Yes, for a very brief period of time I owned a pickup truck. But the universe didn’t think this was a good fit for me and decided to end the, at best, tenuous relationship.
Roughly fourteen years ago, the 1988 Ford Ranger (red) and I became acquainted because of need. I needed a VERY CHEAP vehicle and it needed a home (and a front grill… not included). My mother and stepfather knew of a VERY CHEAP used car dealership in Pikeville, Kentucky and, as we were going to be there visiting his family, so we stopped in, made the deal ($500 for a ten year old truck that was of questionable reliability) and headed home.
The downside to this specific vehicle, aside from the questionable reliability, was that it was a manual and I’d never really learned how to drive one. But necessity is the mother of both invention or “figure it out fast” so we traveled home, caravan style.
For a few months the truck served its purpose well. It got me to and from work without incident. And then it happened. The horrible disintegration of this well intentioned relationship.
On a bright and beautiful day I was hauling my belongings from Knoxville to Sevierville. I was in mid-move, travelling along Interstate 40, a few miles west of Strawberry Plains. My roommate had just put the Broadway cast recording of Beauty and the Beast into the jury rigged CD player and we were happily belting out “Bonjour” when the engine made a clank sound.
“Weird.”
Again, the clank sound rang out and I switched off the music. “What is that?” asked roommate John.
“Dunno,” I said, listening keenly. “Stuff in the back shifting around?”
We listened again. Clank!
“No, that’s from the engine,” he replied.
BANG!
There it was. Smoke. Billowing out from under the hood. And the car came to a halt.
We rolled it to the shoulder and quickly jumped out. Throwing open the hood, after screaming that it was burning hot and shaking the pain out of my finger tips, we saw the smoke and fire.
The engine had, for all intents and purposes, exploded. Tubing was split and laying limply over the engine. Bits of this and that were spinning loosely about.
After a few minutes of us looking quizzically at the carnage a highway patrolman pulled up.
“Boys. What’s the problem?” He said, peering from behind his mirrored sunglasses.
“Dunno,” I said, pointing at the minor mushroom cloud.
He shook his head, wiped his brow, and instructed us to get into the car. From there he drove us to Strawberry Plains and dropped us off at a Cracker Barrel so that we could call my mother.
By the time she and my stepfather arrived and took us back to the truck, the smoke had dissipated. Not long for the world, the truck was fiddled with enough by my stepdad to get it running the next 15 miles to home. And then… after some struggling to repair it and recognizing that the cost to fix it far exceed the cost to pay it off… it was gone.
The universe knew better than I that a pickup truck was not the vehicle for me and chose to remove it from my hands. Unfortunately the Universe chose it’s “Big Bang Theory” as the means of disposal.
Clank. Clank. BANG!
Tommy Karr 