But I found it oddly moving, the intensity with which a group of guys could talk about the lines of a board standing up against a wall—its release points, its rocker—or the way that surfers often dropped to the ground to draw in the dirt the layout of their home breaks for guys from other places, other countries. Their stories, they felt, would make no sense if their listeners didn’t understand exactly how a reef back in Perth caught a west swell.
