This afternoon I heard a news report on the radio that said “India became the fourth country to land on the moon,” which is mind-blowing to think how in the world they got all those people there. But the report got me thinking about travel. Not really. I just needed a lead-in to this strange but moving musing I penned as a break from mind-fry while working on more serious scribblings.

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Much as I can recall, the first means of transportation I had other than my own short skinny lower limbs was not a tricycle but a three-wheel mobile called Mike’s Irish Mailwagon. I called it Mike-the-Mailwagon before I had even heard the word personification. To make it move, you didn’t peddle. You pumped. You pushed, then pulled. It was a bit like the old pump trolley in old black and white films that moved on train tracks by pumping handlebars. I was either the coolest or nerdiest kid on the block depending on who you asked. Being only five, I was not yet capable of reading the neighborhood zeitgeist to know if I was hip or hop. But I loved it. It was one of a kind. My mom no doubt bought it from some mail-order catalogue. I’ve never seen another like it. I didn’t have it for very long. It came to a sad end when my oldest sister was learning how to drive, pulled into the garage, and not seeing Mike, ran over it and in a matter of seconds reduced it to Mike-the-Failwagon.

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I remember when my first child and only daughter got her first bike. Excitement was a palpable substance in the air. That was the mid-80s and not unlike her parents’ generation who grew up in the late 50s and early 60s, getting a bike was still a big deal. Though she was not much “into” Barbie, she was definitely into pink. Everything on the bike except the spokes and the tires were pinkified as was her helmet. And when she got that low rider hot pink velocipede peddlin’ fast around our cul de sac with her 3-foot biker friends she looked like a fuchsia comet with a tail of sparks.

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Her first brother came along a little over three and a half years later and after training on three-wheelers (we used to call them trikes), skateboards, and bikes, he graduated to his favorite mode of transportation and the latest sign of the times: rollerblades. Not the white-Betty-Sue-takes-your-order-at-the-drive-in roller skates, but something a bit more current and cool and Gretzky and Mad Max-like called roller BLADES. He used them to play hockey, to go to his friend’s house or the store, to zoom around the school and playground and impress the girls and worry his mom.

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When the next and last male Miller munchkin came along five years later he inherited a garage full of hand-me-down wheeler wonkers to choose from and was able to identify every car on the road by the time he was six or seven causing his father to wonder if maybe they accidentally switched the babies before leaving the hospital and sending some other unsuspecting new parents home with the infant child who’d be able to name the starting lineup for every major league baseball team by the time he was the age of Mickey Mantle’s jersey number (like father like son). Soon, wanting wheels of his own and desiring to make his own skid mark on the world, he found his signature wheelie-ma-jig. It was part sneaker, part Vegas spaceship, part landing gear, and part magic trick. They had lights that blinked somehow and the capacity to go from ambulatory footware to meals-on-wheels when all of a sudden a three inch-section on the bottoms of each shoe opened like an escape hatch and instead of letting out shoe stink dropped down a wheel so that if he were Jesus he would have been remembered for rolling on water not walking on it. And like his sister and his brother, he moved along the macadam at quite the fast clip and when rollin’ down a slight incline he didn’t even have to move his legs or feet. He just rolled on them sneakers. And I thought, “My my. What will they think of next?”

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That was then, this is now. This morning as I was deboarding from the ferry at Mukilteo and heading up the hill to the freeway that would take me to Seattle, I saw a youngster donning the requisite back-to-school backpack and helmet riding on the most recent iteration of modern wheel travel. At first glance, I thought he was running but he looked so smooth and moved so effortlessly. I never saw him move a muscle, not an arm or hand or leg or foot. Stopped at a light, I uncharacteristically hoped it would stay red longer so the traveler could catch up to us and pass on by on the sidewalk which he did. It was then I realized he was zipping right up that hill standing on a compact board (much smaller than a skateboard) that was powered either by battery or by electric energy stored up in a little box underneath the board. It looked like he was surfing up the hill on wheels. And all he had to do was balance and he’d be at his friend’s house or school or practice in no time.

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I shook my head. How time flies, how things change. And I imagined him thirty years later, talking to his own children who now got from place to place in no time with no effort but simply by saying something like “Beam me up, Scotty” or by wiggling their nose like Elizabeth Montgomery. Here today, Guatemala. I heard him say, “You have no idea how easy you have it these days. When I was your age”—and here the listening youngsters rolled their eyes like wheels up behind their lids—“when I was your age I used to have to go five miles to school through five inches of snow by zipping up hills and surfing down them standing barefoot on a battery-powered skateboard.”

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