On Dad’s F-150
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The first image of Dad's F-150 is smudged. Memories don't retain sharp edges for long. I'm struggling to remember which dealership we bought the truck from. I thought it was Pelican Ford, but Dad texts back "Bill Graham Ford." (sigh) That’s right. I remember thinking it odd that the famous evangelist sold trucks, too. I also remember that we pulled off a stretch of state highway US-41 that didn't feel like we were going to the beach, and Pelican Ford is on the way to Lido. Hours dragged by in dust and clutter, desks, rolodex cards, file cabinets squeezed into wood-paneled corner and serving trays for used coffee cups. It's possible the God-awful experience of buying a brand-new vehicle is texturing these images with things I hate.
I hate dust and clutter.
But purchasing a new truck was new in itself. Were Mennonites allowed to purchase new vehicles? We hadn’t even let a piano into the assembly; four-part harmony was our way. Don’t even ask about the television. No, we usually bought used cars and trucks with nicks and dings visible on close inspection—some on not so close inspection and by "usually" I mean "always." We kept vehicles on life support, hoping for some sort of automotive resurrection to transpire and then promise eternal peace of mind and no more trips to the mechanic shop to see how our Oldsmobile Omega was doing. Had we really been able all along to have a new, dependable vehicle like this truck? I now know the disgust of a monthly car premium—that you’re shelling out money for something that’s no longer worth the amount you owe—which is why this truck is the exception, an experiment perhaps of anticipating a year that had not yet come. Faith is confidence in things hoped for, I read. The truck was a 1988 model when it was still 1987. That fall the Cardinals went to the World Series and gave the Minnesota Twins their first World Series title in the seventh game. Mark McGwire was also a rookie playing for the Oakland A's, but he'd come to St. Louis later. I wished that I had bought more baseball cards that year, especially the Topps cards with their wood paneled trim, but baseball card buying also was new to me in 1987. Doing something new or unusual was in the water.
The truck was sleek. Dad chose it because it was the only manual transmission, four-wheel-drive version that they had on the lot. He liked white trucks because they didn't show dirt, but this one came in a deep, royal blue with a beige trim at the bumper level. A chrome "4x4" plate the size of a dollar bill rested just below the driver side headlamp. Why does my image have beige on the roof? They delivered the truck to us a couple days later, maybe a week later, and I learned it lost thousands of dollars in resale value the second it pulled out onto US-41 and headed toward Fruitville Road. Good thing we weren't intending on reselling it.
Fruitville was still a road to the Florida frontier. The countryside still bled into the fields west of I-75 with cows grazing where now stands a Target. The shopping plaza with Checkers, a Publix, and the anathema that brought the word “cinema” to my vocabulary was still five or six years away. We lived five miles beyond on a five-acre tract of land what was part of the Bern Creek development. The developer declared bankruptcy soon after we moved and refused to fix the roads. Potholes rattled your teeth from the time we passed through the gates until we got to our lane. 1901 Bern Creek Loop. You can still see the house last I checked. Dad bricked it. Gave the house wings. I had never heard of wings on a house before but found you could almost climb onto the roof with those things. You could certainly hide from people there, which is what I did the evening I embarrassed myself by not being able to hit my younger brother’s pitching. But potholes, yes. So bad someone taped poster board reading "Pothole" over the "Bern." "Pothole Creek Ranch" made us laugh in that "I wish it weren't true" way. Humor's helpful for facing life's potholes. Palmettos and live oaks were thick enough to make us talk for months of someday owning alligator boots to keep us safe from snakebites. Never got the boots, but my brother Tony did manage to get a snakebite, which put him in the hospital for a while. I see him with his leg elevated, the same purple hue of the eastern sky at sunset. Six years old, thirty-five pounds soaking wet with pads on. He weighed as much as a cinder block, and that little Pigmy rattler put as much venom in him as a grown man getting seven snakebites. That was the year before the F-150. The same year a man with the last name Grimes murdered a man cavorting with his ex-girlfriend not too far from Bern Creek. There were rumors of a woman he kidnapped walking naked in rural fields, a Sarasota Persephone wandering about in her own dark halls of Hades with no Theseus or Heracles to free her. 1987 was beyond all that. Perhaps a new vehicle was the best way to move on to new experiences.
The truck had very bright high-beams in my ten-year-old opinion. Dad was driving it home one evening, probably from church—we went to church almost daily. I was perched in the middle. Mom was holding my younger brother Tony. He showed me that he could switch from low to high-beam by stepping on a button mounted on the floor under the emergency break. Kut-chic. Kut-chic. Low. High. Power lines and telephone poles that had filed silently by were suddenly yanked from the night and the pine forests beyond with their rattlesnakes and armadillos in villages under the palmetto bushes and swamps with alligators and moccasins. Another light—this one small and blue on the dashboard—turned on cruise control? Dad would later install a cell phone in that truck by bolting a square box between the bench seat and the gearshift and a mount for the phone on the dash board. The cell phone had a stretchy cord and charged him 43 cents a minute to use. What a steal. He no longer needed the beeper. Invincibility came in the cab of a pickup truck with a blue interior and an "F-Series" decal on the dashboard above the glove compartment.
The truck could work. Still does when needed. Pulled a sunburst orange trailer he'd built back in Indiana crammed full of scaffolding and planks that scared me to death. It looked like it was always ten seconds away from a tire blowout. A jack mounted on the tongue never seemed strong enough to support it when Dad parked it out behind the shop. Gave the trailer such a lean when fully loaded you'd think it was going to twist off at any moment from the strain of the scaffold's weight and bury its hitch into the Florida washed shell parking space he created behind the shop near the burn pile where I learned to strike matches and watch aerosol cans explode. Metal fenders that you could sit on trimmed the sides. Its tires were always bald and came from old mobile homes. The image of the new truck pulling that solid-but-soon-to-be-road-ornament trailer speaks to where we were as a family, then. Dad built the trailer in Indiana prior to us moving south, a testament of our heritage. It rumbled from construction job to construction job with Midwest durability, the creation of a young entrepreneur who needed to transport his equipment for many years to come. Pulling it with a successful looking pickup was a nod to a hopeful future. Confidence in things hoped for, remember?
Bern Creek was developed with tracts large enough to appeal to horse farmers. Most of our neighbors had horses, and several had many, but not all. The Grabers living east of us didn't, nor did the other Grabers west of us, but the Gustufsons and the Waglers, whose lands bordered ours, had several, including what I always thought were "stately" stables. You know, the kind you can walk through the middle with stalls on either side and a tack room with sugar cubes to crunch when asked to feed their horses. They made your mouth feel like it had dirt in it. Leon Wagler was a Chevy man and would argue every chance he could about how his Chevy was better than our Ford. All I knew were Fords. Dad's previous truck was a Ford—blue, too—but the old style truck without the wrap-around headlamps and no ABS. While building the Bern Creek house, Dad put me in the truck and filmed me with his 8mm camera attempting to drive it. I'd spin a little poof of dust, go about ten feet, and stop, wondering if that was far enough. I have this perplexed look in my eyes, like that time I tried as a three-year-old to smile for the same camera and looked more like I was singing in a choir, tone-deaf, and trying unsuccessfully to find my pitch: is that good enough? No? Keep going? Seemed to go on endlessly. Tony's head is peering over my arms extended straight because the steering wheel is so far away. So, we would rumble, Leon and I, with me defending that brand new pickup with all of the rhetorical firepower that my ten-year-old brain could muster. Dad never sicced me on his gaudy, cherry apple red Chevy with a giant "4x4" plastered across the entire side of the truck. It was my duty and my pleasure. Chevy was the enemy, and Ford the hometown hero, a searching bond of camaraderie with a dad I was proud of but unsure of what made him proud. The F-150, however, provided one of those early understandings of self-identity that seem to randomly pop up in one's childhood long before puberty and the full-blown adolescence that says "I'm not my family" and labors to search for a home like a ship without anchor. In part, I would say I identify myself and my father with that truck. We are the Overholts, and we like Ford trucks. It bound us together when I wasn't always sure what did. Other families had their bonds. The Enos Mullett troop with their children spanning three decades were among the many families in our church who had lawn businesses, whose children grew up and started their own lawn businesses or married others with lawn businesses. We had our Ford truck, a visible extension of Ford-ness that came with the blue oval capital. Ford was us, and our truck our birthright to take care of and honor. Mr. Wagler's gift to me—besides his friendly banter—was the gift of belonging. Not with him, but with Dad.
In the fall of 1989, we drove the truck to Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Dad liked to deer hunt and regularly exchanged the week of their wedding anniversary with a trip to Colorado. He went nearly every year over the course of three decades, but this year we all went, including my mother. The Giants won the NLCS that year and faced Jose Canseco and the Oakland A's in the World Series. Why was "the Giants won" impressed on my memory though I now see that the A's swept the Giants? Wasn't that the year Kevin Mitchell hit a slew gob of homers and everyone started talking about Roger Maris? A smudged memory. Well, I'll blame the mismatched memory on the fact that we were gone during that series, living in a large canvas tent for nearly two weeks on top of a snowy mountain with tall, silver stemmed aspens while Dad and a family friend Ken Yoder hunted deer and elk. Dad had purchased a camper top from Leon and created some bunks in the back for the drive out by stretching plywood from one side to the other that we could access by crawling through the sliding rear cab window. We were our own traveling palace. Get tired of riding in the front? Crawl in the back and you'll have leg room for days. My mother did not crawl through the window, though she is a tiny human. But she did go along and read (why am I remembering?) thirteen novels over the course of our camping vacation. The Ford made the switchbacks easily while pulling a trailer and then enjoyed its own two-week vacation except for Sunday when Dad didn't hunt and we descended from our heavenly abode to attend church. Tony and I looked forward most to not taking showers and boasted to our friends at school though I don't ever really hating showers. We lived in Florida for goodness' sake, where a shower on the hour deals with the humidity. For the great part of the two week trip to Colorado, we took only one shower. Mom survived. Why Dad put her through that ordeal is beyond me, especially given the joke he likes to tell of when she was born she came with fine print that reads "For indoor use only."
The F-150 made that trek numerous times, and 1989 wasn't the only one I went on. There were two others: one when I was 14 (1992) and the other at 15 (1993). I never went deer hunting again but not because of any real disgruntlement with the profession. I just got busy being a teenager, and after moving to the Carolinas high school and then college took up my October activities. All that to say, I don't have a deer hunting memory that doesn't include the F-150. It was the unspoken hero who saw us through the 4,100 mile journey, braving the weather and even getting back up after hitting a mule deer at 75 miles per hour in God-only-knows-where Kansas after a rather unfruitful hunt. Dad tells me that Lynn Graber was driving. Huh. It wasn’t Greg driving? Hmmm. Okay. He tells me that we had just switched drivers and he had just fallen asleep in the back when that mule deer sauntered into our headlights from the dark recesses of the highway shoulder and we plowed into it. Sounded like someone hit the truck with a sledge, huh? Yes, it would’ve been worse to swerve while pulling a trailer. I do remember riding shotgun. Kansas at night can be downright cruel when you have to pee and that town that you're banking on for a toilet doesn't seem to be getting any nearer. The deer, too, may have been looking for a place to pee. My slow-motion memory sees the truck hitting the deer just left of center, the deer rolling over the hood, an antler flying up and hitting the windshield right at the visor level. Somehow, the truck's radiator was untouched. My memory is remembering Dad taking a look at the situation—bending something so that it didn’t rub against the driver side front tire—and off we continued. The plastic grill in smithereens.
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Last night, my brother set up a video call with Mom, Dad, and myself. Grandma Overholt, who is 93 and still cleaning houses, joins in. Tony lives in Australia; I'm in Iowa; my parents are in Sarasota for a funeral. All of my Dad's side lives in Sarasota. Tony asks about my uncle John who had a scooter accident. Yes, he's doing fine. Nope, no lasting brain injury. Wow! He had quite a fall on that scooter without a helmet. We also learn Dad's scheduled for a hip replacement surgery. He's one of the healthiest people I've ever met, but a scaffolding accident several years ago left him with two broken heels and several residual injuries. It should have slowed him more than it did, but now having worked, walked, and wandered about with one leg shorter than the other, his hip is winning the battle of wills. I feel like I need to add that he just turned 70, but I'm not sure why. He'll take extra doses of Barley Green because he believes in it almost as much as the resurrection. He may or may not do the exercises his rehab program, but he will return to laying brick and block and tinkering in his 50'x100' bricked shop that sits about 200' from their house in North Carolina. Perhaps he can take extra time in Sarasota next winter to pal about Pinecraft with the Amish, walk to the restaurant for morning coffee, and ride a three-wheel bike over to the park where the Amish play shuffleboard and basketball.
I also find out that I was correct about the truck having a beige cab, but I forget to ask when the pickup's royal blue and beige is covered white. Which is the original color Dad wanted. Working construction's a dirty business. The red clay of the western Carolinas and Georgia seeps out of the woods and dusts darker vehicles in our sleep. White's a lot easier to keep clean. The 250 that will replace the F-150 as Dad's main work vehicle will be black, demonstrating Dad's enduring practicality over paint preferences, but Dad likes a clean work truck, and ever Friday after work he performs the ritual of sweeping out the bed and washing the truck before coming in for supper. Next week's work begins with Friday evening cleaning. The F-150 had the peculiarity of being able to have its floorboard rinsed out with the garden hose. It has some sort of tough plastic flooring that's waterproof.
I realize that I'm still trying to remember when it was painted white. My Mennonitism makes me shy to swear, but I’d affirm that by the time we moved to Landrum, South Carolina, in 1995, the truck is white, so I'll just affirm that the memory is correct. My hesitancy is because 1995 is only seven years after Dad bought it. As long as he keeps vehicles running—and the F-150 is still with him—it seems that he would not have had it repainted already. Dad will eventually inform me that he did not seize on an opportunity to have it repainted while getting the bodywork done after that Kansas deer in '93 but rather in 2000 when he and Mom took I-10 all the way to where it ends in the Pacific Ocean. If I see a white F-150 in my memory during that first winter in the Carolinas, it’s because I’ve re-constructed that memory when retrieving it. Used to the flat grid of Sarasota, the mountains were a rude awakening for the F-150. Like being hit from behind with ice-cold water on a blistering summer day. I can recall that image quite vividly. My brother was the guilty party and Dad the victim. Trowel in hand, straw hat in place, his shoulders pulled so far back you might be able to check a credit card between his rhomboids. That image's probably more useful elsewhere, so I'll only say that Dad came as close to cussing in that moment as he ever has. But he didn't.
That first winter, Dad found work putting in foundations in a development called Glassy Mountain, which we learned was part of the notorious bootlegging tradition and an angle of the triangle called "Dark Corner" still today. It's a proper mountain, too, unlike that hill just twenty miles away in Greenville called "Paris Mountain"—the first tier of the Appalachians' Blue Ridge Mountains. Getting to a job site was tough enough. Add Dad's flaming ball of Midwestern durability and you'll know that whatever the F-150 thought about moving north is quickly shrouded in the grunt work of doing something it really isn't built for. Dad will ultimately move to an F-250 with a Power Stroke 7.3L diesel engine to work the mountains, but for now it's just a December day that started off as miserable and proceeded to unbearable: wet snow turned to rain. I was a junior in high school but off on break, so I went to work with Dad. We were on the way home when we realized the F-150 couldn't go on. It was the transmission. I had never experienced something like this kind of breakdown. The truck had gotten us to work; on our way home it informed us that it could not go on. Dad would go on to get it fixed, press it back into service, and drop two more engines in it, but that December day with the truck forlornly angled off the shoulder of Highway 11 like the tilted gravestone of a forgotten war hero—"Here marks the final resting place of . . ." It's my last image of the F-150 as Dad's primary work vehicle. Dirty against the pristine white of the melting snow, it looks tired. It will be some time before Dad replaces it, but I'm in school and no longer seeing myself and another scrunched on the bench seat heading off to a job.
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If there are three main images of the F-150 in my mind—the first being the royal blue and beige model that was delivered to us in Bern Creek and the second on the highway shoulder—the third image has more to do with location. The F-150 resides under a carport attached to Dad's garage. There's a slight bend in the frame that makes the truck look like a pensive old man, head slightly tilted to the side as he sizes you up: "You know, back in my day, we'd take whippersnappers like you out behind the woodshed." It's now on its third engine, this one pulled from a Mustang if I'm not mistaken. Its four-wheel-drive system still works. It's ready to step in when needed. In fact, there's a good chance Dad is going to use it this week. On a trip to Florida for a funeral, his diesel-powered 250 "started blowin' black smoke," says Mom. Had to leave it in Savannah, Georgia and rent a car for the rest of the trip. There wasn't really a question of how Dad would continue working. They'd either get the diesel fixed or make their way home and he'd continue with F-150.
Which makes me wonder what Dad thinks of when driving F-150. Does it feel like the "good ol' days"? Does he remember seeing it in all of its blue and beige glory on a US-41 parking lot thirty-four years ago? If he does end up using it for a day or even a week, I can see him now climbing in. The door will croak open like it's being wrenched off the hinges. He'll wipe the dust off the steering wheel first and then the dashboard with some sort of second-generation dish towel and multipurpose cleaner, slam the clutch up into the firewall, and crank the engine. Maybe it feels like he’s reconnecting with an old friend, and they have work to do.