“I LOOK LIKE A DEAD MAN. I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING CORPSE.”

Snowboarder Kevin Pearce

Pearce at his family's home in Hartland, Vermont, in February.

Snowboarder Kevin Pearce

After the accident, Pearce began craving basil pesto.

Kevin Pearce and family

From left, Adam, Pia, Kevin, and Simon at Craig Hospital.

Snowboarder Kevin Pearce

Pearce in Vermont in February

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Twenty-three-year-old Kevin Pearce is staring at a photo of himself, his body splayed across the bottom of a snowboarding halfpipe. He looks intently at the picture, as if the sight of his fall might help him remember. As if this grainy iPhone image might awaken some long-lost memory, some twinge of what he was thinking just before the right side of his skull slammed into the wall.

But Kevin remembers nothing. He turns away from the scrapbook and leans back into the overstuffed couch. It's the day before Thanksgiving, and the Pearce home in Hartland, Vermont—a sprawling farmhouse set a mile back from the road—is full of visitors. The fire is crackling in the hearth; a soft snow is falling outside. I watch as Kevin's eyes circle the living room, taking in all the family members present. He nods at his dad, Simon Pearce, a noted potter and glassblower, and he smiles at a joke shared with his two older brothers, Andrew, 29, who lives nearby and works for the Simon Pearce company, and Adam, 26, a former snowboarding instructor in Park City, Utah. (Another brother, David, who is 25 and has Down syndrome, lives nearby.) It's a heartwarming scene after a harrowing year. Kevin is alive. “That is what I'm thankful for,” says Pia Pearce, his mom. “My son is still here.”

Her son is also getting hungry. Kevin asks Pia, for the third time in 15 minutes, what she's making for dinner. Lamb chops, she patiently replies. Kevin nods and shakes his head—the answer reminds him that he's asked this question before. In addition to the strong prescription Oakley glasses he wears—the thick lenses contain a prism that keeps him from seeing double—his lack of short-term memory is one of the few signs that Kevin is still recovering from a near-fatal snowboarding accident on December 31, 2009, in Park City. He turns back to the photo, the gruesome portrait of his injury.

“I might as well be looking at someone else,” he says. “That day was the most important day of my life. I mean, it changed everything. But it's all gone.”

A YEAR EARLIER. December 2009. Kevin had been working his ass off, getting ready for the Olympic snowboarding trials, less than a week away. His schedule for the previ­ous few months had been a blur of practice, a relentless loop of spins, corks, 1080s, and McTwists. A typical day would begin with a hike up Mammoth Mountain in California, where he'd been living on and off to train, followed by four to five hours practicing tricks on the halfpipe. Then he'd head to the gym, to lift weights and ride the stationary bike until dinner. His only days off were when he was stuck in airports, flying across the country in pursuit of fresh powder. (Kevin could rattle off snow reports like a Weather Channel meteorologist.) His body fat was down to 3 percent.

“I felt like I could never take a day off,” Kevin remembers. “I was just entirely focused on getting to the Olympics, on winning at the trials. That was the only thing I was thinking about.” His family had already booked plane tickets to Vancouver.

At the time, the Olympic hype machine was in full swing; Kevin had already done interviews with NBC, ESPN, and The New York Times. The snowboarding competition was being framed as a battle between Kevin and Shaun White, 24, the most famous snowboarder in the world. White had won gold in the 2006 Turin Games and become the sole face of the sport, the only male snowboarder ever to grace a Wheaties box and headline Letterman.

The rise of the charismatic Pearce, however, presented White with his first serious challenger. White himself embraced the competition, telling reporters that “Kevin Pearce is the only one trying something similar.” Their rivalry began in earnest at the January 2009 X Games, in Aspen, Colorado, during the last round of the superpipe event. On their final runs, Pearce and White performed a similar set of tricks. Although Pearce was widely perceived to have gone bigger, White was awarded a slightly higher score by the judges. Several snowboarders, such as third-place finisher Antti Autti, disagreed with the result. “I think Kevin went the biggest and was supersmooth, so he deserved the win,” Autti told one reporter.

Although Pearce was gracious in defeat—”It was just a great night for snowboarding,” he told the cameras—the loss was yet another reminder that the only way he'd win at the Olympics was if he pushed the acrobatic envelope like White did. “The thing about snowboarding is that nobody has any idea where the limits are,” Kevin says. “That's what makes the sport so exciting. The guys [on tour now] are trying stuff that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.”

There was one trick in particular that Kevin was determined to land—the double cork 1080. A frontside 1080 is straightforward: the rider rotates his body three times in a single plane, twisting in the air. The double cork, however, takes those spins and inverts them. After the rider leaves the lip of the halfpipe, hurling himself up to 20 feet in the air, he must whip his head toward the ground in a diagonal flip. Then he must flip again and find a way to land on a slick slope of rock-hard ice. There is no bailout position. Even hairier, the move is executed blind—the rider can't see the landing until the last second. There is no harder move in snowboarding, and perhaps no more dangerous maneuver in all of professional sports.

Kevin was aware of the risks. In the months before the Olympics, he'd become worried about the possibility of a serious injury. “I knew that I was trying some crazy moves,” he says. “I was crashing a lot, and sometimes I'd crash and be like, Shit, that was close! You get close enough times and you start to think about what it would be like if something really went wrong.” Nevertheless, Kevin continued to practice the double cork at a halfpipe in Mammoth, perfecting the trick through sheer trial and error.

Shaun White, meanwhile, was perfecting the same move in the Colorado backcountry. That year, Red Bull, one of his sponsors, had built White a private halfpipe in the Silverton wilderness at an estimated cost of $500,000. What made this setup special was its soft landing pit, a 30-foot-long metal cage filled with black foam pillows.

But even White has had some close calls. In one particularly fraught moment, he was attempting a double McTwist 1260 less than an hour before the 2010 X Games superpipe final in Aspen, a few weeks before the Vancouver Olympics. He came up short on the last flip, slamming his jaw into the ice. His helmet flew off his head. White walked away. “Of course there is a level of intimidation and fear when trying a new trick,” White wrote in an e-mail. “But I have learned over the years that you have to know your level of confidence and let that rule over fear.”

Kevin hadn't been so lucky. In June 2009, he fractured his ankle while attempting a double cork in Mammoth—the injury sidelined him all summer. Kevin shows me a video of the accident on his cell phone: he flies into the air, completes his sequence of blind flips, and then slams his board into the edge of the lip. The force of the impact sends him sliding down the slope face first.

Once the ankle healed, Kevin immediately returned to the double cork. “I felt like I really didn't have a choice,” he says. “I knew that if I wanted to win, I needed to land it.”

Such fearlessness has been a hallmark of Kevin's snowboarding career. His first trip to the hospital came after a junior boardercross competition when he was ten years old. Kevin's brother Adam, who was three years ahead of Kevin in school, was leading the snowboarding race going into the final jump. “I knew that Kevin was doing everything he could to catch me,” Adam says. “When he got to the last jump, he took off into the air. Instead of speed-checking, he straight-lined it, overshot the landing by ten feet, and slammed into the fence.” Kevin won, but he left in an ambulance with a sprained wrist.

Or consider Kevin's performance at the 2007 Nokia Air and Style competition in Munich. There were 28,000 people in the stadium, and Kevin was in second place heading into his final run. “I'd just done a 1080 [backside], but I knew that wasn't going to be enough,” he remembers. “So I figured what the hell and just launched into a cab 1260, which meant that I needed to add another turn. I'd never even tried that shit before. I guess I got a little lucky.” The crowd went crazy when he landed the move.

Less than a week before the Olympic qualifier at Mammoth Mountain, Kevin flew to Park City to practice the double cork. On the afternoon of December 31, 2009, he walked to the halfpipe for a training session with Luke Mitrani, a fellow member of the FRENDS collective, a group of seven “pro and bro” snowboarders that began as a means of staving off the loneliness of the pro tour and has since become its own brand, with a full line of eco-friendly headphones. (FRENDS is spelled with no I because the collective likes to say there is no “I” in friends.) Kevin and Luke played rock-paper-scissors to determine who would ride first. Kevin won.

After a few minutes of warm-up grabs and 720s, Kevin began preparing himself for the double cork. Other snowboarders gathered; they watched as Kevin collected speed and then headed straight upward. As soon as he was airborne, he began the double flip, pulling his board over his head. But something was wrong: Kevin was flipping too hard, overrotating. He continued twisting, playing out the tragic inertia of the trick.

Kevin struck the ice with his forehead, just above his right eye. It was a sickening sound, everyone said, the most violent crash they'd ever seen. Kevin slid, limply, to the bottom of the pipe. He would not open his eyes for another ten days.

PIA PEARCE, WHO'D GONE out to dinner, got a call from Simon, who was at home in Vermont. At first it seemed like just another accident, yet another crash for a mom accustomed to the crashes of her sons. (In recent years, Kevin had suffered at least four concussions; Adam had hairline fractures in his back and ruptured his spleen.) “They told us Kevin had hit his head but that he was wearing a helmet,” Pia says. “We had no idea how serious it was.” A few minutes later, one of Kevin's friends at the scene called back.”He told us that it was really bad and that we needed to come,” Pia remembers. “That's when I started to really worry. No one had ever told me to come before.”

The family immediately arranged a chartered flight to Utah, racing to the airport on New Year's Eve. Just as they were getting into the car, Pia heard from the doctors at the University of Utah hospital. “They weren't calling to give me an update about his condition,” she says. “They were calling to ask if they could put a drain in his brain. I didn't know what to say.”

When the family arrived at the hospital, they were greeted with more bad news. Kevin had suffered a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI); his left eye socket was broken and he was leaking blood deep within his brain. The doctors weren't sure if Kevin would survive or if he'd even wake up. Even if he did, they warned the family to have low expectations: Kevin might never be able to walk or talk. Such grim uncertainty is standard with TBIs, as much of the damage is not caused by the initial crash. (The bony skull is the ultimate helmet.) Instead, the damage occurs in the hours and days that follow as the brain tissues swell with fluid and neurons are starved of nutrients.

The family was led to the ICU, where Kevin lay heavily sedated. Adam recalls the scene: “The first time I walked into the room, I looked at him and thought he was dead,” he says. “Tubes everywhere, shit beeping, his head all bandaged. I couldn't believe this was my brother. I couldn't handle it. I walked right out and cried for hours.”

Meanwhile, the snowboarding community was in shock. “When I learned how serious it was, I was blown away,” White remembers. “I didn't know how to feel with something like that happening so close to home. It's something you don't want to hear or believe.” The FRENDS collective distributedÌýI RIDE FOR KEVINÌýstickers at the U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix on January 23, 2010, in Park City. As Kevin lay in an ICU 30 miles away, the decals were plastered on nearly every board. A Facebook tribute page for Kevin picked up more than 50,000 fans. A few weeks later, FRENDS member Scotty Lago would dedicate his bronze medal in the halfpipe to Kevin. “It was a real intense moment for the sport,” says Keir Dillon, another member of the FRENDS crew. “Before Kevin's accident, I don't think people were really worried. We knew the moves were a little risky, but it was just broken bones and stuff. But then hearing that one of your best friends was almost dead? That changes everything.”

After 48 hours, Kevin's condition stabilized. Although he was still on a breathing tube, the swelling in his brain started to retreat; he began blinking and jerking. And then, after six days in a deep coma, Kevin began to wake up. It was a gradual process, not the sudden stirring that happens in the movies. “At first you're not even sure that it's real,” Pia says. “It's hard to describe, but he just seemed more there, more present in the room. He started responding to little things, like when we'd tell him to wiggle his toes.” Simon describes the first time his son squeezed his hand after the accident as “completely incredible … A moment that I'll never forget. I felt like he was trying to tell us that he was coming back.”

It remained unclear, however, whether Kevin was still Kevin. This is often the hardest part of dealing with a severe TBI: the survivor may not emerge the same person.

Relief arrived in the form of a middle finger. It was the third week of January, and the entire family was still camped out in the hospital, spending every waking hour in a tiny ICU room. Nobody remembers what Andrew, the oldest of the Pearce brothers, actually said—”It was probably just some stupid teasing,” Andrew says—but everyone remembers what Kevin did in response: he flipped his brother off. For the family, there was no more reassuring gesture. “I started laughing and laughing,” Pia says. “I was so relieved. Because at least I knew that Kevin still had the same sense of humor. I knew he was still there.”

The next day, Kevin began moving his lips to “The Believer,” a Neil Young song. “It was the weirdest thing,” Adam says. “We'd play this one tune, and he'd be mouthing all the lyrics with his eyes closed. It was like he was singing along.” The song itself is a jaunty melody, with a deeply comforting chorus: “I'm makin' the change, I'm keepin' my faith in you. Oh yeah, I'm the believer, babe. I believe in you.”

But the devastating scope of the injury was becoming clear. Kevin, for instance, had virtually no awareness of his new limitations. He was suffering from frequent focal seizures, and he didn't realize that he couldn't walk, or that his short-term memory had all but vanished, or that the left side of his body was exceedingly weak. As a result, the doctors were forced to restrain him in bed. For the family, these weeks were some of the most trying as the elation over Kevin's survival gave way to the brutal reality of his injury. Kevin would be coping with this wound for the rest of his life.

After nearly a month in Utah, Kevin was airlifted to the Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado. The world-renowned rehabilitation center is dedicated to the treatment of spinal-cord and brain injuries. His first memory after the crash is of the plane ride to Colorado.

REHAB DID NOT begin well. The Olympics were on every television, and Kevin wasn't there. He struggled to adapt to his grueling new routine, in which he was forced to constantly confront his frailties, relearning how to walk and eat and remember. Kevin was frequently confused, and when he wasn't confused he was depressed.

The medical news was also challenging. According to Dr. Alan Weintraub, medical director of the Brain Injury Program at Craig Hospital, Kevin's injury wasn't limited to a particular corner of the cortex. Instead, the impact from his fall had triggered bleeding in the white matter deep within his brain. These are the tissues that bind our thoughts together, and their defining feature is the presence of myelin, a fatty material that insulates our nerve cells, much like the rubber around a power line. Such insulation accelerates the transmission of electrical signals, allowing the brain to process information and execute complex movements with efficient ease. (If ordinary neurons are like a winding country road, these cells are a fast interstate.) Interestingly, myelination seems to increase with practice, suggesting that the insulation and repetitive use of our neurons play an important role in the development of expertise. (This is what's known as muscle memory.) When Kevin was practicing his 1080s, rehearsing the same move again and again, he was building up these myelin sheaths, increasing the speed with which his brain processed the acrobatics. Instead of worrying about the details—that complex choreography of muscle—Kevin was able to simply will himself into motion.

But Kevin's athletic gifts were all gone, leaving him stuck with a body that didn't know how to move and a mind that didn't know how to think. “It would have been difficult enough if Kevin had just lost his ability to snowboard at an elite level,” Weintraub says. “But he also lost some very fundamental cognitive skills, such as moving his limbs and maintaining his attention and even coordinating the movement of his eyes.”

The goal of rehab is to rebuild these skills. In essence, it's the process of rebuilding those interstates, triggering stem cells in the brain to regenerate myelin sheaths. Kevin eventually threw himself into rehab, bringing the same single-minded focus to his recovery that he brought to his sport. He often spent ten hours a day working out, pushing his legs to walk and willing his eyes to see. He practiced past closing time in the hospital's balance room and insisted on repeating his short-term-memory drills until he got everything right. His parents and brothers moved to Denver, living for weeks out of a succession of hotel rooms. When Kevin felt tired, Adam would turn rehab into a competition, forcing him to try harder. “When my brother's doing it with me, I work my ass off,” Kevin says. “And you know why? Because I'm trying to beat him.”

This sibling competition has a long history: the Pearce brothers have been trying to outdo one another their entire lives. They began competing in snowboarding before it was even a sport. In one of the first snowboarding movies ever made, One Track Mind—produced by their uncle Michael McDonnell—Adam and Andrew are shown racing down Quechee Ski Hill in Vermont. Their wooden boards had been custom-built by a friend of the family named Jake Burton, who would later found Burton Snowboards. A few years later, Jake gave Kevin the first child-size snowboard produced by the company. He was six years old.

Kevin became obsessed with riding the nearby Vermont mountains. “That's all he ever wanted to do,” Pia says. “He'd wake up and start tearing down the hallway while putting his gear on. He couldn't wait to get outside.” And yet, even as Kevin and his brothers fell in love with the sport, they found themselves floundering in the classroom. Dyslexia runs in the Pearce family. Simon has struggled with reading his entire life, and his sons inherited the disorder—Andrew, Adam, and Kevin were all diagnosed with severe dyslexia as young kids. Pia believes that the challenges of dyslexia drove the boys outdoors; snowboarding was their escape from the stress of school. To encourage them, Simon and Pia renovated an old barn on their Vermont property, filling the loft-like space with Ping-Pong tables and a skateboarding ramp.

Kevin gets emotional when he talks about the support of his parents. “You've got to tell people that they're the reason I was able to do anything cool,” he tells me. “They didn't hassle me about report cards or grades or whatever. They just wanted us to keep on doing what we loved. It would have been so easy to kill it, to tell us we shouldn't spend so much time snowboarding, but they did the opposite. They're the best.”

As soon as Kevin was old enough, he joined Adam at the Stratton Mountain School, a skiing-and-snowboarding academy in Vermont. The boys would ride in the mornings and then study in the afternoon. The two brothers quickly developed an intense rivalry, pushing each other to attempt moves that they'd only read about in magazines.

It soon became clear that Kevin had a unique talent and was capable of competing with the best riders in the world. He decided to skip college and join the pro circuit, signing sponsorship deals with Nike, Burton, Oakley, and others.

Weintraub, whom Kevin calls “Dr. Dude,” believes that the constant presence of the Pearces played a crucial role in Kevin's recovery. “When we talk about the long-term impact of a TBI, it's not just about the injury,” Weintraub says. “Different people can have the same basic injury and end up in very different places. That's because the network people have in place to help them get through rehab, to help them deal with all of these new life challenges, is one of the most important factors in the recovery.”

After three months at Craig, Kevin had made remarkable progress, far outpacing his doctors' initial expectations. One day he was walking; the next day he was running. His seizures faded away, and his left side regained strength. On May 1, 2010, he moved home to Vermont.

When I first met him, last November at the Pearce home, he brushed aside talk of improvement. Although he looked like his old self—his long brown hair had grown back—Kevin insisted that his normal appearance was an illusion. “I'm still so messed up,” he said. “People tell me I keep on getting better, but I don't really notice it. All I can think about is how far I still have to go.” Kevin showed me an iPhone video of himself skateboarding the day before—”Don't tell my mom,” he whispered—and pointed out all the problems with his attempted tricks. He wasn't just bothered by his lack of body control: he quickly rattled off a list of other complaints, such as the drowsiness triggered by his antiseizure meds or not being able to beat Adam at Ping-Pong or even make sense of NBA games. “I used to love watching basketball, but now it's all a blur,” he said. “The only one I can follow is Shaq.”

Even as Kevin raged against his remaining symptoms, he seemed to marvel at the unexpected ways in which the injury had changed him as a person. “I've become way nicer,” he said. “I'm now a much better listener.” He's also developed new food cravings: since the accident, he's become obsessed with basil pesto, and he insisted that I help him and Pia make a big batch. “I really didn't like pesto that much before, but now I put it on everything,” he said. “It's crazy how tasty it is.” When Kevin put his feet up on the coffee table, he announced that this is also a new habit. “I would never put my feet up before, but now I always do it,” he said. Even his musical tastes have changed: although Kevin used to like hip-hop, his favorite artist is now Neil Young. I asked him for his favorite song. “‘The Believer,' for sure,” he said. And then he started to sing.

THE LAST TIME I see Kevin is on the beach in late December in Carlsbad, California, a sleepy town about 35 miles north of San Diego. Kevin is here to see a tiny cottage he bought a week before the crash but didn't move into. Unfortunately, he has no memory of the place. He doesn't know what it looks like or what he was thinking when he bought it. He thinks he chose Carlsbad for the weather—”I guess I wanted to be somewhere warmer,” he says—and because he loved to surf in the off-season.

The house's renovation is being overseen by his dad—”Oh, man, it's a mess in there,” Kevin says—and so we meet instead at his motel. It's been two months since our time together in Vermont, and I'm startled by Kevin's progress. Although he still has some blurred vision, his eyesight is improving so quickly that he gets new prescription Oakleys about once a month. (Kevin still works with all of his sponsors—his clothes are plastered with logos.) He's back to watching Celtics games. His short-term memory has also dramatically improved—he no longer repeats the same stories or asks the same questions. When Adam leaves to pick up sandwiches, Kevin never wonders where his brother has gone or when the chicken pesto is coming.

The only downside is that, as the effects of the trauma recede, Kevin's becoming increasingly aware of his persistent shortcomings, those problems that rehab can't fix. Studies of severe TBIs demonstrate that not all white matter can regenerate, even after years of therapy. Although the brain is a plastic organ, able to heal itself, the healing remains circumscribed. And so Kevin feels stuck in limbo, increasingly mindful of what his mind can't do. He now remembers when he forgets. He notices when he can't pay attention to things, when his mind drifts away in the middle of a conversation, or when he loses his place in a paragraph. At the motel, I watch him read a fan letter from a young snowboarder. The words come slowly, haltingly; he has to repeat several sentences out loud to decipher their meaning. By the time he's finished, his face betrays a mixture of fatigue and pleasure.

Earlier in December, Kevin was back at Craig, getting an update from the doctors on his progress. (He continued rehab in Vermont, spending several hours every day on memory and attention issues at the local hospital.) Although the family is proud of the medical report from Craig—”If you'd told me when Kevin was in a coma that he would be like this within a year, I never would have believed you,” Pia says—I can see that something is bothering Kevin. After a little prodding, he admits that the doctors gave him some disappointing news. Because the brain heals very slowly, it's essential to avoid the possibility of a second injury, lest the recovery become undone. (This is why NFL players are now sidelined for weeks after even mild concussions.) “The doctor told me I can't go riding,” Kevin says. “My brain is still too fragile. Six more months.” He looks, for a moment, unbearably sad.

“You have to remember, riding is all I've ever done,” Kevin says. “It's what I know. It's the only thing I'm good at. So yeah, I miss it an insane amount. When I close my eyes, I can still remember what it feels like, that feeling of coming down [a slope] by myself. There are no words for it.”

While impatiently waiting for clearance from his doctors, Kevin has begun experimenting with his first solo trips. In December he attended his first contest since the accident, spending a few days with friends on the Dew Tour in Breckenridge, Colorado. Although the trip was a logistical success—Kevin navigated the airports without getting lost—there were some difficult moments. “Every day, I'd walk out of the house and think for a second that I'd forgotten my board,” Kevin says. “But then I'd be like, Oh, wait. Never mind. That second sucked.”

In January, Kevin attended the X Games in Aspen. Although he enjoyed his time in the ESPN announcing booth, it was extremely hard not being part of the action. He still feels like a fierce competitor, constantly thinking to himself about how he would beat that score or outdo that trick. At night he still dreams of landing double corks. And then he wakes up.

The good news is that Kevin will ride again. Although his halfpipe days are over—another TBI would have devastating consequences—his doctors believe he'll soon be able to show off in powder. Kevin is mostly satisfied with this compromise, as he's always preferred “cruising” in the backcountry anyway. Before the accident, Kevin had told Adam that he was going to cut back on competition after the Olympics. “The sport is just too crazy now,” Kevin says. “It's all about kids hitting tricks. No smoothness, no grace.” Although he refuses to use his injury as a call for reform—”The only lesson of my crash is that riders should wear helmets,” he says—he remains uneasy about the direction of the pro tour and the constant one-upmanship among adolescents. (At the most recent X Games, Norwegian Torstein Horgmo became the first snowboarder to land a triple cork in competition.) Kevin believes that the sport should be about more than degrees of rotation and blind flips, that not every new move should require a cushioned halfpipe to develop. “When I start riding again, I want to go to places where no one has ever ridden before, where you have to hike up for hours,” he says. “It sounds cheesy, but I want to show people that snowboarding can also be beautiful.”

Of course, that kind of cinematic terrain is not always safe: Pia reminds Kevin that the backcountry is full of cliffs and avalanches. But Kevin is undeterred. When I ask him whether he thinks he'll always be involved with snowboarding, his first answer is “Of course!” But then he seems to reconsider as the reality of his injury seeps in. “I guess I really don't know,” he says. “Life is pretty crazy. I'm not thinking too far ahead.”

“I spent my whole life on this sport, working so hard at it, and now it's all finished,” Kevin says. “But I'm realizing now that other stuff makes me happy, too. There's more to life than landing a trick.”

A few days later, Kevin calls with big news; I can feel his excitement over the phone. “I got my driver's license, bro!” he yells. “I passed the test! I'm a free man!” For the past few months, Kevin has been fixated on getting behind the wheel. But the last hurdle to independence was cleared in late March when Kevin moved to Carlsbad. “It's been a super-intense year,” he says. “But it feels really good to know that, even after everything that's happened, I'm back on my own.”

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CLAY MARZO HAS BEEN WAITING ALL MORNING FOR WAVES. He’s standing with his surfboard next to a NO TRESPASSING sign on the edge of a pineapple field, looking down at a remote beach on the northwest shore of Maui. There are no tourists here, because there is no sand, just a field of jagged lava rocks and a private dirt road. The tide is still too far out, so the waves are trashy. Clay hasn’t said a word for more than an hour; he hasn’t even moved. He’s just stood in the hot tropical sun and stared silently at the sea.

The waiting ends a few hours later, shortly after 1 P.M., when the trade winds begin to blow. Clay furiously rubs his hands together, like a man trying to start a fire, and lets out a few guttural whoops. He then grabs his board and quickly descends the steep slope in his bare feet, motioning for me to follow him.

There are a few surfers in the breaks to the right, away from the rocks. Clay heads to the left, where the waves are bigger. He paddles out and starts scanning the horizon, counting the seconds between the heaving swells. After a few minutes, he abruptly turns around and points his board toward the shore. His body goes taut and he starts to push backwards. The wave is still invisible I can’t even feel the undertow but Clay is already searching for the perfect position. And then it appears: a six-foot wall of shimmering blue. The water rises until it starts to collapse, which is when Clay pops up onto his board. He accelerates ahead of the break his sudden speed makes the wave seem slow and then he snaps upward, launches his board into the air, and somehow whips it around, so that he lands backwards on the disintegrating lip. For a dramatic moment, Clay looks off balance, but then he reverses the board and calmly rides the whitewash until it can no longer carry him. The wave is over. He’s already looking for the next one.

Clay Marzo doesn’t love surfing. Love is a complicated thing sometimes people fall out of love but there is nothing complicated about Clay’s relationship to the ocean. For Clay, surfing is an elemental need, a form of sustenance, a way of being that he couldn’t be without. He just turned 20, but he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t obsessed with barrels, shortboards, and the daily swell report. When there are no waves, Clay sinks into a stupor. His face takes on a sad, frustrated expression, and strangers think that he’s constantly about to cry, although that’s just because his light-blue eyes get irritated by the sun. When I ask Clay what he would do if he couldn’t surf, he looks confused for a second, as if he’s unable to imagine such a terrifying possibility. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess then I would just want to surf.”

In December 2007, Clay was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of “high-functioning” autism. In recent years, as parents and doctors have begun to worry about a possible autism epidemic a reported 1 in 150 children are now diagnosed with the syndrome there has been an increased focus on understanding and treating its symptoms, which include impaired social interactions, difficulty with communication, and the tendency to fixate on repetitive behaviors. While Clay has many of these deficits he’s easily overwhelmed by other people and often struggles to express himself he also demonstrates one of the distinguishing features of Asperger’s: an “encompassing preoccupation” with a narrow subject. Some children with the syndrome become obsessed with 19th-century trains or coffee makers or The Price Is Right. Others will memorize camera serial numbers, even if they show little interest in photography. Hans Asperger, the Viennese pediatrician who first identified the disorder in 1944, argued that such obsessiveness can be a prerequisite for important achievement, even if it comes at a steep social cost: “It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential,” Asperger wrote. “The necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world with all abilities canalized into the one specialty.”

What makes Clay unique is that his obsession is a sport, not an abstract intellectual category. While many children with Asperger’s are marked by their lack of coordination “motor clumsiness” is a very common trait Clay moves in the water with an uncommon grace. (His movements are much more awkward on dry land; I watched him hit his head on a car door and knock over two water glasses in the span of 15 minutes.) “Clay’s kind of a surfing freak,” nine-time Association of Surfing Professionals world champion Kelly Slater has said. “He’s like a cat. He’s got this ability to always land on his feet. Clay definitely knows things that I don’t know.” Clay’s nickname is “the Rubber-Band Man,” since he’ll consistently stick maneuvers, such as his signature aerial reversal, that aren’t supposed to be possible. He’ll be bent over backwards, his blond hair in the water, and he’ll find a way to stand up.

At the moment, Clay is one of the most celebrated surfers in the world. He already has a national surfing title and numerous Hawaiian titles; he’s been featured on the cover of Surfer magazine and is a mainstay on YouTube, where one of his clips has been watched more than 100,000 times. Although Clay has yet to qualify for the ASP World Tour a series of competitions featuring the 46 top-ranked surfers his low ranking hasn’t hindered his reputation for being world-class. Kai Barger, a fellow Maui surfer and the current ASP world junior champion, recently called Clay “the best out of all of us, and it’s all natural. He never had to work at it.”

But Kai is wrong. Although Clay’s body appears to be perfectly designed for the sport he has a long torso and short legs, which gives him a low center of gravity and the ability to crouch in tight barrels his real secret is that he’s always in the water. If Clay isn’t surfing (and the only time he’s not surfing is when there are no waves or it’s a moonless night), then he’s probably watching slow-motion videos of himself surfing, which he’s been known to study for ten hours straight. His mom, Jill Marzo, used to be his main videographer. From the time he was seven years old, she would sit on the beach in the shade and record Clay until the camcorder battery ran out. “If I ever missed a good ride, he’d get so upset,” Jill says. “He remembers every single wave. They all kind of look the same to me, but not to Clay. Those waves are what he lives for.”

Jill is used to speaking for her son, since he often struggles to speak for himself. Here on Maui, I’ve watched him flail for words during several interviews with an ESPN news crew, avoiding eye contact and staring instead at the cameras and sound equipment. Even the simplest questions lead to awkward silences and stammers, as if Clay is terrified of saying the wrong thing. And yet, if you’re able to talk to Clay when he’s comfortable and he’s always most at ease in the warm Hawaiian water he’s likely to surprise you with his eloquence as he reels off one vivid metaphor after another. He describes the feeling of surfing inside a barrel as “like being inside a throat when someone coughs and spits you out.” When I ask Clay what he loves about waves, he goes silent and looks away. I assume he’s going to ignore my question. But then he utters a line that could easily be his slogan: “Waves are like toys from God.”

CLAY WASN’T A DIFFICULT BABY, just different. He walked before he crawled: At the age of seven months and one week, he stood up and took his first steps. Jill is a warm and physical person she’s a massage therapist with an easy laugh and the crinkled, bronzed skin of someone who’s always in the sun but Clay never liked being touched. He stopped nursing after seven months. And then there was his strange relationship with water. The only way to get Clay to fall asleep as a baby was to put him in a warm bath. “We’d do four tubs a day,” Jill says. “I’d put my hand under his back and let him float with the tap running. He’d pass right out.”

Clay grew up with his mom and his dad, Gino, a construction superintendent, 20 feet from Puamana Beach, near the old whaling port of Lahaina, in West Maui. There was little to do in the town Lahaina consists mainly of chain restaurants, shaved-ice parlors, and convenience stores selling sunblock so Clay would spend all day in the surf. When he was a year old, he started to ride on the front of Gino’s board. Six months later, he was playing by himself in the shore break. “He loved to duck under the waves,” Jill says. “The tourists would look at me like I’d lost my mind, letting this little kid get knocked over, but that’s what made him happy.” At the age of two, Clay started boogie-boarding; by the time he was five, he was riding his own shortboard.

Despite this early start, Clay was never considered the best surfer in his family. His half brother, Cheyne Magnusson, 26, is the son of Jill and skateboarding legend Tony Magnusson. Clay was still learning how to surf when Cheyne, who has a mane of bright-red curly hair, signed with Quiksilver. (Jill married Gino in 1989.) “It was always Cheyne getting the attention,” Jill says. “We’d go to surf tournaments and Clay would be busy collecting seashells, because he couldn’t be out there in the water. He idolized his brother growing up.”

As Clay got older, his prodigious physical gifts started to become obvious. At age ten, he won the state 200-meter freestyle swimming championship for his age group, despite the fact that he rarely found time to practice. (“I could never get him in those Speedos,” Jill says.) When Clay was 11, he finished third at the National Scholastic Surfing Association (NSSA) competition in the “Mini-Grom” age group. Clay became known in West Maui as a fearless surfer, the little kid who found a way to emerge, somehow, from the gnarliest of barrels. Jill remembers one spring contest when the waves were 20 feet tall. “This was a junior amateur competition, so a lot of people wanted to cancel it for safety reasons,” she says. “But Clay didn’t care about any of that. He just wanted to surf, and so he grabbed his board and paddled out. His leash snapped on one big wave, but he still wouldn’t come in.” Clay ended up winning the contest.

Life outside of the water, however, was getting increasingly difficult. Asperger’s is a pervasive developmental disorder, which means that Clay’s mind was different from a very early age. Several brain-scanning experiments have found that people with Asperger’s process emotional facial expressions differently from other people. As a result, Clay must consciously decipher every smile and grimace; a face is a code to be cracked. Other studies have found links between an obscure genetic mutation in the serotonin pathway and the tendency to exhibit obsessive-compulsive and Aspergian traits. Despite these tantalizing clues, the anatomy of the disorder remains mostly a mystery. There are only theories on why people with Asperger’s tend to avoid eye contact, find banal interactions so stressful, and seek solace in repetitive activities. Humans are a social species; Asperger’s turns social interaction into a source of suffering.

While most treatments for Asperger’s and other autism spectrum disorders focus on early diagnosis and intervention it’s becoming more common for a kid to be diagnosed before the age of three Clay spent his childhood getting routinely misdiagnosed. In first grade, a school psychologist blamed his struggles in the classroom on attention-deficit disorder; the Ritalin only made things worse. Jill and Gino moved him from school to school, searching for a teacher who could “unlock” their son. After several frustrating years, Jill decided to homeschool Clay, if only to keep him away from the bullies who teased him for his seashell collection. “He was always such a good kid,” Jill says. “I’d give him his vitamins, and the pill wouldn’t even be down his throat and he’d say, ‘Mom, it’s working, I can feel it working. I’m going to get better.’ He wanted to be like everybody else so bad.” When I ask Clay about his school years, he winces and starts to mumble and swallow his words. “I always knew that I was real different,” he says. “It’s like everyone else has a bucket for dealing with people and I only got a cup. When my cup gets too full, then I shut down.”

But Clay was lucky: When life got difficult, he could always escape to the ocean. As a ten-year-old, he started surfing for eight hours straight, only coming in for fresh water or food, although he was hospitalized twice for dehydration. “It got to the point where he’d only come in to eat,” Jill says. “He’d scarf the food down and then go right back out.” Late at night, Jill would often hear a commotion coming from Clay’s room. She’d find him standing up in his sleep, his arms extended as if he were riding a barrel.

WHEN CLAY WAS 14, in 2003, he sent Quiksilver a video of himself surfing. The 30-second tape is charmingly amateur. The camcorder footage is shaky; the video is set to classical music, because Clay thought it made the promo seem more sophisticated. “Usually you can’t see real talent until a surfer is 16 or 17,” says Strider Wasilewski, the surf-team manager at Quiksilver. “It’s really hard to get all the skills down if a kid isn’t done growing yet. Clay, though, was a natural phenom. He had this deep connection with the water, like he knew what the wave was going to do before it happened.”

Quiksilver immediately signed Clay to a small endorsement deal, and at first everything went according to plan: In 2005, he won the NSSA Nationals Open Men’s with an unprecedented score of all perfect tens. While the tournament introduced the 15-year-old to the professional surfing community “That’s when people began to notice me,” he says it also presented new challenges. “After the Open, life started to get so hectic,” Clay says. “I had to go on all these video trips and stuff. They were fun but also so tiring.”

On one surfing trip, Clay got stranded at an Indonesian airport due to bad weather. He spent five days alone, waiting for a flight home and racking up a $1,000 cell-phone bill as he frantically called Jill for reassurance. Jamie Tierney, the director of numerous Quiksilver surfing documentaries including Just Add Water, a 2008 profile of Clay and his struggles with Asperger’s remembers meeting him for the first time at a restaurant, with ten other company employees. “Clay ate his food without ever looking up or saying a word,” he says. “Then he went over to a nearby bench and laid down with his eyes closed, silently rapping as if he was trying to block it all out. I assumed that he was just another moody teenager.”

Clay also struggled with the commercial aspects of professional surfing, from signing autographs to supporting his sponsors. When Quiksilver asked him to do a short promotional video for a new line of boardshorts, he delivered a characteristically blunt assessment on camera. “They should be a little longer. Maybe with better material, too,” he said of the neon-pink trunks. “And I don’t like the color.” It’s only at this point that Clay realized he might have said the wrong thing. “Why, do you want me to like them?”

Despite the challenges of dealing with Clay, Wasilewski and Tierney became endeared to the other side of his personality, which emerged whenever he was in the water. These dramatic swings in temperament were what first led Tierney, whose parents were both psychologists, to suspect Asperger’s. “I knew it wasn’t a learning disability, because I’d talked to Clay about the ocean and I could see how smart he was,” he says. “He could vividly remember every wave he ever surfed, but couldn’t recall where he left his cell phone or credit card.” After Tierney made the connection, he realized that it neatly explained the contradictions of Clay, how the same person could be rigid and difficult on land but so freewheeling in the surf. “For the first time, I felt like I understood Clay,” Tierney says. “This is why he needed to surf.”

But it wasn’t easy convincing Jill to have Clay tested for Asperger’s. She was worried that if he was diagnosed, Quiksilver would drop him. “Clay had been tested for so many different things that I told myself I was done trying to put a label on him,” she says. “But when I learned about Asperger’s, I knew it was worth one more try.” When she described the myriad symptoms to Clay, such as extremely sensitive hearing and poor sleep habits, his response was simple recognition: “Yeah, that’s me,” he said. And then he left to surf.

A few months later, at a clinic in California, Clay was evaluated by a psychologist using a test based on a series of clinical symptoms. The waiting room was full of four-year-olds and anxious mothers; Clay was the only teenager there. Jill starts to choke up when she remembers the testing day. “I realized this must be so hard for him,” she says. “He must be thinking, What’s wrong with me? Why am I here with all these little kids? What did I do wrong?”

THE FIRST TIME I MET UP with Clay, he was parked on the side of a winding Maui highway in his red Toyota Matrix, which he won in a surfing competition several years ago but only recently learned to drive. The windows were vibrating with the drumbeat of underground rap Clay finds the intense rhythms soothing and he was waiting, along with his girlfriend, Alicia Yamada, a petite and pretty 22-year-old, for the morning lull to pass. Clay and Alicia have been together for three years; according to Jill, she’s the only person outside the family who can give Clay a “full body hug” and not make him wince. “Our life is pretty much about surfing,” says Alicia, who moved from New Hampshire to Maui at 15 and surfs as a hobby. “Sometimes we go get food, but mostly what we do is surf.” I asked Clay if he knew where he was going to surf that afternoon. He looked away and explained that he was going to a nearby beach with nice waves the mere mention of waves makes him smile but it was only for locals. There was a fence and no tourists, so he said I shouldn’t come. Clay is protective of his secret spots; people ruin everything.

The next time I saw him, it was another windless day and he was absorbed in a computer screen, staring at recent footage of himself from Lanai. We were in a small, windowless room at his parents’ house; the air-conditioning was blowing full blast, but Clay was dressed for the beach, in a tank top and boardshorts. This was the house where Clay lives with his parents and his 11-year-old sister, Gina, in a gated development just north of the big Kaanapali resorts. He also has a small condo of his own, although he still depends on Jill to handle the bills and manage his calendar; he likes being home, where he can raid the fridge and edit his videos. I quickly learned that it’s impossible to watch surfing footage alongside Clay, since he likes to replay the same five-second snippet of wave over and over again, as if in a repetitive trance. Once he’s satisfied that there’s nothing left to learn, he fast-forwards to the next swell.

While the diagnosis of Asperger’s was a tremendous relief to Jill and the Quiksilver team, it didn’t help Clay compete in the water as he struggled to live up to his early hype. Although he’d displayed flashes of brilliance at various surf contests, he couldn’t figure out how to put together a winning performance. A big part of the problem was the need to compete for waves in the lineup what surfers refer to as “hassling.” Not surprisingly, Clay finds these negotiations tiresome and frustrating. “A lot of the stuff you have to do [to win contests] is bullshit,” he says. “If the waves aren’t good, then it’s just a paddle battle. It’s not about real surfing.” Chad Wells, Clay’s competition manager, is trying to teach him a few basic strategies to help him perform better in contests, especially when there are mediocre waves and crowded waters.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to win “Don’t let Clay fool you, he’d love to be number one,” Jill says it’s that he’d rather score a perfect barrel than focus on the points standings. Clay is most interested in the pure experience of the wave, the visceral pleasure of playing with physics and water. Quiksilver’s Wasilewski worries that any attempt to make Clay more competitive will end up interfering with the very qualities that make him such a unique talent. “He’s the purest surfer I’ve ever met,” Wasilewski says. “Once he’s on a wave, he’s not thinking about anything but the wave. He’s letting go, and you can feel that release when you watch him. I don’t want to do anything that takes away from that, because that purity is damn rare.”

But if Clay can’t win contests, how can he sustain a career? One alternative mentioned by Wasilewski and others at Quiksilver is freesurfing, which eschews competition in favor of the perpetual quest to achieve the most astonishing ride. In recent years, a number of surfers, from Dane Reynolds to the Malloy brothers, have gotten lucrative endorsement contracts without winning major competitions. (Bruce Irons, one of Clay’s favorite surfers, announced last year that he was quitting the ASP tour to focus on freesurfing.)

Few doubt that Clay has the ability to become an elite freesurfer. In fact, he’s already amassed a collection of stunning clips from his performances in Young Guns 3 and other films. “Clay is absolutely one of the best surfers in the world,” Wasilewski says. “He’s more than talented enough to win contests. But at what cost? I don’t want him to freak out or be miserable because he’s got to conform. The most important thing is for Clay to be happy.”

Needless to say, Clay prefers freesurfing. While he’s not quite ready to give up on competitions at the recent Tahiti trials, he earned the highest scores in the early rounds, before he got too frustrated and gave up in the quarterfinals he realizes that he probably lacks the guile and stamina to consistently win on the tour. He’d rather wake up at dawn, check the surf report on , and pick a local beach based on the direction of the swells. “If I had my way, I’d be a freesurfer,” Clay says. “I’d spend all my time chasing perfect waves. That’s it. No people, just waves.”

NOBODY KNOWS WHY CLAY feels so different in the water. Some speculate that it’s the negative ions or the predictable rhythms of the waves or the way liquid wraps around the body. Clay himself describes being alone in the ocean as a kind of psychological escape, the only place where he can embrace the splendor of experience: “When I’m there, I don’t need to think so much,” he says. “I don’t need to worry. I’m just there, you know?”

According to Jill and Clay, the only downside of getting the diagnosis has been the family tension. Gino and Cheyne have both been dismissive of Asperger’s “Not everybody gets that Clay really is different and can’t help it,” Jill says. Gino remains a supportive parent but still believes Clay’s biggest problem is a lack of discipline. Nevertheless, the diagnosis has helped others understand that Clay’s need to surf isn’t simply a childish obsession or an exaggeration of the Quiksilver marketing team, which describes him as “packing in more water time than most ocean mammals.” Clay has been working with a behavioral therapist, who has helped him become more aware of the conditions that trigger his “meltdowns,” which typically involve too much time away from the sea. He now relies on a color-coded system to describe his moods yellow represents calm and comfort; brown signifies unease, which for him means that it’s time to surf; red is what happens when there are no waves. He’s also learned to be more considerate of others. After a recent surf trip to Peru, he returned home to Maui with a gift for his mom. “It was the sweetest thing,” Jill says. “He wanted to buy us matching magnets with our names on them. Unfortunately, they didn’t have our names, so he brought back the closest match. He’s got a ‘Calvin’ magnet, and I’m ‘Julie.’ But it’s the thought that counts.”

Other changes have been more mundane but no less important. Clay has had to cut back on his favorite junk foods, such as pizza with ranch dressing and beef burritos with extra sour cream. He now drinks lots of açai-berry smoothies so that he doesn’t “crash and get all tired” after a long day in the waves.

While Clay was once regarded as a difficult teenager, and a real problem child on the road, he’s since become an inspiration to many of those around him. Larry Haynes, a surf cinematographer who recently filmed Clay on Maui, said he came away inspired by Clay’s unconditional dedication to doing what he loves.”Clay lives out my motto better than anybody,” says Haynes. “‘In life you’ve got to take the crap with the cream. Enjoy the cream.’ That’s what Clay does naturally. He’s got a lot to teach the rest of us.”

Perhaps the biggest shift, however, has been Clay’s new appreciation for the benefits of Asperger’s. He used to resent his symptoms, those social handicaps that got him teased and ridiculed in school. But now he sees that his burden is also a blessing. “If I didn’t have Asperger’s, then I wouldn’t be out there as much,” he says. “Because I love surfing, I can completely focus on it. And so I do things in the water that maybe others can’t.”

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