My first truck

My first vehicle was older than me by a year. One year newer than my parents' old van. I was 18 years old when I bought it from a friend. His dad had bought the truck new and after a dozen or so years, sold it to his father. More years later, my friend then bought it from his grandfather with a mind to fixing it up and got about as far as replacing the alternator. His parents wanted it off their yard and my parents were fine with hosting another vehicle, so I bought it. It was an old faded blue Chevrolet pickup truck: 4X4, big V8, and two fuel tanks to feed it. From my increasingly fuzzy memory of fuel prices at the time and how much money I could spend at one filling, that truck must have carried over 200 litres just in fuel.

Not far from my parents' old house is a mountain with a road that goes right to the top. There are telecom towers up there, so the road is sort of maintained. In our teen-aged minds, the towers were just there for climbing, but I'm sure they served another purpose. A four wheel drive is usually required to get all the way up. It wouldn't be a worthwhile mountain for hiking up, but driving up with a truck bed full of firewood and a half dozen of your closest friends was as close to a perfect Friday night as we had back then.

We met at the end of the pavement so those in smaller vehicles could pile into the trucks that were going up. One guy showed up on his dirt bike with no headlight at the front and his girlfriend on the back. They buzzed on ahead and we started up the rutted gravel. Being 18, faster was better. This was my first time as a driver, one of the the lucky ones with a truck, so I wasn't going to be left behind. I also wasn't going to soften the ride for my passengers. That was the way it was. I had bounced around in the back enough times to know. Looking back, it's surprising the things we did without encouragement of alcohol.

As we jostled up that dark mountain, one of the rowdies in the back decided that my driving was too tame. To entertain himself, he climbed up over the cab and onto the hood of my truck. Then he climbed back up on the cab. I took this as a challenge to find every low hanging branch I could and drive under it. After a few good swats, he decided to join us in the already full cab. Head first. He was laying across the laps of the people beside me, trying to get everything in the window when I found a big puddle and soaked his left foot. Those old trucks were great. Even with rust so bad on every quarter panel that you could put your hand through it, a maniac could still surf the hood without denting it.

I sold that rusty truck at the end of the summer to an old miner. He looked as though he should be taking his daily constitutional around the mall with his wife in matching track suits, but he wanted my truck to get down the rough track through the woods he had carved between his gold claim and the road. It was rough enough terrain he had almost died the year before falling off a log between his previous truck and the creek. 18 year olds are not in a position to give life advice to 80 year old miners, so I listened politely and left with his money. I was just relieved when he didn't try to pay in gold.