Mickey Muñoz Is a Fish

We once knew nothing but water. There was no knowledge of walk, only swim. This was long ago, when our common genetic ancestors breathed underwater. The first animals on land looked like big, flat-headed salamanders. They emerged on late Devonian shorelines almost four hundred million years ago, waddled onto land, and learned to navigate this new, dry terrain.

Mickey Muñoz, one of the surfing greats to emerge from the 1950s, is going back. He is turning evolution around. You can see in every step he is heading for the water.

When Muñoz runs, he swims. The eighty-four-year-old has the litheness of a lizard and the darting nature of a fish. From a distance, he looks like an animal busying himself along shore, moving crablike through rocks and across lips of water. He looks like an old gnome in a hoodie and bright red boardshorts, club of driftwood in one hand, feet doing a light foxtrot.

Fins and snouts of grainy bedrock lean out of the sand. They