The call came around 3 a.m., a wretched hour when the only things stirring are demons and degenerate ink-stained scribblers like myself. My editor, a man whose blood type is probably bargain whiskey and desperation, was on the line, his voice crackling with the kind of manic glee that means someone, somewhere, is having a very bad day.
“Get down to Florida,” he barked. “Some nutcase is trying to run to London.”
“Run?” I croaked, my throat a desert of cheap gin. “Did he buy a plane ticket, for Christ’s sake?”
“In a hamster wheel,” he said, and hung up.
And that, my friends, is how I found myself screaming down the I-95 corridor in a rented convertible with a trunk full of grapefruit and a head full of existential dread, chasing the ghost of the American Dream as it bobbed, pitifully, in the Atlantic swell. The dream, in this case, took the form of one Reza Baluchi, a marathon runner with a vision so pure, so profoundly stupid, that it could only have been born in the fever swamps of the Sunshine State.
His chariot? A “Hydro Pod.” A glorious, homemade contraption of wires and buoys that looked like a giant gerbil ball had a drunken, one-night stand with a scrap heap. Baluchi’s plan was simple: get in the ball off the coast of Florida and just… *run*. Run until the salt water and the seagull shit gave way to the white cliffs of Dover. A 4,000-mile journey powered by nothing but sinew and a brand of lunatic optimism that modern pharmacology has yet to successfully replicate.
This wasn’t his first wild ride. Oh no. This was his *fourth* bite at the big, watery apple. The Coast Guard had dragged his soggy ass out of the drink in 2014, 2016, and 2021. Each time, they told him to knock it off. Each time, he smiled, nodded, and presumably went right back to his garage to add more buoys and duct tape to his magnificent failure machine. He was a man possessed by a mission, he said, to raise money for the homeless, for the police, for the fire department, and—in a twist of irony so sharp it could cut glass—for the very same Coast Guard that kept having to rescue him.
So there he was, 70 miles off the coast of Georgia, running in place while Hurricane Franklin, a genuine, god-fearing tempest, was churning its way toward him. It’s the perfect metaphor for modern America, isn’t it? A lone man, furiously expending all his energy inside a bubble of his own creation, going absolutely nowhere, all while a category-four disaster looms on the horizon. The death of the American dream isn’t a tragedy; it’s a farce staged in a floating hamster wheel.
When the Coast Guard showed up, sirens blaring across the waves, the whole scene went completely off the rails. They told him the voyage was “manifestly unsafe.” Unsafe? Of course it was unsafe! That was the whole goddamn point. You don’t climb Everest because it’s safe. You don’t eat a chili dog the size of your forearm because it’s healthy. You do it because you’re alive and staring into the void, and sometimes the only sane response is to do something beautifully, cosmically insane.
But the men in uniforms didn’t see the poetry. They saw a liability. And Reza, cornered in his bubble, did what any cornered creature does. He went feral. He pulled out a 12-inch knife and threatened to gut himself right there in the Gulf Stream. When that didn’t work, he upped the ante. He held up a fistful of wires and screamed that he had a bomb. A *bomb*.
For three days, the standoff continued. A bizarre, slow-motion siege at sea. The Coast Guard would circle, bullhorns squawking, while Reza ran in his wheel, a tiny, defiant king in a kingdom of one. They offered him food, water, and dire warnings about the hurricane. He just kept running, a testament to the sheer, stubborn power of a terrible idea. It was a savage journey into the heart of futility.
I watched the whole drama unfold from a chartered fishing boat, the skipper chain-smoking and muttering about the price of bait. We were in the belly of the beast, close enough to see the madness in Baluchi’s eyes, the sun beating down on his bobbing prison. Was he a hero? A fool? Or just another poor bastard chewed up and spit out by a country that promises you can be anything you want, then presents you with a bill for the audacity of trying?
Eventually, like all great bursts of passion, it fizzled out. On the third day, Reza admitted the bomb wasn’t real. The fire went out of him. The Coast Guard moved in, plucked him from his pod, and hauled him back to Miami to face the music: obstruction of boarding, violation of a captain of the port order, the usual litany of bureaucratic sins.
They set his bond at a quarter of a million dollars, a price tag for a dream. And as I watched them lead him away, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of something that felt dangerously like respect. The man is a menace, a drain on public resources, and clearly crazier than a shithouse rat. But by God, he’s one of us.
He is the spirit of this ragged, broken nation, convinced that with just one more push, one more insane burst of effort, he can run across the goddamn ocean and find something better on the other side. He never will, of course. We’re all just spinning in our own little wheels, the storm is always coming, and the shore is much farther than it appears. It’s a hell of a wild ride, though. You have to give him that.
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