When I was just old enough to drive a car myself my uncle’s best friend Mike took me for a ride in his ’87 Corvette. It was a brand-new car, and I certainly understand that he was not about to let a brand-new driver drive it. It was Salt Lake City, and the roads had the usual cracks and holes of a city who suffered winter freezing and salt, and that car let me feel every single bit of damage that we rode over. If you know Salt Lake, you know there are fantastic freeways and amazing mountain roads to tour around, and to really get a feel for a care like that. But I was not worth Mike’s time, and only got a ride around the block. And that is the only time I have ever been in a Corvette.
I did get to ride in a Toyota MR2 when I was 20. The standout moment in that car was when the guy driving it went around a corner at nearly 40 miles an hour, and the car stuck to the road like it was on rails. Again, it was a short ride, but a lot more fun than the casual tool around the block I had taken in the Vette.
when I was 21 I got a chance to go for a ride in an Acura Integra. The guy driving it explained that when he had recently driven it across country, he was getting 28 mpg while doing 140 across Texas. The shift speeds were similar to a Mustang, and the pull that that little engine produced was amazing, for only a four cylinder. Economy and decent power?! Honda reliability? It soon became a dream car.
Of the different cars of my younger years, nothing was like the 1957 Thunderbird that the guy across the street from us had in Broomfield, Colorado. It was sort of an almond white with chromed wire wheels and a white top. He had the porthole roof as well as one without, and he had two hoods for the car. One was the stock hood, and one was a specialty hood that had come from a dealer in Denver that gave it as an option. It was louvered in a couple of bands down the length of the hood. With white-wall tires and a 327 with a six-pack carb, this thing was not only perfect to the eye, but tuned to sound like an orchestra of moving parts and exhaust in a low rumble. As eye candy, it was the most beautiful car I had, and have ever seen. By now the old man is long dead, and I do wonder what ever happened to that car. If it went to anyone sane, it is pampered even better today than it was when it lived in that garage across the street from us.
I have seen the usual car show fare, and even owned a 1955 Pontiac Star Chief myself, though I never had it running before I had to give it up for my list of bad decisions in life. And like everyone in America, I have my own Mustang story. Though the one I owned was only ever a four-banger. I did get to drive my friend’s 67 in high school, though. That was a pretty sweet car. In beauty, it was not far off from that T-bird I just talked about.
And then there was the motorcycle. In 1983 my stepdad took his tax refund to a shop, and there it was. I can still picture it in my mind. I was too young to ride it then, but it eventually became the bike I learned to ride on. It was a Honda XL600. 600CC’s of on road, off road fury with a deep thunderous sound and the kind of power that let me do what other bikes had to get a running start for. I would take it to the dirt hills and prop myself at the bottom of a deep ravine, my best friend on the back of the bike, and we would watch other guys get a long run down the one side of the ravine, then slow as they powered up the other till they pulled air coming off the top. I would nail the throttle, and pull the same air, with my passenger. It was a heavy bike. But it could climb anything. The massive knobbies were wobbly and difficult to handle over 100mph on the road. But I have road along with a guy on a crotch rocket on a windy road, and he turned and gave me a thumbs up as we parted ways at the end. I had kept up with him the entire length of the ride. I know he could have gone faster, but I think he was impressed that an off-road looking bike had the power and speed to give him as good a run as it did.
Famously, that bike had more power than most expected. My friend took it for a ride one day when we were out at the dirt patch. My stepdad and I watched him go down, then turn around and stop. We heard the engine rev high, and I think we both said, “oh no!” The friend dumped the clutch, and the bike left him lying in the dirt behind it as it wheelied off on its own, then it finally fell over backwards some 75 feet away from him. The taillight was broken.
After I moved out and went to live in California, an amazing opportunity presented itself for me to buy a bike exactly like that one. I learned a lot owning my own. The biggest lesson was that just because you fancy a girl, and she tells you she rides, doesn’t mean you let her alone on your bike. She rode off, then faced a run, and I heard the throttle rev high before she dumped the clutch. Same show. Only this time it was in a parking lot, and the crankcase bashed a parking block as the bike came down. I never did get that thing fixed. The bike was self-destructive in the hands of these people!
I will never forget riding the back roads, in places where the steep hills were, climbing 20 feet at an angle before taking it up the five-foot rise above, straight up into the air, and coming down with the back tire just on the flat top, then riding away like the whole affair had been nothing. It could do it from a stand-still, and at relatively low RPM. That single cylinder engine thumped its way up anything in front of it.
Apart from those little tales, and a lot of reckless driving, my car storied about the special ones are few. My cars growing up could not spin tires much, so I made up for it laterally instead. Where they could not burn out, I took the rubber off on the corners, and somehow lived to tell about it. Some of my earliest training came on Flagstaff Mountain over Boulder, Colorado, at night. It’s a hell of a road at speed. It’s a hell of a road going slow and just trying to stick to the corners. But when you are working the brakes and the accelerator like an arcade game, it is a lesson in control that is best not ever failed. In those days, there was a dirt version over between Blackhawk and Idaho Springs called “Oh My God Road.” It was a suitable place to tear out the “Oh Jesus” bars.
Also in those days, Old Wadsworth south out of Broomfield was a two lane with an underpass that took it around a sharp S-curve that was touched on the white lines by the concrete walls that took it under a parallel railroad line. The curve turned a little back on itself and was marked 25 miles per hour. It was the greatest curve anywhere around, though the vision through that underpass was nil. You either threaded the needle perfectly or risked a head on collision with some unsuspecting sod who would not have had a chance against someone blasting through that blowhole. 70. Any of us kids racing through it could never get past that. at 75, the tires could not stick anymore. I have seen the headlights of an oncoming car right out my window as one friend and I tried the 75. A tiny arm of gravel reached onto the road and it took the traction from the front tire first, which recovered. But the back tire did not, and the car was sent into a slide. He kept it on the pavement like a champ, all while saying “oh shit.” The car dived so deep in the turn that a couple of days later we blew a tire doing 80 and realized that the noise we had heard in that dive was the tire getting a slice on the wheel well. It failed us near Terryall, miles from home. What days those were!
There’s much more to tell of! Those Colorado roads were covered in snow quite often, and between that and the dirt roads, one soon realized that training oneself to drive on them is just scaled down handling practice for what happens at speed on the blacktop. And that has saved metal bending more than once for me in my practical driving. There’s nothing like standing on the brakes only to realize that there is no way the car is going to stop before hitting another stopped in front of it, so turning the steering wheel and letting off the brakes completely, then darting to the left and just missing the back of the other car. That is a second nature that a driver has to know. It doesn’t come from growing up tame.
