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Over the Hood - a Reminiscence [1]

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Date: 2025-03-19

Nothing important here, just a memory from long, long ago.

Back in the dim mists of time, somewhere in the late Cretaceous when we were teenagers--and yes I survived my teenagehood somehow, for which I am both grateful and more than a little surprised--my best friend's brother had a pickup truck.

This was a 1973 Datsun pickup, the sleek one with the four headlights and the aero-divot starting in the rear of the door to match the groove along the bed. We used that truck for everything, making money helping folks move, hauling lumber, cutting and selling firewood, and ferrying each other to concerts, restaurants, etc.

Joe (my friend's brother) had put a sliding window in the back of the cab, and my friend Jaime (Spanish pronunciation) and I would ride everywhere standing up in the back. Joe would open the sliding window and the side windows. I'd stand on the passenger side, left hand hooked in the sliding window, and right hand hooked in the passenger door window. Jaime would stand on the driver's side.

I mean everywhere. Joe (being 19 and immortal) would drive slalom style up mountain roads, cutting into oncoming lanes when they were open to make a smoother pass around corners, etc. He hit 80 a few times up the Rio Grande Gorge road up to Taos. Imagine standing up in a pickup truck driving 85 into a 15MPH headwind--100MPH of wind flapping our cheeks and streaming our long (we were hippie-ish teenagers) hair out behind us. And then some cop would stop us and demand we sit down. Why on earth would he spoil the fun?

One time we went wood cutting. Four of us, and the cab could fit no more than three. Our permit was for a square mile of land about 11 miles out past the end of the Caja del Rio dirt road out SW from Santa Fe. On the way out into the wilderness, of course Jaime and I rode standing in the back. We cut a cord of wood, figuring that since this was a narrower bed than a full-size truck we needed to stack it 3-feet high above the bed walls to make an even cord. We roped the stack down pretty aggressively, and Jaime climbed up on top of the stack for the ride home. For safety he grabbed on to a couple of loose ends of rope and cinched them tight into his fist.

Now Joe was the only licensed driver among us, but the rest of us did have newly-minted learner's permits. Joe thought this was a good time to teach our other friend John how to drive. We were 11 miles off road, and there was no traffic.

On the way back, John saw a shallow irrigation ditch across our path. Something in the teenage brain figured that hitting it at speed was the correct approach. We hit it at maybe 25 or 30 MPH. Bam, the front end dipped and then shot up, our speed cut in half and we rode a perfect wheelie until the rear wheels hit the ditch and the front came back down. Jaime on top of the pile flew gracefully up over the front of the cab, touched his hat lightly on the hood, and then rose back to somehow miraculously land standing up on top of the stack of wood, still holding onto the rope. No injuries except a busted gatorade bottle of sun tea in the bed.

As I said, we lived to tell about it. I'm grateful to this day and still a little amazed.

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