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motor on it. When the throttle’s up high, the impact of the water against the bottom of the hull lifts it right up out of the water. It skims like a skipping rock and who gives a fuck about hydrodynamics. When you throttle it down, the vessel sinks into the water again and wallows like a hog.
    This is the principle behind the Zodiac, as far as I can tell. You take a vessel that probably weighs less than its own motor, you radio the control tower at Logan Airport and you take off.
    We had a forty-horse on this puppy—a donation—and I’d never dared to throttle it up past about twenty-five percent of maximum. Remember that a VW Bug has an engine with less than thirty horsepower. When you hit running speed in this Zode, if the water’s not too rough, the entire boat rises from the water. The only wet part is the screw.
    It’s the ultimate Boston transportation. On land, there’s the Omni, but all these slow cars get in the way. There’s public transit—the T—but if you’re in good shape, it’s usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren’t bad. But on water nothing stops you, and there isn’t anything important in Boston that isn’t within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.
    Contrary to what every bonehead believes, the land surface has been stretched out and expanded by civilization. Look at any downtowncity: what would be a tiny distance on a backpacking trip becomes a transcontinental journey. You spend hours traveling just a few miles. Your mental map of the city grows and stretches until things seem far away. But get on a Zodiac, and the map snaps back into place like a rubber sheet that has been pulled out of shape. Want to go to the airport? Zip. It’s right over there. Want to cross the river? Okay, here we are. Want to get from the Common to B.U., two miles away, during rush hour, right before a playoff game at Fenway Park? Most people wouldn’t even try. On a Zodiac, it’s just two miles. Five minutes. The real distance, the distance of Nature. I’m no stoned-out naturehead with a twelve-string guitar, but that’s a fact.
    The Mercury was brand-new, not even broken in. Some devious flack at the outboard motor company had noticed that our Zodiacs spent a lot of time in front of TV cameras. So we get all our motors free now, in exchange for being our extroverted selves. We wear them out, sink, burn and break them; new ones materialize. I hooked up the fuel line, pumped it up, and the motor caught on the first try. The stench of the piers was sliced by exhaust. I dropped it to a tubercular idle, shifted into forward, and started snaking out between the pilings. If I wanted to commit suicide here, I could just twitch my hand and I’d be slammed into a barnacled tree trunk at Mach 1.
    Then out into a finger of water that ran between piers. The piers were actually little piers attached to big piers, so out into a bigger finger of water that ran between the big piers, then into the channel, and from there to a tentacle of the Harbor that fed the channel.
    At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown. Boston Harbor is my baby. There are biologists who know more about its fish and geographers who have statistics on its shipping, but I know more about its dark, carcinogenic side than anyone. In four years of work, I’ve idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at everyinch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamn pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your