by Edward Cameron Dimock
I remember, some years ago, gazing with some envy at a television screen on which then-president Bush was dashing among the rocks and reefs of what looked for all the world like coastal Maine in his big blue power boat Fidelity.
Fidelity is not a good name for this boat.
A big blue power boat should have a name like Avenger or Inyourface or Neptune's Belch or, in the mode of the day, Domination.
Fidelity is a soft, considerate, inspiring name - feminine, if I may say so, and conveying little of the snarling, bullying, petulant aggressiveness more typical of big blue power boats and of the degendered guardians of the seraglio than of its graceful inhabitants.
Big blue powerboats have very little to do with gender, in fact, just as muscle cars have little to do with transportation, or power lunches with nourishment.
But it is a democratic age, and the hostile statement made by such power boats has been brought within every wastrel's price range in the form of something called the jet ski, which is a concentrated form of irritating, self-important uselessness.
This jet ski has become so familiar a part of our deteriorating environment that it has even been given an acronym: it is called a PWC (pronounced "pwick"), standing for "Personal Water Craft."
A boating magazine to which I no longer subscribe recently spent a lot of valuable space trying to convince me that a pwick is actually a boat, and that the operators of these aquatic abominations are mariners and thus due the respect accorded members of that calling, and that I should not be such a dinosaur about evolutionary change above the surface tension.
The magazine did not succeed, in part because the next several pages were filled with ads from Yamaha and Kawasaki, who manufacture these things….
A PWC, I continue to hold, is to a boat as a gnat is to a lark: they share a medium in which to move, and that is about it. The power of the jet ski, I might finally observe, lies not in bluster and brutality, as is the case with its larger relative, the big runabout-type power boat, but in its whining voice.
In both cases, the effect is the same: that of calling attention to itself. PWCs, ridden by people mesmerized by the sensation of speed and simulated danger, which pass within feet and very real danger of my swimming grandchildren, certainly do draw my attention.
Excerpted with permission from Mr. Dimock Explores the Mysteries of the East: An American in India, by Edward Cameron Dimock, (Algonquin Books, PO Box 2225, Chapel Hill, NC 27515, 224 pages, $18.95 hardcover).
Those Annoying Little Pwicks