The day I learned to swear and drive

The house I grew up in did not have a furnace. We heated with a fireplace.
I remember getting up every morning and starting a fire with chips of cedar wood.
My mother hated the smell of diesel so she wouldn’t let us start the fire using diesel.
In our later years she relented and finally let my dad use diesel.
As every Boy Scout knows you can get a fire going much quicker with a little help from diesel.
Heating with a wood stove sounds quaint, but it is a great deal of work when it is your only source of heat in the house from October to March.
When I was about ten, my job was to clean out the ashes every day, chop the wood and bring it in, and start the fire. Everyone helped keep it going through the day.
On cold nights – something Monticello has an abundance of – we would load a large tree-root full of pitch so that it would burn hot and slow all night long.
Some years my dad would drive to Price and get a load of coal. Coal was great for heat and duration, but I also remember having to wash the walls and paint almost every year because of the film of soot.
And cleaning out the clinkers was a chore.
Because we heated exclusively with wood, we needed to haul about ten cords of wood during the fall to be ready for winter.
When I was younger, my job was mostly throwing small sticks and logs into the truck.
As I grew older, my siblings were gone and so I was the “volunteer” that my dad always took.
One beautiful fall day, we went up the mountain for a load of wood and as usual we would drive our old Ford pickup down a path he claimed was a road.
We would back up next to the trees we were cutting. On this particular day we arrived in the afternoon, it was sunny and warm.
My dad, of course, handled the chain saw and I used the ax to break off smaller branches and to finish breaking the log if he didn’t cut all the way through.
We had made some progress on our wood gathering when from a short distance I noticed the chain saw was on the ground and my dad was waving his hands all about, slapping around hysterically.
He hopped about like his feet were on hot coals. He was making a bee line for the truck.
And indeed, it was exactly that… a bee line. He had cut into a log and busted open a beehive.
These bees were dedicated kamikaze dive-bombing bees out for revenge. They were sacrificing their lives with a vengeance protecting their queen.
He jumped into the truck and rolled up the window and made a few more slaps and swings.
I ran to the truck and I heard my dad sing a chorus of profanity that can only be compared to Handel’s Messiah.
It was rehearsed with such earnestness and desperation that it seemed as poetic as Dante’s Inferno.
Mark Twain said, “Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”
I believe to this day that the bar was met; that these “certain circumstances,” were adequately “urgent” and “desperate.”
He sent me to retrieve the chain saw. “#$%@%* Get it quickly I think we are in #$@%# trouble #@$%^@#.”
I went and grabbed the saw and took off back to the truck with bees buzzing around me like a fresh flower.
I do not believe my circumstances were as urgent or desperate as my dad’s; but I let out a few cuss words just for the sake of practice.
By the time I got back to the truck, my dad’s eyes were starting to swell shut. Apparently, he was allergic to bees, and suddenly I was scared because he was scared.
Mind you, I am only 10 years old and although I had been a keen observer of my dad’s driving technique, I didn’t really know how to drive.
On a good day, I might be able to push the pedals, shift, or see over the dashboard; but not all at once. But I had the confidence of any ten year old that believed he was a super hero.
My dad got us to the main road and then his eyes were swollen shut. So, my first real driving lesson was in an old 1954 Ford pickup with a temperamental clutch going down a mountain road with a blind instructor and half a load of wood.
There was a good deal of grinding of gears on my part and exercising of faith on my dad’s part. He swore every time I would grind the gears or kill the truck as I tried to let out the clutch, push on the gas, and go from the “granny gear” into second gear.
I was glad his eyes were swollen shut so he couldn’t see, I am almost certain the ride home would have terrified him even more. He may have died from a heart attack instead of anaphylactic shock.
I will say that we arrived home safely with the transmission still attached to the truck.
I pulled into the driveway and the truck died because I was in fourth gear and pushing on the brake.
Apparently, I hadn’t mastered using all three pedals so I couldn’t get the clutch in at the same time and we chugged, jumped, staggered, and lurched to a stop.
If the tires had fell off, springs flew out, and steam rose from the engine it would have been a fitting end to my driving lesson and the truck.
As my mother saw me at the wheel and my dad swollen like a gross pumpkin, she made the sign of the cross, whispered a mother’s prayer, and asked, “What the hell happened?”
It was all good, he was taken to the hospital and survived, and I had a good story for school the next day as I bragged about how I already knew how to drive.