Today, my sister Heather refers to it as "The rolling Humiliation", I have no idea when that name came to be, but when we had it,  it was just known as "The Truck".

Near as I can tell, the truck was the result of my father's decision to buy a cow. Of course I was pretty young then and my recollection might be clouded, but I know the cow came first, then he needed to have something to haul hay, feed etcetera,  so buying a truck was a pretty reasonable next step. Of course, you'd have to have known my father...

It was back in about 1970 or so, back when Langley was a hell of a lot more rural, before the Vancouverites discovered it, and back when we had about three cops in town.. and the Motor Vehicle Act was a fair bit more lax.

From out of nowhere (Where a lot of the old man's announcements came from) dad stated he was going to buy a truck.. Next thing any of us new it was in our yard.. I think it was bought from a friend of Jay Blake's. Jay Blake was the local garageman (We didn't have "Mechanics" we had "Garagemen" might have been a family thing.. might not) who had a litter of mongrel children that attended dad's school and were the seeds from which many a local legend grew, but I digress...

The Truck appeared in our driveway one day . I returned home from school and was assaulted by the sight of it. I don't think dad actually drove it home, I think it sprouted there, it sprung like a tumor from our driveway.. and like a tumor no one knew from whence it came.. or why..  Let me see if I can paint you a picture...

The Truck was a 1955 Chevrolet half-ton. It was an ex-Canada Dry truck, if you are old enough to remember, Canada Dry used a particularly vile color of green on their vehicles, this truck was no exception, only the green of the truck was faded lighter, somewhere between Mold and Phlegm, hard to say. The Canada Dry logos were still on the doors. Now, had these been the only strikes against it, things would've been bad, but not horrible, these weren't the only strikes against it...

Accompanying the spew-green color was the box.. Usually one refers to the rear part of a truck as "The Box"  I guess this harkens back to the days of horse-drawn wagons, when it was a box bolted to the rear of a wagon. Most pick-ups have developed more aesthetically pleasing boxes since their inception, but the term "Box" has stuck. In our case it was literal, the box was just that. Someone, at some point of the truck's evolution had removed (for whatever reason, probably to curse our lives) the original box and had replaced it with something made from 2 X 8s and plywood, probably six feet wide and nine feet long. The sides were all of three feet high. Like so much of the truck, the dimensions, though notable weren't what made it memorable, it was the color, a most alarming shade of blue, nothing I could ever hope to adequately describe. Why anyone, anyone at all would ever think to put those two colors together is beyond me. The effect was physically painful.

Some things are beautiful in their sheer ugliness, the truck was not one of them.

The truck itself was horrific, but the obvious delight the old man took in driving it around was the really frightening part. It was an extension of his cruel sense of humor. The old Man didn't torture small animals for amusement, he had teenage daughters.. they were easier to torment and made more entertaining noises.. Teenage daughters with no driver's licenses,  the possibilities were endless...

The girls would go to visit their friends in the evening and call home for a ride.. things were pretty spread out around here back then, no streetlights, lonely backroads, so the darkness made it fairly frightening for a young girl to walk home in the at night. The old man was always ready to be the shining knight and speed to the rescue.. riding his phlegmandblue charger he'd set forth to rescue the fair maidens...To their utter horror, dismay and mortification this rolling abortion would drive into their friend's driveway and they would have no choice but to climb in. They would call home and talk to mother, plead with her not to let HIM come and get them, begging her to drive the slightly less embarrassing Ford Falcon wagon. But no,  little did they realize he was lying in wait, predatory instincts keen, anticipating the call...

As soon as the phone rang he'd be up out of his chair reaching for the keys.. "No need to bother yourself my dear, I'll go get them" and he'd be out the door like a shot. Often I'd go with him, it was a source of amusement for me too I'll admit, but then, I was 9 or 10 years old at the time...

God, how they hated it, but it didn't end there.. once, one of them made the mistake of requesting that he park down the road so she wouldn't have to be seen getting into it, so he drove into the driveway and leaned on the horn. Other times he would wear his "barn pants" which he used when cleaning the barn, these were sweat pants covered liberally with cow shit, of various vintages, some dried to a crust, some fresh, all fragrant to say the least. Invariably when he wore them the friend's parents would want to have a word with him, so he'd be more than happy to get out and shoot the breeze with them.. the girls would whither into dried husks of horror casting about for razor blades to end their lives with. This would  richly amuse him.

Other than the fact that it was ugly to the point of nausea, one can't take too much away from that truck, it always ran, amazing for something that was never maintained other than to make sure it still had oil to burn, and it put up with a hell of a lot of abuse.

Rosses never take two trips, if there is stuff that needs to be moved we always overload ourselves till we need hospitalization before admitting we might need to come back for something, we learned this at our father's knee, and he expected no less from his truck.

One day we were off lurking in some local bushes cutting fenceposts, sawn trunks of windfall trees spilt with a wedge, in the pissing rain (Standard weekend recreation). We had been at it for most of the day and it was dark by now, we had loaded that mobile catarrh with probably a ton of wood and were ready to go home. Unfortunately, it wouldn't move. Every time the clutch was released it would stall, no matter what, it wouldn't move.

After looking around a bit, I noticed that we had overloaded it to such a point that the box was resting firmly on top of the rear tires squashing them down half an inch or so, solidly wedging them, and stalling the truck out, the old springs just weren't there anymore. I know I deeply disappointed my father when I said "I guess we'll have to unload some of this"

He riveted me with a fierce gaze and spat "TO HELL!".. as he seized the chainsaw and set his jaw, I never imagined how things would unfold...

The old Homelite fired up with a ripping snarl and he set it's blade to a nearby piece of Alder, sawdust flew in a cloud as he brutally hacked off two pieces 18" long or so. He put the chainsaw away and explained what we were going to do.. I nodded dumbly, almost in a daze as my mined grappled with what he proposed. I crawled under the back of the truck.

I have no idea how much weight he lifted, but by god, it was enormous, he set his shoulder under the box and surged upward, he was an immensely strong man normally, but add the possibility of having to take two trips to his already considerable might, and the result was superhuman. The box rose slowly off the tire, he only needed a couple of inches, as it all rose the springs relaxed a bit and I wedged the first piece of Alder between the rear axle and the frame rail, he set it down, fixing it firmly in place with the weight of the load. The same thing with the other side, no sound or word from him, just the slow, inexorable rise of the load and my shaking hands slipping the block into place, VERY careful where I put my fingers.

We got into the truck and drove ever so slowly and carefully home, a mile or so, over roughly paved roads, our sphincters puckered, not speaking or breathing.. till we got home, in darkness, and backed it around to where we were going to unload. Both blocks chose that moment to let go, with a resounding WHOMP they shot out like cannonballs and the truck settled firmly in place. I looked at the old man and said "Christ, that was lucky!"

"Not luck" he said "Good management"
 
 

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