When you grow up on the ranch, driving trucks and pulling trailers becomes second nature. If you’re going to be any help at all on the ranch, you have to start driving by the time you hit seventh grade. By that age you take over your mom’s job of driving the truck while dad pushes hay off the back to the cows. Mom could hardly wait until you got taller than the tires on the one-ton. Now she doesn’t have to listen to your dad yell “slow down…speed up…quit jerking the clutch.” It’s your turn to take the abuse. You learn to drive under the pressure of a “back-seat driver.” Dad says he is just getting you ready for the time you’ll drive your mom to town for groceries. He says “she’ll do all the drivin’- you just turn the wheel and push the pedals.”
By the time you’re in the eight-grade you can make turns without knocking down the corner-posts. Your dad lets you drive on the county farm roads (only from the mailboxes to the cattle guard) and your mom won’t let you near her new Suburban. Sometimes you confidently drive down dead-end roads with the gooseneck hooked-up knowing you’ll have to back out. No big deal. As my dad would say, “no step for a stepper.” Whatever that means.
After a few hundred miles of dirt road driving you hardly notice you have an empty gooseneck trailer behind you. When it is full of six-weight calves, you just drive a little slower and start hitting the brakes a little sooner. Piece of cake. You begin to feel pretty cocky about your driving. Instead of having both hands on the wheel, you start to hang one arm out the window just like dad. In time you even begin to talk on the two-way radio with some of the “other hands” on the ranch. Someday you’ll be the foreman.
By the time you get to ninth grade and start going to high school in town, you’ve driven the tires off of the feed-truck, the bucket-loader, and the quad-runner. The city kids at school are all jealous of your driving ability. They still can’t master the simulated driving game on Nintendo. They ride their bikes to school. Your mom brings you to town in the Suburban. You kinda wish she’d drop you off two or three blocks before you get to the school. It’s embarrassing having your mom drop you off right in front of the flagpole every morning.
Your sophomore year approaches and you become officially eligible for your driver’s license. It is rather anti-climatic. Except for the written test. Dad always just told you to “keep it between the ditches, gun it when you go through the mud, and take the wire-cutters out of your back pocket before you jump in the truck.” Now all of a sudden, the mean looking lady at the motor vehicle place is giving you a test and asking all sorts of questions about lines and signs. Yellow lines this, solid lines that, a red sign means what, a picture of a cow on a sign is universal for blah, blah, blah. Who knows? Who cares? You don’t care about the speed limit in a commercial loading zone. At 16 years-old you simply want to roll the windows down, rev the gas and feel the wind blow through your hair. Freedom is what you seek, not answers to a stupid test.
When you overcome the written test and you have your license in hand the world changes. You spend every waking minute thinking about getting a new vehicle. Your fantasy is owning a three-quarter ton, club-cab truck with a Detroit diesel powerstroke engine, iPod jack and a retractable gooseneck hitch installed by the dealer. Your reality is getting the 1974 GMC half-ton with a flatbed and a headache rack your dad bought at the last farm dispersal auction over in Waller County. The paint is faded, the seat has a big hole in the driver’s side, and the blinker switch is a Phillips head screwdriver sticking out of the steering column. But, you don’t care because it’s yours!
Your new symbol of freedom runs a little rough, but Earl the mechanic at the John Deere dealership, says he’ll help you get it running “smooth as a top.” Earl’s a good man. He grew up working for your dad until the bottom fell out of the bean pit, the hog market and the cattle futures all in the same year. After that he had to get a new job in town, but still thinks of you as his little brother. He loves your dad and was really the one who taught you how to drive. And, much to mom’s dismay he was the one who gave you that first pinch of snuff.
Growing up on the ranch teaches you a lot about being a driver in life. You learn to press the gas and let out the clutch all at the same time. You learn how to shift gears when the load gets heavy. You learn that what you drive says a lot about who you are and what you value. You learn that you care more for people than a pile of metal and rubber. And, you know you can back a gooseneck down a ditch bank and never turn your head. You use your mirrors of experience to get you where you need to go. Keep on truckin’.
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