My Dads Car

Perhaps borne from a deep seated resentment of having the family car withheld from me, I entered my early adult years harboring open contempt for the automobile. I had had to drop out of sports and get a job my senior year in high school to ‘learn the value of money’, and if I wanted a car, I’d have to earn the money and buy it myself. At the time I didn’t appreciate the theory of the learning experience as much as I resented having to abandon what little sports experience I enjoyed.

This reality hit home when I was finally able to buy my own car. Clunkers – other people’s cast off problems -- were all I could afford, and this heaped (heaped being the operative word) additional resentment on my already established opinion of the car. The sorry states of my cars were of course compounded by the fact that when I drove, I drove fast -- not just for fun, but I’m sure in some subconscious effort to exact my revenge for the power our need for the automobile held over our lives. (This is why Communism didn’t work -- people resent power being held over them.) And from here it was a downward cycle. What kind of girls could I hope to attract with the kinds of pieces of shit that I was willing to fork over my hard earned cash to buy? With my typically angst ridden teen social life fueled further by the beaters, I had to lash out, and not being violent by nature, it all came to rest on my nemesis…the car.

I worked after school and into the night for an auto dealership that in those years also had a filling station and full service repair shop. Winters were cold in Iowa, and much of what I did was to launch out at night on service calls with a small tow truck to start cars, or charge their batteries, or pull them from a ditch or whatever, and it occurred to me that it was often only a nickel or dime part that would reduce a car to the transportation equivalent of a flower pot.

I never made money on a car. Since I couldn’t trust myself to obey speed limits, I bought only four cylinder cars, and old six cylinder crappy trucks – and these I didn’t buy well. None were far from the salvage yard when I got a hold of them, and I helped solidify their fate! I would change the oil because that seemed to be necessary in order to avoid the obvious, but from there on it was undisguised contempt. If I went on to buy eight Volkswagens, I had to buy at least nine motors. You get the idea.

But this isn’t a story about simple mechanical neglect. Growing up in an Iowa backwater, my friends and I got to channel our anti-establishment, frustration into full-scale car demolition. This was more than mere neglect. When we were finally fed up with some piece of shit beater, we’d take it down to the “river” The first thing that we always did once our sights were leveled on a car for destruction was to march around the outside with a shotgun and shoot all the windows out, followed with the gesture of raking a broom handle around the window frames to dislodge the remaining glass, and sweep the bulk of it from the car. Seat belts, leather jackets, and helmets were required, and the passenger had to hang on to a fire extinguisher in the event escape was delayed.

One of the best examples to illustrate how this worked was the day we destroyed my friend RG’s Jeep Wagoneer. RG showed up out of the blue after rolling the Jeep, and -- being that his uncle was willing to buy him a new CJ7 -- was willing to part with it (even though it still ran just fine and coincidentally had a tri-power Pontiac GTO motor). And because he’d had so much fun destroying cars with me in the past, RG was coming to me to do the honors on this one. This was probably the single greatest gift of my life! I was going to get to completely demolish a high horse-powered four wheel drive vehicle, and much preparation was called for.

This was a unique vehicle for this kind of fun. Mostly because the horse power insured that this was going to be fast, but also owing to the four wheel drive feature. These would be uncharted demolition waters and required an entirely new approach. Instead of racing down a well worn path through the swampy backwater of the Iowa River, where we had previously been exorcising our demons; we could confidently launch, literally, off the road through fencing and over fields in pell-mell abandon.

We had on hand a half a dozen guys already wizened to the dangers – there was no way in hell they would ride along, but were happy to right the Jeep when it rolled, cut down the trees that pinioned the truck when we got thrust into them, and bring the vital fluids to required levels when the truck was upside down for too long.

Our usual route was a mud- rutted progression of footpaths and animal trails that wove through the natural openings in the trees and around high water pools and such. But on this day I stopped about a hundred yards in front of the opening in the overgrowth that marked the beginning of our standard route. and I asked RG to look over the edge of the ravine below and tell me if everything looked okay. RG stood on the bottom wire of a fence and reported that everything looked alright to him, though through the heavy vegetation it was difficult to see very much.. After he was strapped in I wheeled the Jeep around and drove over the steep embankment and only when we were plunging down the slope did we see a huge log laying across the bottom,! We thought we were doomed,, however, the front bumper was just high enough that the impact lifted the front end enough and as the tires hit the log the impact exerted an enormous force catapulting the truck’s front end even further into the air.

Then the rear tires slammed into the log and this sent the whole of the truck pivoting in the air while the front was coming down and we landed full on the front grill planted dead vertically like a tree… the engine running, RG and I looking at each other. We were both strapped in, looking out the gone windshield at the thistles and grasses, the insects were buzzing about, and the whole world had this kind of incongruence, and we were just kind of stuck, hanging from our seat belts. The engine was running and all systems were operating, but we were just planted there, and then the truck just fell with a ‘whomp’ back down on to the wheels and we were off!

We raced off through brambles too-high-to-see until we found our original course in a place where there were developed some pretty good muddy washboards. At our new speeds these really threw the truck around and up and down and it was really hard to get a clear picture of what was happening because we were losing control so much. The motor roared and vegetation cut-off by the front end was coming into the cab through the hole where the windshield maybe should have been left. The truck was leaping all over the place bouncing off the ruts and rolling pathway, but I was just unwilling to back off anymore than was necessay to keep the truck from flying off into the woods! I would back off the throttle just long enough to see the trail come back into view and then stomp on the gas pedal again. It was becoming quite a ride at this point, throwing us about in the cab. We had a corner come up in the trail that took us through a forest of poplars, and though the speeds were too fast to make the corner,, we quickly realized that the force of mowing down the trees held us from overturning. Lower branches would whip into the cab and then strip the leaves as they whipped back out again. Vegetation from everywhere was whipping at our faces and we would duck and cover and look up again and there would swirl a cloud of leaves stripped by the windshield posts. RG was screaming “Jesus” a lot, which was always a sign that we were having fun! Soon the cab was full of leaves, which lent some feeling of security, like we had some padding or something, but the speeds of our circuit were getting ever faster, and our demands on the poplars to support us was bordering on clear-cutting. The gas pedal was in fact the first thing to go. I broke the pedal off the little rod coming down from the firewall, and the solution was to duct tape the rod directly to my shoe. The brake was never used anyway, as I only had time to use the engine braking to get control back, and then I was into it again. This meant that every time I rolled it, I had to take my shoe off to get out of the truck and wait for help to arrive. Then, once righted, I had to put my shoe back on. Small price to pay!

The end came, though, as it always does. The poplars got back at us when on one particularly stretching pass, trees snapping and shit flying every where, the roar of the engine indecipherable from the din of impact, and RG’s pleas for “Jesus” and it was all happening faster than I could make clear when the truck took a decidedly different flip exactly sideways and launched at the Mother-of-all-poplars large and square to our front end. We had been going perhaps sixty miles an hour and this new direction didn’t seem to alter this and it was immediately evident that braking, though called for, was prevented by the duct tape to my foot and we hadn’t a chance to stop the inevitable. We braced ourselves for the impact, but what happened wasn’t what we expected. We expected the gut wrenching end-to-all, but what we got was the truck was lifted in the impact up the tree and sort of laid-out on the tree. The tree yielded just a little and one of the rear tires caught at just the right moment and threw the truck up the tree as it fell a little further Then one of the front tires caught on the branches and sort of pulled us up just as tree fell flat and we were able to drive over it! We were astonished to have averted disaster but only temporarily as I saw the check oil light come on. The oil pan was probably unstitched when we drove over the tree, but I yelled to RG that this was it! I stood on the throttle and red lined the motor until it blew the sides of the motor out. We unbuckled, got out and left the doors open, opened the hood to admire our handy work, and walked away the happiest men on earth!

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