When I was 12 or maybe 13 my foster brother Bob purchased a 1971 Mustang Mach 1, that’s “Mach” as in the speed of sound not “mock” as in to brutally make fun of something, which is important because Bob knew he was very mock-able, and I’m sure that he hoped that this amazing black and gold mighty sports car would put an end to all derision and place him on the road to cool-Dom. It worked on me, but then again, as a teacher I can confirm that most 12 year olds are still pretty stupid!
I washed that car more times than I can recall. I remember hoping for a sort of sympathetic magic that would cover up the humiliation of my own bright yellow mode of transportation: a Bike McCycle. Yes, you heard right, a Bike McCycle. My parents entered my name in a raffle at the McDonalds on Allen Street and the *ahem* winner got a bright McDonalds yellow 10 speed bike with Bike McCycle on the frame.
“Shultis got a Bike McCycle”
“Hey Shultis, nice Bike McCycle”
It was a nice bike. I’d never had a 10 speed before. It would definitely take me further faster than whatever bicycle I had before. But every ride brought humiliation. By the time I took the key to the lock I now needed to protect my oh so valuable Bike McCycle and scratched off those horrible marketing school inspired words it was too late: I rode a Bike McCycle; and the jingling of that key from my belt running around the bases at baseball practice got me my first junior high nickname: Chain Legs.
In high school the most beautiful girl in my grade, Tammy Crouse, was dating a guy who drove a Trans Am. Yes, the Pontiac Firebird with a giant decal of a Phoenix on the hood. In my future was a car with a decal of another sort. During the oil crises of the mid seventies my mom had chosen to buy a fire engine red Toyota Corolla station wagon with faux wood paneling in the form of giant stickers from the front all the way to the back: Bob’s Mustang had a higher cool quotient in its gas cap than could be found in my mom’s entire car, but starting in February of 1980 that became the car I was to drive on my first date, to prom, to college in Utah, and home from my wedding.
But sometime between washing that Mustang and now my attitude toward the automobile has changed completely. I hate them. I hate what they do to the environment. Most of all I hate how much our Post War development pattern has made us so totally dependent on them. I still own one, but I’ve gone out of my way, little by little, to make the automobile a diminishing presence in my life. In the row of 5 townhouses on my street in downtown Springfield, mine is the only one without a single allotted space for a car; I park my car half a block away on a side street. Behind the house, where we might have been able to park some vehicles, we’ve instead planted a garden: some raised beds, a few fruit trees, and a handful of grape vines. I have some rain barrels I use to water the garden but I never, never wash my car
The Bike McCycle is a new one on me. Made me laugh out loud.
Love this sentiment of car-disdain. I have a 47-minute commute, one-way, to a job in the nearest metropolitan area, and otherwise live in small Midwestern town of 12,000 that still manages to have its own identity. The thing I realized with a shock, fairly recently, is that if I did not have the daily commute, I could live almost without a car, despite their being no public transit here, and despite winter. My entire town’s area is less than 6 square miles. That means virtually everything is a very moderate bike ride, and most things a very moderate walk, from my front door. With the investment of a good bike rack/saddlebags, I now assume that once I park the car after work on Friday, I will not get in it again until Monday morning. Now it totally blows me mind when I see people getting in the car to “go downtown” when they live in one of the neighborhoods. Don’t get me wrong, EVERYONE does this, but it literally take 15 – 20 minutes to walk anywhere in this town, so to get in the car and drive, and park and get out, is a savings of about 7 – 10 minutes, max. So the expense, the sedentary lifestyle, the angst over parking, the upkeep & storage, the concrete, the car parks, the ugliness and noise of all these cars all over the place, and they are almost completely unnecessary. I have this vision I call 1000 cars. It is a wild guess, but I think my little town could pool to buy 1000 cars, (it now has about 6000, I think, judging from revenue of our new wheel tax) to have collectively, and we all could sell our private cars and save collectively millions of dollars to spend on other better things. At any given time, I think 1000 cars, of all sizes, would cover everyone’s needs all the time. It is estimated that cars are in use about 5 – 10% of the day, and the rest of the time they are storage problems. We could have 100 pick ups, 100 electric vehicles, 400 hybrids, 400 people- hauling SUVs, and we’d all save $1000s of dollars, be better served, and could turn a bunch of fancy huge garages into income-producing funky living spaces. Plus our downtown would be free to add street trees, art, and pop up shops where dead car parking spots are now. We could collectively hire 3 – 5 mechanics, and use modern dispatch apps to manage coordination. A fantasy, but a cool one. Would talking about this make the guys with the Bike McCycles notice me? Oh swoon.
I totally agree. For ten years now I’ve lived with the rule that I won’t use a car for any trip inside the city limits of my Southern college town (26 square miles, says Google). So my car sits unused for weeks or months, and when I do have to use it, I’m annoyed about sitting in traffic. The car is a 1997 Saturn that I bought for $2000, and it’s doing just fine because it gets so little use; likewise, I pay the bare minimum for insurance. “1000 cars” makes total sense to me.
As a guy who appreciates old bikes, though, I gotta say that the Bike McCycle looks like a pretty crappy ride (probably a re-badged Huffy or Murray). In the ’70s, European and especially Japanese bikes were blowing U.S. manufacturers out of the water. The Corolla was definitely a way better car than the Firebird, too.