Stakes. Out on a motor-driven surfboard without a wetsuit. I paddle away from my family to hop aboard a luxury houseboat maintained by the publisher of a prestigious magazine. His children play with me, and he seems to grow about twenty years younger as he laughs at my tentative jokes, sprouting a thick head of curly hair and sideburns. As I paddle away, a large wave almost overturns their houseboat. And then, in the distance, I see an enormous front of water, maybe fifty feet high. It takes a whole city's worth of amphibious vehicles and sailboats and trawlers and even a few lone swimmers and plunges them all into the depths. And then another, bigger wave topples a larger array of vehicles and homes, this one much closer to us. I can feel myself and everyone around me swelling with a kind of juvenile excitement, one that is heightened by the awareness that we have just seen from the outside something that, from the inside, meant a great loss of human life. We feel deranged, but sense that we cannot be sobered until we know if, or when, our own wave is coming.