IT IS SAID THAT we are a divided people, but on many issues of the day there is broad agreement. In the case of personal watercraft—also known as jet-skis or even, in Britain, water scooters—public opinion cleaves between the tiny minority who at any instant might be riding them (soaking wet, grinning like lunatics) and virtually everybody else, who hate them.
Perhaps the only recreational vehicles more polarizing than PWCs are snowmobiles, the sounds and smells of which carry far into the backcountry. And when they move in herds, as they often do, their whining can echo from one side of Lake Tahoe to the other. Ask me how I know.
