game during the 1941-1942 season, the Margaret Duke Bonaventura ribbon and prize for the
student who conducted himself at hockey most like the way her son had done, the Devon School
Contact Sport Award, Presented Each Year to That Student Who in the Opinion of the Athletic
Advisors Excels His Fellows in the Sportsmanlike Performance of Any Game Involving Bodily
Contact. But these were in the past, and they were prizes, not school records. The sports Finny
played officially—football, hockey, baseball, lacrosse—didn’t have school records. To switch to
a new sport suddenly, just for a day, and immediately break a record in it—that was about as neat
a trick, as dazzling a reversal as I could, to be perfectly honest, possibly imagine. There was
something inebriating in the suppleness of this feat. When I thought about it my head felt a little
dizzy and my stomach began to tingle. It had, in one word, glamour, absolute schoolboy
glamour. When I looked down at that stop watch and realized a split second before I permitted
my face to show it or my voice to announce it that Finny had broken a school record, I had
experienced a feeling that also can be described in one word—shock.
To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny seem too
unusual for—not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there were few relationships among
us at Devon not based on rivalry.
“Swimming in pools is screwy anyway,” he said after a long, unusual silence as we walked
toward the dormitory. “The only real swimming is in the ocean.” Then in the everyday, mediocre
tone he used when he was proposing something really outrageous, he added, “Let’s go to the
beach.”
The beach was hours away by bicycle, forbidden, completely out of all bounds. Going there
risked expulsion, destroyed the studying I was going to do for an important test the next
morning, blasted the reasonable amount of order I wanted to maintain in my life, and it also
involved the kind of long, labored bicycle ride I hated. “All right,” I said.
We got our bikes and slipped away from Devon along a back road. Having invited me Finny now
felt he had to keep me entertained. He told long, wild stories about his childhood; as I pumped
panting up steep hills he glided along beside me, joking steadily. He analyzed my character, and
he insisted on knowing what I disliked most about him (“You’re too conventional,” I said). He
rode backward with no hands, he rode on his own handlebars, he jumped off and back on his
moving bike as he had seen trick horseback riders do in the movies. He sang. Despite the steady
musical undertone in his speaking voice Finny couldn’t carry a tune, and he couldn’t remember
the melody or the words to any song. But he loved listening to music, any music, and he liked to
sing.
We reached the beach late in the afternoon. The tide was high and the surf was heavy. I dived in
and rode a couple of waves, but they had reached that stage of power in which you could feel the
whole strength of the ocean in them. The second wave, as it tore toward the beach with me,
spewed me a little ahead of it, encroaching rapidly; suddenly it was immeasurably bigger than I
was, it rushed me from the control of gravity and took control of me itself; the wave threw me
down in a primitive plunge without a bottom, then there was a bottom, grinding sand, and I
skidded onto the shore. The wave hesitated, balanced there, and then hissed back toward the deep
water, its tentacles not quite interested enough in me to drag me with it.