Note: Very rough and unpolished, but still centered around a topic.
My dad started teaching me how to drive when I was 14 years old. We were visiting family out on the farm in Minnesota, and he wanted me to drive. We had driven up from our home in Colorado, to the little farming community just northwest of Rochester, Minnesota, for my cousin Andy’s high school graduation party.
On the long, 14 hour road trip, my dad offered the steering wheel to me many times, but I refused. I wasn’t ready to drive on the highways, even if they went straight across the flat plains of Nebraska and the midwest without many turns. I wanted to start on the county roads, which my dad warned were not as safe as the highway. The Minnesota countryside was ruled by wild rednecks and outlaws, who never followed many road safety laws.
Nevertheless, I did get behind the wheel on the dusty county roads. I was very slow at first, but my dad remained patient until it was clear I knew what I was doing, at least well enough to drive faster. But I didn’t give into his pressure to go faster during any drive on that trip. In fact, I was scared out of driving until the next summer. My dad was right about the roads being infested with speeding rednecks.
That next summer, I had myself a two-stroke dirtbike my dad got me in the fall months before. I spent the fall, winter, and spring months, getting used to riding my dirtbike on the insufferably windy plains of eastern Colorado. The CR80 was small, but it was the perfect fit for me. It had 50 HP at least, and could carry my ass downhill, 5th gear pinned, close to 80 miles per hour. I rarely went that fast though, especially in the beginning, where I had 20 acres of rough pasture land to ride, rather than the wide open county roads. The pasture was much more inviting to me at the time, than the county roads. My dad, Clarke, and plenty of others tempted me to races on those wide open roads, but I refused out of fear.
At the time, Clarke’s best friend, a man called Doug, had recently died. Doug was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident decades before, and he was confined to a wheelchair, unable to move or feel anything below his waist, and struggled with partial paralysis from the neck down too. Seeing his condition scared me away from riding anything other than a closed vehicle on the roads, even though Doug was paralyzed in busy city traffic on an actual motorcycle, not on deserted county roads on a dusty little dirtbike. I was eventually forced to get over that fear, but I still refuse to ride on the main county roads and city streets.
That fear of ending up paralyzed or even dead extended to my driving as well. There are hierarchies on the road in many places. The biggest, meanest, roughest vehicles tend to get the most respect, while the little cars often have to dodge and weave to get their way. Because of this, I outright refused to drive in anything smaller than my dad’s Xterra. My mom bought me a little blue car from a friend, and I was so scared of driving in that thing, that I fought with her constantly over it, and she eventually sold it. It was very clear I would never get behind its wheel.
Around that same time, Clarke had an old, lifted Jeep Wrangler just sitting in a parking lot in Grand Junction, Colorado. My mom forked over a couple grand in cash to get that thing shipped down and tuned up enough to start, and immediately regretted her decision when my grandpa Lyle drove it from the mechanic’s to our front driveway.
It needed some work. It ran just fine, but was lifted so high that it had a severe, inevitable death wobble at 35 miles per hour, and was more or less a major public safety issue. It was tinted a pale red from being used as an off-road toy for many years out in the Utah desert, and the interior smelled like gas, ass, and the desert. The interior lights and radio didn’t work because the fuses needed to be replaced. It had areas of surface rust that I thought added to its character, but made my mom cringe. Oh, and it had silver flames painted on the hood, and faded stickers (most of which I scraped off because they were not legible), except for one sticker just above the hitch, which read in big, bold letters “JEEP NAKED” above, and “but don’t grind your gears” below.
The jeep was a perfect reflection of myself; unapologetically rugged, vulgar, riddled with treatable issues but not necessarily completely fixable, slow to move, but loyal and reliable (once fixed enough to work). I even mounted a pair of old steer horns on the front of it. Mom gave me a lot of crap for having the jeep and mounting the steer horns onto it, ultimately deciding to sell it and leave a wad of cash on my desk, unless I got it out of the driveway before the end of the year.
Well, I granted her wish. Less than a week before New Years, the Jeep was signed over to my dad, and Clarke helped us tow it out to his place. It was a sketchy setup for sure. We used a cheap tow bar from Walmart to hitch my jeep to the back of Clarke’s lifted Toyota Tundra, and followed him in the Xterra for the longest 45 minutes of our lives. My dad and I barely talked while we cautiously tailed Clarke and the jeep. We were clenched up and chewing our nails shorter (and bloodier) than usual, listening to country heavy death metal music (yes, that’s a genre), just waiting for the tow bar to fail and send my jeep careening into oncoming traffic, or rolling into the ditch, or crashing into us and pushing us down the ditch with it.
We managed to take the jeep to the carwash to spray off excess rust and dust, before towing it the rest of the way to Clarke’s house on the high, windy plains of Elizabeth, Colorado. Once there, we unhitched the towbar, thanked Clarke for his help, and knelt down to inspect it. The Jeep was too wet to work on that day, and the unforgiving freezing weather drove my dad and I away anyway (and also froze my jeep, so it was encased in a thin sheet of ice). For the next few months, we tried to prepare my jeep for the shop to be taken down from a 12 inch lift to a 4 inch lift, but we made little progress.
The weather on the open plains of Colorado is pretty terrible. It’s almost always exhaustingly windy. The winters are too cold for me to spend much time outside without losing feeling to my fingers and toes (despite wearing layered gloves and wool socks in my boots). The spring warms up but the wind picks up too, to the point loose objects are often turned into dangerous projectiles and I’m choked by dust, sending me into a violent coughing fit and itching my lungs for days. During almost every summer afternoon, dangerous thunderstorms blow through. And the weather only calms down during the fall hunting season, where I’m too busy doing other things to go out to Elizabeth and work on anything. I also tend to be very sick during the fall and winter months, so when I’m sick like that, I don’t have the energy to loosen up worn down bolts and rip out rusty parts of iron. It’s not that I lack the strength or the will. I just don’t have the energy.
So, as of now (January 2019), the Jeep is still sitting in the front yard. Dad and I managed to take off the front driveshaft and the front shocks earlier in the spring, and that’s it. We just couldn’t tolerate Elizabeth’s horrible weather, and I was also too sick to be much help. It still runs, and it’s ready to be towed to the shop when we are.
I just need to save up enough cash to ensure it gets fixed, but my health insurance has ridiculous guidelines that force me to work, but only two hours a week, because I can’t make more than $400 a month or save more than $2000 in a lifetime. The upside to that is I currently don’t have to worry about taxes, so I can put that money towards the jeep, and no one can stop me.
Meanwhile, learning how to drive has been… Interesting, for lack of a better word. The only things I’ve come close to running over have been a few squirrels and a deer, but I’ve otherwise been described as overly-cautious behind the wheel. That is, until the asphalt turns to gravel and the skyscrapers and suburbs give way to wide open plains.
My dad uses the phrases “Give ‘er hell!” and “Hammer down!” quite often when I’m behind the wheel, and it’s pretty effective. It’s hard to drive on the unkempt dirt roads on the plains, especially in a vehicle like the Xterra. Our off-road adventures in the Xterra took a toll on its steering and overall performance, and the lightweight, high-profile vehicle was easily caught by howling crosswinds. Plenty of F-bombs were dropped each time a gust came by, as I fought the steering to keep the Xterra in my lane or out of the ditch, while my dad sat next to me in the passenger seat at the mercy of the wind, sketchy steering, and my wild driving. But, I learned to drive the Xterra, and I grew to love it. My dad secretly hoped we’d crash and total the damn thing (as long as we were unharmed, of course), just so he could get an insurance claim to get a better vehicle. (We still have the Xterra, and I’m pretty sure he still hopes we’ll one day get too wild and total it. It’s got airbags everywhere, and doesn’t go very fast. We’d probably be ok.)
Because of how relaxed my dad was about the condition of his SUV, I learned to relax too. I still got stressed and anxious when I drove around other drivers, but when we were alone on the dirt roads, I drove like a bat out of hell. The tires spun and slid whenever I started from a stop, accelerated below a hill, or took certain bends. The Xterra barely had any top-end power, so to gain enough actual speed to get going or maintain the speed, I had to “Hammer down and give it hell”, according to my dad and the song Eastbound and Down.
In fact, music makes me a better driver. I’ve always been musically-inclined, and have used it to calm my nerves in many ways throughout my life. I have over 3,000 different songs on my general playlist (which grows weekly), which are all downloaded on my phone (Paying monthly for Apple Music rather than paying per song has paid off so well). I also have about 5 different playlists, including a playlist dedicated to when my dad takes me driving. It’s kind of hard to not have fun when the Dukes of Hazzard theme song is blasting through the speakers, while I haul ass down the country roads with my dad. My dad has too much fun too, and encourages me to drive as fast as his Xterra will take us (which is barely 65 miles per hour on most roads).
I learned how to drift in that thing, as well as how to do burnouts and spin tires out of ditches. I’m still scared of doing doughnuts yet, not that I’ll be able to do that or drift in my Jeep. It’s good snow-driving practice, at least according to my dad, and my drives in the Xterra have improved my go-karting skills. Logically, I should’ve learned how to drift a go-kart before I knew how to drift a vehicle, but I know how to drift a go-kart because I learned how to drift in the Xterra. Stupid? I guess. Dangerous? Probably. Fun? Hell ya!
I’m naturally a hell-raising, redneck outlaw. I hate society, and society has good reasons to hate me. I don’t want to hurt anyone, which is why I obey the laws of the road in the city. But when I return to my heart’s home in the country, my outlaw side really shows. I just can’t help myself.
My grandpa Lyle has sat frozen and wide-eyed in the passenger seat while I raced his Honda Pilot down the county roads. He couldn’t believe I could drive like I could, but always told me to slow down to the speed limit. Speed limits on country roads are stupid, at least in my eyes. But hey, what do I know? I’m just a crazy redneck with a need for speed. (And a terrified grandpa who mumbles the Lord’s prayer under his breath whenever I take him out on the country roads.)