Truck. Rhymes with...duck. Yes.
When my grandfather died back in ‘86, he left my dad his old pickup truck. That bastard vehicle – in ‘baby diarrhoea green’ - already had about 100,000 miles on it when my dad took possession.

The bottom of it rusted clean through, so road debris would ping through the truck’s carriage. My father tells a fable of when he couldn’t swerve around a dead deer and covered the inside of the vehicle with ‘sploosh’. Rancid ‘sploosh’, which he hosed out after crackin’ a case of Budweiser for courage. We also had a lot of Amish living in the area, so their ‘buggy exhaust’ (horse shit), would often find its way onto the passenger seat. Previous to that, I had to sit in the passenger seat with a blanket protecting me after my sister almost received a nasty injury from a wooden missile that had ricocheted into the truck off its front wheel. You’d have thought that my parents would have disallowed my sister and I from travelling in this vehcile, but they just put down a piece of plywood over the hole to keep us safe, because we were poor, we were rednecks and it was the reckless 80s.

On long-distance rides, my dad never bothered to stop at a rest station or a nice shaded tree for a wee, he’d just keep driving and piss out the gaping hole in the bottom of the truck. Later, when I learned to drive, one of my girlfriends was ‘caught short’ miles from anywhere and used the hole as a slightly uncomfortable makeshift toilet, thus protecting her dignity. Later, she was arrested for selling sex to a farmer for weed and beer, but that’s another story.

I thought I’d done the truck in as it approached its 20th birthday. Coming over a large hill just outside of town, I forgot to perform the required hill manoeuvre to prevent death, the truck bounced on its front wheels and fell into a ditch. Luckily, it lived a few more months until my best friend and I decided to teach an exchange student how to drive. This ended with the truck rolling through a cornfield and coming to rest on its roof.

It was several inches shorter and the lights were blown out, but once we got a tractor out to flip the damned thing over, it started right up. Dad decided it might be time to retire it, so he drove it to our back acre on the fishing lake and laid it to rest.

It still lives there. It’s 34 years old, has over 600,000 miles on the engine and does a real slap-up job of putting boats on the lake ever summer, despite the fact that it has a screwdriver where the ignition once existed.

Oh, and it still has a bottle of egg nog in it from 1996.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Fri 23 Apr 2010, 15:19, 1 reply)

A noble vehicle indeed
We call them feral utes in Australia
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Fri 23 Apr 2010, 15:41, closed)