Remembering Dad's Toyota

The past few weeks have caused me to think about the pickup my Dad had while I was in middle and high school. It was a Toyota with a little diesel engine and a camper on it. Dad always took care of it (often changed the oil himself) and I think it had somewhere in the neighborhood of 170,000 miles on it when he got rid of it. The reason I have thought of it recently is because of the slick roads and the fact that I had to get new tires on Amber's car. We took that truck up to Kansas City more than once for vacations. Jami and I would ride in the back and other than the noise, it was not that bad. There are many stories that I vividly remember with that pickup. This one I will call "The Snake."

When I was in high school and my first two years of college, I did lawncare and a few odd jobs to make money. One time a lady from church asked if I could come out to her place to mow down weeds, weed-eat around the house and do some general cleanup. I thought it sounded cool to me and I must have made arrangements with Dad because I took his truck. The first thing that should have tipped me off was the location of the house. She lived out by herself, miles away from just about anything. When I got there, she said she had some trash in barrels that she wanted me to load in the truck and take to a different spot on her property to dump. When I say trash, I mean the partially charred remains of trash that has been burned and left out in the elements, and when I say barrels I mean large metal barrels that have rusted through in spots enough to create holes. Well, I went ahead and started loading the trash in the truck until I started to hear a noise. The noise sounded like a rattle and I caught a glimpse of a snake in one of the barrels. I was not sure what kind of snake I was dealing with, but the rattle kind of concerned me. When I told the woman about it, she decided to burn the trash some more to either kill the snake or drive it out of the barrels. So she lit the stuff on top on fire and after a short time it burned out. After the smoldering was done, I had to go through the remaining half-burned, half-wet mess that was left. I sifted through the trash and then loaded up the truck with it. When I say loaded the truck, I mean loaded. There was not too much room left in the camper once I had all the trash in the back. Now that we were loaded up, she and I got in the truck to take the stuff to the dumpsite. The problem was that it was on another part of her property, so there were no roads, really not even a path. The toyota was a great little truck, but it was not a 4 wheel drive. Also, at the time I was using it, dad was just about ready to get rid of it. It had 160,000+ miles on it and the rear wheels (the drive wheels) had 110,000+ miles on them. The back tires were slick to say the least and we are getting ready to go "off-roading". We got stuck less than 100 yards from the house before we even made it out of the "yard". Then things really got weird. Since we were not near anything or anyone, we had to wait on a "neighbor" to come pull the truck out. While we waited we had bologna and mayo sandwiches, oh man it was a feast. About an hour later the neighbors pulled the truck out and we were on our way again. Surprisingly, we did not get stuck again. Once we made it to the dumpsite (which was just a ravine in the middle of a pasture) I started to pull all the trash out of the back of the truck. I had almost everything out when I caught a glimpse of the snake in the back of the truck. Somehow, I had loaded the snake in with the other trash and it was still alive and now in the truck. He decided to coil up in the one of the front corners of the truck bed and I was frustrated enough to start throwing large rocks into the bed at him. That did nothing but make a bunch of noise. I pulled just about everything out of the truck and we headed back to the house. The lady said she had something at the house that she could take care of the snake with. When we got back to the house, she came out with insect killer in a spray bottle. She opened the windows on the side of the camper and started spraying the snake with insect killer. The snake almost seemed to smile at that and just sat there blowing bubbles in the spray. I finally was done with the whole thing and told her that I would go home, take care of the snake, and come back tomorrow to mow. On the way home I left the back of the truck open in the hopes that the snake would just find his way out the back. For awhile, it looked like he was going to. He went all the way to the back and even was hanging half off of the tailgate. But, he decided to turn around and make his way back up the front of the truck bed. When I got home and found a shovel, I was finally able to take care of the snake. He was about 4 feet long and probably just a garter snake, really scary stuff. The best part of the story is that I had a friend go back with me the next day to mow and weedeat and since we split the pay, I made $20 from the two days worth of work.