thanks to fancy things like retractable wheels. Things became complicated.
“I want to get moving again, and I see Shacktopus as the way of making that happen — kind of short-cutting that whole process,” he says, perhaps hopefully. “I’m looking for a big boat that I can live on and do some world traveling.”
When I started talking to Roberts for this story last summer, I immediately noted that his tech-nomadic vehicles — the bikes and the boats — shared the distinction of being small vehicles that relied mainly on people power. I wondered what the appeal in that was for him.
“I like the human scale of it. I find that when you cruise on a motorcycle or car, you’re really anonymous. You’re just somebody passing through on the freeway. Whereas, when I was on a bicycle, I was completely non-threatening,” he said to me back then. “Back in the early 80s when I was [biking through] small towns in the South, people would take me home. They weren’t worried about me. Also, it’s a lot more satisfying. Kayaking to an island is more exciting. There’s an old saying: the smaller the boat, the bigger the adventure.”
Afterwards, I mused for several months: what could be the thematic connection of a human-powered vehicle, or wind- and solar-powered one (as in the case of the Microships), to mobile communications technology? What was the appeal of the two brought together?
When I meet the tech-nomadic pioneer in person on a sunny afternoon in February 2006, I ask him about this. Beyond the fact that the two subjects have always interested him personally, he cannot come up with some profound, satisfying explanation for it all.
I climb aboard the Wordplay — or climb into it, to be more precise. At 5' 8", I’m much shorter and thinner than Roberts, so the inside doesn’t feel “coffin-like” to me at all. There’s a lot of legroom. I fiddle with some of the levers and try to relax myself into the hard seat. I look ahead, out the canopy. A compass is affixed to the top of the dashboard, and beyond that I see a large marker board with technical-looking diagrams drawn on
it, hanging from the wall in front of the Wordplay. If I were on Puget Sound, my view instead would be of the water rippling out beyond and into a backdrop of the mountain ranges of northwestern Washington, I imagine. But it also feels like I’m in a starfighter.
It then gradually dawns on me: there’s a unique feeling about being inside such a small craft that relies upon your own physical skills and wits to control. It becomes like an extension of your own skin, your own body. It becomes personal.
Maybe that’s the connection: mobile communications, and vehicles like Roberts’ bikes and this boat, both evoke a personal, emotional bond between themselves and the user. The more physically invested the rider is in the direct powering of the vehicle, the more personal the journey becomes.
“My goal is not to spend my life in the lab building electronics,” Roberts says. “I got this beautiful place in the woods. It looks like it ought to be paradise, but I’m just itchin’ to get moving again.”
The last time he felt that itch, he was living in a three-bedroom, ranch-style house somewhere in the suburbs of Columbus. There was no eBay, so he was stuck with a bunch of unwanted stuff that he couldn’t easily get rid of.
But one day, he left it all behind — there were still dirty dishes in the kitchen sink — and didn’t even bother to lock the front door of his house. He just pedaled away on an odd-looking bike that he had slapped computers and mobile communications gadgets onto. “It was like I reached around the back of my head and hit the reset button,” he says of that day when his journey began.
The microship Wordplay: 1. Retractable wheels facilitate transport. 2. The cockpit is covered with a bright red canopy made of heavy waterproof fabric. 3. Solar panels can provide thrust in an emergency, otherwise it’s wind and sail.
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