Boston Through the Eyes of its Moped Gang

It has been said that there are as many cities as there are people in a city.

The Boston that reveals itself first, easily, to day trippers and passers-through, is a collection of separate places where one burrows down into subway holes set in quiet streets and where, after a few dark and sleepy minutes of rocking through tunnels (though you don’t seem to be moving at all), one pops back up again to surface blinking at the feet of inscrutable structures that disappear far above into clouds. 

It is a collection of self-contained places strung along a web of red and green and orange, the coded network of trains and buses that abstracts the city into lines and connections, that abstracts the city beyond distance and transition and proportion, that is almost imaginary. Many people who live here have only known this Boston.

There is also a Boston found along the streets and expressways, threading with difficulty through stoplights and pressing hard against the open wounds of construction. There is the city you discover on your own two feet, a slow and intimate place, formed by the glacial running together of many neighborhoods, any of which can command devotion, and from which it is thus difficult to stray. And these two cities are forced into uneasy cohabitation, laid atop one another and winding tensely through one another.

And there is a Boston that only two strokes, 49 cubic centimeters, and a gallon of gasoline will make apparent.

Dave and I grew up in Pennsylvania, and when we were about seven, he would go on and on about mopeds. I never knew exactly what he was talking about–something about a motor and pedals. But he knew something that I didn’t, and when, thirteen years later, a friend let me ride his bright orange moped–that was that, I understood.

Within a month or so after moving to Boston last July, I found a 1984 Garelli for less than $400 through some guy north of the city. He brought it down in the back of a pickup with his son, who was just entering college and had apparently exhausted his moped phase by age fifteen, as most mopedophiles do. After nearly bursting a lung the next morning trying to get it going (it needed gas), I found the Boston I hadn’t been looking for slipping lazily by as the two stroke engine pulled me steadily along, my heart pumping like the piston.

A week later I was accosted at a garage sale by Mike, who had been attempting to get together a Boston moped scene for some time. He has about five, in various states of disrepair–the majority of moped enthusiasts seem to possess at least three mopeds and spend the majority of their time transferring parts from one to the other in an occult effort to conjure life from tired metal. Since I met Mike, the ranks of the Boston moped gang, the kHz, have been growing. We got Dave a chrome Puch toptank, which he loved so much he was willing to completely disregard his own life, and most of ours, every time he got it started. It has since come under the new ownership of a nameless thief who was no doubt forced to abandon it after finding that the engine seized, unloved, in desperate need of a tenderly mixed ratio of fuel and oil. Our hearts were broken. But there will be another.

The city is new to us, always. We weave ourselves into the city, not only into its arteries but into its capillary side streets–not easily. I have come to know neighborhoods and access routes that would have been completely alien, were I not liberated by my little engine, taking me on errands and to work and simply to be about on blinding Sunday joyrides and late wet nights. None of us are from the area originally, but with our ‘peds, the whole place has become our city more than we could have dreamed. We find our feet, our wheels, caught between cement and taxicabs; we find ourselves becoming closer to the streets of Boston than we’d like sometimes, but they are streets that few others will know. We find ourselves at the business end of dirty looks and sophomoric jokes and aggressive automobile grills; it is out of confusion, we’ll say, and misunderstanding, and (we like to think) a bit of envy.

But we are also stopped by groups of seven-year-old kids on kick-scooters whose eyes grow wide, and by people who had all but forgotten but now remember in grins their days at fifteen in the late ‘70s. We are few and far between, in general, and when we find others our eyes grow wide too and we already know one another. When we ride together, the city, all of the cities in Boston, seems to be ours, though our brakes are worn on the bottom of our shoes and we cannibalize ourselves by the side of the street and we sound like a swarm of emphysemic weedwhackers and just getting our engines running is a feat of endurance and majesty.

Maybe it is an exaggeration, what was said about cities, and how each person sees their own. We have found Boston, maybe one Boston, that we love. And atop our well-loved, aging little machines, we are still finding it.