He sits alone in the night, there on the seashore amid the cobblestone rubble and tangled driftwood. A yellowy green and gray mottled full moon floats above the horizon like a giant hard boiled egg yolk. The luminous orb slides higher into the sky, shrinking, shedding its yolky hues, morphing into a blazing white disk that illuminates the nocturnal seascape in a silver light. He wades into the wilderness among the barnacled boulders, through the surge of seething windrows of percolated white froth and the rainy blast of cold salty mist spat from the explosive billows crashing toward him. The fizzing liquid roils about his body, heavy and torsional like a pool of serpents set aboil. He leaps onto his surfboard and paddles. He sits in the wintry Pacific Ocean bobbing about the tumult, rolling and pitching with the swells, the water's surface peened to the horizon before him with the moon's brilliant reflection winking across myriad facets of the agitated sea. Men have met grisly ends in the jaws of great white sharks not far from where he floats like chum along California's Gaviota Coast, lacerated by a phalanx of razorous teeth and drowned if not drained of blood in seconds. He is undaunted, thrilled more than horrified. Life is felt more intensely at no other time than in the ecstatic thralls of primordial existence, whether in the joy of love or the jaws of death. The macabre feeling is endangered these days in the Anthropocene. He appreciates that the opportunity to experience these ancient emotions still exists. Wave trains explode on the rocky shoreline behind him. The powerful Aleutian energy from a distant storm grinds the edge of the continent to cobblestones and sand like crumbs from a cookie. He floats up over crests and sinks down into troughs and waits. A set wave silently appears out of the depths of night, a one dimensional black wall growing larger. The big wave approaches in the vague form of a solid constant in an otherwise ceaselessly shifting realm of the darkened half visible. A quick shift to prone position and he is furiously paddling toward the oncoming wall of water. He digs deep and hard with each hand, fingers bent and spread, too cold to draw together. He springs up to a sitting position just before reaching the wave, leans back grabbing the pointy nose of the surfboard with his right hand as it thrusts skyward, his opposing free hand reaching out for balance as he shoves the board leftward riding it like a rodeo cowboy as it swivels around, pushing against the seawater with muscled legs and thrusting onto his belly and into a fierce paddle, chin pressed against the gritty deck of the surfboard, nostrils filled with the fruitiness of Mr Zog's Sex Wax. He affects a ninety degree turn in one fluid, masterly motion, the wave looming over his, crest curling like the snarling lip of a monstrous watery maw about to slam down with the force of a waterfall. Two hard grabs of seawater and the wave grabs ahold of him itself, pushing him forward, the back of his board lifting in the hooking peak of the swell as the nose plunges down towards the trough. He slides down the steep liquid slope on his belly for the briefest moment before pushing up and leaping to his feet. In a second he is standing with arms spread for balance and angled back as if to fly, mouth agape in concentration, eyelids pulled wide, tendrils of wet hair fluttering in the hissing scud blowing up the face of the heaving breaker. At home his family sleeps soundly snuggled in warm beds. His surfboard becomes a vehicle to a parallel universe, a magic carpet slicing a nick in the fabric of time as he enters another dimension for a fleeting moment before piercing back into reality. He slips into a liminal realm where the space between seconds stretches into something that matters. Where there are no barriers but the limits of nature and the extent of her skills. He is the supreme pilot of his existence in a moment of absolute freedom. All burdens vanish. There is no cold; no problems; no pain; no work; no responsibilities; no politics; no arguments; no fights. There is not a worry in the world. There is no world. There is only a single-minded focus on the wave and his relation to nature. And nothing else matters.