Saturday, November 6, 2010

Why Rick’s Saturn is the Greatest Surf Car Ever


While most people are drawn to flashy, high-performance cars, as a surfer, Rick is drawn by the more practical, spacious offerings. The usual demands of comfort, speed and safety are preempted by the ability to transport longboards, sandy wetsuits, and piles of fast-food refuse. No other car performs this task better than Rick’s Saturn. Nobody can differentiate between Saturn models. It’s just ‘a Saturn.’ They all look similar. Like cult members waiting for the mothership to arrive.

Any car can be used as a surf car.  You can build a functional board hauler out ratcheting straps and foam, but the straps will emit a constant hum once you reach freeway speeds. After three or four hours you stop noticing it and go insane, secretly plotting ways to free captive orangutans trapped in zoos.

Perhaps you could argue that a classic van would be a better choice. The choice of free-loving hippies and folk musicians, cab-forward Dodges and Volkswagen vans have endless space for boards and passengers. However, they’re almost impossible find since most of them have evaporated into rust. Even if you do obtain one, it will kill you in a crash or sport a mural conceived during a psychedelic-drug-fueled bender.
A truck seems like the ideal solution. Plenty of places to cram moist, balled-up wetsuits and no need for a poorly-engineered strap rack to carry surfboards. Ideal, until you discover that inner-city hoodlums nick your surfboards every time you leave them unattended in the bed. You can buy them back when they trade hands a couple times and emerge on Craigslist a week later, but that will get expensive.

Surf cars are required to be simple. If an electric window gets stuck when its rolled down, it’ll probably stay that way. Mercifully, Rick’s Saturn has roll-down windows, steel wheels, and cloth seats. No anti-lock brakes or traction control to intervene while you exercise your precision driving skills on Kanan Dune Road.

And since its constructed almost completely from recycled plastic spoons, it will never rust. It will take more than eight hundred-thousand years to decompose, meaning Rick will be driving it for years to come. Maybe the stereo only tunes to Latin hip-hop stations, but it will run as long as you remember to pour oil in it.

The ‘98 Saturn. Perhaps the greatest surf car ever?