As so many kids, my daughter is obsessed with cars. She convinced her uncle—a holy man, a model for all humanity, un pardillo—to drive her to see the Ferrari museum, 130 km from where we are staying. Evidently, I don’t care about that, and in fact, I am pretty sure that even at 10, I wouldn’t have cared. In any case, had I cared to go, I probably would not have managed to convince anybody to drive me there. Now, don’t take me wrong: I have very nice uncles. But the most vivid memory I have of driving with one of them is that the car was new, that my uncle was going to fill it up, that I tagged along, and that this short ride was long enough for me to puke all over the upholstery. So, maybe it would be unfair to blame my uncles for not volunteering to drive me to places. But I am sure that I would not have misused one of those rides to go to Maranello.

On the other hand, I would have definitely begged to go to see a maritime museum. Over the years, I have seen many of them: the naval museums in Madrid, the maritime museum in Bilbao, the Vasa museum—basically the only reason I always wanted to go to Stockholm—, las Atarazanas Reales in Barcelona, the historic naval museum in Venice, the one I just saw here in Pisa, etc. The best, by far, is the Royal Navy Museum in Portsmouth. At some point, I will make it to Roskilde.

Besides going to look like an idiot at a few remaining boards of old boats, I have also wasted prodigious amounts of time reading about boats. I know stupid things about boat construction, about life on old boats, about naval battles, about trade, about maps, about winds and orientation at sea, about coaling stations, etc. As a kid, I spent countless class hours drawing boats and making boats out of all sorts of things, like the aluminum foil in which my snack had been packed. I still know how to make those boats. You can make them so that they look pretty, or you can make them so that they can be floated in a pond, going in vaguely the desired direction. It is hard to get both things right.

I also built larger boats that survived for a while on the (really calm) sea. Although sometimes larger, they were mostly totally makeshift, made out of thick paper covered with aluminum foil sealed with wax. Sometimes they had sails, and sometimes an electric motor. Those with the motor were most of the time a total flop because if you build the axis out of wire and use the tin of a can to make the propeller, it is not going to be very mechanically efficient. And this still doesn’t touch the key issue of connecting it all, because the rubber sheath of a cable is going to work well when you test the motor out of the water, but with some more resistance, it comes apart really fast. Still, sometimes those paper and aluminum boats with motors and DIY transmissions reached, for a few minutes, something close to walking speed. Anyways, I had some more success when using wood, but the point was never to have a functioning toy, but to make it.

I never really outgrew my obsession with boats, and it is only the combination of the modicum of self-awareness I have accumulated over time, with a lack of easy access to a pond, that prevents me from spending my time building boats now. Although if I were to build one now, I would definitely invest more in materials.

Not far from where we lived, there was a sailing club. It didn’t occur to me that I could have gone there to learn to sail, and nobody suggested it. I guess that at the time, children had way fewer extracurricular activities than now. Maybe there was also some sort of class thing going on, although class might not be the right word. In any case, I suspect that my parents, had they thought about it, would have thought that sailing was something other people did. Anyway, when I moved to Vancouver, I decided to learn to sail. I did, and I have somewhere a diploma saying that I am/was allowed to rent some basic sailing mini-boats. The plan was to buy a real sailing boat. Nothing too big, but big enough to sleep in while moored in a harbor. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I was aiming for 24 feet. I wanted to buy it secondhand because you could get one for about a tenth of the price of a new one. Among all those ads, you found incredible things. There was, for example, a WWII cutter for sale for $3,000, moored somewhere up north in British Columbia. If I remember right, it had been used as a bar, or a party boat, or something. I guess the price was explained by the fact that you needed to find a place to moor such a behemoth.

Anyway, all of that is now quite a while back because Vancouver didn’t last long. And giving up on the idea of sailing my own boat, or just sailing altogether, was part of the deal that I made with myself when I moved 70 km inland, leaving half of my salary behind. Being landlocked, boats have morphed into trees, I guess.

Nowadays, my boat obsession continues, although I guess in an attenuated form. I take a ferry every time I can. I would also like to do some long-distance travel on a freighter. A bit of the problem is where to go. The evident choice would be to cross the Atlantic. It is not cheap, it is long, but I would love to do it. The issue is that I am not sure I want to arrive now in Norfolk or Savannah and confront US immigration, telling them with my horrible accent that I just came off the boat. In any case, it seems that after COVID, a lot of companies stopped offering passenger travel on their freighters. I hope they allow it again. I will keep looking. And I might go back to building boats during class. I am sure that students would find that more memorable than the proof of Rauch’s theorem.