One afternoon on the hottest day of the hottest month in the hottest state south of the Mason Dixon Line, my husband Tim and I decided to try out Segway Personal Transporters. I was thinking two things when I agreed to this: first, that I could possibly stir up a little breeze while exerting no effort at all, and second, that riding on one of these things would be verification that the future was truly at hand and at my disposal.

When I was a kid I always imagined what the future would look like. I would be riding in either a hovercraft or have a jet pack strapped to my back as I made my way to the grocery store—wait, there would be no grocery stores because all of
our food would be in the form of little pellets that expanded to glorious dinners when put in some kind of rehydrating device. Anyway, I’d return to my home in the bubble with whatever I had shopped for. I think that everything I imagined about the future I got from watching “The Jetsons.”

So, when I first saw a dorky looking man on a Segway cruising along the sidewalk in my hometown of Ithaca, New York, I thought, “Ah, that’s what the future really looks like.”

Tim and I were visiting Amelia Island Plantation in Florida and were trying to beat the 112-degree heat and 99-percent humidity by lying very, very still in our room. But this felt wrong. Here we were in a beautiful place, although it was so humid a mist obscured the view of the ocean from our ocean-view room. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s take a Segway Back to Nature Safari.”

It seemed like such an oxymoron to me to put Segway and nature in the same sentence but I was game to see what that really meant.

A Segway PT (Personal Transporter) is a two-wheeled contraption with a platform between the wheels where you put your feet and then a long handle with a handlebar that you adjust for your height and then hold on to. The whole thing weighs about a hundred pounds and runs on a rechargeable battery so you can go out for a spin and then come home and plug it into the wall. Several police departments use Segways, and if you’ve been to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport lately, you’ve seen airport security guards whizzing past tired travelers pulling their bags behind them. The model we used at Amelia had three speeds and, if you were lucky, your guide would let you take it up to its maximum speed of 12 mph.

We had to sit through a training film that showed us what not to do—don’t go sideways on a steep hill because you will fall over and don’t try to ride your Segway down the stairs because you will fall over—and then after strapping on helmets we were allowed to mount our vehicles. The second those helmets hit our heads the sweat began pouring down our faces causing momentary episodes of blindness. We’re not talking beads of perspiration but full-blown rivers of sweat.

Our nature safari guide showed us the Segway basics on an obstacle course set up in the parking lot. We learned how to shift our weight forward to go forward and to lean back on our heels to stop. On our Segway models we had a left handle grip that controlled the direction the machine went—rotate it forward to turn right and rotate it back toward you to turn left. When we had mastered all the basics in the first gear, we were allowed to go to the next setting and soon headed out onto the paved bicycle path that snaked into the jungle of live oaks and sycamore trees.

I kept thinking, ‘Please, please let us go in third gear.’ I was so hot I thought I might faint but I knew I had to keep my wits about me because for some reason this futuristic mode of transport was not intuitive to me. Every time I needed to turn, even ever so slightly, I had to think about which way to turn the handle. At one point I got going a little fast down an incline and found myself drifting toward the edge of the path. Attempting to straighten my Segway I turned the handle the wrong way and headed toward an ancient oak tree at which point I abandoned my vehicle. I gathered you’re not supposed to do that when I saw the look of horror on the guide’s face as the $4,000 machine came to rest against the tree trunk. But hey, no harm no foul. And at least it took my mind off the fact that my shirt was drenched and clinging to my body.

We did make it all the way down the paved path through the tunnel of trees that dripped Spanish moss and looked like a picture postcard of the sultry sweltering South and we reached the sea with its slight wave-generated breeze. We parked our Segways and took off our helmets and let the salty wind blow through our sweat-drenched hair. As I listened to the rhythmic pounding of the waves and the screech of the gulls I thought about how people have been hearing this same sound for thousands of years, and it struck me that this timeless scene before me was the past and the future. And parked behind me on the beach was not the future at all but the present and, like the DeLorean, a kind of cool way to get back to the future.