Forget Roads

Forget planes, trains, any of it—I’ve found my preferred mode of long-distance travel. The only condition is that an ocean separates you from wherever you’re going. Robbie "Maddo" Maddison just rode a modified motorbike across the waves off Tahiti, and I haven’t thought about much else since.

DC Shoes released the video, titled Pipe Dream, and the first thing you look for is the seam—the CGI, the cut, the wire. There isn’t one. It’s Maddison, his bike, and Tahiti’s surf, completely real. He skims past onlookers who look like they’re witnessing something physics hasn’t caught up with yet.

I’m probably the laziest person I know. I have no business caring about extreme sports. And yet something about watching a man tear across open ocean on a motorcycle—past swaying palms, past slack-jawed bystanders—ignites this violent, irrational urge to be moving, to be outside, to be doing something that reckless. It would end with me thrown into the water after about four seconds. I’d still go.