thing I've ever seen. My God, this thing is really big. He stopped worrying about missing the ride and started concentrating on technique. In surfing, any move toward the break is known as a fade. If a wave peels to the right and you slice to the left, toward the core of falling water, that is a fade. The word is deceptive because a fade makes things more intense, not less. The more you fade, the deeper you go. The deeper you go, the more wave energy you encounter. The deepest you can go is inside a barrel, or tube, but you can't always get there. If you go too deep, you will wipe out and get crushed, demolished, and slayed. On the other hand, if you don't go deep enough, you will have wasted the wave. To some minds the waste seems the greater shame. Carving the line between wipeout and waste-managing to go deep without dying-is the real art of big-wave surfing. Normally on a tow, with the wave gathering beneath him during the last seconds before the release, Bradshaw would have faded toward the peak, swinging in this case to the left of the Jet Ski ahead and placing himself as deeply as possible into the energy of the wave, while also giving Moore the margins to peal off to the right and escape to the shoulder. But not now, not this time. Instead of thinking, Go deeper!, he thought, Just don't fade! He signaled Moore to widen to the right, and Moore started a turn toward the safety of the shoulder. Bradshaw released the rope. Moore felt the drag come off and looked back. Bradshaw waved to him like, "See you later."

He had the intercept he needed. The wave continued to rise beneath him, drawing water from ahead and below, steepening, and advancing toward the coast as he accelerated down its face. The ride was smooth for lack of chop. The board fluttered because of its speed. He heard the wind, and then the thunder as the wave began to break to his left. He crouched low on the board, with his arms out for balance and his feet locked into the straps. He thought, O.K., don't look left! Don't fade! Don't even think left! Then the slope turned vertical beneath him and he went weightless as he began to drop straight down the face.

Later he told me it was like skiing down an avalanche chute in the mountains. He said, "You know that feeling you get when you're going over a cornice and it's just straight down after that?" He counted the seconds. He went, "One. Two. Three. Four!" Already it was a long drop, and the wave kept rising higher. "Five! Six! Seven! Eight!" He went, "Holy shit!," and kept dropping. He went, "Don't fade! Don't even imagine it!" He got toward the base of the face, still well above the bottom, and rounded out of the drop as the surface curvature allowed. Bradshaw had never seen such wave expanses before-huge fields of sloping water to the right. He was aware of the mass gathering above and behind him. He went, "I gotta get out of here, now!" He dug his right rail in, banking the board hard against its will, and held it with all of his strength into a carving right turn. The turn was slow because the board was fast. Bradshaw kept at it, however, and went slicing up the wave face almost to the crest. He was briefly elated. Technically he had "made" the wave, but he wasn't done with it yet. From the crest he turned again and went angling back down the face. He intended to perform a full cutback toward the break, but no sooner had he started than a roar erupted behind him as the wave formed a giant barrel. The barrel spat spray at him from its throat. There was no way into that barrel from his position, and it blocked any turn back toward the core of the wave. The ride was almost over for Bradshaw. It had lasted 30 seconds, or hardly more. He exited straight ahead and over the wave's shoulder. He was angry with himself. He thought that he should have been in that barrel, and that he would have been if he had not shied away from the peak at the start of the ride. He did not care about having made history-and did not consider it until others began to insist on it that night. He did not even think that this had been a great run. He thought, Shit, I should have faded.

Moore had a different idea. He motored up to him wide-eyed, shouting, "That's it, man! That's it! You should have seen what I saw! It was crazy! It was nuts! You were like a cartoon character on that face! You could have put houses in the barrel behind you!"

There were other eyewitnesses to the ride-some nearby in the water, and a few more on the shore. They agreed that the wave had been very large, though their estimates of its face height varied, ranging between 85 and 105 feet. Only one piece of visual evidence exists-an optically compressed low-resolution video, shot from shore, in which Bradshaw's wave is at times obscured by other waves in the foreground, and Bradshaw appears about three pixels high. The number finally settled on was something less than 90 feet. It was almost arbitrary, as Bradshaw knew, and for him it was a poor measure of the ride. The largest wave ever surfed? O.K., fine. He regretted that the wave happened early and turned out to be by far the biggest of the day. He and Moore stayed on the water for six hours and were joined by other tow-in teams as they sliced repeatedly down 70-foot faces. It was the best surfing ever. But not once was there a wave like the one he had ridden in the morning-another monster that would have given him a second chance to fade, take risks, and correct the mistakes he had made.

Life can be like that, too. Bradshaw sank into a listlessness that lasted months. At last he understood why Greg Noll had walked away. What does record-breaking mean, anyway? Something, of course, but probably not a lot.

Sitting with me on the ground overlooking the waves last winter, Bradshaw said, "It's weird how a single wave can seem so important, when it's all the waves it took to get there, and all the waves since, that actually count." I nodded. He shrugged. Now the North Shore breaks are hopelessly overcrowded, and even the coastal road is thick with traffic. The paradox is that Bradshaw helped to bring this on, if only by adding legitimacy to the scene with his purist attitudes and his presence in the waves. He does not agree. He blames the entire mess on commercialization and greed. The loss of Waimea Bay is particularly galling to him. The success of the Quiksilver contest opened the gates to marketers, photographers, and ambitious surfers from around the world. Every beachwear company, every surfboard company, every accessories company wants its surfers photographed there. The surfers are primarily (and in descending order of numbers) Brazilian, Japanese, Australian, and Californian. Their purpose is to get their pictures taken. The pressure is so intense that one day last winter no fewer than 90 people occupied the pool-size takeoff zone at the break. Bradshaw absolutely refuses to surf there anymore. Furthermore, Pipeline is just as bad, and Sunset Beach is getting there. Bradshaw said, "I can show you. At some of these breaks it's like that every single day. It never stops. It's like going to war, being in battle every time you paddle out. You know what you're going to have to do. You know what everybody else is going to try to do to you."

Still, there is great surfing to be done at the North Shore, especially at the outside breaks, and Bradshaw remains a surprisingly cheerful man. He told me that he takes life as he rides waves, one section at a time. Now he has a wife with whom he is deeply in love. Now they may have babies. I asked him if he had regrets about the choices he had made. He said, "My life is full of 'my faults' because I chose passion over industry." But a "my fault" is not the same as a regret. He mentioned that he was going through a manic What's-Ken-gonna-do-for-the-next-25-years? phase.

I pitched him a smile.

He laughed.

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LONE RIDER Ken Bradshaw near his Sunset Beach home, on Oahu's North Shore, a 13-mile stretch of renowned surfing coastline. Last winter, on the North Shore of Oahu, in Hawaii, the man who is believed to have ridden the biggest wave ever surfed, Ken Bradshaw, fell down the outside stairs of his self-built beach house while rushing to take the garbage out.

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As a child Deirdre Sullivan’s father told her to always pay her respects at funerals. Now, the Brooklyn attorney believes those simple acts of human kindness are as important as the grand heroic gestures.

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https://thisibelieve.org/audio/TIB_Thomas.mp3

In 1946, I decided I did not wish to live in my native land any longer; and that I would take my wife and children to Haiti, where as Negroes in a Negro republic, we would be free of racial prejudice and our opportunities would be limited only by our ability to use them.

I do not believe I need detail the reasons behind this unhappy decision, except to say that being considered and treated as an inferior on every level of life can become intolerable, especially when it is by one's race rather than his individual worth, or lack of it, that he is pre-judged - and condemned.

When I reached this point, I had become an unbeliever in both God and country, for it seemed to me that racial segregation and all that it implied was as rigid on the spiritual as on the temporal plane. And so finally I made the decision to leave my native land - permanently.

However, I did not do it. Love of country, I found, can be very deep, very strong. So I thought to make one final try in my motherland for the equality of status which I considered I had been denied; and I chose Vermont for the experiment. I reasoned that because of its great traditions of personal freedom there was at least a chance that I and my family might find there what we so yearned for, and we did. In the small farming community where we settled, we were accepted on a basis of individuality unqualified by race.

However, it is not that which now seems most important to me. It is, rather, that in such a friendly atmosphere, and amid the quiet of a beautiful countryside, it was possible to think calmly, and gradually to gain understandings by which I believe I can live in peace with other men, and with myself, for the rest of my life.

One of these understandings is that unless one seeks sincerely for whatever it is he most wants, he surely will not find it, and that what I really had been seeking most of my life was not what I wanted but instead was justification for the resentments I felt. This is not to say there was not cause for those resentments, but rather that I had so concentrated upon them I could not see that the picture was not all bad - that in fact, there was considerable good in it.

I had condemned my country and my religion because I viewed only what seemed wrong in both. But when I was able to remove the blinds of my own prejudice, it became clear that these failures, these flaws in church and state, were human failures, human flaws, and not mere self-willed bigotry; and that within each there were, and there always had been, many who had worked and fought for what was right.

I think the core of my earlier bitterness had been the conviction that I had been denied my birthright of human dignity. But I know now that is something which cannot be given or taken away by man.

It has been written that he who seeks shall find, and that to him who asks, it shall be given. And I can only testify that when I did seek, I did find; and that when I asked, it was given to me. And I know that only the God I once denied could bestow such precious gifts.

Will Thomas was born in Kansas City and worked as a newspaper writer, editor and prizefighter. He eventually settled in Vermont with his wife and three children. His book, "The Seeking," details the family's integration into the all-white community of Westford. Long out of print, it has recently been re-published as part of the Northeastern Library of Black Literature and is available at the This I Believe Store .

Independently produced by Dan Gediman for This I Believe, Inc.

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https://thisibelieve.org/audio/TIB_Thomas.mp3 In 1946, I decided I did not wish to live in my native land any longer; and that I would take my wife and children to Haiti, where as Negroes in a Negro republic, we would be free of racial prejudice and our opportunities would be limited only by our ability to use them.

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Delia Motavalli - Fairfield, Connecticut

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Delia Motavalli has grown up watching movies about fairy tales and princesses. But after she received a piece of advice from her mother, Delia has come to realize her own definition of

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https://thisibelieve.org/essay/62638/

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THE AFTERNOON I STUMBLED across the human leg bone at the bottom of K2, it was one of those flawless days you almost never see in the Karakoram. The light was radiant, the wind was calm, and the air at 16,000 feetÂ-sharp and clear as etched glassÂ-seemed to lift and intensify the hulking black mass of the world's second-highest mountain, which erupts in a single, unbroken thrust to its ice-armored 28,250-foot summit.

Don't look back; Rick Ridgeway, Foreground, and John Roskelley, members of the first American expedition to summit K2, ascend the northeast ridge in 1978.

It had taken the better part of two weeks to get here, the heart of the high peaks in the Pakistani region of Baltistan, 800 miles northwest of Everest. When I arrived in late summer, the tail end of K2's climbing season, there was only one team left on the mountain: Hector Ponce de Leon, a 36-year-old Mexican climber who has summited Everest from both the north and south sides; his fiancÃ©e, Araceli Segarra, a 33-year-old Spanish alpinist who doubles as a fashion model in Vogue and Elle; and Jeff Rhoads, a 49-year-old American filmmaker who has worked as a mountain guide in Utah. The group would eventually be turned back by exhaustion and bad weather, 4,300 feet short of the summit.

K2 base campÂ-a lunar landscape of shattered rock sitting atop a river of moving iceÂ-was all but deserted, with only a few Pakistani porters and an American woman named Jennifer Jordan. A 45-year-old journalist and filmmaker, Jordan had been in camp since June, monitoring the progress of Rhoads, her boyfriend, and working on a documentary about the five women who have summited K2Â-not one of whom, she pointed out, is alive today. We talked a bit about the history of K2, a subject Jordan has studied deeply, and then she asked if I might like to take her "tour of the dead."

We started up the Godwin-Austen Glacier, which cuts along the foundation of the mountain's immense southern face. As we walked, Jordan told me about the postmortem K2 performs on the climbers who perish here. The ridges and escarpments of this peak are so sheer that the dead are rarely entombed on the mountain itself; most are scoured off by avalanches and rockfalls, and when their bodies hit bottom they become encased in the glacial field, where they are slowly torn to pieces.

"It's kind of like a bread mixer," Jordan observed as we picked our way around thin crevasses and frigid pools of Windex-blue meltwater. "The worst of the violence is the avalanches, but there are also the years of tearing and crushing in the glaciers. The movement churns them up in summer, back down in winter. Appendages get torn off in the disgorging process. When they surface, they're almost all headless, because that's the weakest link in the body. Mostly you find legsÂ-very few arms."

The summer of 2002 had been unusually warm, so the dead had risen in large numbers. Six weeks earlier, Jordan had uncovered traces of Dudley Wolfe, a wealthy American playboy-cum-mountaineer who in July 1939 was stranded at 26,000 feet on the southeast ridge and vanished, along with the three Sherpas who tried to rescue him. They were the first climbers to die on K2. Jordan found some of Wolfe's equipmentÂ-including a mitten with his name on itÂ-plus 30 of his ribs and vertebrae. Over 64 years, his bones and gear had traveled a mile and a half down the Godwin-Austen, averaging about four inches a day, before resurfacing.

At the moment, our attention was fixed on a small piece of delicate purple cloth that had recently emerged from the ice.

"Wow!" Jordan exclaimed. "Now who would wear something like this up here? A woman." Jordan surmised it might be a piece of Alison Hargreaves's clothing.

In May 1995, Hargreaves, a gifted 33-year-old British mountaineer, completed the first undisputed female solo ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen. Her intent was to summit K2 next, and then Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain, later that same year. But on August 13, after reaching the top of K2 in clear weather, Hargreaves and five other climbers were plucked off the mountain by a gale-force wind. "She was blown right off the summit ridge somewhere near that huge serac," Jordan said, pointing to a massive block of ice near the top and tracing Hargreaves's probable trajectory. "The thing is, we could be right on top of her."

We resumed walking, passing sundry bits of gearÂ-a rack of pitons, an oxygen cylinder, a bootÂ-until we reached the arm of a wool shirt lying on the ice. "This has got to be one of the Spanish guys," she said, referring to one of the climbers who died with Hargreaves. Earlier in the summer, Jordan had found his body, minus his head, and reburied him in a crevasse. "The skin was like burned leather," she said. "Dark brown, but not black. He hadn't been in the ice for long, because he still had his hands and his feet. Well... a foot."

You couldn't get any more nonchalant or dispassionate about human remains, and initially it seemed morbid and unseemly. But Jordan meant no disrespect. In fact, she was addressing something that sets K2 starkly apart from other great peaks in the Himalayas. All of these mountains have teeth. And all tender the seductive possibility that by venturing onto high, hard, unknown terrain, a climber can touch something within himself or herself that often proves elusive at sea level yet can be powerfully transforming when realized at altitude. On most mountains, this epiphany invariably goes hand in hand with reaching the summit.

Not on K2.

The secret to K2 seems to reside somewhere inside the frozen ossuary at its base. As new climbers wade over the remains of so many who came before them, they are reminded of what it is to strive and to failÂ-horriblyÂ-on an 8,000-meter peak, and they confront the question of whether that failure, played out amid the elemental indifference of stone and wind and ice, can possibly have any meaning and inherent worth.

We were nearing the end of the tour when I blundered upon what appeared to be a hollow stick lying on the iceÂ-an odd thing to find in a landscape without a single tree. I knelt to examine it.

"Oh," Jordan said. "Your first femur. Pretty gruesome, huh?"

The ends of the bone had been cut at such a sharp angle it looked like the job had been done with an electric saw. Bits of brown gristle clung to the sides.

"Welcome to K2," she added with a chilly smile. "There's nothing quite like it."

IF THE CRITERION YOU USE to measure the majesty of mountains is simple math, then the greatest peak on earth is Everest; at 29,035 feet, it surpasses K2 by 785 feet. If popularity is the gauge, the answer seems equally obvious: More than 1,600 people have been to the top of Everest, claiming all manner of "firsts," including but by no means limited to: the first one-legged summiter, the first one-armed summiter, the first person to sleep on the summit, the first live TV broadcast from the summit, the first person to make five summits in five consecutive years, and the first husband-and-wife team to fling themselves off the summit in a tandem paraglider. This year, another 262 climbers have reached the highest point on the planet as of press time. And in 2008, the Chinese intend to carry the Olympic torch to the top on their way to Beijing.

By comparison, in the last 50 years, only 196 climbers have made it to the top of K2. This past summer, another 55 gave it a shot as six expeditionsÂ-from Kazakhstan, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic, plus one international groupÂ-converged on the south side of the mountain. Among them were some of the strongest mountaineers in the world, including the Czech climbers Radek Jaros and Martin Minarik, as well as Segarra and Ponce de Leon, who returned for another try. None of them reached the summit.

It was the second summitless year in a row, a statistic that, at least by the standards of Everest-level success, seemed to confirm K2's stature as the lesser giant. But among professional mountaineers who tackle the world's most formidable peaks, things look a bit different.

"People are drawn to Everest because everyone can understand the idea of 'the highest mountain on earth,' " says Greg Child, an Australian mountaineer and author who has summited both Everest and K2. "Christ, my grandmother can understand that. Unless you're on the inside of climbing, however, it's almost impossible to fathom an obsession with the second-highest. But K2 just has something about it. Partly it's the shape and beauty and symmetry of the thing. And partly it's the infamyÂ-the stories of what's happened to people who've tried it: how fucked up they've become and how many have died. K2 is simply not an amateur's mountain."

K2's difficulties begin with its remoteness, reflected by the fact that the Balti hill people don't even have a name for the mountain. It was dubbed K2Â-K for Karakoram and 2 for the second peak in the range to be identifiedÂ-by the British mapmaker T.G. Montgomerie in 1856. "Just the bare bones of a name," wrote the Italian alpinist Fosco Maraini in his 1959 book Karakoram: The Ascent of Gasherbrum IV. "All rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human."

There are only two ways to reach K2. To get to the north side, which straddles the border between China and Pakistan, you first must fly to Islamabad, then drive 500 miles northeast to Kashgar, in China's Xinjiang province, then travel by jeep across the southern fringe of the Taklimakan Desert, then transfer to camels and caravan over the brown, broken wastes of the Shaksgam Valley. The more "accessible" southern approach requires slogging 40 roadless miles up the Baltoro Glacier in northern Pakistan.

K2's remoteness has other consequences. It sits eight degrees north of Everest, so the weather is considerably more vicious. "It's much colder, and great storms come shrieking off the mountain," says British mountaineer Jim Curran, author of K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain, the definitive history of the peak. "Unlike Everest, you almost never get a good, clean week to push for the summit."

Everest also boasts a well-established support infrastructure of guides and Sherpas who set up tents, fix ropes, and ferry canisters of supplemental oxygen to the high camps. On K2, there are few high-altitude porters or commercial firmsÂ-partly because of the isolation and partly because experience has demonstrated that guiding a mountain like K2 is an invitation to disaster. This point was proven yet again this July when a German climber named Klaus-Dieter Grohs slipped and fell to his death while pushing to the top. One of ten clients being led up the mountain by Kari Kobler, a veteran Swiss Himalayan guide who has climbed Everest twice, Grohs became the 53rd person to die on K2.

According to a 2000 study on high-altitude mountaineering deaths published in The American Alpine Journal, one in 29 climbers who summited Everest between 1978 and 1999 died on descent; on K2, one summiter in seven perished. "Those are pretty grim odds," says Raymond Huey, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who co-authored the study. "It's getting perilously close to Russian roulette." Things become even more dire when you compare summit fatalities among climbers who did not use supplemental oxygen: On Everest, the casualty rate is one in 12; on K2, it's nearly one in five.

That last number is rather chilling: Even among experienced mountaineers, K2 is more than twice as deadly as Everest. "Think of it this way," suggests Curran. "From Everest Base Camp, you can walk four hours and you're lounging on grass, drinking beer with trekkers. K2 stands absolutely on its own. The approach is hard. The base camp feels like the moon. The mountain itself looks utterly impregnable, and there's no easy way up the thing. And all this hits you between the eyes when you see it for the first time. It's like that famous Munch painting. You know the oneÂ- The Scream? Except, of course, you're the one doing the screaming."

FOR CLIMBERS, the existential angst kicks in the moment they round the bend into Concordia, the most majestic amphitheater of high peaks in the world. An enormous hub of ice situated six miles from base camp, where the Upper Baltoro and Godwin-Austen glaciers collide, Concordia is surrounded by the crown of the KarakoramÂ-Broad Peak and Gasherbrum I, II, and IIIÂ-four of the 15 tallest mountains on earth, with an average height of 26,330 feet. To the east, the fluted ridges of Ladakh rise above the Siachen Glacier, the front lines of an ongoing border conflict between India and Pakistan. And if the weather is clear, a mountaineer will get his first glimpse of K2 directly to the north, filling up the sky, lustrous and giant.

"You're standing at 15,000 feet, and you're looking up at 28,000 feet," says Jim Wickwire, a 63-year-old climber from Seattle and a member of the first American team to summit K2, in 1978. "No photograph can do justice to 13,000 feet of vertical relief."

Nor can a photograph convey the ponderous immensity of a pile of rock and ice large enough to contain no fewer than 84 Matterhorns. "When I reached Concordia and saw K2, it literally stopped me in my tracks," recalls Rick Ridgeway, 54, who made it to the summit alongside Wickwire in '78. "It stopped us allÂ-that mountain affects everybody in the same way. Nothing on the whole planet matches it."

Even Reinhold Messner, who at 59 is generally considered the greatest mountaineer of the 20th century, reserves a special measure of awe for K2, which he christened "the mountain of mountains" in 1979, after completing the fourth ascent of the peak. "It is the most beautiful of all the high peaks," Messner told me. "An artist has made this mountain."

There are a handful of fiendishly arduous Himalayan peaks that pose even greater technical challenges than K2, the most prominent being Gasherbrum IV (26,000 feet) and the Ogre (23,900 feet), both located in the central Karakoram. Neither of these, however, involves the difficulties posed by the extreme altitude of K2, where even the most popular passage upÂ-the Abruzzi RidgeÂ-leaves no room for error. A steep spur on the southeastern side first explored in 1909 by Italy's Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of Abruzzi, it involves more than 11,000 vertical feet of climbing and is approximately 20 degrees steeper than the South Col, the most heavily trafficked path up Everest.

Abruzzi made it to 20,500 feetÂ-above where Camp 1 sits todayÂ-before abandoning his attempt. If anyone ever reaches the summit, he later declared, "it will be a pilot, not a mountaineer." But on July 31, 1954, two Italian climbers, Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni, topped out using Abruzzi's route. Compagnoni later claimed he heard the voice of an angel beckoning him to the summit; when he reached it, on his knees, he felt something on his face. "There was ice under my eyes," he later said in an interview. "I realized I was crying. Frozen tears."

He had good reason. Of the 196 climbers who have summited K2 since 1954, 144 arrived by way of the Abruzzi Ridge. And of the 53 people lost on the mountain since 1938, 36 perished somewhere along its spine.

The ridge begins with a line of towers that stretch up the lower part of the spur, ending in a 100-foot vertical fissure known as House's Chimney, named after Bill House, an American mountaineer who first climbed it in 1938. The pitch involves 5.6 rock climbing at 22,000 feetÂ-the route's greatest technical challenge.

Above the chimney lies the Black Pyramid, a triangle of notoriously unstable slabs of ice and rock at about 24,500 feet. At the pyramid's apex, the route emerges onto the Shoulder, a broad hump at roughly 26,000 feet and the site of the fourth and final camp before reaching the top. It was here in 1986 that Al Rouse, the first British climber to summit K2, was overcome by exhaustion and abandoned by his companions in the middle of a six-day storm. Minutes after leaving Rouse, two Austrian climbers, Alfred Imitzer and Hannes Wieser, collapsed in the snow and died as well.

From the Shoulder, the summit is 2,250 vertical feet away. But reaching it involves negotiating a broad couloir often loaded with knee-deep snow; undertaking a delicate traverse out of the Bottleneck, a 100-foot ice-enameled couloir that steepens to more than 50 degrees; and then scaling an exposed traverse that drops 9,800 feet to the Godwin-Austen. At least ten people have died in the BottleneckÂ-including the Polish climber Tadeusz Piotrowski, perhaps the finest winter mountaineer of his day, who in 1986 lost both his crampons in the midst of a grueling descent from the summit, bounced off his partner, Jerzy Kukuczka (who managed to keep his footing), and hurtled off the face.

Finally, there are the snowy slopes of the summit helmet itself, which are broad and steep and, as anyone familiar with the gut-wrenching plummet of Alison Hargreaves and her companions in 1995 can attest, more than able to kill you.

DEATH AND IMPREGNABILITY have always been great motivators, of course. Not long after the Italians achieved their victory over K2 in 1954, India and Pakistan plunged into an extended period of fighting over their northern borders and closed off the central Karakoram; it was not until 1975 that foreign expeditions were permitted to return. Two years later, a 52-man Japanese expedition with 1,500 porters laid siege to K2, scaled the Abruzzi, and posted the second summit. A year after that, in 1978, an American team led by Jim Whittaker (the first American climber to summit Everest, in 1963) finally succeeded. Four menÂ-Wickwire, Ridgeway, John Roskelley, and Lou ReichardtÂ-made it to the top via a new route on the northeast ridge. The '78 expedition ushered in an era of breakthroughs on the mountain, including routes along the west ridge (Japanese-Pakistani, 1981), the south face (Polish, 1986), and the south-southwest ridge, which was summited that same year by Peter Bozik, a Czech, and two Polish climbers, Wojciech WrÃ¶z and Przemyslaw Piasecki.

K2's reputation as the most difficult and dangerous of the world's 8,000-meter peaks is surpassed only by the irrational pull it seems to exert upon climbers. No one understands this better than Wickwire, whose obsession very nearly cost him his life. When he completed his push for the top late on the afternoon of September 6, 1978, he was stranded on the summit face without a tent or sleeping bag as night fell, forcing him to endure 50-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures that plunged to minus 25 degreesÂ-the highest solo bivouac up to that point.

"It was the only time in my climbing career that I really did let it all hang out, in the sense that I was going to get there no matter what," says Wickwire, who came down with pleurisy and had to have a piece of his lung surgically removed when he got home. "But I had this 20-year preoccupation with K2 in my dreams, and those dreams simply were not going to be denied. That's the power, the magnificence, of K2."

That magnificence can take strange forms. Weeks before he summited, Wickwire was descending with Roskelley to Camp 3, on the knife edge of the northeast ridge, when he witnessed the Specter of Brocken, a rare play of light in which a climber's silhouette is magnified and cast into the center of a cloud, sometimes surrounded by a double rainbowÂ-two perfect circles, one inside the other. "That was the only time I've observed it in over 40 years of climbing," he says.

It was along this same ridge that Roskelley and Ridgeway found themselves enveloped one afternoon by a flock of orange-and-black butterflies that had wafted up on air currents. "They were everywhere," says Roskelley. "The world suddenly turned into this beautiful, orange, flapping mosaic of color."

Such moments can occur on any great mountain. But as commercialization threatens to overrun the highest peaks, these experiences become more elusive. K2's tendency to yield such ephemeral encounters partly explains why it draws a different type of climber than EverestÂ-a climber who not only commands superior skills but harbors a deeper reason for wanting to be on the mountain. Greg Mortenson, who attempted K2 in 1993 after his sister, Christa, died at 23 of epilepsy, got as far as 25,000 feet but had to forgo his own summit bid to help an exhausted companion descend safely to base camp. Still, he has no regrets.

"I could have gone to Everest," says Mortenson, who went on to found the Central Asia Institute and spend the next decade building schools for young girls throughout northern Pakistan. "K2, however, seemed to better exemplify the freedom of Christa's spirit and my angerÂ-my angstÂ-over her death at a young age. On K2, you can't pay a guide service $65,000 to get you to the top. On K2, you need the experience, the skill, and the stamina to climb without these resources. Everest is a mountain for those who just want to climb to the highest point on earth. But K2 is more about philosophic heights. It's about purity, clarity, and being humble."

Perhaps no one fuses these elements more eloquently than Dr. Charles Houston, who led two of the earliest American attempts on K2. One morning, almost 24,000 feet up the Abruzzi Ridge during his second attempt, in 1953, Houston looked out of his tent. "It was about sunrise," he told me, "and the air was just filled with ice crystals. It wasn't snow; they were tiny, tiny ice crystals, and they were red and yellow and green and purpleÂ-all the colors of the rainbow. There were trillions of them, shimmering against the blue and black sky. It was a gentle and beautiful thing. And unforgettable."

This coming from a man who endured some of the most terrifying hardships on K2, and whose ordeal in 1953 has come to signify, more than any other, what it means to fail with dignity.

CHARLIE HOUSTON is a legend in mountaineering circles. A physician educated at both Harvard and Columbia, he had participated in the first ascent of Alaska's Mount Foraker, in 1934; led the first detailed reconnaissance of the Abruzzi Ridge, in 1938; and was the first Westerner to enter Nepal's Khumbu Valley, in 1950, spearheading the route to the south side of Everest. As a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy, Houston spent World War II conducting pioneering research on the effects of high altitude on the human body.

In the summer of 1953, at age 40, he and his oldest friend, Bob BatesÂ-a 42-year-old Exeter English teacher who had accompanied Houston in 1938 and gone on to develop much of the Tenth Mountain Division's equipment in World War IIÂ-assembled a team of amateurs for the third American assault on K2. "We chose the expedition intuitively," Houston explained. "We avoided superstars, people who we thought were going to put themselves first. We were a group with common ideals, a willingness to share, and, if I may say so, a singular lack of self-aggrandizement."

The group was made up of eight men. Besides Houston and Bates there was George Bell, 27, a theoretical physicist at Cornell who had pulled off several first ascents in Peru; Bob Craig, 28, a philosopher who worked as a ski instructor in Aspen and had completed the first ascent of the Devil's Thumb, in British Columbia; Craig's friend Dee Molenaar, 34, a landscape painter and geologist from Seattle who had summited Alaska's Mount St. Elias; Pete Schoening, 26, a chemical engineer who had led a successful climbing expedition to the Yukon; Tony Streather, a 27-year-old British Army captain who'd reached the summit of Pakistan's Tirich Mir in 1951 with a Norwegian expedition; and finally, an accomplished 27-year-old rock climber from Iowa named Art Gilkey, who'd researched glaciers in Alaska. They reached Pakistan at the end of May, in time to receive the news that Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had just knocked off Everest. It took them two months to transport their equipment to K2 base camp, but by early August, Houston and his men had forced their way up the Abruzzi Ridge to roughly 25,000 feet, where they were pinned down by a massive storm. After nine days, the team members were finally able to climb out of their tents. As Art Gilkey emerged, he fell facedown, unconscious.

Examining Gilkey, Houston realized he had thrombophlebitis, a condition in which blood clots develop in the veins of the legs; if the clots break off and flow to the lungs, they can cause a pulmonary embolism. At sea level, the condition is extremely serious; at 25,000 feet, it is virtually a death sentence.

"It was hopeless," Houston recalls, "but we certainly were not going to leave him there aloneÂ-we never even considered that."

All notions of making the summit were forgotten. After an initial attempt to move Gilkey down the same route they had ascendedÂ-which ended when they realized the entire slope was about to avalancheÂ-Craig and Schoening proposed lowering him down a rocky ridge to the east. Houston suggested that the rest of the party descend while he remained with Gilkey; they could return when the weather improved. The team would have none of it. That night, Houston determined that two clots had indeed moved into Gilkey's lungs. The next morning, with the storm raging again, they wrapped him up like a mummy using one of the tents and launched their rescue effortÂ-the highest ever at the time.

By midafternoon, they'd inched their stricken teammate to within 150 yards of an ice shelf. To reach it, they would have to haul him across a steep gully, beneath which the ice fell off almost all the way to the glacier. Schoening stationed himself above Gilkey on the slope and belayed him by thrusting his ice ax deep into the snow above a large rock. The rope holding Gilkey was looped around the haft of Schoening's ax, back across his hips, and through his right hand.

The plan was to pendulum Gilkey across the gully. Before the work began, Craig, who had nearly been engulfed in a small avalanche a few minutes earlier, unroped from Molenaar and moved over to the ice shelf for a breather. When Craig unhooked, Molenaar took the precaution of tying himself to a loose rope connected to Gilkey.

Moments after Molenaar tied in, George Bell, who was also standing above Gilkey, lost his balance and shot down the slope. As Bell tumbled, he pulled Streather off his feet. Streather's fall took him directly into a second rope connecting Houston and Bates, ripping them from their positions. There was nothing to stop the fall of the four entangled menÂ-except the rope connecting Molenaar to Gilkey, which Streather snagged as he slid by. Molenaar fell, and now five men rocketed down until the strain fell on GilkeyÂ-who was connected by a single rope to Schoening.

Schoening leaned into his ax and braced himself for the impact of their fall. The rope thinned, then drew taut as a steel wire. For the next five minutes, he held all six men. This would have been remarkable anywhere, but at an altitude at which most people can barely think, it bordered on the miraculous. It has become the most legendary ice-ax belay in the history of climbing. "If Pete hadn't held that anchor, Bob Craig would have been the only survivor," says Molenaar.

When they all came to a halt, Bell was lying precariously close to the drop-off, Molenaar was bleeding from a gash in his thigh, and Houston lay crumpled at the edge of the abyss, unconscious. While the rest of the team struggled to right themselves, Bates soloed down to Houston, whose eyes opened.

"Where are we?" Houston asked. "What are we doing here?"

It was obvious that the battered team could not pull its leader back up the steep rock. In a last-ditch effort to get the concussed Houston to understand what he had to do on his own, Bates took his old friend by the shoulders.

"Charlie," Bates said, "if you ever want to see Dorcas and Penny [his wife and daughter] again, climb up there right now! " Houston obeyed.

It was now essential to get the injured to shelter. Gilkey was anchored securely to his position in the gully with two ice axes while the others moved to the other side of a rocky rib to set up a tent. Houston, Bell, Schoening, and Molenaar were placed inside, then the remaining three returned for Gilkey. When they got back to the gully, the axes were gone and Gilkey had disappeared. An avalanche had apparently torn through the chute and taken him with it. "It was," Bates later wrote, "as if the hand of God had swept him away."

The next morning, after a horrendous night, the team found themselves climbing down through a tangle of chopped ropes and pieces of sleeping bag. Houston was first on the rope. "It was obvious that we were climbing down the same route that Art had taken, and that we were climbing through Art's blood," he recalls. "Blood and blood and blood...We didn't talk about that for a very, very long time."

Four days later, the seven survivors stumbled into base camp, as stunned by the unlikely fact that they were alive as by the loss of their friend. The porters erected a cairn, dedicated to Gilkey, on a prominent point of rock 200 feet above the glacier floor. It stands there to this day.

ON THE AFTERNOON after my tour of the dead, I clambered up to the Gilkey Memorial, a pile of ocher rock now festooned with dozens of plates and saucepan lids inscribed with eulogies to all the men and women who have died here. Below, I could see a procession of Pakistani guides bearing the bodies of six Japanese climbers who had been killed by an avalanche in 1997. Like Dudley Wolfe, they had recently emerged from the glacier. The guides stacked the corpses, wrapped them in plastic, then piled ice on top to keep them cool until a funeral pyre could be assembled from wood they had carried to base camp. As the wind kicked up, the plates and lids began rattling against the stone, beating out a mournful, otherworldly cadence.

At that moment, K2 seemed little more than an abattoirÂ-a place linked inextricably with death. It was only months later, after I had returned home and met Charlie Houston for the first time, that it occurred to me that K2 might also embrace another qualityÂ-a dimension of redemptive grace that extends beyond the sport of mountaineering.

This summer marked the 50th anniversary of Art Gilkey's death. George Bell died in 2000, but the remaining six teammates still convene for reunions, united by a sense of solidarity about what they did on K2. "There was nothing heroic about it," insists Houston, who turned 90 in August. "It was just a job that had to be done. We weren't counting how many people would be bereft if we died, because we weren't figuring on dying. That's why I don't accept people who call us heroes. What else were we to do?"

Houston's unsentimental attitude is admirable, but it fails to do justice to the fact that he and his men did, in fact, have a choice: They could have abandoned Gilkey to a fate that was almost certainly inevitable. Their selflessness in refusing even to consider such a thing may not qualify as heroism in their eyes, but to some it defines them in terms that cannot be other than heroic.

"The year after Charlie and his team came home," says Jim Curran, the K2 historian, "the Italians finally succeeded in reaching the topÂ-but it is Houston's expedition that remains the touchstone of all that is best in mountaineering. Unfortunately, the world has since slid past this ideal. Events in climbing today are totally silly, particularly on Everest. But what those men did on K2 in 1953 was incredible. It is now one of the great legends of the mountains. In the annals of Himalayan climbing, there is nothing finer than this."

What that legend suggests is that K2 may well be greater than Everest. Not because it's technically harder or imparts more lyrical visions to those who climb it, but because, through the actions of Houston and his men, K2's signature narrative achieved an expression weightier than mere triumph. "I have great respect for the Italians who summited K2 for the first time in 1954," says Reinhold Messner, "but even greater respect for the Americans and the way they failed in 1953. They were decent. They were strong. And they failed in the most beautiful way you can imagine. This is inspiration for a lifetime."

If Everest is a mountain that supposedly personifies the highest level of human achievementÂ-achievement that each year is cheapened by ever less meaningful distinctionsÂ-then K2 is a mountain that embodies the supreme level of human failure. Failure imbibed to the fullest measure. Failure that cuts to the bone. And failure, too, that through some paradoxical alchemy transcends carnage by transforming those who possess the resilience and the honor to weather the ordeal. This is the secret to K2.

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How do you crack the code to K2, the darkest, deadliest peak on the planet? If you're a climber, have the courage to accept that you're bound to fail, and the wisdom to know that failure has its own rewards.

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Name Origin My Name-Excerpt from The House on Mango Street