Me and dad, and the broken truck

“You walk in front of the truck and show me which way to go,” said Dad.

“Okay,” I said, hesitant to walk in the waist deep grass. “I can’t see the ground. What about snakes?”

“It’s okay, I’ll be in the truck.” He turned to climb into the cab of his beloved white Bedford. “Snakes can’t get up there.”

I took my hat off and mopped sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. “You know how I feel about snakes.”

“They are more scared of you than you are of them.” The door made that strange hollow “CLANG” as he slammed it.

“That’s not strictly right is it? I don’t go around biting things and killing them, do I?” I had once bitten my dog, just to prove a point, and he was still kicking.

A quiet squeak came from the cab as Dad stepped down on the clutch pedal, and any chance of reasoning with him was drowned out by the rumble of the Bedford’s Chevrolet motor as it chugged, protesting as always, into life.

“Don’t run over me, you old fart,” I said, a picture of sweaty innocence.

His return smile said two things at the same time, “I can’t hear a thing you said,” and“I couldn’t care less.” He gunned the motor and I took the hint.

Summer had baked the grass to a crisp golden colour and with each step I could feel the brittle stems crunch under the soles of my boots. The thought of my imminent agonizing death by brown snake subsided and for a moment I was “Ian, destroyer of nations” reveling in the destruction wrought by my mighty footfalls.

A grey shape materialized out of the golden grassy ocean. A tree stump. Oddly it wasn’t the broad flat topped sort of stump you normally think of, but rather narrow and fairly pointed at its top end. It looked to me that it had been broken off rather than cut off. Either way, it’s dark grey complexion told me it happened a long time ago, for what that observation was worth.

I was so relaxed now in my role as scout that I pointed languidly toward the stump, as though it was of little consequence. “Be gone, O’ ligneous remnant. Thy sear visage offends…”

“KABUMP”

The very un-Shakespearean sound of wood and metal coming together dragged me back to reality. I turned slowly, accompanied by a sick lurching sound. The grey stump was wedged in under the truck.

The stranded Bedford made one last mournful lurching motion as Dad flung the door open, unleashing a string of inventive and medically impossible obscenities. A steadying hand on the door, he dropped to the ground, the stream of invective only ending when he came around the front of the crippled truck. Innocent as I was, I didn’t understand most of the words he was using. However, it was one of the longest sentences I ever heard him utter, and I was secretly impressed.

When he ran out of breath, he stared at the stricken truck, massaging his stubbled chin with a bony hand.

“Did you see the stump I pointed to?” I asked and immediately regretted it.

“No,” he said, a little too quietly.

“I pointed at it, so you wouldn’t …”

His glare suggested strongly that finishing was bad idea. “I wanted you point the direction I should drive in, to avoid stumps.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’s embarrassing.”

We stood in silence for a few more minutes before Dad got down on his knees and crawled under the front bumper. I was about crawl under there with him when another string of muffled obscenities wafted up from under the truck. My canny knack for spotting signals told me that being within arm’s reach of him at this moment might not be very wise, so I leaned on the scratched and dented bumper bar, waiting for the not so veiled threats of bloody murder to abate.

He ran out of steam before the air turned completely blue, and crawled back out into the daylight.

He paced around a bit “Well that’s no bloody good”. I took my turn and went below to see for myself what could make my father so vocal.

The underside of the Bedford J Series is interesting. The cross member that runs the width of the chassis is straight. Mostly. It is straight for about two thirds of its length and angled up at the ends to where it meets the chassis.

My father, who  always had a pretty good eye for these sorts of things had turned the wheel enough that the stump passed through the angled gap between the cross member, chassis and front wheel. After that feat of unintentional accuracy the stump was now heavily wedged up against the engine.

While I am down here, I should briefly mention the motor that the old Bedford had under its rounded white bonnet, or hood, for those who are inclined to be American about these things. Dad’s truck had a Chevrolet 292 running it. Not a particularly big motor, admittedly, but dad loved it.

With this motor, the Bedford had a top speed of about 60 kilometers an hour, unloaded. Slow was a wet week you might say, and you would be right but it pulled harder than a 15 year old boy watching a Katy Perry video. Dad would load seven ton of wood on it and it would still go 60 kilometers an hour. I got a lot of sleep on the double seat of that truck going to and from work with him over the years.

A curious little observation about the Chev 292 motor. The oil filter hangs really low on the motor. Just low enough in fact for a stray stump to sneak through the gap like Luke Skywalker and hit it just like a 2 meter ventilation outlet on the Death star. The amputated oil filter now lay, sad and forlorn in the grass in a rapidly expanding pool of oil.

I emerged, covered in yellow dust, from beneath the truck to see dad priming his old Stihl chainsaw. “Umm, dad,” I said, suddenly nervous about his intentions. What are you doing with that?”

“What do you think I’m doing with it?” he looked at me as if I had my jocks on the outside. “It’s a bloody chainsaw.”

“Hes going to kill me and tell mum I ran away to live on a farm, where I can chase rabbits all day” immediately came to mind. I began slowly retreating and looking for a stick, only realizing later what a bad weapon that would be against a chainsaw.

“You get around behind the front wheel and pull back on the stump. I’ll cut it off.” He sat the chainsaw near the front of the truck.

“You want me to crawl in under there?” I asked “While you also crawl in there and swing a chainsaw around.”

Dad pulled the starter and revved the saw a couple of times while giving me familiar “the cant hear you, don’t care what you think” nod and smile. He pushed the idling chainsaw before him under the truck.

Filled with dread at my approaching gory death, went to side of the Bedford and crawled into my soon to be grave. Lying on my side, I reached up, took hold of the stump. I opened my mouth to ask Dad one last time if he wanted to reconsider. Big mistake.

Dad, laying on his side revved the chainsaw and hit the stump with surgical whizzing metal teeth of death. The shady underside of the truck reverberated violently in response, and the space was full of choking dust, impaling fragments of dry yellow grass and tiny serrated chips of sawdust, all of which competed to fill every orifice in my head. The stump gave way a second or two later and added a gush of viscous motor oil to my face hole additions. I bailed out, dragging the stump wreckage behind me.

As I dropped the lump of dessicated wood in the grass, Dad came round the side of the truck, idling chainsaw in his hands and proceeded to mangle the wood into pieces.

“Are you sure that’s necessary?” I said, spitting out oil flavoured mush.

He glowered at me, revved the saw twice in answer, before finishing the mutilation.

When he was done, he took a drink from his re and white drink bottle – thermos thing with the cup that goes on top and said, “Well, we are going for a walk.”

“Which way?”

He pointed somewhere off into the distance. “Mile or two that way.”

I started walking.

“Where are you going?”

“To the farm, to call mum to come get us.”

“Not yet, you’re not.”

He passed me a ratty old leather thing with a shoulder strap, full of his smaller spanners and screwdrivers and other paraphernalia of chainsaw fixing. He then handed me his favourite Stihl chainsaw, saying “I’m not leaving them to get nicked while we are gone.”

“Ok,” I said and began trudging away.

“Not done yet,” he said from atop the truck, as he produced the old wooden soft drink crate he sued to store bottles of chainsaw fuel.

“How do you expect me to carry this bag, and your saw AND your petrol?”

“Easy,” He said, climbing down. He took the bag and hung it around my neck by the strap. “There you go.”

So, we started walking, me with a bag of tools hanging from my neck, a chainsaw in one hand and a box full of stinking glass bottles in the other. Dad bravely led the way, encumbered by his red and white water bottle with the cup for a lid.

As I mentioned earlier, it was summer, and summer in Australia can get warm. By warm, I mean up around the 40 degree mark (over 100 for the yanks in the audience). It can feel even warmer when you are carrying more kit than Burke and Wills camels (Historical fact. They all died). We trudged for days. If the weighty bag of spanners had allowed me to turn my head, I would have seen vultures waiting for us to die so they could feast on our rotting carcasses.

“Bloody hot isn’t it?” asked dad, as he took a swig from his red and white water bottle with the cup for a lid. “Lucky I brought the water, eh.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, still spitting out oil soaked saw dust. “Bloody lucky.”

After an eternity of hellish trekking, through the scenic hell of the Australian bush, we finally reached the bush gate. We tip toed across the iron cattle grate and walked up to the little wrought iron gate in front of our farmhouse objective.

I unceremoniously dumped my load at the gate. I dumped myself even more unceremoniously next to it as dad went to the house and asked to use their phone. “Ask mum to bring us some water.”

“No need,” said dad, taking a swing from his red and white water bottle with the cup for a lid. “Got plenty.”

Mum arrived about half an hour later, and somehow this how affair became my fault by the time we got home. By the time had called his favourite mechanic an hour later, I had more or less become responsible for the black plague, and somehow assisted a man named Abbot to become prime minister twenty years in the future. If I had to pick, I would prefer the black plague option.

I wasn’t invited to go with them when they towed the old Bedford in to town. The good old truck threw one more little surprise at dad. I mentioned earlier that the old truck had a Chevrolet motor on board. Turns out it was hecho en Mexico. That’s right, the damn thing was made in Mexico! That might not seem a big deal but it turns out that Mexico uses metric measurements, while the more traditional American built jobees use the imperial measures. What this meant was, dad couldn’t get an oil filter for love or money.

Dad thought about it a while, ignoring my unhelpful suggestions. Eventually he measured the in and out holes (apologies for the technical jargon) on the engine and went rummaging around the shed and came up with a scientific solution to the problem.

An hour and a lot of swearing later the problem had been solved. A piece of copper pipe had been inserted into the out hole and bent around to enter the in hole. Dad stood on the bumper, hand on hips surveying his handiwork.

“Might have to change the oil a bit more often, but it’ll work,” he said, as proud as any backyard DaVinci could ever be.

In spite of myself, I had to agree. He didn’t say much. He might have even occasionally threatened to kill me with a chainsaw, but he was an inventive old bugger, my old man.