I just posted this in a comment over at Og's, but it was good enough that I thought I ought to share it here, too.
I loved the guys in the pre-70’s pickemuptrucks with the corncob or the rag stuffed into the gas filler sitting right behind the driver’s door. Dad would often point that out as “the fuse”.
I always wanted to see one of them go up in a bang from a cigarette butt carelessly tossed out the window.
But then my Dad was driving a truck to Champaign, Illinois one time, mid-70’s as I recall, with a very dead, very dry evergreen tree in the back that he was going to dump in the trash pile at the job site he was managing there. Dad smoked, of course, till the day he died. Unfiltered Camels.
So about halfway up I-74, he happened to look in his rearview mirror and saw flames. Yes, he’d tossed a butt, and yes, it had set the tree on fire.
So he pulled over and started looking for something to cut the rope from the tree with. Which became moot when the rope burned through. Meanwhile, a semi had stopped just past him. But nobody came running up. Finally, the driver appeared and told Dad that he’d been looking for his fire extinguisher but couldn’t find it.
It was a rainy night as I recall it and sooner or later a cloudburst put the fire out, and Dad and the semi driver (who had found a fire axe) pulled the tree out of the pickup bed and left it on the side of the road.
Good times. Too bad I wasn’t with him on that trip.
My first car was a 1966 Chevy Pickup. It was a pile of rust with a good engine. I paid $400. The gas tank sat in the cab, right behind the seat. If you had more than 1/2 tank it smelled to high heaven. My piece of crap truck had no door handle or window crank on the passenger side.
One rainy day my dad and I were heading to deliver some furniture to my brother. We had a cooler between us on the bench seat. The newly filled tank filled the cab with gas fumes.
As I stopped at a corner I saw smoke come up from the bottom of my seat. I threw the three on the tree into neutral, stomped the emergency brake and yelled at my dad we were on fire as I bailed from the cab.
Just as I realized dad was stuck with no way out, blocked by the cooler and no exit handles on his side, I also realized the "smoke" was just steam hitting the hot exhaust and coming up through the many rust holes in the floorboard.
Dad was sure pissed that I left him in the "burning" truck.
That reminds me of the time I dumped Dad out of a canoe on a Scouting trip...pulled the bow too far up a steep bank and over he went.
That's a great story, Nathan. I have a few like it myself. I expect our childhoods were quite similar.
Could be. :)
We need to get together one of these days soon so I can pick your brains about an AR. I'll have a lot more weekends free after the first weekend in May, thank goodness.