Bow High humanities teacher Jessica Fisher told graduates yesterday that life is like surfing. You spend a lot of time paddling and falling, but everyone now and then the wave is yours. Senior Maria Zachistal, 19, knows plenty about that. Her family lost their house to the economy last year and spent the summer living in a tent at Epsom campground. At the start of this school year, they moved in with friends in Bow so Zachistal could graduate with her class. And that was only the family's most recent knock from the surfboard.

Zachistal has had multiple ear surgeries to deal with a tumor. Her hearing is diminished enough that she needed aides to help her through many classes. And she still mourns the death of twin siblings, who died several years ago from health problems.

Yet, Zachistal is determined, even appreciative of what those struggles have taught her.

"Everything we've gone through has brought us together," she said of her parents, Sue and John, and siblings, William, 7, and Allyson, 9. Like when it rained at the campground and the family ran an electric cord into the tent, gathered around the computer and watched a movie.

Zachistal's favorites are oldies starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

"It's always brought us closer, and I think that's the way I am now," she said. "I think that it's what on the inside that matters most, not what's on the outside."

Bow High graduated 128 seniors yesterday, and speakers touched not only on surfing but also on Charles Darwin, Queen Elizabeth, Barack Obama and . . . Bow senior Ben Morrow.

Senior Alex Davis implored his classmates to be exhilarated, not frightened and discouraged by limits. "Too often we are bashful about our limits," Davis said. "Unwilling to break through them. It's our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."

Morrow convinced Davis that's true.

When the two were in ninth grade, Davis asked Morrow, a wrestler, if he thought he'd get 100 wins before he graduated. Morrow didn't know but said he was shooting for 130 because even if he missed by a bit, he'd get his name on a banner in the high school gym.

And there it was at yesterday's ceremony. Morrow

nailed 129 wins, Davis said, the second most in the school's history.

"Hold in your mind your deepest fears and use the rest of your life to smash through them," Davis told his classmates.

For Marissa Lynn, the metaphor was not surfboards or wrestling wins but swimming iguanas.

Darwin discovered the water iguanas during his study of the Galapagos Islands, research that led him to believe a species survives not by being the smartest or strongest, but the most adaptable, Lynn said.

What, she said, was an iguana to do when it found itself washed up on an unfamiliar island, far from its habitat? Learn to swim. Be like the iguana, she told her classmates.

"Don't be afraid of changes that are sure to come," she said. "We can adapt."

For Zachistal the changes and questions are big and imminent. Her parents are trying to find the family a home of its own, and her dad is looking for work.

But like Morrow, Darwin and the others who thought big, Zachistal is hoping to follow high school with cooking school. Her dream is to be a chef. First up, though, was enjoying her new status as Bow High graduate.

"I have no clue what we are doing to celebrate," she said Friday. "I think I just want to go home and yell, 'Hooray' and let it sink in."