Adventures In Fuel Mileage

Adventures in fuel mileage

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

SCENE ONE: IT IS A BEAUTIFUL WARM morning in 1967 and the lawns around my college dormitory at the University of Wisconsin have finally turned a brilliant, almost artificial Easter-basket green. Fat robins are hopping around the campus. I’m flying high, having just taken my last semester exam (Geology 101 ) at 7:45 in the morning. My freshman year is finished. Summer is almost here.

I head back to my empty dorm room in Sullivan Hall. My roommate is already gone, and there’s nothing left in the room but a geology textbook, a WWII surplus A-2 brown leather flying jacket, a Bell 500 TX motorcycle helmet, an Official Boy Scout knapsack and some dust mice under the bed. My parents had stopped by two days earlier and hauled away my guitar, typewriter and other earthly belongings in their Falcon wagon. Now my room looks like a barracks at the end of a war.

In the parking lot across the street, my chariot awaits. It’s a silver-and-black 1965 Honda Super 90 motorcycle, purchased just a few weeks earlier with money earned by washing pots and pans every night for the residence halls food service. I got the bike from a high school kid named Ronnie Coke (don’t ask me why I still remember his name) for $180.

I put on the helmet, zip up my jacket, swing the pack onto my back, turn on the fuel, pull the choke lever up and hit the starter button. The lovely little singleoverhead-cam engine fires immediately and I’m on my way. I cruise by another dorm nearby and join forces with my old high school friend, Dave Schroeder. I ran into him on campus the day before and discovered he z/Avo just bought a Honda S-90 and planned to ride home the next morning, so we decided to ride together.

We head into the green Wisconsin hills, running flat-out at about 55 mph on Highway 12, stop for breakfast in Sauk City, then motor toward my home town of Elroy, Wisconsin (pop. 1502). Dave lives to the north, in Kendall, six miles farther up the road.

When we get to Elroy, Dave waves good-bye and keeps rolling toward home. I pull into Garvin’s Mobil station, which still has a flying red horse in front. Bob Garvin comes out, cranks the pump back to zero, lifts the nozzle and trips the switch.

There are no self-service gas stations at this point; the only people who pump their own fuel are employees or owners

of service

stations. I’m 19 years old and have never operated a gas pump. Bob would be offended if I tried, and it would be taken as a rude demonstration of impatience, like going behind the counter to bag your own popcorn at a movie theater. It just isn’t done.

I remove the gas cap and Bob carefully tips the nozzle into the Honda tank. “All done with college for the year?” he asks, and in the time it takes to say that, the tank is full. Bob peers into the tank and back at the pump and looks baffled. The bike has taken a tick over .7 of a gallon, and the pump says I owe 23 cents.

“When did you fill this up last?” he asks.

“Yesterday afternoon, in Madison.”

“You really went 90 miles on 23 cents worth of gas?”

“I guess I did,” I reply, feeling somewhat guilty for making Bob come out of the station to pump so little fuel.

“That’s well over 100 miles per gallon,” he says. “More like 120-something...”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” I say, nodding in solemn commiseration. I take two dimes and three pennies out of my blue jeans pocket and hand them to Bob. It doesn’t feel like a fair exchange for two hours of carefree motoring on a beautiful spring morning.

Bob hefts these tiny, almost weightless coins in the palm of his hand and then looks at the Honda. “Well,” he says, “I hope they don’t make too many more of those things.”

Scene Two: Yesterday afternoon, almost exactly 37 years later.

I’m leaving this coming weekend for Colorado to do some fire-roading in the Rockies with my friend Mike Mosiman, so I’ve been prepping my dual-sport Suzuki DR650 for the trip-DOT knobbies, skidplate, heavy-duty handguards, etc. The last step is to install a plastic 4.1-gallon Clarke gas tank to replace the stock steel 3.4-gallon tank.

I throw a splash of gas into the new tank and ride to the nearest station, where the sign out front says unleaded regular is now $2.099/io per gallon, up 5 cents from yesterday. You are allowed (required) to pump your own gas now, so I slide my credit card in and out of the pump at exactly the right speed, then fill the tank with a further 3.9 gallons of regular, for a cost of $8.18.

I look at the pump and then stare at my receipt numbly, trying to comprehend that I’ve put more than $8 worth of fuel into a moderately sized motorcycle tank.

But my bad fuel day is not yet over. I return to the station later to top off the 35-gallon tank in my Ford Econoline van for the trip. It takes 30 gallons, or $62.97 worth of fuel. Then I fill up all the plastic 5-gallon gas cans we keep at our rural home for running lawnmowers, chainsaws, weed-whackers, etc. The total on those is $71.29. Now I’ve spent $142.44 for gasoline in one day-without going anywhere!

So it turns out Bob Garvin needn’t have worried about Honda making too many more of those fuel-sipping Super 90s and putting him out of business.

He couldn’t possibly have foreseen that an entire generation of riders who bought those bikes would later escalate to much larger motorcycles that get about one-third the mileage of the S-90.

Or that some of us would feel compelled to haul our bikes 1000 miles to Colorado and back in a 16-mpg van for a few days of trail riding.

Or choose to spend perfectly good motorcycle funds on lawnmowers, chainsaws and weed-whackers, using up our rare, remaining riding days to groom real estate bought with our own money.

Who could have guessed?

Certainly not that free and easy college kid with the little Honda. □