Make Way For "Duck" Boats

Students leaving foreign locales for Cambridge have long dealt with a disappointing drop in the number of transportation options open to them. Tokyo’s longtime bullet-train commuters clamber drearily onto the unreliable T, while quaint Europeans enthused of the unicycle are frowned at by our city’s hard-headed pedestrians. And then there are those from even more exotic climes like that of, well, the rest of the urban United States, who discover that on the tortured “grid” of metropolitan Boston, taxicab rides are ever-unfolding, decidedly meta Borgesian enigmas. Cambridge is simply not the place for those who demand speedy or imaginative journeys.

Thanks to the inspiration of one man, all that could change as soon as the summer. Errol Tyler has dared to think outside of the box that divides boats from buses, cars from canoes. He has no time for the moldy pre-Socratic divide between earth and water. While some prophets of conveyance might be content to devise a single more efficient kind of vehicle for land or sea, Tyler has a plan that would do both at once, making the aging bridges that line the Charles entirely obsolete: he wants to bring amphibious tour buses to Cambridge.

Already, small minds are opposing Tyler’s forward-thinking proposal on a number of grounds, including the aesthetic. Cambridge Puritans, it seems, have no time for what they characterize as “duck boats” dredged from some military warehouse. Tyler has already made a vigorous—and convincing—case that his planned vessels are not in the least mallard-esque, nor are they warlike. (They are, he contends, merely a transcendent kind of bus, separate from the Patton-era DUKW surplus vehicles familiar to many.)

But put all that aside. The purity of Tyler’s vision is beyond question. So what’s so bad about duck boats, even those that are not strictly duckish? Well, to begin with, there’s the problem of Duck Hunt. Who’s to say that Nintendo-addled children of the early 1980s, so frequent on the College campus, wouldn’t grab gray-plastic rifles and start shooting at the pixellated fowl they imagine they see flying by their newest form of transit?

More worrisome is the sad possibility that years of transportatory deprivation in Boston have made its natives entirely unprepared for such a trailblazing addition. The lonely quadling waiting outside Johnston Gate for a Harvard shuttle is already confused by the presence of public buses run by the city, blue-and-red vehicles destined for Wellesley and its “treasures”—even Harvard-run shuttles going to far-off places like the Business School instead of comfortable Cabot or Currier House. These things should not be confusing. But to those living in a land where a creaky set of buses can pass for a Silver subway line (we wouldn’t like to see what they call the Bronze Line), the introduction of Tyler’s non-duckly fleet could be disastrously confusing. The sleepy Crimson commuter could easily step onto one of the new arrivals and find himself or herself destined for the depths of the river.

Perhaps, then, the aquatic-terraneous transports are not meant to be. Still, a community of scholars like our own should not hesitate to extrapolate theoretical lessons from Tyler’s proposal. Though he quite rightly insists that his buses would not be salvaged from Eisenhower’s army, Tyler cannot deny their resemblance to military surplus—and that is a resemblance which is not in the least shameful. Harvard should take a page from Tyler’s apparent book and get hold of some unused K rations to be parachuted onto Quincy House’s courtyard. They couldn’t be worse than Harvard University Dining Services’ weaker offerings, and they would surely keep longer than the delicate, all too short-lived culinary fantasia that is Guiness steak pie. And though Cambridge is not yet ready for the non-duck boats, the option should hardly be, ahem, rivered—with talk of moving undergraduate Houses to Allston in the next decades, Tyler’s may be the murky, polluted Charles-side wave of the future.