and perhaps it was, if you’re charitable enough to call it that.
really it was a red sheet of wood, a seat, a steering wheel, and a lawnmower engine bolted onto the back. if it had any transmission at all it was limited to the lawnmower’s forward-park-reverse.
i remember being kinda disappointed because i knew what “real” gokarts were supposed to look like, but i was still intrigued enough to try it out.
my grandparents built a small dirt track in their backyard for it too. from what i remember, they must have done some amount of dirt-moving to make the track, since it had like banked turns and shit and my patch of ohio doesn’t normally allow for elevation. but, like, this is one of those things i didn’t ask about, just like the origins of the gokart itself. grandpa either built the gokart himself or had help from great-grandpa, and while it seems just complex enough now for me to wonder about,1 i didn’t question it at the time. he just was proud of it, and i was happy to ride it.
it was bumpy, and even though it wasn’t very fast it had just enough speed to make it feel like you were never fully in control at any time. still, i wouldn’t say i ever felt unsafe. it’s just that you can only get so much out of riding on a small track.
i don’t know how much land my grandparents owned out there in the sticks. i don’t know how far back it extended.
but off in the distance, there was a forest.
a dirt road traveled straight back toward it, and ran alongside the forest. to the left of the road there was a football field, or maybe a rugby field. i don’t know why that was there. to the right was the woods. i don’t know how far back they went. i don’t think i ever went in there.
next to my grandparents’ house on the left there was an auto shop that might’ve been a chop shop. on the right there were some homes, but they were small.
Update on July 11, 2021
while talking with my parents, i decided to bring up the go-kart. apparently it was actually my great-grandpa who built it! since he used to be a farmer, he’d often have various machines break down on him, and the ones that couldn’t be repaired could still be stripped for parts. my great-grandpa and his friends enjoyed creating new machines out of these scraps, and once he heard that i had an interest in go-karts, i guess he tried his hand at making one for me.
scratchpad: the house
written sometime 2018 for twitter but never posted
there used to be a house here.
grandpa built it with his bare hands to raise his family in. then ten years ago the landfill got too big and the house was too close so they were forced to sell it to the government.
now it’s gone.
a swingset that by the time i came around was more rust than swing. a tv antenna that stretched to the heavens, and was also more rust than antenna. i always wanted to climb it.
a go-kart (really a plank of wood with a motor) that my uncle burned the engine out on. a civic which that same uncle street modded into unusability after watching fast and the furious exactly once
an office with a wooden desk with a green desk lamp on one side and windows 95 on the other. it also had a chest with some real cursed toys.
a basement with a ping pong table where we’d practice trick shots against the rafters. a basement with a closet that my cousin would lock me in with her and uh…
a basement with the wayne’s world vcr board game.
i was raised there too my first few years, and even after that, i spent twenty years of holidays there. it was where i’d eat a quick lunch between classes at community college.
now the empty plot rests there, filled in by grass with only bits of the gravel driveway peeking through, and only those who share these same memories can see what used to be here.
Footnotes
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then again my grandpa built the house he lived in too, so maybe i shouldn’t doubt his acumen. ↩