“The Edge . . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” - Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
I was looking pretty dour on the beach at Ocean City. Two seagulls had found a pile of foodscraps and garbage left behind by some hick family, and soon began fighting over a single Veggie Straw. I followed the action with my eyes, tracking the birds as they flew down to where the waves were breaking. They sidestepped expertly, one holding the Veggie Straw in its beak, one pecking at the other in an attempt to snatch it. Eventually, the richer bird cocked its head up, forced its beak shut, and snapped the rotten little morsel into three sections. The center remained in its beak and fell down its gullet, but by the time it had finished swallowing, the other pieces were pecked out of the sand and swallowed as well.
They stood still for a moment afterwards, looking around like they were seeing the land for the first time. Then a wave crashed, and as foam rushed towards their feet, they flew back to the garbage pile together, finding it inhabited by two more of their species. The Veggie Straw Debacle seemed to leave a lasting impression on the two originators, and the lesson they learned from it was immediately applicable. The four birds found order amongst themselves and pecked at the sand in peace for a while, sharing the tiny landfill in a beautiful communion. I sat watching them behind my Ray-Bans.
Suddenly I heard a series of terrible squawks, all falling around me in quick succession and reaching me from different angles in the sky. In the reflection of the world behind me, vaguely glimpsed from the tint of my sunglasses, I watched as a white shape whizzed past my head. Then I saw it come into my forward-facing view and land at the garbage pile, kicking up sand as it did and flapping its wings out to full length.
The other gulls backed off immediately. A Goldfish cracker fell from one’s beak in the wake of the squawker’s arrival. He continued screaming in the faces of the other birds, widening the circle his landing had created; puffing out his chest and all the while flapping his wings like he was trying to blow the goodwill back to the sea.
This kind of petulance and rage was impossible to understand as a human, and disgusted me to the point of turning away. In the brooding that followed, I realized that my disgust rose from a place more disturbing than a mere misunderstanding of birds: that the petulance and rage was actually very familiar as a human being.
I ruminated on this and scanned the ocean, looking for Ryan. A wave crashed. Two children screamed with surprise and delight as the chilly water crashed over their heads. Above them, I could see another seagull, midflight. For a moment, he looked painted onto the sky. He was flying against the harsh wind and going nowhere. He was a stationary object against the gray firmament, like a mark that had been scratched onto the world in its molding. A profound sense of depression struck me, and I rested my head against my knuckles.
Ryan appeared slowly conquering the height of the shore, water dripping from his hair like from vines in a rainforest. He shook a little bit and flung more droplets into the sand, leaving dark circlets where they fell.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “You done?”
“Yeah. The water’s too cold to stay in right now.”
“Are we heading back?”
“If you’re done birdwatching.”
The next day was sunnier, and miserably hot. Just standing inside Robert Bunting’s biplane hangar/control room/tiki bar had sweat pooling in the small of my back. We needed to find a way to rectify this mind-numbing heat, but our thoughts at first rested only on getting back to our 137th Street condo.
Stuck in traffic somewhere along the (don’t laugh) Assawoman Bay Bridge, the idea of jet skiing came to Ryan, presumably after looking into the bay and seeing a few go by. Even after sitting in a car with air conditioning for the better part of an hour, I was still too delirious to feel any apprehension to this idea at all. As he looked up rental agencies online, I turned to the window and saw a few in action. I watched as two small shapes struggled to hang on to fast machines that were bobbing harshly in the water. I remember thinking that it looked rougher than it does in cartoons.
The available rental slots for the day were at eleven o’clock, two thirty, and four thirty. After reading this off to me, Ryan looked at me from the passenger seat searchingly, as if I would have said anything but four thirty. I needed time to recuperate from our early rising and the brutality of the sun, so I told him I would be napping until we had to leave.
Matthew Ryan Barrett is more than just a Car Guy–he is a driving freak. There is a definite joy for him in the fact that he possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of makes, models, and their years; along with the in’s-and-out’s of all the mechanical information pertaining to any streetcar you could point at. But the real joy for him lies in the operation of a vehicle, and the discovery of the limits he can push it to.
He’s hit a deer going forty five, flipped a 2019 Nissan Rogue trying to take a turn at sixty in the rain, and broken his wrist and collar bone flipping a four-wheeler. He drag races sparingly (occasionally at my insistence) and has shown me–after two or three attempts–his skill at performing handbrake turns in his 2004 GMC Envoy. On long, straight, empty roads, he tests a car’s zero-to-sixty speed; on empty roads with huge asphalt hills, he tries to get a little airtime. On dark nighttime roads, we sit with his headlights off and wait for a car to pass. Then he opens the Envoy’s luminescent eyes, and we follow that car’s every turn until we’ve forced the driver into a frantic, paranoid chase. We follow them until they park in the middle of a cul-de-sac with their hazards on and watch as the door flings open and the driver runs out, presumably into their home to grab a handgun. Then we peel off into the night, out to find somewhere new where we can do it all again.
These are not risks I’d be willing to take in my own car, because I am not the driving fiend that Ryan is. He has an intimate understanding of how to operate vehicles efficiently and daringly, and a near preternatural connection to the Road that escapes even my psychic consciousness. He knows that the Road is not something you can tame or even live passively with. Every second on the Road is like trying to break a crazy horse: knowing when to dig your heels in and knowing when to let up; knowing when the horse is calm enough to step around on its own, and knowing when to take up the reins again. Some people have a natural talent for that, because they can vibrate sympathetically with a horse’s soul. Ryan is one of the few living people who has come to not only understand that a car too has a soul, but that it is possible to vibrate with it.
All of this being fact, renting jet skis in the bay sounded like a necessary moment in the ideal vacation for the typically land-locked West Virginian. Without the delirium I felt coming from the Bunting farm/hangars, I might have been more apprehensive about renting jet skis though. I don’t have the same lust for speed that he does, and I certainly don’t possess the same skill behind the wheel. In fact, I can’t even ride a bike properly. But this instinct of mine was wrong, and probably would have been overridden by my patriotism anyway. There was something very alluring about being sent out to traverse open waters with compact, high-speed vehicles. It was the promise of Free Enterprise, which every American is bred to reach out for at every opportunity that shows itself, however temporary it may be.
When I woke up, I turned in my toosmall twin bed to Ryan’s side of the room, where he was sitting up in his justright twin bed, watching Top Gear on his laptop.
“What time is it?” I asked.
He looked down and squinted at the corner of his screen. He turned his whole upper body to face me, resting on his elbow and pointing his bare nipples at my side of the room. “Almost two,” he said, stretching.
With the time we had to kill, we decided to go down to the beach, though he was strict about leaving for our appointment no later than three. In failing to shake the grog from my mind and my eventual sun-drunkenness, I did not realize how ludicrous it was to leave an hour and a half early for Uptown Jet Skis, which was four minutes away. So, even as I crouched under the shade of our umbrella and Ryan checked the time on his phone, I mounted no argument when we began packing up our chairs and towels, returning our umbrella, and walking back to the car park under our condo.
“We didn’t think this through,” Ryan said, staring at the car’s clock. 3:09.
I took my sunglasses off and unbuttoned my shirt. “I didn’t think at all.”
Ryan wanted a new beater board to replace the one that had disintegrated in his pool at home, so we eventually ended up at Sunsations. Earlier, I had mentioned to Ryan that I wanted to adopt a hermit crab while I was down here, to atone for the poor conditions my childhood crab Hermie lived in.¹ He suggested I might be able to find them here, so I walked around the store, looking for one of those big, terrible cages with hundreds of them crawling over each other.
Scattered throughout the aisles, there were many fellow tourists–mostly women–along with the Asian family that ran the store, which was entirely women. This, and the considerable chill coming down from the farway AC system made me very much aware of my open shirt. I looked down and observed my sparse patch of chest hair, my severely darker treasure trail, and the contrast of my healthy stomach with the outline of my ribs. I grabbed both sides of my shirt, covering some of the small, oriental tigers that decorated it, and pulled them together to cover myself.
This was a barely noticeable yet hefty social defeat. I had already gained a collection of sidelong glances, and this final backing down, as it were, made me fully realize my position: I was not your average tourist. Not in any heroic or individual sense, just by way of being a pale and gangly adolescent, fresh out of highschool, graciously drug-along by his friend into the sun, as well as into the spray-tanned, decadent social vortex that Ocean City becomes this time of year. Because of Ryan’s sensible head, I needn’t worry about getting caught in its sweaty, stinking center, though it surrounded us still.
Presently, I couldn’t find any hermit crabs, and the beautiful women behind the counter began eyeing me suspiciously as I wandered back and forth, up and down the aisles, idly scanning swimsuits and cheap snorkels. I knew I looked strange, and maybe even a little sick as I clutched at myself, so I hastened across the length of the store and found Ryan at the back wall. He was contemplating which beater to get, comparing prices and consulting his own expertise on their functionality. He also wanted a good boy color.
With Ryan’s blue beater board incinerating in the back of his car, we walked into the jet ski rental agency to start filling out paperwork. The building had personality, which is refreshing, but dangerous. Aesthetically, the trend of businesses slimming everything down and decorating exclusively with millennial grays and sleek blacks is a travesty to the world, and serves only as a physical representation of liveliness and wonder being syphoned out of society… but in this lies an advantage: it steps up large and says WE ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS.
Walking through large, vibrantly blue rooms with giant plastic sharks hanging from the ceiling and tiki masks on the wall is certainly a more pleasant experience than having nothing but gray paint, a newspaper, and black leather to stare at, but it also makes me feel comfortable spending a sizable amount of money on exorbitant activities, which is, by all accounts, unnatural. The only place in which I should feel joy during the life of this transaction is outside in the bay–not when handing a hundred dollars over a counter. Even if the counter has a wickerwood facade and a statuette of a pygmy Hawaiian.
And I should especially not have fun when signing waivers, which thankfully I wasn’t. Beyond the typical bummer that paperwork elicits, the various notes throughout the ten pages of paperwork about a “guide” embossed a sense of disappointment even further into my and Ryan’s spirit. After we had both checked off a series of boxes, thoroughly ignored the text, and signed our names about fifteen times, we stood leaning against the counter, waiting for our IDs back, asking each other if we had both read that right. The bleakest images cascaded through our minds. Probably we would be led along a narrow path, passing the waterfront houses at ten miles per hour and getting scolded for letting go of a handle as we cover our mouths to yawn. The thought of being bored on a jet ski was more than unnatural. We had trouble coping with its mere consideration. Would we really be impeded with a guide on the open waters?
We already had to provide proof that we can drive a car, and the rules that we didn’t read would have surely spelled out the necessary safety tips for high-speed traversal of the (don’t laugh) Assawoman Bay. The idea of having absolute amphibious freedom waved in our faces and stripped away only after payment felt extremely un-American… but then, maybe it was more American than we could imagine at the time. We happened to be on the proletariat end of the deal, so it was natural to feel angry at our situation. This is already deeply American. But to look further and peek in at the bourgeois end of it was to understand that this was still a monument to Free Enterprise: just not to our Free Enterprise. The only job of the business is to provide the jet skis, but after that their primary responsibility is to make their money back and turn a profit. Like pimps with sex, the family that owned Uptown Jet Skis had found something that many desire and few have easy access to. To those with a lust for open waters, Freedom costs $100, and only lasts an hour.
Whatever Freedom means, we were feeling fucked. We were handed our IDs back and told to walk along the dock until we found our guide. They told us his name was Pembleton², but that was all they gave us. We had no idea where we were going or what Pembleton looked like, so Ryan resorted to asking everyone we walked by if they were him.
After thoroughly confusing a few strangers, we came to a picnic table with an umbrella next to an open shed. A sign hanging from the inside of the door read ᴊᴇᴛ sᴋɪ ʀᴇɴᴛᴀʟs ʜᴇʀᴇ. We looked at each other, then cast our gaze to the man sitting at the table, shaded by the umbrella. A cheap, redwhite&blue cowboy hat sat next to a greasy bag of Chipotle in front of him. He was still eating when we limped up, covering our faces from the sun.
“Are you Pembleton?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Are you my four thirty?”
We muttered affirmatively, and then the three of us launched into pleasantries: We’re from West Virginia and Maryland, and it’s cool that you get to live down here; but yeah, we are lucky to be able to buy such great fireworks; it is a shame that you have to drive all the way to Pennsylvania for anything substantial.
It was at this point that I suggested shooting fireworks directly into an Amish community on his way back, to make his trip actually worthwhile. This received a small smile that read more as self-preservation than amusement. Even Ryan was puzzled by my input, which he signaled to me with an exaggerated head slant and a look of bewilderment. Needless to say, it was he who did most of the talking from then on.
As I stood listening to the two, I noticed a pair of beautiful, finely-tanned women walking up the dock. Just behind them, a finely-toned man. I imagined that these people could very well be natives with friends wealthy enough to afford true agency on the water. Probably they were convening here to board a pleasure boat, go deep into the (don’t laugh) Assawoman, and get wasted, containing their hedonism to the maybe twenty feet of room they’d have on deck.
If things got really decadent in the mix of cocktails, heat, and sweat straight from the pores, there might be a cuddy cabin for couples to retreat to. Then the impatient pairs among them could leap into the water together and fornicate beside the ship. I could see the July Fourth news already… besides the countless preemptive parties shut down by the police, everyone on the boardwalk would be whispering about the couple that jumped overboard in the middle of the (you seriously can’t laugh, this is a serious matter) Assawoman Bay and was swiftly knocked unconscious by the movement of the boat, then drowned and treaded over many times over before they were found in the morning.
I felt sorry for this trio as they passed, knowing their fate before they did. I shook my head imperceptibly as they drew nearer. But then something strange happened. They started walking towards me. Had I said all that out loud? Did they know I had created a scenario wherein two of them would be exposing themselves bare to the saltwater? Worse yet, had they guessed which two of them I was thinking of? I looked to Ryan in a panic, but he was still focused on our guide, who was now trailing off into silence. I was worried that I had somehow slipped into a different state of being, one where every inaudible fact of existence was transmogrified into the physical world, and where every audible expression of thought was silenced. I convinced myself that even the water directly in front of us had gone quiet, along with the constant flow of bellowings, shrieks, and dadrock from the early drinkers on their pleasure boats.
Then I heard a noise. Our guide asked the approaching group if they too were part of his four thirty. They were. The guy sulked down onto the bench across from our guide, facing the water wordlessly. The girls stood diagonally to my left, a distance much too short for comfort after the terrible series of nerveshocks I had just experienced.
Eventually, the three thirty group returned to the dock. Ryan and I stood there in just our slides, swimshorts, and lifejackets, looking like poor imitations of our guide, watching as a collection of amateur baseball players cautiously squeezed the throttle on their jet skis, letting go as soon as they depressed it like someone testing the heat of a stove with their fingertips. They were some of them ginger, some of them wearing the ridiculous, windshield-sized, multicolored sunglasses common to their caste, some of them sporting white caps, and all of them very sunburnt.
They came to the long plastic docking bay teetering in the water and floating aimlessly like wild horses being driven along a ranch; possessing a great pride in their powerful physicality, but fearing the unknown as they funnel into the corral. As their guide was docking his own vehicle, Pembleton stepped onto the platform and started guiding the baseballers individually on how to park the jet skis.
There were deep, tight-fitting divots in the plastic where the jet skis could rest snuggly, but each space was elevated about a foot above the water. The lanes were sequestered off by small plastic embankments, flanking an even crest up into the cutout. There was a certain angle you had to come in at, and a certain amount of acceleration needed to clear the crest.
Pembleton’s guiding words and gestures were mostly useless, flying unheard over the quietly panicked heads of the Baseball Lobsters. They tested the movement of their handlebars, seeing how far they would go and if that would properly course-correct. Eventually, the ginger directly in front of our already exasperated guide heard the words Give it some throttle! above his ill-suppressed trepidation, and once his synapses fired, he did.
He managed to come up onto the space sideways, never looking away from the handles as Pembleton jumped back. The whole strip bobbed in the water, and Pembleton stumbled with it. Then the jet ski turned with the slickness of the water that coated its undercarriage, found the divot, and slammed into place with a sickening thwunk.
This tableau dulled the sense of nervousness I had amassed. Even if I made a fool of myself trying to operate the jet ski, I had full confidence in my ability to park. If Ryan’s skill with vehicles could transfer to his operation of a jet ski, it meant that I’d pretty much look like a mental deficient trying to solve a puzzle in comparison, but it also meant that my skill with parking would transfer as well. My ability to guide my 2007 Honda Civic straight between two painted lines was the only thing about driving that came naturally to me. I had a prophetic sense for knowing when and exactly how to turn my steering wheel in order to pull in, back in, and even parallel park. My Holy Psychic Radio works in sometimes confounding ways, but I will give thanks for its blessings at every opportunity.
Once all of us were seated in a row atop our jet skis, our guide gave us the official spiel with the previous group’s guide standing beside him. He told us first where the brake was, and made us squeeze it. He scanned the line to see that we were all doing it correctly. I looked to my left to make sure I was squeezing the same way everybody else was. Then he told us where the throttle was, scanning again after. If we were about to hit something, he said, we would have to actually maneuver away from it. If all we did was break, we would still hit the thing–just much slower. Finally, he told us where the ignition was, and that we would wait for the command to start the jet ski once in the water.
I paid attention to it all–more eager to learn now than I had been while skimming the warranty earlier–but one item in particular held my attention: “If you somehow flip the jet ski,” he said, “you have thirty seconds to get it upright. After thirty seconds, you owe my boss a new jet ski.” He smiled the smile of someone not at risk of owing a company seventeen thousand dollars, which did not put me at ease.
For a reason unbeknownst to me, the Holy Psychic Radio removed all static from my frequencies and recorded this tidbit of information for permanent etching into my consciousness. I felt the change as it happened, and thereafter felt my stomach drop. The few times I have doubted the truth or importance of an event that the Holy Psychic Radio impressed onto it, I have been left severely hurting because of it. I knew my time on the water was marked for doom.
Presently, Pembleton made a final note, directed at the girls, who were riding two to the jet ski: “If we encounter sharks out on the bay, please push any passengers with you into the water to ensure the rest of us make it back safely.” He fixed us all with a wide grin, but the girls didn’t laugh. I might have smiled, but I might not have. My mind was still too caught up on the prospect of owing someone a jet ski.
Being in the farthest space on the dock, I was the first to follow Pembleton out into The Ditch, a popular fishing spot and entrance to the (don’t laugh) Assawoman Bay. The Baseball Lobster’s guide stepped down to the nose of my jet ski and placed his spread-fingered palms on its face, giving it a hefty push and sending me backwards into the water. He called out to start my jet ski, and afterwards, I turned to see Pembleton motioning for me to ride towards him.
Our procession began at once slow and fast. I followed our guide as he began to ride forward, careful not to follow too closely, anxiously splitting my attention between this and trying to keep a straight path in the wake of waves pounded into the water by passing pontoons full of wine moms and stepdads. At one point, while waiting for the last of our group to be sent into the water, he eyed my position nervously.
“Mind giving it some throttle, bud?” he asked me.
I looked and saw that I was drifting towards a support beam in the still choppy water. I precariously triggered the jet ski’s handle, carrying me safely away from my slow-coming collision.
It wasn’t until halfway through The Ditch, when the harbor started to open up and I saw the greater expanse of the water that I felt enough security to look behind me. Ryan was following me at a distance of several feet, closer than I was our guide, boredom showing clearly on his face. A buoy in the water had a girthy wooden pole sticking out of it, a sign hanging off that said ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ, ɴᴏ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜᴀɴ 5 ᴍᴘʜ. I looked down at my dash and saw the electronic interface reading 7. I felt dangerous.
But at the end of The Ditch, the very mouth of the (don’t laugh) Assawoman, our guide swung around to face us, signaling us with the downward waving of his hand to slow down. Once we were all gathered and our engines shut off, he called out to us:
“Do you see the farthest island over there?”
We nodded affirmatively.
“Don’t get within six feet of that island. That’s the farthest out and left you can go. The farthest right will be where I’m sitting.”
Hope started to rise in my chest. I looked to Ryan, who returned my gaze with his lips tight and one eyebrow cocked.
“If you need me, I’ll probably be on my way; but if I’m not, you’ll see where to find me.”
I could feel something tearing at a place between my ribcage and traveling up my arms.
“The passing boats will be watching out for you, but please be respectful of them.”
My thumb was already over the ignition button.
“Have fun!”
Ryan and I started out jet skis and tore off across the length of the bay, beaming for the farthest island.
We tried several times to race from the island to two small patches of land rising up out of the water, but soon found that the outcome of a race consisting of the same make and model of vehicle on a straight path is determined solely by who triggers the throttle first. Usually, whoever counted the race off would take the lead, and the other would get foam sprayed in his face.
We split off and tested the true capabilities of the jet ski by ourselves. I ran straight paths back and forth from the island, standing up into a half crouch occasionally to ground myself against the wind. Several times–I’m embarrassed to admit–I cried out noises akin to yeehaw! and long, drawn out Yeeeaaah!s
But I’m only a little ashamed of this, because it was completely natural. There was no one around me, and even if they were, they probably couldn’t make it out above the sound of the engine and the breaking of the water. I was a cowboy only for myself. And the movement of the bay did make the jet ski feel alive, like a horse clutched between my legs. It bobbed up and down, gaining the most miniscule amount of airtime and splashing hard against the surface again.
Unlike a horse, I could push the jet ski to top out at around fifty miles per hour. The wind made my eyes water, and it caught hard against the back of my throat when I opened my mouth to hallo. It played in my silted hair like the sped-up movement of many hands and flowed past my arms like light falling on a wall beamed with shadows. I was moving with the jet ski as one figure against the straightahead sun, one figure on the water.
Several times Ryan and I reconvened and shouted to each other to see how it was going. We would slip out of our lifejackets and plunge into the water to cool ourselves down, returning up the back of the craft and shaking droplets from our faces.
“What’s the top speed you’ve gotten to?” I asked.
“It tops out at fourty-eight for me,” he said.
“Damn!” I shook my head, climbing up the stern. “I’ve only gotten to fourty-seven.”
“You see those boats passing out there?” Ryan pointed out along the waterway where the personal boats had been driving by all the while. “I’ve been waiting for them to go by and jumping the waves they make.”
I watched silently as another passed, leaving small cascading rivets in the water on both its flanks.
There is no shifting gears on a jet ski. When a pontoon or sailboat comes into view over the edge of the world and its course is a lucky, dead-center run across the bay, you try to be still in the water. But even the jet ski is impatient. If the engine is on, you’re going to be moving. It doesn’t matter if your hand is completely off the throttle. Even in calm waters, you’re inching forward slowly; the jet ski itself like a child dragging you down the toy aisle. The same one you feel in your soul.
As the boat comes closer, you look out at the other riders. Maybe your friend is circling back around after hitting a nice one. The girls are coasting around in a big circle, stopping every once in a while to switch who gets to drive. The solemn man is scorching the horizon, far beyond the limits roughly etched out for you all. You check to make sure the guide’s attention is drawn to him and not you, but it’s hopeless to make out over such a distance and saltwater dripping into your eyes.
When the boat is just about to cross your line of sight, you screw it on all the way. There is no first gear in the same way that there is no fifth. The whole ride up feels like you’re fighting against the engine; pushing the machine to a brink that it could easily pass, but one which has been neutered out of it. Even at fifty (which feels like twenty now that you’ve been whipping it around for half an hour), you feel like you could still be accelerating. Like there’s more life in the jet ski than you really know, and more than you’ll get to know in this hour of rented freedom.
You wonder for a moment if the people in the boat fear your coming. From their point of view, it might look like you’re on a straight course to crash against the side of their hull. But it would probably look like that to anyone driving that much money around. For just $100, you can make a man question his purchase of several tens of thousands, which is just a bonus to the real thrill.
You wave away your sympathy for the people on deck. Naturally, the highest crest of the trailing waves is found closest to the boat, so you actually bank closer to the vessel. In chasing this fleeting peak, you try to see if you can spray some foam into their wine glasses as well. For one ignorant second you question this–question the entire stunt you’re pulling–but then you remember that there’s nothing better to do with your time than this. Nothing better.
It’s always immediately following this ignorant second that you hit the wave. You jump the gap between the liquid embankments, crossing the entire width of the pontoon, piercing the air like you were aiming to crash against the ghost of a boat. There’s a moment right before the comedown when your body lifts up from the seat sympathetically, and you stare down the nose of the jet ski thinking of nothing but the fact that you are in the air. That you are coming down now, and that it feels amazing. There are no pretensions to this freedom.
When you land on the other side, you teeter and skirt in the water, traversing the tiny, overlapping waves with all the skill you’ve gained in the last half hour. You pull slowly on the brake, not wanting it to end but accepting that to experience it again, you must reset yourself. So you slow down, turn back to face the island where you started your run from, and try to get back to it as fast as possible.
I carried on like this for a couple rounds of wavehopping. Ryan and I had accidentally begun to operate in a consistent rhythm. As I would be coming back from a jump, he was just starting one. To keep this unadulterated, sometimes we had to start a run a little early and wait to completely screw it on until about halfway across the water, but this only helped us more thoroughly experiment, crudely finding the opportune angles for maximum airtime.
Maybe it was the breaking of this rhythm that doomed me. Maybe it was the wind changing directions, or maybe it was Poseidon seeing that somebody living on rented time in his domain was getting a little cocky. Whatever it was, I didn’t feel it creep upon me at any point along my run. I was feeling too in control of myself to worry about things like possibilities.
Ryan had already returned, so we sat next to each other, diving in again to fend off the cruel heat. We stood there shaking the water from our heads like dogs. It was shallow enough for me to stand with a good bit of my chest exposed. We climbed back onto our jet skis and sat talking to each other. I was waiting for a good one, I told him: a boat of decent size traveling at a good speed. He nodded, not saying anything. Maybe he was upset that I had broken our rhythm, thereby making him wait as well for a “good one” to come. Maybe he was disgusted by my greed. Maybe he didn’t really give a fuck either way. Whatever might have motivated it for him, there was then an unspoken thing lingering in the air between us. With the two of us bobbing here, building potential energy, it was only natural that we would take off together. We never decided anything with words, but only the most natural of compulsions dictated our actions at this point. It felt right–whatever it was–and both of us could feel it very strongly. We would try to jump the same boat.
When it came into view, I knew right away that it was what I’d been waiting for. I took off without saying anything, and after a moment, Ryan followed. I was making it for this boat like I had made it for all the others, aiming closer than I probably should have been for its stern, throttle depressed all the way and the engine running at full bore.
And it was a great jump. Time and again, there was something so exhilarating about going violently against the direction of the wave; to see it coming towards you, moving the way you had just come, and instead using its own force to launch yourself over it and forward. I felt like I had conquered something more than a wave each time I did it. But in reality, I hadn’t even done that.
I landed with a hefty splash on the other side, and just… kept going. I knew Ryan must have been closing in behind me, so I wanted to give him plenty of room to land. I also wanted a victory lap. I never let off the throttle, running it at top speed deeper into the bay, trying to extend my moment of—
Then I was spinning. I remember the feeling, but I don’t remember what the world around me looked like in that moment. I don’t remember breaking the water, but I remember slamming against the bay floor.
I woke up with the green water bubbling around me, already floating against my weight because of the lifejacket. Barely conscious, the Holy Psychic Radio exhibited a retrieval of information faster than I have ever experienced. My first thought was of owing somebody a jet ski. Pembleton’s words floated through my head. I had thirty seconds. I was terrified primarily of being thousands of dollars in debt to a company located several hours from my home. Then the mortal fear sunk in. I wasn’t going to sink and drown–I knew that much. But I was rising. Fast. And for all I knew, Ryan was still coming in behind me. Faster.
Remembering the shallowness of where we had been cooling ourselves off, I realized that I had mere seconds before my head was above water again. Fear rose through my whole body, moving quicker than I was through the water, overtaking me and needing to extend above my head. So I raised my arms out of the water and into the air, flailing them wildly around. My hope was that Ryan would see this and avoid my head, but then I thought about my arms breaking instead.
When I resurfaced, I saw two things that calmed me immediately: my jet ski was upright, and Ryan had driven up to it and grabbed a hold of one of its handlebars. Then I saw Pembleton speeding towards me. His face was grim, but I couldn’t help fixing him with the most genuine smile I’ve ever felt creep across my face.
“Be honest with me, man,” he reached out his arm and pulled me into the seat behind him. “Was that on purpose?”
I let the idiocy of this question slide by, because I was still reeling from the high of slipping The Edge. I wasn’t able to tell it was happening, let alone plan it in advance.
“No,” I said.
“Alright, I was just wondering because I had seen you guys getting into the water before.”
I didn’t have a reply to this.
Yes, officer. I did wrap my car around that tree on purpose. The thrill of turning the AC on just wasn’t enough for me!
What the fuck kind of logic is that? I thought of telling him that we only did that to cool down, and that the whole point of me wavehopping is that I didn’tgetto plan anything; that I was letting myself be briefly in the hands of forces no living person could control or predict, and that as soon as my head was straight, I was going to do it again. I decided against this, using the last of my energy to resist the impulse to wrap my arms around his waist instead.
When he had driven me back to my jet ski, Ryan was still holding onto the handle, steadying it for me as I climbed weakly back aboard. The space for my feet was filled with water.
“I think you should take it easy for a while,” he told me as Pembleton sped off back to his vantage point.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’ll throw up all the water in my stomach before I do anything else.”
For a while, I was content “taking it easy.” I went off on my own, riding slowly and trying to derive my enjoyment entirely from the already failing sun, large on the horizon and burning with an orange more vibrant than I was used to, like I was seeing it across a hot desert. The movement of the water was nice, but I knew the movement of jumping a wave was nicer.
I watched Ryan circle around our allotted perimeter for a while. I didn’t see it, but the solemn man took a turn too fast and ate shit as well. I rode around for a while until I found one of his slides floating in the water. Ryan found the other, forced into a kinship with the stranger over their poor judgement of turns. He appreciated us for finding them. Water sloshed around my feet constantly, trapped inside the jet ski with me.
Eventually, I looked to my right and saw Pembleton riding up to me. Jesus Christ, I thought. What did I do now? I breaked and turned towards him, awaiting my sentencing, not smiling as he approached.
“My jet ski’s almost out of fuel,” he hollered over to me. “If I run out, you’ll be the one to drive me back to the dock. You’ll have to drive me back out to refuel, too.”
I nodded, my mouth hanging open dumbly.
“We’re gonna head back in about six minutes. Keep an eye out for me.” As he turned to ride back again, he threw his head over his shoulder and winked. “I’m counting on you!”
I didn’t know if this brotherhood was etched out because he too had experienced The Edge and saw it in my face that I had been changed by it; if he saw in my smile the memory of his moment Going Over when he was a novice as well… or if he pitied the fool who had smacked against the bay floor and inhaled about a gallon of saltwater. What this interaction told me for sure, however, was that our time was coming to an end. If there was anything left to do out here, I better do it soon.
Of course, there was only one thing to do.
For a while, I just ambled around the bay nervously, casting my head back and forth to see if it looked like our guide had run out of fuel, and to make sure Ryan was enjoying his last few moments. I didn’t know what being out of fuel looked like, but I was pretty sure Ryan was having fun. Our guide was too far for me to discern anything complex about him, actually, which invited trepidation to creep into my heart. I didn’t know where his eyes were, and if he was to see me go speeding towards a pontoon again, it would surely sour all the trust he had just placed in me.
But I also knew very well that I would not have the opportunity to ride a jet ski for quite some time. Probably years. And when that opportunity arises, I’ll have to pass on it because of extraneous circumstances. Then it’ll be years after that before I actually experience it again. I enjoyed wavehopping. I even enjoyed eating shit after wavehopping. If I was given six minutes on a jet ski at some random point in the future, I would use it to hop waves again. So I picked out an oncoming, faraway boat, and I screwed it on.
I reached top speed before I was even halfway there. I felt the water around my feet churning over itself, an unwanted reminder of the water churning in my stomach. I felt every subtle rock of the jet ski, every fold in the fabric of the water the undercarriage caught on. It scared me, but I didn’t care, because it was the fear that made it fun. I looked down to my sides and saw the spume flowing around me like a rolling royal cloak. In it were stretches of rainbows, frilly and impermanent, making themselves whole and stagnant against every flying molecule of white foam. I looked up again. A straight course to the stern of the pontoon. I adjusted myself until I felt fully right: the moment when the Holy Psychic Radio said Stop! Right here! I knew I was catching the most important wave of this expedition. Maybe not the greatest, but the most important.
Just before I reached the pontoon, I looked up to the sky. I can’t explain why. I can’t explain anything at this moment very well, as I was fully at the mercy of the Holy Psychic Radio. For whatever reason I did it, I saw a seagull flying directly overhead. It was soaring gracefully, the wind lifting it and propelling it forward. It was following my exact trajectory, mimicking me like a reflection from a bay suddenly formed out of the sky. I pumped my fist into the sky and screamed incoherently above the hum of the jet ski, the roar of the waves. I was the king of a world I had created, which I would seldom–if ever–know again. Even if millions of other people had created worlds similar, mine was my very own, and it was one which would never die beyond my consciousness. I looked down and hit the wave.
Slowing down on the other side and looking back, I saw the seagull banking up from where I had jumped. It flew up, up, and turned. I watched it change directions and fly back the way we had come, working effortlessly against the wind to reset itself.
Our guide didn’t run out of fuel. He wore his cowboy hat back through The Ditch, and I followed him close behind. I sat watching him, dully mesmerized. Everything else faded away. He was standing to one side of his seat, driving with one hand, the other holding his hat firmly down on his head. He looked over his shoulder and nodded to me. I nodded back.
When we had reached the dock, I was the first to park. He motioned me forward, but I was just ramming the thing against the plastic. I had come in at it from a weird angle, and now had no way to course correct. I was struggling against the crest when he told me to give it some throttle. So I screwed it on again. He jumped back and then lurched forward, grabbing the handles to steady the jet ski into its divot. I fell into place with a sickening thwunk.
“Way too much,” he said.
As Ryan and I walked back to our car, we discussed the indescribable Edge, something he was a veteran of. I told him it was the most fun I had ever had, and that we needed to try Go-Kart racing next. Gulls were perched on the last support beam along the dock. I couldn’t stop sighing. I didn’t have words to tell him that this was a league of its own, something etched permanently onto my mind as a peak of life. I felt confident in my ability to attend the birth of my children and still afterwards say It was beautiful, yeah. But it was no jet skiing.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Well, my ass hurts.”
¹ I did end up getting one from the boardwalk that night. Regrettably, it was only after I had gone back to the condo that I read up on hermit crab husbandry. He had to live alone in a small, grated metal/plastic container for a short while, but I am happy to say that Ronnie Milsap the Hermit Crab is now living in a spacious, heated tank with a new friend named Tiny Tim. See Acid Attack Postage #4 for more Ronnie content.
² Name forgotten due to procrastination, false attribution instated.