DANA CUMMINGS: “I was just existing, not living. It took me to lose my leg to get me to realize how precious life is and get off the couch and start living. I do more things now than I ever did before.”

MARIO RITTER: Disabled people have more sports programs available than ever before -- skiing, soccer, basketball. But surfing classes are less common. The eleven students on the beach in Maine have come from all over the Northeast to learn.

One family drove six hours from New Jersey. They are joined by more than thirty volunteers who have taken time from work to help Dana Cummings.

DANA CUMMINGS: “How’s everybody feeling? Feeling good.”

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Brian Foss from New Hampshire is fifty-seven. He got sick from the polio virus early in life.

BRIAN FOSS: “I had polio in nineteen fifty-five, when I was two years old, the year the vaccine came out, actually. I missed it by a little bit.”

Brian has weakness in his legs and walks with crutches. But he loves downhill skiing, bicycling -- and now surfing.

BRIAN FOSS: “It’s a sense of being able to fly and a sense of freedom. You’re not constrained by gravity, almost.”

MARIO RITTER: The youngest participant in the class, at six and a half years old, is Shaun McLaughlin from Massachusetts. He was born without a right foot. He received a prosthetic device before he could walk.