Six years ago, on this very day, at this very beach, a young man rose with the dawn, crawled from his tent, stripped naked, and pulled on his wet suit. He did not attempt to wake his friends, all recent Class of 2000 high-school graduates from Michigan who, to mark their final days together before heading off to college, had piled into a couple of cars and driven nineteen sleepless hours to this state park on Florida’s Treasure Coast. A week later the boy’s father would read a newspaper interview with one of those young people, a girl who had never camped before and kept startling awake at the slightest sound. According to the report, she’d heard the young man curse under his breath as he’d tripped over a trash bag full of empty beer cans. Peeking out through the mesh of her doorway, she watched him gather his surfboard and stroll off with long, lanky strides, his impressive muddle of curly brown hair bouncing ostentatiously as he made his way toward the beach. Because the campground overlooked the water, she could see him wade in, climb onto the board belly-down, and paddle out into the waves. Then, as the girl would explain in that interview, she lost sight of him, his silhouette disappearing into the first fierce burst of sunrise.