Cruising the loop

Today another blogger (on whose site I frequently lurk) talked about dragging main. If you aren’t familiar with this term, lucky you, let’s just say it involves teenagers driving the same stretch of road over and over while trying to pick up, drag race, or otherwise engage other teenage drivers traveling the same stretch of road. Like in American Graffitti.

In Des Moines, where I went to high school (and, okay, lived for a very large portion of my life), this stretch of road(s) was referred to as “The Loop” (this is not to be confused with the much more famous, much cooler area in Chicago) and extends over several streets downtown.

This was the thing to on a Friday night after the football game or a Saturday night after scoring some weed or stealing your older sister’s id and buying beer. Not that I ever did that.

I don’t have an older sister.

Anyway, cruising the Loop was the shit.

Cruising the Loop in your mother’s old two-tone brown Ford Taurus that frequently overheated for no reason whatsoever was not.

My friends and I much preferred going to the Lost Planet, which was a drainage dump used by the city’s water works system and mostly consisted of lime deposits. This gave it a really eerie glow under the moonlight – thus the name.

Getting there meant parking your car on an unlit street and walking through a quarter mile of even darker woods and across a set of railroad tracks and up a hill to a small opening in the trees where you would be greeted by a glowing lake of lime.

The best part about the Lost Planet was the trip there. First was the fear that the police would see your car parked on the side of the road and, knowing what you were up to, would follow you to the pit and arrest you for trespassing. Or tow your car. And even though it was located in a nicer part of town, near the governor’s mansion in fact, there were often homeless men sleeping near the train tracks. And then of course, there were the requisite legends of disappearing teenagers, alien abductions, and psycho killers. And did I mention it was dark? Like hold-on-to-the-shirt-of-the-teenage-boy-in-front-of-you dark?

Okay, so that was the best part.

I don’t really have a point to this post (why start having one now?). Just reminiscing. And thinking about how really stupid it was to be wandering around out in the woods after midnight.