All surfers, all readers of surf magazines-and I had memorized nearly every line, every photo caption, in every surf magazine I owned-spent the bulk of their fantasy lives, like it or not, in Hawaii. I was beside myself with excitement just to be in Hawaii. “If it’s really bad, we’ll pretend we don’t know you,” my mother said. “It won’t be the Hawaiian Amateur Hour,” my father said. Kildare,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Now he was the production manager on a new series, a half-hour musical variety show based on a local radio program, “Hawaii Calls.” The idea was to shoot Don Ho singing in a glass-bottomed boat or a calypso band by a waterfall or hula girls dancing while a volcano spewed and call it a show. He had been working, mostly as an assistant director, in series television-“Dr. I had been surfing for nearly three years when my father got the job that took us to Hawaii. I threw on a pair of trunks, grabbed my surfboard, and left without a word. Everyone at the house was busy unpacking and fighting over beds. Then I spotted, well off to the west, and rather far out at sea, a familiar minuet of stick figures, rising and falling, backlit by the afternoon sun. Waves broke here and there along the outer edge of a mossy, exposed reef. I ran to the beach for a first, frantic survey of the local waters. But the cottage was near the beach-just up a driveway lined with other cottages, on a street called Kulamanu-and the weather, which was warm even in January, when we arrived, felt like wanton luxury. My brother Kevin and I took turns sleeping on the couch. The budget for moving our family to Honolulu was tight, judging from the tiny cottage we rented and the rusted-out Ford Fairlane we bought to get around. And nobody, blessedly, seemed to notice me.

William finnegan surfing