A Little Bit Like Home

Hot Laps in the Parking Garage

Every once in a while, you run into someone from an earlier chapter of life who reminds you of something you hadn’t thought about in years. Not because it wasn’t important, but because life kept stacking new memories on top of the old ones.

That happened to me recently when I ran into one of the guys from college who used to run hot laps with us in a campus parking garage.

That’s right. Hot laps on a moped.

Not just any moped, but a black, slightly tired, 1980s-era Yamaha that Chris Koutz and I co-owned during my junior year. We paid $75 each for it, hauled it back to campus in the trunk of my car from somewhere west of Boonville, and convinced ourselves we had made a sound financial investment.

Our “test drive” consisted mostly of listening to it run outside a man’s garage, since there wasn’t much room to actually ride it. It sounded healthy enough, though, and after Chris drained the tank, cleaned it out and put in a new spark plug, it ran like new, or at least like a moped that had seen its best days a decade earlier.

It was a two-cycle engine, the same as a chainsaw. The main difference between a chainsaw and a moped is two wheels and handlebars.

The sound proved it. When you pushed that little engine to its limit, it roared like a chainsaw with a slightly deeper tone. Put two college guys on it, and the pitch dropped even lower, like the machine was protesting but still willing to try.

We drove that thing everywhere, mostly to class, occasionally across Columbia on side streets, and sometimes just because there was no reason not to. Filling the tank cost about $2.50, and you could ride for what felt like forever on a single fill-up. Some people claimed they got nearly 100 miles to the gallon with their moped. I’m not sure we ever proved that, but we covered a lot of pavement finding out.

One of our favorite destinations wasn’t a destination at all.

In the evening, the parking garages on campus emptied out, leaving several concrete floors wide open and echoing like an indoor racetrack. We would ride double over to the garage, meet up with a group of guys from Campus House, and take turns driving what we affectionately called hot laps.

Each rider would buzz up the ramps at about 12 or 15 mph, then come flying down the other side at speeds that felt much faster than they probably were. The engine screamed against the concrete walls, the sound changing ever so slightly as you passed each support column. On the down ramps, the wind whistled through our hair because none of us wore helmets. In our minds, it was just a 49cc engine that didn’t move much faster than a bicycle, and back then nobody wore bicycle helmets anyway.

While one person ran the course, someone else timed the laps on a Casio watch. The rest of us stood around talking about everything under the sun, laughing more than we probably should have, and enjoying the kind of freedom that only shows up in small windows of life.

We should have been studying.

Nearly 40 years later, though, I don’t remember a single night spent in a study hall. I do remember hot laps in an empty parking garage, the echo of that little engine bouncing off concrete, and the feeling that life was wide open and just beginning.

Eventually, we sold the moped for $200, $50 more than we paid for it. At the time, that felt like a tidy profit. Looking back, we could have given it away and still come out ahead.

Because the real return on that $150 investment wasn’t transportation.

It was the friendships, the laughter, and the memories that still come roaring back whenever I hear the distant buzz of a small engine echoing somewhere off in the distance. Back then we thought we were just killing time. Turns out we were making it.

Some things appreciate long after you think you’ve sold them.

Tom Brand writes the weekly A Little Bit Like Home column about life, family, faith, and the kind of decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable in college but require a little more explanation now. Find more at ALittleBitLikeHome.com.