Dawn Patrol

141

Remember when you were a kid in the swimming pool and you'd see how long you could hold your breath underwater?

This isn't that.

Getting caught in the impact zone is different from holding your breath in a swimming pool. For one thing, you can't come up; you're being rolled over the bottom-bounced, somersaulted, slammed, and twisted. The ocean is filling your nasal cavities and sinuses with freezing salt water. And it isn't a matter of how long you can hold your breath; it's a matter of whether you can hold your breath long enough for the wave to let you up, because if you can't You drown.

And that's just the beginning of your problems, because waves don't come to the party alone; they usually bring a crew. Waves tend to come in sets, usually three, but sometimes four, and a really fecund mother of a set might bring a litter of six.

So even if you make it through the first wave, you might have time to take a gasp of air before the next wave hits you, and the next, and so on and so forth until you drown.

The rule of thumb is that if you don't manage to extricate yourself from the impact zone by the third wave, your friends will be doing a paddle-out for you in the next week or so. They'll be out there in a circle on their boards, saying nice things about you, maybe singing a song or two, definitely tossing a flower lei out onto the wave, and it's very cool, but you won't be there to enjoy any of it because you'll be dead.

Sunny's in the Washing Machine, and it rolls her, tumbles her, somersaults her until she doesn't know up from down. Which is another one of the dangers of the impact zone: You lose track of which way is up and which way is down. So when the wave finally lets you up, you budget that last bit of air for the plunge to the sweet surface, only to hit rock or sand instead. Then, unless you're a really experienced waterman, you just give up and breathe in the water. Or there's already another wave on top of you.

Either way, you're pretty much screwed.

Keep your head, Sunny tells herself as she plummets. Keep your head and you live. You've trained for this moment all your life. You're a waterman.

All those mornings, those early evenings, training with Boone and Dave and High Tide and Johnny. Walking underwater, clutching big rocks. Diving down to lobster pots and holding on to the line until you felt your lungs were going to burst, then holding on a little longer. While those assholes grinned at you-waiting for the girlie to give up.

Except you didn't give up.

She feels a jerk upward and realizes that her board has popped to the surface.

“Headstoned,” in surf jargon.

Dave will be out there already, watching for the board to pop up. He's on his way now. She forces herself to do a crunch, not to release the leash but so that if she does hit bottom, she'll take the blow on her shoulders and not on her head, snapping her neck.

She hits all right, hard, but on her shoulders. The wave somersaults her three or four times-she loses count-but then it lets go of her and she pushes up, punches to the surface, and takes a deep breath of beautiful air.