I Should Buy A Boat

I was a train kid when I was little, specifically Thomas the Tank Engine. My parents would record episodes of Shining Time Station to those brick-sized videotapes so we could watch them whenever we wanted, and I would fast forward the parts with the real people to get to the trains. We had wooden Brio train sets, complete with ramps and tunnels and merges and a little shed where the trains could go to sleep at the end of the day. The Thomas-branded Brio trains were in an uncanny valley where they didn’t look quite like the trains from the show, so I preferred the faceless generic engines.

When I think about it, the appeal of trains was the tracks. Trains couldn’t go just anywhere they wanted, which made them neat little storytelling devices. You could lay out the story in parallel with the tracks. Everything on the Island of Sodor had a predefined place, and the stories fit within them. The same went for playing with the wooden trains and tracks. The paradox of choice wasn’t present in my childhood imagination (unsure if this was a good thing or a bad thing) because I was limited to the tracks we had when playing with trains. Sure, there were still hundreds of possible track layouts with those pieces, but it wasn’t infinite, which was probably daunting in some invisible back-of-the-mind way.

I was (still am) a big computer nerd when I was little. My after-school time was a mix of playing games and “making” games, where the making was either re-skinning existing games in ResEdit or creating tiny black and white point and click adventures in HyperCard. The equivalent of today’s AAA game back then was anything that came in a box from a store, as opposed to being a download from AOL or a CD that came with a magazine. And the only non-educational boxed game in our house was Myst, so of course it was my favorite.

The immediate allure of Myst was walking up to the big rocket ship and checking it out. Space is cool! But the enduring appeal came from a similar restriction as train tracks: the main area of the game is an island, there’s only so much you can do. Furthermore, it was a game where timing or dexterity or skill really didn’t matter. You could take as long as you want to clumsily work through a puzzle and you couldn’t really die or reach game over. This isn’t what they were going for, but: it was kind of a laid-back island lifestyle approach to a video game set on an island.²

They say you can either be a beach person or a mountains person. I definitely skew more beach than mountains, but it’s more about being near the water. Laying out on the sand doesn’t really appeal to me. And forget all the planning that goes into a big beach day: packing a cooler, setting up shade and/or chairs, re-applying sunscreen, there’s so much work that goes into relaxing! What really fires my synapses is being on a little island, where the infinite horizon of the sea dwarves your sense of where you are. They also say no man is an island, but I think I would like to be.

And this tracks throughout the my life in the places I’ve gone and the places I want to go. The closest thing I have to a bucket list is a loose desire to see the wonders of the world, and the first and only one I’ve checked off is Easter Island. I loved that trip. When I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway for the first time, the thing that stood out was Rincon Island — a tiny manmade island disguising oil wells! Our family would go to my grandpa’s place in Jupiter for spring break more or less every year, and even that was technically on a barrier island.

My parents would trade off on the long drive from Cleveland to Jupiter so we wouldn’t have to stop overnight anywhere. There was something magical about falling asleep in a car seat somewhere in Virginia and waking up at the Florida state line, to go into the welcome center for a free sample of orange juice. I kind of enjoyed the trip down as much as the week there. (The trip back, not as fun.) But I had to share it with three brothers and two parents, and I want to be an island! So when I was maybe ten years old I infamously told my mom that I would like to pack my backpack and take the bus by myself. That obviously didn’t happen, but it did become a tiny bit of lore (“remember when you thought you could just ride a bus by yourself as a little kid for 24 hours?”).

By far the thing I’m proudest of is my skateboard trip from North Carolina to Florida. It wasn’t quite Ohio to Florida, but it also wasn’t by bus. I was alone with my thoughts and podcasts for a month. I was an island. The first leg ended at my grandpa’s place in Jupiter of course, and two years later, I returned to Jupiter and skateboarded from there to Key West. And the four days I spent riding a skateboard down the Overseas Heritage Trail were the best days of my life. Still are. Less than a year later, I packed up my life and moved to Florida.

I moved to Melbourne, a little more than an hour drive north of Jupiter. I spent a lot of time that year commuting back and forth to see my grandpa and aunt and uncle. Then my grandpa passed away and I moved into the Jupiter place. A “five year plan” started to take form: I would keep moving south until reaching the keys. I had done Melbourne for a year, was now in Jupiter, would eventually move to West Palm Beach, then Miami, then the keys. Well, I stayed in Jupiter for two years, then when the pandemic brought a lot of people to south Florida including my parents, I got my own place in downtown West Palm. And as five years somehow passed, during which I mentally aged fifteen years and went to Miami a handful of times, I realized I would be miserable there. So I started focusing my nighttime Zillow wish-browsing on the keys. And when a too-good-to-be-true condo showed up in Marathon, I went for it.

Now I live on a little island in a little home by myself. It isn’t lonely, it’s what I’ve been moving toward my whole life. The keys exist as they are today, where I am able to walk to a grocery store and get whatever food I want despite being over an hour drive from the mainland, because an impossibly rich maniac³ built train tracks over the ocean a hundred years ago. Those train tracks became the road and bridges that I skateboarded on. This delights the train kid in me more than I can describe. The best bridge in the world for gliding over the infinite ocean, completely safe from cars, is a couple minutes from my front door, so I can relive the best days of my life any sunny day that I want. And most of them are.