I sneered at first, but after taking that puppy out on the lake and cranking it up, I felt like I was home. My folks preferred my "lake hog" to a bike, on the grounds that water was softer than asphalt if I ditched. What they didn’t realize was that the WaveRunner, with the throttle cracked wide open, goes so fast that water’s no more compressible than concrete. I proved that one day in a spontaneous race with a neighbor who also had a WaveRunner, when I jumped it over a ski-boat’s wake, corkscrewed in, and broke my leg in three places—along with the keel of the lake hog. My folks got me fixed up, but they wouldn’t—categorically would not—let me do anything but sell the WaveRunner for scrap.