my dad and cars

I was fourteen when we moved from the suburbs of Detroit to sixteen acres in rural, central Florida. We went from walking to school and neighborhood stores, to school buses and needing a car for every activity away from home. Instead of a gang of kids in our neighborhood around for play we had two teenage girls as our only nearby peers. There was a huge culture shock for my younger siblings and me but my dad had been raised in the north Georgia mountains and was in his country-style element. There were orange trees and two small lakes on our property and the undeveloped area was populated by possums, raccoons, snakes, hawks and even a Florida panther. My dad spent most of his off work hours exploring fields and back roads in his 1960-something red Chevy Bel-Air.

Mom always said when my dad got his hands on a car that no one else could ever drive it. When anything broke, he fixed it, but his way of fixing it was to rig it. The trunk didn't have a keyhole. It used to be a key hole. Now it was just a hole. He had a pair of vice grips in the floor of the back seat that he used to open it.

Groceries never went into the trunk when Mom used it to go shopping. They were lined across the back seat and in the floorboard because even if she could have maneuvered the vice grips to open the trunk, it was loaded with one of every tool my dad owned. There were also rolls of electrical tape, pieces of wire, tins of grease, quarts of oil and brake fluid in there. Just in case he needed it.

My dad wasn't known for being a particularly focused driver. He liked to 'sightsee.' One afternoon I saw him walking down our long, sandy driveway toward the house. He had to walk home because his car was in a ditch just down the road at the s-curve. He'd been chasing a snake across the road with his car and hadn't noticed where he was headed. His car was soon nose down in a small ravine on the side of the road.

One night after Byron and I returned to my house at my midnight Saturday night curfew, my dad met us at the door.

"B. You in a hurry to go home?"

"No, Mr. Bryant. What do you need?"

"I was driving around in the back by the lakes while a go and got stuck. It's up to the axle. Can you go with me to help me get my car out?"

Looking for any chance in the world to stay later at my house, Byron said he'd be glad to help get it out.

My dad, Byron and I went trekking out into the darkness with a flashlight and a shovel. We started walking down the path toward the lakes in the back and discovered we didn't need the flashlight because the moonlight shone nearly bright as day. I was sixteen and desperately in love so I held tightly to my guy as we traveled into the night. I stumbled, tripped and complained, making Byron also stumble and trip as we made our way off the trail into the high grasses to my dad's car.

When he'd heard enough of my complaining my dad said,

"If you'd let go of the man's arm, you could walk, Suzanne!" Patience wasn't exactly his strong suit when he was focused.

We reached the car and the two of them worked together in the bright moonlit midnight to free the thing from its sandy trap. Our ride home was jubilant and wild. We bounced all over the car as my dad drove us through the field to get us back to the house.