When Parking Wasn’t About Cars

Before smartphones, GPS, and reclining seats, teenagers had a Camaro, an 8-track, and a quiet country road.

If you ask people my age about parking, they are likely to respond, “What kind? Parallel? Angle? Backing in? Perhaps they will talk about some neer- do-well who pulled in a spot crooked, making them feel like a human tube of toothpaste as they tried to squeeze out of their car. 

However, some of us have forgotten about another kind of parking. The type of parking that was not an adjective, but more like a noun. The kind you did in a car, not with a car. 

It was the kind of parking we did as high school kids on a Friday or Saturday night. The kind of parking we used to do between the end of the movie and taking your date home. The kind that would elicit a question from your friends like,“Hey, did ya’ll go parking last night?”  

Parking was an integral part of the dating ritual during my high school years. It involved finding an out-of-the-way road, pulling over, cutting the lights, and sliding in an 8-track tape with The Temptations or James Taylor to set the mood. Then you made out with your date like the plane was going down. 

Finding a good parking site required some daytime scouting. If you wanted to spend time alone with your date, you needed to locate a road where cows outnumbered people.

Fortunately for us, we had a number of new subdivisions being built nearby. Recently paved roads without houses were always prime parking locations. They attracted hormone-infused teenagers like squirrels to a bird feeder. One new housing development was so well-known that on date night  it looked like our high school parking lot. 

Unfortunately, they were also well-known to the cops. And I can speak from first hand experience when I say that nothing killed the mood faster than a little tap of a policeman’s flashlight on the driver’s side window.  

If you chose a deserted country road for your nefarious nocturnal activities, it was critically important to choose the movie carefully. That’s because you wanted your date to be relaxed, not on edge.  So it was never a good idea to see a horror movie where a hideous creature emerged from a swamp, and ate two teenagers it found in a car on a deserted country road. 

One of my most memorable episodes of “parkus interruptus” was quite unusual. Once I was parking with my girlfriend near a large river. James Taylor was crooning a soft melody on the eight track, and we were very much in the moment.  

Suddenly James’ soothing voice was overpowered by a loud blast from a shrill horn. Instantly, the inside of my Camaro was illuminated with the light of a thousand suns. I jumped up, and looked out of the windshield, fully expecting to see some big-eyed, gray aliens preparing to abduct us for medical experiments.

I was wrong. There was no UFO - instead, it was a coal barge making its way down the river. The crew was using their horn and boat spotlight for some cheap entertainment. They apparently decided that terrifying a couple of teenagers was more entertaining than pushing coal downstream. I reached out the window and expressed my appreciation with a hand gesture I’m sure they recognized.

They answered with two more blasts of the horn, cut the spotlight off, and continued down the river.

It could have been worse. It could’ve been the tap of a policeman’s flashlight. 

I’m not sure that kids today even go parking; however, if they do, they have a serious technological advantage that we did not have – the reclining seat.  

My Camaro looked sporty, but whoever designed those bucket seats clearly wasn’t sixteen years old. They reclined just enough to remind you they didn’t really recline.  It was like a church pew with a console.  I’m convinced that most of the business my chiropractor gets today started in the front seat of my Camaro.

So, unless you were dating in your mom‘s car that was usually the size of a small aircraft carrier, there eventually came The Question - a moment every teenage boy both anticipated and dreaded. Six words required more courage than most teenage boys possessed.

“Do you want to get in the back seat?”

Generally, you didn’t ask that question on the first date. You had to work your way up to it. Asking too soon could dampen the evening’s activities.

Looking back, these are all fond memories of a simpler time. However, we weren’t necessarily in love with parking. We were in love with being teenagers -  awkward, hopeful, and trying to figure out this thing called dating one Friday night at a time.