The pick-up truck f@#$-up

(This hoodoo originally ran on 11212014)

As if. Who really needs HooDoo when the Tide is playing the dang ole ‘Noog? I mean seriously people, this game is the equivalent of me getting in a member-measuring contest with John Holmes, the X-rated brotha…doesn’t matter how much effort is expended, the two just won’t measure up.

But, as always, the football gods do not evaluate the worthiness of every opponent, but rather pick their time and place on the whim of sacrifices made or neglected. And let’s face it people, Football Loki has developed an affinity for our beloved Crimson Tide. Apparently, the Noles must be praying to Football Jo-Bu, because those sumbitches just seem downright snake-bit when it comes to winning anything of consequence in the last 10 years. “What about the ACC title?” you may ask…I said winning anything of consequence, did y’all miss that part? Reading is fundamental, people, let’s keep it between the ears, shall we?

At any rate, thank the Good Lord that we aren’t Florida State, or any other team for that matter. No, we are the Crimson Tide and are apparently immune to such folly thanks to the wealth of HooDoo deposited year in and year out on these here pages. Regardless of the opponent, a HooDoo submission is demanded, and so shall it be. Let us see, with what tale from my wanton youth shall I choose to regale you fine people this week?

Ah.Yes. I have just the thing for an opponent of the ‘Noog’s apparent temperament. And the timing of the year makes this a bittersweet, nostalgic story for OWB to impart on you fine people (and the rest of you, too). This is another tale from my formative days as a Whistlebritchian, after my induction into the Sith order by Lord Vader but before I myself could claim the title of Darth Whistlebritches. During this time I was mentored by another man of whom you’ve heard me speak in these pages before, my Great Uncle Ellard. He is one of the guiding beacons of my young life, a man with whom I was so enamored growing up that I’d heed his every command, regardless of how pointless or misguided it would seem to be. For in the end, when the situation had played itself out, I’d always undoubtedly discover that his advice was as sage as any offered by Master Yoda, if only Master Yoda had the central Alabama twang and gruffness of a man cracked open on the red clay and raised on hard-scrabble of central Alabama.

Uncle Ellard, as I called him, was my grandmother’s brother. Now that line of the family has a trait that I’m not so sure I hope that I have inherited, namely the ability to live well beyond the average lifespan of one’s generational cohorts. My grandmother, the 3-time Heisman finalist one, will be 93 in February and is just as spry and able as she was when I was a child pitching Wiffle balls at her and marveling at how she could hit from both sides of the plate. Uncle Ellard was cut from the same piece of flour sack, he was John Wayne, Coach Bryant and George Patton rolled into one shining example of blue-steel Alabama humanhood, all grit and Hell and rust and dirt. The man was damn near killed on more occasions than I can count, and he never shied away from recounting these tales to our young ears in that gruff half-holler of his, the same voice with which he likewise hailed cattle from across the far pasture.

Just for shits and giggles, here is a brief recounting of the man’s near death experiences. This shit right here is three shades of unbelievable, but you know OWB wouldn’t perpetrate a lie on you, his faithful audience. Uncle Ellard fought in the European theater during WWII as an infantryman, surviving the worst the Germans had to throw at him and his cohorts as they liberated Western Europe from the grip of fascism. Immediately after the war, still stationed in Germany, he was attacked and stabbed by three men who were after his recently-acquired GI paycheck, and they, thinking him dead, rolled him off of the bridge on which he was attacked and into a frozen river. 

Somehow or another, he survived, pulled himself to shore and collapsed. The last thing he remembered seeing was the light of a distant farmhouse before he succumbed to the shock of cold and lost consciousness. When he awoke, he was in a comfortable bed in that farmhouse, being cared for by a gracious German family who saw the Americans as liberators rather than conquerors. Uncle Ellard appreciated it so much he ended up marrying a German woman himself and brought the best Dusseldorf had to offer back to Vance, AL with him. While still in the military, he had a 5 ton truck slip off the jack and land on him, and by some miraculous turn of fate, the tough ole buzzard survived.

On another occasion, after returning to his life on the ranch, he was skidding logs carelessly on a hillside and rolled the tractor over atop him, breaking his back in several places along with a couple ribs. Doctors told the family he’d likely not survive, but he did. Then doctors told him he’d never walk again. Well, he did that too. He just refused to accept quit as an outcome, and a lot of that poured from his veins into mine. Thank God. He was also shot in the chest at point blank range in a hunting accident in the ‘60s, in the middle of the woods, six miles from the nearest home. A cousin who will always carry my warm regards ran and summoned help, but again, Uncle Ellard was told he would not recover by the docs. You guessed it, that sumbitch pulled through like a champ. Again.

Later in life, in his late 80’s, he again had a mishap with a tractor, this time while bailing hay. The tractor got sideways on him and rolled, and the bailer went over along with it. He was pinned between the grinding steel of machination and the hard-pebbly iron ore-riddled clay soil common in those parts. As he debated his escape, the blade of the bailer cycled ever closer to him with every revolution of the still-working machine, and it would have been the reaper’s scythe if he couldn’t free himself of the predicament. He used his arthritic, gnarled, monkey-paw hands to scrape out a hollow enough to wiggle from beneath the steel beast before the blade could take his life. With a broken neck, he pulled himself across the 40 acre pasture to the old house, where an ambulance whisked him to DCH. He survived, but for the remaining five years of his life, he had a crooked neck.

Needless to say, my Uncle Ellard was one tough sumbitch, hard as the world in which he grew up in Depression era Alabama and as tough as the pine knots in the weathered smokehouse he hewed with his own two hands. He was chapped leather and gunsmoke, and he is the reason I am here to entertain you people here today.

Because of Uncle Ellard’s long history of baddassedness, the ritual for several generations of men in my family was much like the initiation one receives upon entering the armed services. Men in my family had to do hard time with Uncle Ellard, in the summer, doing his bidding regardless of what else may have been going on at the time. My mom’s brother was a hellion in his younger years, a ne’er-do-well who has since reformed himself into a retired colonel in the United States Army Reserve (MedCorps) and a professor of business at a state college in Georgia. He’s an impressive fella in his own right, but he’ll tell you, it was those summers spent working alongside Uncle Ellard that made him a man. 

I am the oldest of my generation on my mom’s side of the family, one of five boys. When I hit the age of 14, it was time for my rite of passage to begin. You see, I’d never really had to strike out on my own, away from my mom and the familiar confines of Mobile, AL. I liked my neck of the woods just fine, but I did always enjoy going “up the country” to spend time with Uncle Ellard. After all, he was someone I idolized more than any other person in my life, and he was the hammer that pounded the raw materials of who I am today into form in the forge of Ellard-initiated adversity. I say that in all seriousness, I’ve never seen a man of any age work the way that man would work. He was like a machine, just never stopped, required no maintenance or fluids. I remember once we were stringing fenceline, an old rusty serpentine coil that he refused to throw away because in the back of his Depression-era mind, he “might need it sometime.” Well, I sure as hell wish he’d have needed it before my time, because unrolling and trying to string brittle, rusty barbed wire is akin to wrasslin’ a barrel full of copperheads, it ain’t a matter of whether or not you’re gonna get bit, it’s just a matter of how many times. I looked like I’d been in a fight with a papershredder by the end of it, I tell you what. After hours of this foolishness, I asked “Can I take a water break?”

He looked at me with those cold eyes, as if I was speaking Swahili to him, backwards at that.

“Water break?” he mumbled before turning back to his work. I mean, it was, after all, like 110 degrees, and that central Alabama heat is different from the heat we have on the coast. It’s more humid here, but up there, you don’t get the benefit of the sea breeze to moderate the temperature. It was like we were stringing barbed wire across the face of a hot cast iron skillet.

That’s just the kind of man he was. So when I arrived for my summer indoctrination at the age of 14, he had made up his mind that I needed to learn how to drive. Problem is, I was a weird kid. I didn’t want to learn how to drive, at least not a car. Drive the tractor? Hell yes. But I didn’t want any part of driving that truck, and old 1980 model Chevy full size, white and beat to hell and back from years of farm-work abuse.

“You goan drive that truck today, boy,” he told me one morning over our daily eggs, grits, home-cured ham and cantaloupe. “You ever drive?”

“No, sir, I don’t know how to drive.”

“Well, you’re goan learn.”

But I didn’t want to learn. Dammit, I hated being forced out of the warm confines of my comfort zone. But there was no way out of it. Once Uncle Ellard decided you were going to do something, by God, the die had been cast. Your ass better just resign youself to it.

He showed me the basic instruments of the truck in as few words as possible. Fortunately, it was an automatic. That gave me a bit of reassurance. Now keep in mind, when he said I was going to learn to drive, it didn’t necessarily mean he was going to teach me to drive. No, his methodology was more akin to letting me sit in the seat, make a bunch of mistakes, then barking at me the correct way to do things. I guess that’s learning, but it felt more like haranguing. Regardless, it was effective, as I was wheelin’ around the pasture in no time, cuttin’ julios in the high grass and throwin’ rooster-tails on the gravely dirt roads around his home.

Uncle Ellard had responsibility over the church cemetery adjacent to our property where many generations of our family had been previously interred. He would take care of the tract, and everyone with family in the plot would contribute money to pay Uncle Ellard for the upkeep. Each summer, part of my hard labor was helping him to clean up the grounds, trim the bushes, cut the grass and collect the weathered artificial flowers and arrangements that had been left on the graves. After completing this task during this particular summer, Uncle Ellard handed me the keys to the truck. “We’re goan to the dump…”

Now the dump was not a formal dump, per se, but rather a bluff on the backside of our property. As illegal as it probably was, Uncle Ellard would cast all of the trash he collected from the cemetery off of said bluff, and that’d be the end of it. Now to this point, I had spent most of my time behind the wheel moving in a forward orientation. In other words, I was all about driving forwards, but I still didn’t have much wheel time traveling in the other direction.

“Aight, back ‘er up to the edge of that cliff, boy.” Cold shock ran through me. I was terrified.

“You mean, like in reverse?”

Again, he looked at me with that blank stare, no comfort offered to the young dumbass with less than 20 hours of time in the cockpit. “Yeah,” was all he said.

“But I don’t…I mean, I’ve never…” I stammered while looking at him, hoping he would see my lack of comfort in the situation and offer some relief. But nope. Nothing. He just looked at me, as if he was waiting for the rest of the story, like “I’ve never backed up and my gas pedal foot just fell off.” Without any convincing follow-up, he continued to stare at me while I hurriedly tried to figure out how to make the requested task happen.

I stared at the indicators on the dash and found the one with all the letters. “Must be the one for shifting,” I thought, “this is the one I pull to put it in drive, so I’ll try R.” I popped the column shift down into the R position, and low and behold, the truck began to lurch backwards. “Ha!,” I was excited, the way R2 feels when he finally locks on to the proper security code to stop the trash compactor from smashing his friends. I backed up slightly, swung the truck around square to the cliff and took pride in a job well done.

But my trial was not over. Now I had to successfully negotiate the 30 feet from the spot where I turned around to the edge of the cliff so that we could rake out the back of the truck. The trash was piled so high in the back that I couldn’t see out of the window and I had to rely on some combination of side mirrors and the living Force to make sure that I didn’t do anything from which I could not recover.

Uncle Ellard got out to wave me in. In the sideview I could see him back there, looking at the ground and waving that monkey paw, motioning me back. I was terrified, y’all, covering about an inch a second as I’d release the brake then re-apply, release the brake then re-apply. The increase in the frequency of his hand wave told me he wanted me to hurry, so I let my foot off the brake and let that old white pick-up glide smooth as dry silk right on up to the edge of the cliff. He gave me the halt and boy did I ever, liked to have stomped that pedal through the rusty floor of that ole bucket. I cut off the ignition, stepped on the e-brake and leapt out of the truck, expecting an “atta boy” and a slap on the back. None was to be had, however, as ever the task-master, Uncle Ellard was already unloading the back of the truck.

“Climb on up in there boy and push that stuff out with the pitchfork.”

I dutifully responded. Now let me take a minute here to tell you people, I hate heights. Hate them. Like the upper deck at BDS scares the hell out of OWB, must have fallen off a mountain in a past life or something. As I pushed the trash out, I noticed Uncle Ellard had waved me up real snug to the edge of the cliff, leaving very little margin for error. I was kind of shocked he’d trusted me enough to let me get that close, but that gave me a little pride. Maybe I really did have this driving thing figured out. Maybe I too could one day be a baddass.

Except for the whole height thing. We were sitting on the edge of that cliff, with about a 40 foot fall beneath. I didn’t even want to get close to the ledge, and walking out on the tailgate would have set me teetering over the physical edge of the cliff, with nothing but my trust of hinge engineering to keep from falling to sure death, or at least injury that would result in prayers for death. I was timid, gingerly pushing the garbage towards the edge of the truck like I was poking at a bear with a broom handle.

“What’s wrong, you scared of heights?” he asked. Wow, finally, a little gentility from Uncle Ellard, I thought. He sees I’m truly scared of heights and won’t make me…

“Get out there and push it out, you ain’t goan fall.” So much for gentility.

Finally, the task was complete. He lumbered around to his side of the truck, and I jumped back in the pilot’s chair, feeling pretty good about myself having overcome two of my fears in the presence of my idol. Once in, he uttered just about the only words that would indicate he was pleased with a day’s work or one’s effort: “Let’s go down to Donnie’s and get us a Mountain Dew.”

I was all for it. I had been through enough that day, and could sure as hell use a Mountain Dew. Excited about the prospect of a break, I put my foot on the break, as instructed, turned the key and fired the engine, grinning at my new-found source of pride. Couldn’t wait to tell my mom and B-Rad I had learned how to drive!

Then it happened. I let my foot off of the break and realized to my horror that the truck lurched backwards, towards the cliff. You see, I had forgotten to put the truck back in park previously, was lucky the sumbitch had not rolled off into the ravine with me in the bed. Probably the only thing that saved my big ass was the fact that I had pushed the e-brake, keeping the truck from careering to its, and surely my, certain death.

Quickly realizing the error of my attempt, I quickly pushed the brake pedal to stop our rearward progress. But I felt it. The back wheels went off the cliff, the cliff began to fall from beneath the weight of the vehicle, and the truck dropped off the edge enough that the differential was sitting stuck on the ground, the only thing preventing us from going over the edge. “Holy shit,” I thought, knowing that the next few words I said would likely be my last, so I should probably choose them wisely. “I’d like to thank all of the little people who made this all possible…”

I expected full volume berating in my right ear at this point, but none came. I looked over at Uncle Ellard, and true to form, he was staring at me again, the way cattle blankly stare at the funny-looking steel cows racing by on highways adjacent to pastureland.  I braced for impact…

But it never came. In a plaintive voice, gravelly as it was, he said…

“Now why’d you go do something like that?”

That was all he said. I’d have felt better if he’d have yelled and cussed at me, called my mama and ordered her to pick my worthless ass up directly. But he didn’t. Just looked at me as if to more accurately gauge the true nature of my major malfunction as he opened his door and got out. He began to walk in the direction of the old farm house, and I followed, in silence, crest-fallen, about 30 yards behind him. He never said an unkind word, simply cranked up the tractor, got a chain and rode down to the dump, where he had me affix it to the front of the truck’s undercarriage to draw the truck out of the gorge. What he did next shocked me.

“Get in, drive it to the house.” Why was this man trusting me to safely ferry the tool of his livelihood just moments after I nearly ran it off a cliff? I still don’t know the answer to that. Such was the nature of Uncle Ellard. Good God I love that man, and every Thanksgiving, I can’t help but remember all the time I was blessed to have in his company.

Moral of the Story: Tractors can be dangerous. Sometimes, old people are cool. And always, always, always use that damn e-brake…God put it there for a reason.

Roll Tide y’all, Happy Thanksgiving.