Breath: Pages 37-78 Summary & Analysis

To Bruce’s surprise, his parents enroll him in a school in Angelus, 30 miles away, that requires a long bus trip every day. Becoming acquainted with the larger harbor town of Angelus makes Bruce aware of and embarrassed by Sawyer’s comparative paltriness. He begins to resent the city folks who visit it as a “quaint” getaway.

On weekends, Bruce and Loonie continue surfing, finally taking up the older man’s offer to store their boards at his house. The first time they do so, they are surprised to find the house eerily empty and quite rustic, like an “elevated safari tent.” The view from the house lets Bruce see for the first time how wild and ragged the region is. Poking around, they find that the house is strewn with surfing paraphernalia, and underneath the house is a jaw-dropping stash of boards, as well as a huge didjeridu. They leave nervously excited.

Back in the present, Bruce plays his own didjeridu and reflects on the nature of breath. For most people, it’s automatic and unconscious until something goes wrong. Bruce, however, has been preoccupied with it since childhood, when he would hear his father’s deafening snoring all night, alarmed by the brief moments when it would cease. Much later, Bruce realized that his father in those moments had stopped breathing, not just snoring, and he’d resume snoring with a terrifying gasp. Bruce thinks how he and Loonie’s breath-holding experiments were a rebellion against their own bodies.

Bruce and Loonie return to the man’s house one day, and a woman emerges. She’s somewhat cold and initially skeptical of their claims that they left their boards underneath the house. She tells them that the man is in Indonesia. The boys take their boards and leave in a hurry.

In the water, the surf is bigger and rougher than the boys are accustomed to. They fall in with the older guys, following them further and further out. Bruce realizes that they’ve gone beyond Sawyer Point, into the open sea. He and Loonie struggle just to paddle over the big waves, not attempting a ride. Soon, Bruce and Loonie are alone with an older guy named Slipper, who peer-pressures Loonie into riding a huge wave. Bruce remains reluctant, so Slipper belittles him further and Bruce finally attempts a surf. He gets up, thrilled for a few moments before being slammed and held underwater, finally surfacing and gasping for air. The board he had lost in the wave has washed ashore next to Loonie.

Slipper and the older guys grudgingly respect Bruce and Loonie for their efforts, and they give them a ride back up to the road. They pull up at a cliff to marvel at a giant break offshore, which none of them have ever tried to surf. Loonie is giddy from the day’s adventure.

The boys return to the man’s house to stow their boards again, and the woman invites them in. She remains skeptical of their claims to have ridden the huge waves. She reveals that she’s from Utah by way of California. She gives the boys coffee, which Bruce has never had before and struggles to choke down—his family only drinks tea. She gives them a ride home, and Loonie boldly asks her her name. She tells them it’s Eva, and as she drives away, Loonie is convinced that she likes him.

Bruce reflects how he sometimes needed a break from Loonie’s wild energy, and that even though he’d never admit it, he actually enjoyed going to school, which was dull and calm. The solitude of reading books would once have marked him out as a loner, but now Bruce has come to enjoy it. He begins going to the nearby state forest after school. Although Loonie and his agricultural school friends have a powerful slingshot set up there, Bruce resists the invitations and prefers to go by himself, despite the forest’s eerie isolation.

One day, retrieving their boards from the house, Bruce and Loonie see that the man has returned—Sando is his name, although they don’t know it yet. He greets them and asks them to wax his board, but they are too awed by the beautiful craft. He brings them down to the beach; the waves are puny, but Sando just wants to test out the new board. The boys are amazed by the older man’s vigorous physical presence—he looks about 30, muscular and bearded. Sando tells them that the huge offshore break they saw is called Old Smoky, vaguely alluding to having been out there.

Bruce and Loonie become habitual guests at Sando’s house that spring. His walls are lined with classic literature of an individualist bent. Eva remains apparently irked with the boys being at the house. Sando sometimes shares surfing stories and tips, but he’s frequently aloof and will give his attention to the older, more experienced surfers when they’re around. When he’s concentrating on surfing, however, no one can lay a claim on his attention, and he appears mystically dialed in. He begins having the boys cut his weeds, sometimes paying them, although they care more about soaking in his powerful and mysterious presence. During the last good surfing day of the season, Sando goes out without a board and bodysurfs—better than the actual surfers. Everyone in the water marvels at this enigmatic figure.

One day while bicycling near the coast, Bruce comes across the stopped car of Sando, who’s deeply upset over having just hit a kanga roo with his car. Sando kills the wounded animal to put it out of its misery and loads its carcass into his truck. Bruce rides along back to Sando’s house in the truck bed next to the carcass. The dead animal inspires philosophical reflection in Bruce. Sando cleans and fillets the carcass, offering Bruce some meat—and thereby revealing his city origins, since country folk would never eat an animal that they think of like a rodent. Bruce tosses the meat on his way home.

One summer day, Bruce and Loonie ride out to Sando’s house but are disappointed to find no one home. Digging around under the house, they find a box of old surf magazines left on top of their surfboards. They flip through them and find images of Sando—“Billy Sanderson”—surfing famous breaks and even appearing in magazines.

Sando reappears and finds them looking at the magazines, growing instantly upset. He commands them to wait there and then has a shouting match with Eva inside. Eva has put the boxes where the boys would find them, and he accuses her of jealousy, while she claims that he doesn’t understand her. Sando returns, brushing off the boys’ apology for seeing the magazines and saying not to worry. He drives them back to town, dismissing Loonie’s suggestion that pills Eva has been taking are responsible for her behavior. Bruce is upset that Loonie didn’t mention that he knew about Eva’s pills. Something about Sando’s unsettled identity both attracts and disturbs Bruce. Sando offers to take them surfing somewhere “discreet” in a few days.

The next day, while pulling down an old shed for money, Loonie and Bruce debate the Eva incident. Loonie seems to despise her, and he bristles at Bruce’s reminder that he was once romantically interested in her. In the present, Bruce wonders about Eva’s motive for revealing Sando’s past.

At dawn the next day, Sando picks up the boys with a dinghy trailing his truck. He drives miles through the forest without explaining anything, then they unload the boat in an estuary. They navigate through apparently untouched landscape to a point of rock, which Sando calls Barney’s. The point picks up all the swell in the vicinity, and the boys marvel at the extremely long waves breaking.

Soon, Sando reveals that “Barney” is a 14-foot great white shark that lives in these waters. He enjoys terrifying Loonie and makes fun of his fear, angering the boy. Sando dives into the surf, and Loonie can’t tolerate the insult to his courage and quickly follows. Bruce, terrified, follows as well. The day of surfing feels like a milestone in maturity for the boys. They return to surf the point for months before word gets out about the prime spot. One day, Loonie comes face to face with Barney, who fixes him with his black eye before receding. Loonie is shaken.

Returning from the first time surfing the point, Loonie regrets that he has no photos of himself from the day. Sando tells him that photos are worthless, and that when Loonie really confronts a life-or-death moment, he won’t think about photos at all: instead, he’ll wonder if he’s actually cut out for the extreme situation, or if he’s just “ordinary.” He says that this feeling is like touching “the hand of God.”