Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux Page B

are teenagers, not old enough to drive a car. A rowboat is no match for one of these foaming monsters that goes slapping past. I have lost count of the number of times such boats have almost swamped me. I can only believe that it is deliberate. Is it possible the boaters don't know they throw up a five-foot wall of water in their wake?
    The smaller and frailer-seeming the boat, the greater the threat. In my kayak I am frequently yelled at, barracked, hectored, and mocked. Kids on Jet Skis are unspeakable. They sideswipe, they strafe, and they leave you in no doubt that these machines ("personal watercraft") are just the latest in a long line of technological atrocities unleashed on a peaceable world by Japanese manufacturers.
    Anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly indicates that anyone who jogs or rows or cycles in the open, in this free country, is asking for some kind of trouble. As I've said, it ranges from an obscene gesture to an attempt at murder. This is worth examining as a social phenomenon, partly because we take for granted that it will happen, but also because it is a specifically American occurrence. I have cycled and rowed in other countries, and I have been stared at, but not harassed. The aggression in the American reaction often has a comic veneer, the bullying, joshing sort which characterizes a certain variety of our humor and which makes it indistinguishable from sadism. The origin of this kind of heckling might be summed up in the old-time shriek "Get a horse!" but it is much more serious than it seems, and I believe it constitutes an actual threat.
    In the most common situation, the threat comes from more than one person—rarely is it one-on-one. The group of people in the car or speedboat, the phalanx of jet skiers, are nearly always male. Their response appears to be a reflex of violent envy directed against an isolated and vulnerable person—the skimpily clothed jogger, the madly balancing paddler, the panting cyclist. It is like an objection to the assertive freedom and health implicit in these pastimes, and it might be bound up with the suspicion—in a minority of cases a well-founded suspicion—that someone who exercises this way so publicly is showing off.
    Yet the response is so lacking in tolerance that I cannot help but think that at its source is a wild anger, a fear and frustration, at being faced by a free spirit, someone who cannot be controlled. And the instance where the foolish person plows by in a speedboat and lets loose a loud and stupid remark might be explained by his sudden realization that for once in his life he is stronger and faster and apparently superior. Such a person would deny he is a criminal, and yet his reaction is the impulse behind most crime: the eagerness to commit an act of violence because the victim seems weak, ludicrous, exposed, and naked—victims nearly always seem that way. Crime is a monstrous sort of unfairness, and so it is always in the criminal's interest to pick on an especially weak or supine target.
    Why does this, as far as I know, mostly happen in America? What is it that rouses us and incites us against people pursuing innocent and healthful objectives? Perhaps that is part of the answer: the very innocence and robustness implicit in jogging or cycling might themselves be a kind of provocation. As for the shouting, well, Americans tend to think out loud—you get perfect strangers yapping at each other all over. In our strenuously verbal and competitive culture, great stress is placed on self-assertion. The irony is that people jogging, paddling, or cycling are exhibiting in a non-aggressive way those same demonstrative characteristics. And as I mentioned, it is more than likely, too, that joggers and other fresh air fiends are motivated to a certain extent by impure enthusiasm. There are many who could be described as hotshots, seeming to invite comment. It is hard to see a person cantering on a horse without imagining that