Tales from the Dad Side by Steve Doocy

Author:Steve Doocy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

14

Independence

Driving Miss Doocy

See, it’s like a triple-legged H.” My father pointed to the top of the gearshift during my first driving lesson. The family car was a 1963 Plymouth Belvedere that my father had bought from a friend who had used it as a stock car. Most people get their first taste of the road in a vehicle that’s “street legal”; I, on the other hand, learned how to drive in a car that had, next to the license plate, a parachute.

“It’s a little souped-up, so let’s take it easy,” my dad said after a thorough thirty-second orientation. When I turned over the ignition I immediately heard the deep throaty lub-dub-dub-dub of a 427-horsepower gas-guzzler modified to feature “double carbs,” which had nothing to do with the Atkins diet.

My father taught me the basic tenets of driving over half a dozen afternoons on little-used dirt roads where the land was flat and the cops were few and far between. In Kansas, if you were involved in some branch of agriculture, you could obtain a “farm duty” driver’s license at age thirteen and a half, which was my age at that moment, so I applied for and got one. Being honest, to justify the license my parents made me find an actual farm job, which wasn’t hard, because farmers were always searching for young men to work on impossibly hot days, slowly squeezing the life out of them.

One phone call and I had a two-dollar-an-hour job. But it did not require a license. I stood on a slow-moving hay wagon, grabbing hay bales as they shot out of a baling machine. Halfway through the first day I pulled out a fresh bale of alfalfa that seemed noisy for hay. I thought the buzzing was the sound of a bee until I saw the tail of a rattlesnake. If the hay-bale hurl had been an Olympic competition that year, I would have advanced immediately to the semifinals. And folks wonder why kids leave the family farm for the bright lights of Omaha.

Seeing that I was freaked out, the farmer asked me if I’d like to change places with him and drive the tractor. My back was broken and I was thoroughly exhausted; when he offered to switch jobs I had the same sense of liberation that Jessica Lynch probably felt when those marines showed up and rescued her from that hospital.

“Do you know how to drive a hand clutch?” he asked.

“Sure do,” I said, having no idea what he was talking about, but how hard could it be? He could do it, and he clearly wasn’t the sharpest tool in the barn. (FYI: sharpest tool in the barn, the pitchfork.)

I climbed into the driver’s seat and was suddenly presiding over the tractor, which was towing a baler and a hay wagon; I was the conductor of my first three-vehicle parade. The hand clutch did the same thing as a foot-pedal clutch, but they’d installed it up by the steering wheel, apparently just to make it more precarious.

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