Drive - A Memoir 39th Installment
throttle
pulled out part way. He would bail out of the truck, and I would
stand on the seat and steer. At the end of the field I would start
turning as the Old Man would clamber into the cab and aim the truck
back down the field. Even Vicki, a very young and inexperienced human
being, knew how to drive any vehicle.
For
transportation – we had a bike, a scooter, the Ford tractor that
got us around the farm, and the 1938 International pickup got us down
the highway, to the store, fishing, and to work. I loved that pickup:
inline flathead four cylinder engine, 4 speed, narrow bed with
running boards and the headlights perched out on the front fenders.
We also had a snow plane in the winter, and we had ‘shanks pony,’
our feet; we walked everywhere.
Farm
kids, end of story.
Russ
and I would occasionally walk to Hamer which was two miles away.
Hamer consisted of the Hamer school, the small white Mormon church, a
couple of homes, and Mel's place – a huge rock building that had a
small grocery store, one gas pump, the post office, and the bar and
pool hall. It was the town center of unincorporated government that
was filled at night with the locals drinking, playing cards, and
yammering about all things wrong in the world and in this town of –
population 23. This wide spot in the road was surrounded by several
small farms, ours being one of them.
Chapter
8
We
made the bargain for the wire and over the next few weeks we worked
long daytime hours, along with our farm work plus chores, and then
late into the night on weekends and after school and chores on
weekdays. Soon, we were finished; we had our wire carefully rolled
up, and we had saved a lot of smaller pieces and poles of wood to
build free standing traps. “I still think this was a dumb deal and
really, really hard,” Russ grumbled.
“And
I still think it was fun,” I replied; only I was having a hard time
thinking of any reason why. “Oh Yeah, when we freed, then rolled
the thirty foot logs off the top of the wall and down the ramps we
put up; they went fast and far, crashing and smashing everything.
That was fun! See work and fun are the same,” I concluded. I
could BS with the best of men,
I
thought.
“No
it wasn't,” he said stubbornly. “Then we had to stack those logs
in a fine looking pyramid pile, and each log weighed more than both
of us.”
“Well,
we did it, just like the pyramids in Egypt. They had a hard thing to
do; we had a hard thing to do. We both did it and they had us out
numbered.” This was a bit of a stretch coming from an Idaho farm
kid. It was getting
500 more words tomorrow
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