A Spirit the Waves Couldn't Break

It took me

Too powerful to let go

Crack!

He is a 19-year-old, moon-faced quadriplegic with a completely upended future and no notion of how he will matter now in life.

The first of August was the first full day of a weeklong getaway. For Josh, it capped a summer spent living large -- an internship at Smith Barney on K Street NW, golf at Avenel with his boss. In a month, he would enter his sophomore year at Skidmore College, where the tennis coach had him pegged as a future team captain.

"I love my life," he told his father.

The family's house was on the north side of town, across the street from the beach. What everyone remembers is that the first morning was wet and gray, which was okay because stormy weather churns up surf. That Josh and his friends stopped by a grocery mart, where he bought a cheap plastic boogie board. That the rain cleared in the waning afternoon, and they wanted to try out his purchase.

What John Basile remembers next is the pounding, not of the ocean but of someone rushing toward the house, too fast, taking 10 steps in two. A panicked shout from Josh's friend Paddy: "Dr. Basile, Dr. Basile, Josh is hurt really bad!"

People were standing in a stunned semicircle. Josh lay on his back where several of them had dragged him onto the sand after the wave had come crashing in and the boogie board had shot off into the foam, and they had looked around for Josh and found him facedown in the Atlantic -- kidding, they thought, until they realized how utterly motionless he was.

The wave's violence had ripped off his swim trunks. Someone covered him with a towel. "I can't feel my arms and legs," Josh cried. "I can't move." It was his father, a physician, who saw the crook in his neck, bone jutting obliquely under the skin.

A state police medical helicopter set down along the highway in Bethany Beach. Choppers land with chilling predictability on the summertime strip of fun from Cape Henlopen to Ocean City. There is no Hollywood "Jaws" drama, only the devastation of spinal injury. The luckier cases leave by ambulance rather than by air. Josh was among the unluckiest.

Rescuers such as Mike Jandzen, director of lifeguard service at the Sea Colony resort, call the Delaware and Maryland beaches some of the most dangerous in the country. Scientists such as Stephen Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University, fault government projects to replenish the shoreline for making the beaches' naturally steep slopes far steeper. At the point where deep water suddenly becomes shallow, waves build in height fast, then break hard.