I saw the gas price boom way before anyone. More importantly, I was given a stack of Playboy magazines, which I actually read. In one magazine, -a Christmas special, I discovered an article titled: Return of the Scooter.

The featured bike was an old fashioned two-stroke one-off of the old fashioned Vespa 'P' series, called 'Stella' by The Genuine Scooter Company. Well, I went down to the bank, Got a small loan, and ordered the very next '02 Stella to come off the boat. There was some hassle -I gather these things were selling like hotcakes, and I ended up with a pretty silver scooter, which took about twenty minutes to figure out how to operate. Days later, I got the license and registration and insurance (all required by law for any vehicle over 50cc's in Colorado. I started taking the thing to work, which was then a twenty minute drive though some winding canyon roads. Within a week I decided I'd done well. Real well.

Where I had once been filling up almost weekly, at about thirty dollars a shot in my old VW (remember when you could fill up for $30?) I now went two weeks to a month, with a fill up that was less than five dollars.

A zippy little bike that was advertised as being able to pull off sixty miles an hour, at the altitudes of southwest Colorado it still pulled off fifty five on a good stretch, and could cruise at 45 no matter where you took it, and I took it everywhere. Unless I meant to bring my dog to the lake, or get groceries, or haul tools to a job site, I could get there faster and with less gas.

About a month and a half after my first ride, I got hit by a car. Some ancient gent with the sun in his eyes and a squirming kid in the back seat pulled out onto the road, stopped, went again, stopped again -I saw trouble, and made to use the nimble bike to get around, but he went again, and bumper met cowling, and my little bike and I were knocked clean off the road.

My helmet never touched the ground. Steel toed boots and a good and thick set of carhartts protected my right leg. I got away needing to patch up my pant leg. The bike didn't do so well. The cowling bent in enough to contact the flywheel and stator plate, ruining the engine. I got up, tossed the bike in the back of the next pickup to come along, and went the rest of the way to work, broken-hearted.

The heartbreak only began with the wreck, though. Dealing with the old fellah's insurance company was the real tragedy. Rather than do the right

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