This is a Branta Canadensis Maxima, for you non-latin speakers.

Christmas Driving Lesson 1974, this is a Ugliest Crapola Jeepillia for you non-Jeep speakers

We had a '51 Willy's "station wagon" that Dad bought for some reason...I think it was because all of his friends had four-wheel drives and he wanted one too.

When I think back on it, I can't really decide whether I liked the thing or not. I guess its kind of like having an ugly girlfriend...She's lots of fun to ride, but you don't want your friends to see you doing it.

You have to picture this thing...It looked like a pregnant army jeep of Korean-era vintage. It was two tone green (pea soup over bile) and had a narrow wheelbase and exterior front fenders.

Inside the contraption was a very confusing set of controls. There were three (count 'em THREE) stick shift levers sprouting out of the hump between the seats. The turn signals didn't self-cancel, which I'm sure was confusing to the other drivers we encountered.

And to top it alloff, the windshield wipers ran on an electric motor that cut out every time you gave the motor some gas.

The Jeep (we called if a Jeep, even though it was made by Willys) was ALWAYS cold. Even in high summer. It was pretty spartan.

If that wasn't enough, most of the time it just sat there in a lonely, ugly heap, undriven, with a battery.

On Christmas eve of my 6th grade year Dad decided to give me a unique present. He walked into the TV room and said "Karl, come with me."

"Where to?""Just come on."

I think that, looking back on it, he didn't want to ruin the surprise by telling me what he had planned.

We went out into the dark, winter night all bundled up like we were going somewhere to work (which is what I thought was going on) to the Jeep. He told me to get in the driver's seat. Now, this is where things got exciting, confusing, and not a little intimidating. But you know that feeling you get when you take a monumental step toward maturity? You know, like the first time you rode a bike, or got drunk, or beat your dad in a footrace, or hit a home run, or found a pubic hair (on you...), or found a pubic hair (on someone else...). I got that feeling sitting in that driver's seat.

I'm sure the young men in the plains Indian tribes felt something like this on their first vision-quests.

Yep, I got that feeling... For about 15 seconds, until we discovered that I couldn't reach far enough to completely depress the clutch pedal without ducking my head below the bottom of the
windshield.

So Dad stomped into the house and came out with what Mom called a "booster seat" to put on the driver's seat of the Jeep so I could reach the pedals AND see over the dash board at the same time. I guess this was done in the spirit of "safety." Then Dad locked the hubs and put the Jeep in four-wheel-drive. I guess that was for safety too.

I started the Jeep (I'd done that LOTS of times...no big accomplishment there), and backed out. As I recall, I didn't kill the engine trying to get the hang of the clutch. Well, not more than a few times anyway.FINALLY I got the thing backed out of the carport and into the driveway. There was about a foot of new snow all over everything, and it was still coming down. It was an overcast winter's night, and if you've never been out on a night like that...Well, its pretty damned dark.

We started up the windshield wipers (with their on-again...off-again arrhythmic tempo) and shined the lights out toward the pond. All I really saw was that tunnel effect you get when driving in a snowstorm at night. The headlights define an illuminated circle in front of you, and the only sensation of movement is that the snowflakes all look like they are coming at you, instead of the other way around.

But I knew that field and the pond in the middle of it like the back of my hand, so did Dad, so off we went driving around the pond.

For all you city kids out there, ponds are full of water. And that water has to come from somewhere, not to mention the fact that the water has to GO somewhere too. So at one end of this pond was a creek (pronounced "crick") flowing IN, and a the other end was a spillway (no pronunciation tricks in "spillway") flowing OUT.

Well, if you're going to drive around a pond , you have to negotiate the creek and the spillway.

So, since I was driving in what Dad called "grandma gear" which is just a classy, uptown way of saying "compound first" which moves the vehicle while idling and thus requires no clutch-skills, we limped along around the pond at about 1 mile an hour. It took forever to make one lap.

Going through the spillway (we encountered it early in the journey) was a piece of cake. It was just a ditch in a dike made of river rock. No bridge, no culvert, just drive right through the thing, and climb the hill on the far shore.

Later, at the opposite end of the pond, we had to negotiate the creek. I almost got us stuck because the ground around the creek was soft.

Dad yelled "give ‘er some gas!" So I floored it. We climbed out of the soft mud in record time, and I let off the gas. Now you've got to understand, that was as far as my accelerator foot had been trained. Either no pressure on the accelerator, or all the way to the floor. Pretty much Driving Miss Daisy or Dukes of Hazzard. Not much middle ground.

After about four laps around the pond (taking at least 5 minutes each at that speed) Dad got antsy.

He said "Push in on the clutch" and then shifted into second gear for me.

Now, I should probably interject that I hadn't used the brake pedal all night so far...We just hadn't gone fast enough to need to slow down. Hell, up until this point, we'd almost been stopped anyway. But I was riding that brake pedal...just in case. With my left foot.

But now we were careening around the frozen pond at a speed approaching 10 miles an hour (hold on!). Somewhere during the fifth lap Dad said "Give 'er some gas."Well, I stomped on it (there's that dukes of Hazzard thing again). All of the sudden we were bouncing around in the cab of the Jeep, and my foot was jumping on and off the accelerator a couple of times a second. The Jeep was bouncing over river-rocks while all four tires were spinning. Dad was yelling, my eyes were wide, and as the snow parted beyond the stupid on-again-off-again windshield wipers a great big fallen tree appeared. So I slammed on the brakes, jerked the wheel left and braced for impact with both feet straining against the floor-boards.

Right against the gas pedal.

I guess a good way to describe it was that the Jeep had lots more GO than STOP. With one of my legs standing on the brake pedal and the other leg standing on the gas pedal, the Jeep just got confused and did what any normal Jeep would do under the same circumstances. It spun its wheelsaround and headed for the pond.

There was about a 6 foot drop-off at that end of the pond. That was before you got to the water level (which was covered in ice...Hell, it WAS Christmas eve). That was also the deep end of the pond. It was easily 10 feet deep.

Lucky for us there was a huge cottonwood tree to keep us from going swimming. That tree must’ve moved over a couple of feet to its right (out of the goodness of its heartwood, you understand) and caught our left front fender. That tree definitely saved us a lot of problems that night.

The Jeep had slammed into that cottonwood tree hard enough to crumple the industrial-strength left front fender into the tire. We were looking almost straight down at the pond (okay... It SEEMED like straight down) when Dad said "What’re you DOING?"

Hell, I didn’t know what I was doing... This WAS my first actual driving lesson, you know. So I didn’t have much to say... But knowing that I was probably in awfully big trouble made me start bawlin’ like a baby.

I cried, Dad (inexplicably) laughed, and when we finally got back to the house Mom got pissed. Then, because Dad was laughing, I figured that was the right reaction and started laughing. Well, that pissed Dad off, and he started in on the "What the Hell do you think is so funny?" speech.

Well, it cost $270 to fix the fender (you know, so the Jeep would retain its value), and I was the first kid in my class at school to wreck a vehicle. I didn't drive much for a while.

Until I got to be about 13 or 14. Then the Jeep replaced my bicycle. I got mobile.

At first Dad told me to drive it to the farm to build fences and irrigate, so the Jeep, my shovel and I did some traveling. We looked pretty classy, the three of us, considering the Jeep’s newly painted fender let people know what color the Jeep used to be.

The Jeep would just about do 60 mph on a slight downhill incline (if you REALLY stomped on it), and it was built like a...well, it was built like a jeep. Thus, it was pretty safe for a fledgling driver, three stick shifts notwithstanding.

One summer Dad hired high-school senior to work on the farm. He let me drive all of the time at the farm, and sometimes on the road. The only creature-comfort that the Jeep had was an old AM radio. The speaker dangled down by one wire under the driver's side dashboard. We played that radio all of the time. The radio station in Enterprise owned three rock-and-roll records: Dance the Night Away by Van Halen, The Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits, and I Want You to Want Me (the live version... very hip) by Cheap Trick. While working at the farm we hoped that we'd hear them played that day... Usually sometime between Paul Harvey’s "The Rest of the Story" and the Farm Report.

Our hired man let me drive the Jeep every time we had to move it, so I got better at driving and using a stick shift during the course of the summer. In fact, I got downright cocky. I'd smoke out across the pastures as fast as that Jeep would go.

One day, it was quitting time and I was tearing up the road to the last gate before the road. The ranch hand was saying "You'd better slow down...slow down...DAMMIT SLOW DOWN!"

I was trying, but we weren't slowing down. I was pushing down mightily (OK, as mightily as a 13 year old can push down) on the brake pedal, but it wasn't moving.

And that gate was coming up awfully fast.

The Jeep ran through that gate like it wasn't even there. It took us 40 yards to stop, and another hour to pull the barbed wire out of the wheel assemblies. And yet another hour or two to replace the gate.

The korean war-vintage radio speaker that hung underneath the dashboard had fallen off and wedged itself under the brake pedal. It was just EXACTLY the right width to keep the pedal from moving at all. And let me tell you, I've never seen a more solidly built speaker before or since.

When I was a junior in high-school, the Jeep was pretty much my only transportation. Then Dad bought a Porsche 924 in the summer between my junior and senior years. That meant I got to drive the Ford Pickup (which was cool for a country boy, thank you very much).

Dad came to me and said "Karl, this is your last year to get good grades and get into a good college like Stanford or Harvard. So I'll make you a deal. If you pull a straight 4-point-0 during your senior year, I'll give you a car. It may not be a great car, but it'll be one more car than you own right now. But you have to pull straight A's. Nothing less is good enough. Anything less, and no car."

What a fantastic opportunity for a free car! And for about one semester it worked. But I started struggling in one of my classes (I forget which), and eventually pulled a B grade. I was crushed.

I figured this put me completely out of the running for any sort of car based on our deal. Plus, since I always secretly figured he was just going to give me the Jeep anyway, I just did the Karl thing and coasted through the rest of the year.

At the end of the year Dad said "You know, I would have given you a car if you had applied yourself. Forget the grades, if you would have TRIED I'd have given you a car."

I said "Well, you were just going to give me the Jeep, right?"

I almost vomited when Dad said "No, I had a Porsche 914 picked out for you."

Later, after I had quit college, in retrospect I believe that one of the worst things about my unsuccessful college career was the fact that I was so immobile. I had a dinkasaurus loser-bike (just like when I was younger...its funny how things run in cycles isn't it?). I think a car might have helped a little (but I doubt it would have made the difference between dropping out and getting a PhD).

I learned an awfully valuable set of lessons in that Jeep. It was one of my icons of growing independence. Whenever I see that body style Willy's now, I tell everyone within earshot that I used to drive one of those.

Dad eventually traded it to a guy for the promise of two nice dinners with him and his wife.

The guy paid for one. That was about par for the course with that Jeep.

Fashion, Beer, Mechanical Work... It's Another Oregon Redneck Roadtrip!

Mom, Dad and the girls moved away from Enterprise in the summer of '83. That left me alone to my own devices, but Kurt stayed with a family friend that was generous enough, or stupid enough maybe, to volunteer to let Kurt live at his home.

I lived in town in a small apartment. The apartment building had a back courtyard that contained stables and an outhouse at one time. That pretty well dates the building. Circa 1890-something.

Mom and Dad sent plane tickets to Kurt and I so that we could come to Phoenix for Christmas. The nearest airport that actually had a flight to Phoenix was in Portland. Portland was (and still is, surprisingly enough) a LONG way from Enterprise.

For those of you who are geographically challenged,Portland is nestled into the lower-right-hand corner of that hump on the west side of Oregon. Enterprise is across a river from Idaho.

That's a lot of road.

It’s an ESPECIALLY long road if your cars can’t be trusted. I had a '69 Camaro which was great for getting around in a town the size of a football stadium. But it wasn't a good choice for a trans-state pilgrimage. Kurt, on the other hand, had a pretty Chevy Luv Truck that was fairly reliable.

FAIRLY reliable. You'll notice that it has been at least 10 years since you saw a Chevy Luv. There's a reason.

Kurt and I gave ourselves 2 days to get to Portland. Its really only a 13 hour drive, but we didn't want to miss our flight. We figured we'd just sleep in the truck. It was a good thing that we planned ahead because Kurt's truck had a trick or two up its tailpipe, and it snowed and snowed and snowed between Enterprise and Portland.

First, we ran into the weather. The Oregon National Safety and Feel-Good Agency was requiring tire-chains to go through the mountains. Kurt had some chains that he had got a really good deal on...almost free as I recall. You know the old adage: "If it’s too good to be true..." That’s the story of our life.

We stopped at the bottom of the mountains and put the chains on with all of the other people attempting to negotiate that Donner-like mountain pass. When we were sure that the chains were on securely we began our trek up the snowy mountain.

Almost immediately we heard the ominous "thump-scratch, thumpety-scratch, thump-scratch" of one of the cross-links of the tire chain tearing the paint off the side of Kurt's shiny truck. We got out and fixed it with baling wire and went a few miles until the same thing started on the other side. So we wired it up.

Again and again this happened. It took all day to get over those stinkin' hills. We almost ran out of baling wire. That would have been a catastrophe. A day without baling wire is like a day without sunshine.

We continued westward after we got to the low lands along the Columbia River west of Pendleton. But the truck wasn't running quite right. That is to say, the damn thing would die, at 60 mph, headed down the highway. Sometimes it would spontaneously restart, other times it would magically start only after having come to a complete stop.

It was almost like Kurt’s truck was trying to tell us something.

Not knowing anything about trucks, but having limited knowledge about 2 stroke dirt bikes I guessed the problem was ignition, and had to be fouled spark plugs. So we stopped and bought some plugs and installed them in the truck on a cold snowy Oregon night under a streetlamp at a truck stop. Nope. It wasn't plugs. In fact, the truck seemed to run better with the old plugs. We know this, because we switched plugs, then switched them back because the new plugs actually ran worse.

Somewhere during the course of changing the plugs, one of us bumped the air cleaner which jiggled loosely. I tried to tighten the wingnut holding it onto the carb, but the nut was already tight.

Its hard to figure this stuff out in the dark, along the side of an interstate, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing.

The carb was loose. But the bolts that had wiggled loose were installed from the underside of the intake manifold, which was securely bolted to the engine block. To further complicate issues, the Japanese design team had chosen to attach every possible hose, vacuum line, and linkage to the carb, so the array was pretty intimidating to two non-mechanical dudes like us (HAH! Stupid Amelicans wirr nevel figule this out). Apologies to Toshiro Mifune, whose work I enjoy.

So we did the only thing we could do. I rolled up my nasty old cowshit-smellin' Vietnam-era army jacket and put it on top of the air cleaner housing and slammed the hood on it. The idea was to put enough pressure on the air-cleaner to keep the carb in place, so it wouldn’t suck air through the joint between the carb and manifold.

It wasn't entirely successful, but we were able to limp at about 29 miles an hour the rest of the way to Portland.

We had planned to sleep in the truck and save money on a motel room. But we were COLD! I can't describe it, we were freezing. And my coat was under the hood holding the engine together. We got a motel room, and turned the heater on "Redneck Defrost." It was about 120 degrees in a half-hour, but we were still chilled to the bone.

That was the first time I had ever rented a motel room. Since I had no credit card we had to find one that took cash. My first motel room came with hot and cold running -dealers. I can't recall ever bringing a tire iron and a bowie knife into a rented room on any other occasion. But I did it that night. At least it was warm.The next morning, before our afternoon flight, we found a garage that only had a foot of water running through it from the torrential downpour hitting Portland right then. There was an old redneck mechanic in the service bay who told us it was going to cost thirty dollars more than everything we had. We explained our plight to him and he fixed Kurt's truck as a favor on his lunch-hour. What a good guy. We sure didn’t expect to find anyone who would be helpful in a city like Portland. I guess it goes to show that if you look hard enough, you can always find some good... Wherever you happen to be standing.

By now we were tired, cold again, and frustrated. Then we had to hike about half a mile from our parking space to the airport terminal in the cold driving rain. Now picture this. Two soaking, shivering hicks with cowshit stained boots and hats dressed in old, ripped army jackets which look as if they came across a state under the hood of a truck...and did, walking through an international airport looking pissed-off. Even the Hare Krishnas left us alone. When the stewardesses saw us coming, they changed our seat assignments to keep us away from the decent folk flying the friendly skies. They sat us right up front, next to the stewardess' station.... Presumably so they could keep an eye on us.

Once in the air, almost as an afterthought, one of the stewardesses got close enough to smell us, wrinkled her cute little nose and asked "can I get you...gentlemen.... anything?"

We couldn’t miss the "I’m from the city... someplace nice, and we don’t really like people like you" implicit in her otherwise proper question. I’m sure she would’ve added "like a bath and a decent set of clothes" if we hadn’t appeared so anti-social.

That was pretty much the last straw for me. I just looked out from under my shit-stained hat brim and said "two beers."She ever so politely asked "May I see some ID?"I impolitely responded "No, you may not."

"Well then I can't sell you two, uh, gentlemen any beer. The drinking age is 21."

I asked "In what state?"

"Well... in Oregon." She was losing her sense of humor. So was I.

"Well in California, Arizona, and Nevada it’s 19. Bring me two beers when we get over one o' those states."

She was licked, she was standing there arguing with someone who looked and smelled like the Broadway cast of "Deliverance"...She made the right decision. She brought beer. And lots of it.

I think she was hoping we’d drink ourselves to sleep. Kurt and I expended all of our remaining funds on beer somewhere over the whole western United States.

When we landed in Phoenix we were tanked, smelly, unshaven, and walking around in army coats and jeans with sweaty long underwear underneath.

It was 80 degrees in Phoenix. The crowd of greeters at the gate was full of beautiful women in halter tops. Life was good, women were beautiful, I was snockered and Kurt was looking for a trash can to be sick into.

It’s a good thing video cameras were so expensive back then. Otherwise, I’m sure Kurt and I would have been on "America’s Funniest Drunk Redneck Home Videos" ... Or maybe "COPS"It was obvious that we didn’t fit in, so we decided to be awfully blatant about not fitting in.

But that’s another story.