If you should find yourself down the shore during the hot, sweaty, dog days of summer with no desire to sizzle on the beach or swelter on the boardwalk, perhaps you could try surreying, which is an inexpensive, enjoyable way to have a stroke.

To clarify, a surrey is a type of bike/carriage hybrid invented by early settlers as one of the first — and most effective — forms of birth control. The way it worked was early teenage boy settlers (called “lads”) would announce to their parents that they had a date and wanted to borrow the carriage for the night.

“The carriage is in the shop with a busted carburetor,” the parents would say. “Take the surrey instead.”

Of course, this was an obvious lie; changing the carburetor on a horse-drawn carriage was a simple, half-day job, and rarely required the services of a mechanic. But, being as this was the “early days,” teenagers were far better behaved than they are now, largely because every family owned a gun and the penalty for murder was a stern talking to.

So teenage settler boys would mount their surreys and pedal over to the houses of teenage settler girls (called “lads”), where they’d squeeze a rubber ball at the end of a small horn, thus producing a sound remarkably similar to that of a duck going through puberty.

Invariably what would happen is the teenage girl settler would poke her head out the door, point at the boy in the surrey, laugh heartily, and then slip into a three-week coma because corsets were worn so tightly back then that anything more than a polite chuckle could only be performed under the direct care of a physician.

With their unconscious dates strewn about the countryside, early teenage settler boys channeled their hormonal energy and focused it on building cities. This launched America into The Industrial Age, which led to The Information Age, and finally to The Age Of Aquarius.

As time progressed, the surrey’s role in society morphed into what it is today — a way for locals in beach towns to rip-off tourists.

In my case, the rip-off occurred several years ago in Ocean City with my wife’s family.

We were all sitting around the porch having a wonderful time, primarily because none of us were on a surrey at that moment. Then somebody, probably one of my nephews, suggested that we rent one to ride around the boardwalk the next morning.

“Hey, what a great idea,” said my wife and her sisters, almost in unison. (Ocean City may be a dry town but, as the previous statement shows, alcohol played a significant role in our vacation plans.)

The next morning I awoke bright and early to accompany my wife’s clan on their merry jaunt. At the rental shop, we paid for a single surrey even though we had no less than eight people in our party, because when weaving through throngs of senior citizens with the reflexes of plywood, it’s more fun when there’s 1,000 lbs of momentum behind you.

On the plus side, with all the extra weight, the surrey propelled itself at a very leisurely pace, ideal for gazing at passing scenery. The problem was that half our party consisted of pre-adolescent boys, and scenery gazing wasn’t what they had in mind. Pretending to be Maverick zipping among a squadron of Migs was more their idea of fun, which required me to pedal the eighty-year-old surrey to a speed of roughly Mach 1.

I managed to keep this up for about fifteen minutes before every bone in my body from the waist down got off to go buy fudge, at which point we slowed to the pace of an average commercial jetliner.

As we coasted to a stop in front of the rental shop (and by “coasted” I mean “down a ramp and into a wall”), everyone screamed in delight and clapped their hands. Later that night, in bed, my wife tried to thank me for being such a good uncle, but I wasn’t in the mood.