There Goes My Truck!!!

I’ve always been a trader. I absolutely love to just trade things. Doesn’t really matter what it is either. My friend Ronnie was the same way. We had been trading, basically, junk back and forth since childhood. When I say trading, just in case someone doesn’t know, it would be like, for example, I’ll give you my Superman comic book for your two baseball cards. As we got older, obviously we didn’t trade baseball cards but just about everything else from watches to guns. What always made it fun was trying to burn each other while trying not to get burnt. A good example of burning the other trader is to have a windup watch that would only run for about 15 minutes at a time. It was during that fifteen minutes that you would want to trade the watch off for something that worked correctly thus burning the recipient of the watch.

There was a point when Ronnie and I were drinking buddies. He was with me and a few other friends on nearly every alcohol induced expedition in the International Scout. This story, that I will eventually get to, happened a few years after the scout and I was actually living in Ohio but had come to West Virginia for vacation. Ronnie, myself and his girlfriend had, for lack of a better description, a lets get drunk reunion. Sometime during that party Ronnie asked me if I wanted to trade my car for his truck. I had a pretty decent white 1990 Pontiac Bonneville, I don’t remember the year of his truck but it was a Chevy S-10 4×4. It was a decent looking truck. But I think, after he got a little trashed, he forgot I heard it run. It was a six cylinder that sounded like it was running on four of those if it was lucky. There was no way I would trade my car for it no matter how trashed I was.

I thought it was funny that Ronnie was so blatantly trying to burn me. That truck would be lucky to make it out of the county let alone all the way back to Ohio. After playing along for most of the evening I finally let him off the hook and told him there was no way he was getting my car. He acted like his feelings were hurt when he asked why I wouldn’t trade. That’s when I told him about his truck being unable to leave the county under it’s own steam. He got a big kick out of that but quickly recovered a straight face as he tells me how good it runs. I told him, “let’s take it up the mountain and I’ll show you how good it runs.” He lived in the head of Peachtree so it was just a matter of getting in it and going to the mountains. This, my friends, was mistake number one. The second mistake quickly followed on the heels of the first when Ronnie let me drive. I’m gonna flat out tell you. If I’ve been drinking DO NOT put me behind the wheel of a four wheel drive. Especially with permission to put it to the test. I will get to the top of the nearest mountain if I have to blaze a trail. That might sound funny but I did just that in the old scout, but that’s a story for another day.

To be honest I didn’t think the S-10 had what it took to go any distance up the mountain. At any rate, off we go. I kept to the roads. I was very surprised the truck made it even on roads. I had it locked in four wheel low. The truck was really struggling. By this time Ronnie had given up on trying to pass the truck off as a good running truck but somewhere we adopted a new mission. We were going to take the truck until we ran out of road or blew the engine up whichever came first. The time was somewhere around midnight. I don’t know why it didn’t cross our minds that we had already came up the mountain about five miles from the nearest house. Then again, I do know why, we were having a blast and still had cold beer in the cooler.

We are a pretty good distance up the mountain when the road takes a sharp turn uphill and back to our left. As soon as we rounded the curve we saw the first of about six very huge dirt piles that the gas company had obviously put there to block the road. They were spaced about a hundred yards apart with the first one being the tallest mound. At it’s center, I would say it was about ten feet high with a twenty foot base. Facing it with the truck the valley was on our right and the mountain on our left. It was where the mountain and the pile of dirt met that we decided to go over. Even at that low point on the dirt pile it was all the truck could handle. We did make it over but thats when I regained some of my senses and decided that we probably shouldn’t go any further.

I pull up to the next mound and the road is just wide enough for me to turn the truck around. That was scary because as I was turning around, when the truck was sideways in the road the headlights pierced nothing but blackness. The nose of the truck that close to the very deep hollow. When I did get it turned around, I was so relieved, I decided to take a break. I parked the truck on the hill. I would say the grade was somewhere around 25 degrees. The truck’s emergency brake didn’t work and it was a standard shift. I left the truck in four low, in first gear and with the tires pointed towards the mountain. That was my third mistake, leaving the truck parked unattended on the hill. We were drinking a couple beers. I had walked on up the road just to take a look at some of the dirt mounds. Ronnie was pretty trashed. His girlfriend who had come with us on this trip was also pretty trashed. I had started back towards them when I heard Ronnie say something about a cigarette and go staggering off towards the truck. I didn’t think anything about it. That high on the mountain the stars kind of had my attention. They have a way of doing that regardless of my state of mind. At any rate, I’m standing there not paying attention when I hear the truck door shut then hear Ronnie calmly say, “my truck.” Just as I turn towards him he yells, “there goes my truck!!!” Sure enough it was going down the road with nobody in it.

At this point I didn’t know what to do besides watch it go and hope it stayed on the road long enough to reach the tall dirt pile, but it didn’t. After about fifty yards of smoothly going right down the middle of the road it suddenly turns to the right and right down in the hollow it went. When we got to where it went over I was still speechless. It had went about sixty feet down into the ravine and stopped in a briar patch. The big problem was, that was where it was going to stay. It would take a wrecker to get it out of there. I had to scramble down the bank and get the keys out of the truck. It took us about an hour and half to stagger back to the bottom of the mountain on the road. Ronnie was so trashed he could barely walk. After we got to where I thought I could bring my car to, I had Ronnie and his girlfriend sit and wait while I went to get the car. It was easier that way. We did finally make it back to his house in one piece but that was one hell of a night.

We joked about that forever afterwards always pointing the finger at each other as being the blame. I’m not sure but I can guess that what actually happened is when Ronnie got his cigarettes out of the truck he accidentally knocked the transmission out of gear. Since it was in four wheel low it didn’t just take off but started out moving real slow. It may have even not started moving till he shut the door. It was a good thing he was outside the truck.

The S-10 ended up staying in that hollow for about three months before Ronnie found someone that had a wrecker that could get to it. I never did see it again. Ronnie told me the wreck didn’t kill it but the wrecker tore it to pieces just trying to pull it back up the mountain. It was hauled away for junk.

Mission accomplished. We took it till it could go no further, ever…

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