You thought Cruise the Couve, downtown Vancouver’s annual cool-car festival, couldn’t get any cooler? This year, folks who make food donations to Share during the event will be rewarded with commemorative, magnetic dashboard plaques. That’s a cool way to underline the serious, charitable mission of this big blast of fun on wheels.
White with green lettering, the plaques mimic classic Washington license plates as they tell the whole world exactly where and when it’s at:
“COUVE 18.”
To get one of these special souvenirs, interrupt your automotive fun for a moment July 21 and drop off some nonperishable groceries at the new Vancouver fire station that marks the north end of Uptown Village (another cool addition to the scene).
The plaques are only the littlest, latest addition to the massive downtown car festival that gets more massive every year. Cruise the Couve officially revs up at 10 a.m. July 21, as drivers start steering their favorite vehicles up and down a very crowded, colorful, noisy Main Street; but the most dedicated cruising fans start showing up as early as 6 a.m. to stake the best sidewalk viewing stations.
After that, Cruise the Couve is a temporary mecca for car lovers, who motor slowly along in everything from gorgeous, vintage machines that deserve to be drooled over — to, as organizer Bryan Shull recently put it, “Mom’s Honda Civic.”
Both are perfectly welcome, Shull said; Cruise the Couve is open to everything automotive. While the main point for most visitors is showing off and gawking at great vehicles, others simply want to keep cruising in whatever they’ve got. That’s an American tradition from simpler, less crowded times — a tradition now nearly submerged below the rising tide of commuter traffic and all its jams.
Back when jam was something confined to a jar, young folks with no place to go, plenty of time to get there, and wheels to take them, used to while away weekends parading their heaps on prominent streets. One of them was Phil Medina, a Hazel Dell kid who inherited his parents’ car-cruising tradition and who eventually decided to try launching a huge cruise in downtown Vancouver. All car enthusiasts and clubs were welcomed to an inaugural attempt in July 2009 called Cruisin’ the Gut.
Many thousands turned out. Medina, local merchants and the city of Vancouver were all amazed. And year after year, Cruisin’ the Gut kept growing.
The wheels nearly stopped
Cruise forward a decade, though, and the picture gets complicated. With just a few weeks to go before the 2017 event, Medina, disputing the city’s insurance requirements and objecting to rising police costs, decided to discontinue what was by then a beloved and lucrative local tradition — one that brought a whole lot of hungry, thirsty customers to downtown bars and restaurants.
“It became one of the centerpieces of doing business in the Couve,” said Shull, a co-owner of Main Street’s Trap Door Brewing. “We are a brewery, and having a beer is one of the things people enjoy most on that day. It’s a large revenue-generating day. For some, it’s the best day of the year.”
So a handful of slightly panicked Uptown Village merchants decided to rescue and rename the cruise. Shull was partially worried that car cruisers would swarm downtown Vancouver anyway, with or without a formal event and infrastructure like portable toilets and sufficient law enforcement. “I personally feared that 20,000 people would show up and the whole thing would be a mess. If it goes sideways once, it’ll keep going sideways,” he said.
The second-generation event was called Cruise the Couve. That wasn’t different enough for Medina, who warned through his lawyers that his intellectual property rights were being violated — but the warning was met with a collective shrug. Most people were simply glad that a downtown Vancouver car cruise would keep rolling forward; some were relieved that the frankly chubby former name, Cruisin’ the Gut, was slimmed down to something less obese and more specifically local.
Ironically enough, Shull said he’s been feeling the financial and managerial stresses that Medina felt. The city has continued to pull back on providing financial support, he said, even as the cost of the event keeps rising. The total price this year — including extra police and code enforcement coverage — will be about $30,000. To cover that, he and his planning group created structured corporate-sponsorship packages as well as opportunities to buy T-shirts, posters and more.
“With hindsight, I can see what a good job Phil did,” Shull said. “And I feel like it’s important to keep it going. There are thousands and thousands of people who love to cruise cars in this county.”
