Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

Hang Twelve is shocked. The young soul surfer stares at Boone with a look of hurt innocence, his wet goatee dropping to the black neoprene of his winter wet suit, his light brown dreadlocks falling on his shoulder as he cocks his head. “But, Boone-all-female outrigger canoe teams?”

Hang Twelve loves the women of the all-female outrigger canoe teams. Whenever they paddle by, he just sits on his board and stares.

“Listen,” Boone says, “most of those women play for the other team.”

“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks.

“He's so young,” Johnny observes, and as usual, his observation is accurate. Hang Twelve is a dozen years younger than the rest of The Dawn Patrol. They tolerate him because he's such an enthusiastic surfer and sort of Boone's puppy; plus, he gives them the locals' discount at the surf shop he works at.

“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks urgently.

Sunny Day leans over her board and whispers to him.

Sunny looks just like her name. Her blond hair glows like sunshine. A force of nature-tall, long-legged-Sunny is exactly what Brian Wilson meant when he wrote that he wished they all could be California girls.

Except that Brian's dream girl usually sat on the beach, whereas Sunny surfs. She's the best surfer on The Dawn Patrol, better than Boone, and the coming big swell could lift her from waitress to full-time professional surfer. One good photo of Sunny shredding a big wave could get her a sponsorship from one of the major surf-clothing companies, and then there'll be no stopping her. Now she takes it upon herself to explain to Hang Twelve that most of the females on the all-female outrigger canoe teams are rigged out for females.

Hang Twelve lets out a devastated groan.

“You just ripped a boy's dreams,” Boone tells Sunny.

“Not necessarily,” Dave the Love God says with a smug smile.

“Don't even start,” Sunny says.

“Is it my bad,” Dave asks, “that women love me?”

It's not, really. Dave the Love God has a face and physique that would have caused a run on marble in ancient Greece. But it's not even so much Dave's body that gets him sex as it is his confidence. Dave is confident that he's going to get laid, and he's in a profession that puts him in a perfect position to have a shot at every snow-zone turista who comes to San Diego to get tanned. He's a lifeguard, and this is how he got his moniker, because Johnny Banzai, who completes the New York Times crossword in ink, said, “You're not a ‘life guard’; you're a ‘love god.’ Get it?”

Yeah, the whole Dawn Patrol got it, because they have all seen Dave the Love Guard crawl up to his lifeguard tower while guzzling handfuls of vitamin E to replace the depletion from the night before and get ready for the night ahead.

“They actually give me binoculars,” he marveled to Boone one day, “with the explicit expectation that I will use them to look at scantily clad women. And some people say there's no God.”

So if any hominid with a package could get an all-female outrigger canoe team member (or several of them) to issue a gender exemption for a night or two, it would be Dave, and judging by the self-satisfied lascivious smile on his grille right now, he probably has.

Hang Twelve is still not convinced. “Yeah, but, fish tacos?”

“It depends on the kind of fish in the taco,” says High Tide, nй Josiah Pamavatuu, weighing in on the subject. Literally weighing in, because the Samoan crashes the scales at well over three and a half bills. Hence the tag “High Tide,” because the ocean level rises anytime he gets in the water. So High Tide's opinion on food commands respect, because he obviously knows what he's talking about. The whole crew is aware that your Pacific Island types know their fish. “Are you talking about yellowtail, ono, opah, mahimahi, shark, or what? It makes a difference, ranking-wise.”

“Everything,” Boone says, “tastes better on a tortilla.”

This is an article of faith with Boone. He's lived his life with it and believes it to be true. You take anything-fish, chicken, beef, cheese, eggs, even peanut butter and jelly-and fold them in the motherly embrace of a warm flour tortilla and all those foods respond to the love by upping their game.

Everything does taste better on a tortilla.

“Outside!” High Tide yells.

Boone looks over his shoulder to see the first wave of what looks to be a tasty set coming in.

“Party wave!” hollers Dave the Love God, and he, High Tide, Johnny, and Hang Twelve get on it, sharing the ride into shore. Boone and Sunny hang back for the second wave, which is a little bigger, a little fuller, and has a better shape.

“Your wave!” Boone yells to her.

“Chivalrous or patronizing, you decide!” Sunny yells back, but she paddles in. Boone gets on the wave right behind her and they ride the shoulder in together, a skillful pas de deux on the white water.

Boone and Sunny walk up onto the beach, because the morning session is over and The Dawn Patrol is coming in. This is because, with the exception of Boone, they all have real j-o-b-s.

So Johnny's already stepping out of the outdoor shower and sitting in the front seat of his car putting on his detective clothes-blue shirt, brown tweed jacket, khaki slacks-when his cell phone goes off. Johnny listens to the call, then says, “A woman took a header off a motel balcony. Another day in paradise.”

“I don't miss that, ” Boone says.

“And it doesn't miss you,” Johnny replies.

This is true. When Boone pulled the pin at SDPD, his lieutenant's only regret was that it hadn't been attached to a grenade. Despite his remark, Johnny disagrees-Boone was a good cop. A very good cop.

It was a shame what happened.

But now Boone is following High Tide's eyes back out to the ocean, at which the big man is gazing with an almost reverential intensity.

“It's coming,” High Tide says. “The swell.”

“Big?” Boone asks.

“Not big,” says High Tide. “Huge.”

A real thunder crusher.

Like, ka- boom.

What is a wave anyway?

We know one when we see one, but what is it?

The physicists call it an “energy-transport phenomenon.”

The dictionary says it's “a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.”

Adisturbance.

It's certainly that.

Something gets disturbed. That is, something strikes something else and sets off a vibration. Clap your hands right now and you'll hear a sound. What you're actually hearing is a sound wave. Something struck something else and it set off a vibration that strikes your eardrum.

The vibration is energy. It's transported through the phenomenon of a wave from one location to the other.

The water itself doesn't actually move. What happens is one particle of water bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on and so forth until it hits something. It's like that idiot wave at a sports event-the people don't move around the stadium, but the wave does. The energy flows from one person to another.

So when you're riding a wave, you're not riding water. The water is the medium, but what you're really riding is energy.

Very cool.

Hitching an energy ride.

Billions of H2O particles work together to transport you from one place to another, which is very generous when you think about it. That last statement is, of course, airy-fairy soul-surfer bullshit-the wave doesn't care whether you're in it or not. Particles of water are inanimate objects that don't know anything, much less “care”; the water is just doing what water does when it gets goosed by energy.

It makes waves.

A wave, any kind of wave, has a specific shape. The particles knocking into one another don't just bump along in a flat line, but move up and down-hence the wave. Prior to the “disturbance,” the water particles are at rest, in technical terminology, equilibrium. What happens is that the energy disturbs the equilibrium; it “displaces” the particles from their state of rest. When the energy reaches its maximum potential “displacement” (“positive displacement”), the wave “crests.” Then it drops, below the equilibrium line, to its “negative displacement,” aka, the “trough.” Simply put, it has highs, lows, and middles, just like life its own self.