A friend of mine asked recently if I knew what a cotter pin was. I guess most guys do. Apparently all women don’t. Sure, they know a safety pin, a bobby pin and perhaps if they are old enough, a fraternity pin. But a cotter pin? Not sure if that’s part of their daily or even lifetime lexicon.

They were the lifeline of the venerable icon of male youth, the push cart. You know the kind. Find a couple pieces of wood, slap on some wheels from an old wagon, tie on a rope to steer, go to the biggest hill you can find and hope to hell you don’t get creamed by oncoming traffic because the idea of brakes never crossed your juvenile mind.

For us the “biggest hill” meant 27th Street or if you were a little more timid, Aberdeen. My street, 28th, had a very small hill at the end of it. More of a slope, really. Certainly nothing that warranted extensive runs in a new push cart. It took way too much push.

No, a good push cart really didn’t need to be pushed, at least not if you could find a hill. Why not let physics do all the heavy lifting, or in this case, heavy rolling.

My first foray into push carts was a craft my father built. While other kids slaved away on their soapbox entries, my dad was a little more freeform. I like to think of him as being a trendsetter in sustainability. To this day I am still not sure what my cart was made from. I can safely say that it was fiberglas and rectangular, but that’s about it. It had a grill on the front and a cockeyed saw cut that had split it in half, creating a jagged, sharp-edged cockpit for the driver – yours truly.

It was in building this craft that I learned the secret and magic of cotter pins. It’s a right of passage for a young man. Not only do you learn their value, but you see the beauty in their simplicity.

As we all know, a cotter pin is essential if you want your cart’s wheels to 1) turn smoothly and 2) stay on. I found out the hard way that #2 is extremely important. Push carts seem to need all their wheels, especially when you’re trying to steer out of the way of an oncoming car.

Fortunately, I was only on 28th Street when the wheel came off, not on the behemoth one block over. I’m pretty sure my father would have preferred that I was one block over. On 28th, he was the “push” in the term push cart. I had endless enthusiasm for carting but my dad was less enthusiastic, largely because he was a heavy smoker and the endless pushing left him wheezing and looking to the heavens every time I finally got enough speed to go the 40 or 50 feet I could go on our pathetic little hill.

My follow-up car was much more pedestrian. It was built for speed, not beauty. As I had done with my other projects – my treehouse, wooden hydroplanes to pull behind my bike and that full size Gemini spacecraft I had dreamed of building in the yard – I turned to the fence for raw materials.

I’m not sure my parents noticed that the fence was slowly disappearing, but its cedar planks made darned good projects.

This was certainly the case with my push cart. It took very few boards. Two six foot fence boards for the sides, one 2×4 for the cross bracing and another for the axles. I knew well that you couldn’t just nail wheels to a board and go anywhere. You needed a real axle. An aluminum bar that could extend out far enough from the board to secure the wheels to it. I would dutifully nail the axle to the 2×4 with bent nails, then slide on a pair of washers, an old wheel from my Radio Flyer, then another large washer and finally, the all-important cotter pin.

This required some precise drilling first, as you had to drill a hole through the round piece of aluminum in order to slide the cotter pin through it before bending it back and around. If you didn’t do this with great care, your wheel could decide to make a run for it right in the middle of shooting down 27th Street. All control and hope would be lost in an instant as you wove from one side to another, hoping to hell an oncoming car wouldn’t use you as a speed bump.

My cart was a road rocket. Bare bones. Just those two boards, holding up an old B-25 bomber seat in the middle, a cushion stolen from the living room providing comfort for the driver.

It was first class all the way. While some kids would tie the steering rope around the 2×4, I had steel eyes driven deep into the wood, the rope being tied off to them with a stylish bowline.

The time had finally come to face 27th street. I put on the family’s Italian crash helmet and matching goggles and pulled my cart to the hill. I waited for the traffic to die down, then positioned the road rocket at the top.

The cart couldn’t wait for my final preparations. Instead, it began to head down 27th on its own, gaining speed with me in hot pursuit. It was as fast as I thought it would be. I couldn’t catch up. Unerringly it shot down the hill, steering itself with amazing accuracy. It finally reached the bottom, greeted by two cars that had stopped to watch this amazing racing machine cross the finish line sans driver, not far from where they had pulled out of the way.

Eventually I caught up to it. Thankfully, the road turned or I swear I would have eventually found it in Lake Washington, about five more behemoth hills away, it having a mind and will of its own.

I would eventually conquer the behemoth of 27th. And I will never forget the thrill of learning all about cotter pins from my dad, or the exhilaration of flying like the wind down that wonderful hill that God put just a block away from my house.

In the Emerald City, feeling sorry for Florida dads whose kids wanted push carts,

– Robb