Moped at Sea

Isaac had been standing on the afterdeck for hours. He was a nice enough kid, but a little strange. When he worked on board ship he longed for a job onshore and when working in an office he longed for the sea. Isaac could not stand the monotony of shore life and had no money for cruises. But when he was at sea – working as a run-of-the-mill crew member (bespectacled and therefore always a cabin boy, mess assistant or officer’s valet, never a seaman – let alone helmsman, his greatest ambition), he was confronted with the crude blustering of the seaman, who played cards for keeps with their knives on the table. Isaac simply did not fit in. At sea he was even more of a misfit than in his jobs in the harbour, the factory, the office or the bottling plant. Yet it was at sea that he hoped to find true adventure.
When his work was done, Isaac could always be found on the afterdeck. Midnight had passed two hours ago, but Isaac stayed put. It was a moonlit night, all the major constellations of the southern sky could be seen clearly, as could the fierce white backwash from the ship’s propeller. Anyone who has stood for hours on the afterdeck of a moving ship knows that in the dead of night, in broad daylight, come rain or fog, in the polar regions or the tropics, in grey, green or dear-blue water, a ship always sails on a white road, a sea-way stretching from the horizon to the props, a road invisible to a castaway crossing it only fifteen minutes after the ship has passed.
A warm, inviting breeze was blowing. If you looked hard – you could make out the horizon and, a bit near, the light of a crossing ship that would have been heading straight for Isaac, had he been on deck an hour earlier. But, as we shall see, our senses can deceive us. There are philosophers who assert that everything is illusion, and who is to say they are wrong? Isaac’s ship was a tramp steamer, and he had never seen other ships at night. He thought about how long it would take until he was back home. He gazed at the witches, the bollards, the hawsers, the railing and the easy chair he had brought up to the afterdeck.
Then Isaac saw the light in the distance swerve abruptly. It seems to make a tight run on the water and was now coming straight for him. As the light steadily approached, Isaac decided this could hardly be a ship; not only was it bobbing far too much with the motion of the waves, but there was only a single light. A ship running with only a stern-light? Too dangerous.
When the extraordinary vehicle had come within two hundred fathoms of where Isaac was standing, he recognized it as a moped. Finally something strange and wonderful was happening to Isaac. What he saw before him defied the imagination. At first Isaac was afraid, but when it came right down to it he simply could not believe that a new prophet or Messiah would move across the face of the earth in quite this fashion. Even though the Christians claimed that Jesus had walked upon the water.
By now the moped was only about fifty feet away. Isaac shouted and waved wildly, but forgot in his excitement to lower the rope-ladder. The man on the moped, whose accent revealed him to be a country-man of Isaac’s, called this to his attention. The man steered his motorbike towards the rope ladder with remarkable dexterity and utmost caution; he seized up the sheer wall of the ship’s hull like a boxer in the ring, first a few explanatory jabs, weaving slightly from the waist, shuffling the feet and blocking with his arms. Suddenly, in one fluid motion, he sprang – moped and all – onto the ladder.
“Careful!” he said. “Careful.”
The man wore badly steamed-up goggles and a cap with great jutting leather flaps to protect his eyes and ears from the salt spray. The moped was a standard machine, with no special attachments. Isaac helped the man lower the moped to the desk.
“Give me something to eat,” the man said.
Isaac went to find food. Below deck, he noticed that the seamen, the ship’s mates and the engine room crew had all gone to their berths. When he returned he asked the stranger: “What are you doing riding on the water?”
The man claimed he was out to set a record.
“But how can you ride on water?” Isaac asked in amazement.
“It’s a matter of practice,” the man explained. “I started by placing a pin on the water’s surface. If you’re very careful, the pin will float. I gradually increased the weight of the objects, over a long period of time. Naturally, I was working up to my moped; eventually I was able to take my first, shaky spin on the pond in the park. Now I’m riding around the world. I never go ashore, but I often ride up to ships to get something to eat. I prefer doing that in the middle of the night, when everyone’s asleep. The first few times I approached ships in broad daylight, but it wais too much for some people to take. First they began shouting that this was the most wonderful thing they’d ever seen in their entire lives; then they began babbling or went completely insane. I’m out to cover forty thousand kilometers by sea, but I don’t mind putting in a few extra kilometers as long as I’ve circled the globe. I want to do something no one has ever been able to do before. That’s always been my dream.”
“Aren’t you afraid of drowning?” Isaac asked.
“Not at all,” the man replied. “It’s all in the way you steer, plus careful acceleration and deceleration, of course. For example, never take a big wave too fast or the sides of your tires will get wet. Once that happens you can forget it.”
“Yes, of course,” said Isaac, gazing in awe at the man who was stuffing himself with food and drinking large quantities of milk and alcohol. When he had finished he asked Isaac for a bottle of iodine, which he said he needed.