Jeep Stories Update

All in the family.

My son was here this weekend because he and his wife are moving to Alberta again and he needed a place to store The Jeep. He can’t take it with him, because it is too modified for him to register it in Alberta, so it’s back home in Idaho.

He wanted it for his own for years and finally I relented, under one condition: it must stay in the family. Staying in the family means, at least for a while, it’s at dad’s house. Why must it stay in the family? Because it is a machine that fills our family memories. It reminds us of many good times and several sad times.

One of the good times was when he and I drove it on New Year’s Day, 2007, to a ghost town called SilverCity in southwestern Idaho. We were part of a small convoy of jeeps and even though the snow was bumper deep, we tried all day to get to our destination, but late in the afternoon, we were forced to retreat, because the Boise State Broncos were playing the Oklahoma Sooners at the Fiesta Bowl in what became the greatest football game in the history of the known universe.

https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2017-01-01/david-vs-goliath-retold-looking-back-boise-states-2007-fiesta-bowl

But soon after we turned around and headed home, we hit a sharp rock in the snow. Not wanting to wallow around in the deep snow to change the tire, we decided to go with Plan B. We stuffed some baby wipes into the gash, let them freeze, then filled the tire with compressed nitrogen from an onboard tank, and off we rolled. We were worried that when we got to the highway, the tire would warm up enough to thaw and go flat, but that night, destiny was on our side and we made it in time for the last part of the third quarter and Boise State’s spectacular double overtime win.

And the next morning, the jeep tire was fully inflated. What a great twofer to begin a new year.

But there is more. Much more. Our jeep has quite a backstory.

The big kid who works at the mountain hardware store (where you can get anything you need, and if you can’t, it’s because you don’t need it) moved up from California last year and he still wears his California-plumber-low denim shorts even in winter. He laughed at me when I placed two eleven inch wiper blades on the counter.

"You got really small wiper blades," he said.

I said it's not the size of the wiper blades; it's the size of the jeep that matters.

The big kid didn't know what to say.

***

Each tire on the Jeep is as big as a Prius. The visualize-whirled-peas crowd at the organic co-op always gives me the stink eye when I park there just to feel the love. They tell me the jeep is a big neon sign flashing my utter contempt for the rest of humanity. They must not like the tires. When they finish complaining about my utter contempt, they get into their shiny new BMWs and their Volvo S70s and they drive to their McMansions in the Boise foothills where I hunted jackrabbits and ground squirrels when I was a kid.

***

The jeep is either too hot or too cold, the Prius-size tires howl too loud on the pavement, and the bare metal floor rattles like the inside of a snare drum. Uncomfortable is how a jeep should be.

I wait until the last snow melts from my mountain-weed elk pasture yard before I take off the big-eyed gray hardtop and I don't put the bikini-zucchini shade top on until after I get my first neck sunburn of the year.

When the jeep makes me uncomfortable enough, I feel alive, and I am grateful.

***

So I drive the uncomfortable jeep along the narrow winding river canyon Highway 55 at forty- five miles per hour. It is so tall I can see across the guard rails and concrete jersey barriers and through the big cottonwoods and bull pines and over gray sagebrush along the lime-jello green river where a yellow-beaked eagle stands in the cold water and tears apart a plump trout.

At forty-five miles per hour, somebody always wants to pass. A pale I-think-metro-sexual in a champagne-bland climate-controlled steel Subaru-cocoon empeethrees behind me so close I can see his pasty-smooth face and roof-racked roof gleaming in my rearview mirror. When he finally passes in a sierra-club-dams suck-obama ‘08-coexist-bumper sticker blur, I am already distracted by another eagle eating another plump trout.

Even forty-five is too fast in Idaho.

***

My cousin bought the black jeep at a junkyard where shining-sixty-easy-payment dreams die hard and rusted. Nobody wanted the old half-burned wreck so he got it cheap. He took it home, took it apart, and put it back together like a Million Dollar Man-jeep, but he didn't finish it because he died one November evening just before Thanksgiving when he flew his airplane upside down into Squaw Butte.

I lived in some third-world hellhole when they called to tell me about the crash, and through ten thousand kilometers of copper-wire-static-popping-satellite-echoing-through-a-mobile-phone, I felt oh-so-long-distance pain.

A few months later they called me and tried to get me to buy the jeep. They wanted to keep it in the family, they said.

“No,” I said, “the black jeep will always be a hearse in my mind.” Then they called me a third time, and I said yes I will buy the jeep.

***

Jeeps-built-not-bought are never quite finished. The black jeep needed ball joints and u- joints; it needed new brakes and engine mounts; it needed new seats and a new headlight switch; it needed a new steering column bearing. But most of all, its front springs were pigeon-toed and needed to be straightened, except I couldn't do it because of dark clouds in my mind, so I asked my bushy-bearded father-in-law, who is to gears, bearings and steel what Picasso is to paint, to fix it for me.

Fixing the pigeon-toed jeep took more time than we both thought it would and when it was done, I took my shallow checkbook to pay him because he has to make a living, but he turned the invoice face down and pushed it away from me and he said something about not wanting my money, and I didn't know what to say, so I promised him that someday I would change his Depends for him. He said that would be good enough.

***

For most of my adult life, I worked in hellhole countries where my job was to do things that were anything but showing utter contempt for humanity. The world is a Bosnia, Haiti, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe broken place that you can either block out with 54 inch led screens and Grand Cherokee-MasterCard-shopping mall forgetting, or you can let it break your heart.

Sometimes I came broken-hearted back to my home in Idaho and drove the black jeep beside the lime jello green river just to clear hellhole countries, jobs, and utter humanity from my mind. On one ctrl-alt-del jeep trip to my house, when the snow was deep and the afternoon sky was black-blue intense, I fell asleep in a spindle-back rocker beside the fireplace. The fire eventually died out, the sun went down, and I woke up cold to see nineteen elk resting beside the black jeep that was also resting in my mountain-weed elk pasture yard.

I was thinking about elk, blue-black skies, and snow on the mountains at forty-five miles per hour back to the city, the airport, and the hellhole country. As I drove swaying-jeep slow around the last sweeping corner at the bottom of the big hill, a cop pulled me over and asked for my driver's license and registration.

I asked the four-dee-cell Maglite shining into my eyes why it had stopped me.

"Everybody comes around that corner at seventy-five except for drunks," the Maglite said.

"My next beer will be my first one," I said and then for no reason at all, I told the cop behind the Maglite about elk, sky, and snow. I think he thought I was crazy, so I told him about going back to the hellhole country, and I even asked him to arrest me so I could miss my flight, but he let me go.

***

When memories from the hell-hole countries form dark clouds my mind, I drive the black jeep to a mountaintop behind my house and I watch the sky and the far mountains and the river in the valley far below until the clouds in my mind start to lift. Chasing dark clouds away is something a jeep is good for.

My white-haired aunt always cried when she saw the black jeep, but she was always ready to go for a ride in it. Riding in the jeep cleared some of the clouds from her mind, too.

Once when we were Prius-sized-tire crawling up a narrow v-shaped sand ravine, the jeep slid onto its side into the bottom of the ravine. I fell against her and all she could see from her window was a sandy wall. She said she enjoyed the view and she said I was one of her favorite son-nephews, but I thought I saw tears in her eyes again and not because I landed on her.

After we stopped looking at the dirt, we decided to drive to town for ice cream cones. When we drove up to the window, we discovered we both left our wallets at home. We confessed to the kid at the window and he said we could either take them for free or he could throw them away. We took! Then I saw tears in her eyes again, but this time because she was laughing so hard.

On the last day before she died, I sat beside her, held her hand, and told her stories. I didn’t know if she could hear me until she softly squeezed my hand and I saw a little tear in the corner of her eye. I hope she was thinking about the two free ice cream cones.

***

I came from a jeep-driving family. My brother has a jeep, my cousins and uncles have jeeps, and my brother-in-law has a jeep. My grandfather owned a red Willies jeep with a silver cab that looked like a big baseball cap. It was the first jeep I ever rode in.

In my favorite picture of my grandfather, he stands 3% body fat tall in front of his new, blue 1963 GMC pickup somewhere along the Lochsa River. He never missed a day of work at the sawmill no matter how sick he was, grew an acre of corn-potatoes-squash-beans, built a twenty-three cord backyard firewood mountain of buckskin tamarack and old red fir every fall, and owned a grizzle-faced pack-jackass named Pete. In the picture, he holds a black iron skillet with little trout he just caught in the river. He reminds me of an eagle.

***

My six-foot eight yes-he-plays-basketball son who also has a jeep, and Sherman the part- yellow-lab-part-Akita floppy-eared dog are riding with me in the topless-until-we-get-sunburned-necks jeep down the South Fork road where the no-land-for-sale-no-hunting-predators-no- trespassing-don't-even-ask rancher lets us hunt ground squirrels in his field because he is getting old and I snowplow his road in the winter. Sherman sits on the jeep floor where a cheap plastic console and the 64 ounce Big Gulp holders used to be, and where his mother once blew a whole load of meaty-chunks-in-a-rich-gravy-sauce.

From behind, Sherman looks like a short hairy man when he sits on the jeep floor.

So my son stands up in the jeep with Sherman watching him intently, and he aims his pellet gun over the windshield at a fat running ground squirrel just before it leaps into a culvert.

Sherman, who doesn’t own a jeep, enjoys a fresh ground squirrel and he doesn't get jeepsick like his mom.

***

Too rarely I drive the black jeep to the cemetery where my cousin is buried, and it seems like a good way to visit that place, but I think it is better when I drive the jeep to a valley where I know I will always see white mountain goats high up on rock crags, and where my cousin and I fished for rainbows in the big beaver pond creek.

Sweet light reflects off the shining lovely loops of his cast and off the fly falling ever so softly onto the still water. I watch the fly ripple floating across the beaver pond, then disappear into an explosion of trout, spray, and glistening loops of fly line. I hear my cousin’s laughter as alive and as wild as the rainbow tail-dancing across the pond.

***

I wonder if the visualize-whirled-peas crowd at the organic co-op would still give me the stink eye when they see me in the tall black jeep with Prius-size tires if they knew these stories?