Somewhere in America, a baseball stadium. Forty thousand people, and suddenly, for no reason I could see, one slice of them stood and sat back down. Then the next slice. Then the next. A tide of bodies, rolling around the bowl toward me. I understood at once: a maneuver. A rising passed shoulder to shoulder, the way a clan signals along a wall that the enemy is near. I did not know the enemy. But I would not be the man who broke the formation. I studied the timing. The men beside me tensed. This was my section's moment to hold the line. I stood — Too early. Alone. One warrior risen against a sky of seated strangers. The tide had not reached us yet. The man beside me looked up, kindly. "You gotta wait for it, buddy." Wait for it. The maneuver has a rhythm, and I had insulted the rhythm. I sat. My face was hot. Eight hundred years of reading the battlefield, and I had misjudged a wave of office workers eating nachos. It came around again. I felt the swell now — three sections away, two, one — I rose with them. Arms up. A clean link in the chain. The tide passed through me and rolled on, and I had never felt so completely part of something I did not understand. "There you go," the man said, not looking, eating a nacho. A man does not ask the tide to wait for him. He learns its rhythm, or he stands alone. I do not know who the enemy was. I no longer think there was one. The wave exists only so that forty thousand strangers can, for six seconds, become one body and feel it. I will ride every wave from now on. And I will never again rise too soon.