I drove my first motorized vehicle when I was six years old.
This was before OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration).
Mom needed a baby-sitter. Our teenage neighbors agreed to watch me while they were harvesting hay.
Mom dropped me off at the edge of the field. Her idea was I would ride on the hay wagon.
But the crew was short on help and needed a tractor driver. I was lifted up onto the seat of their grandpa's old Farmall.
The brothers put the faded red machine in a low gear and set the hand throttle on slow. My legs were too short to reach the foot pedals.
I steered zigzag through the hay bales while the big guys loaded the wagon. I only ran over a few bales. It was a frightening and exhilarating experience perched up there on top of the work force.
A few years later I graduated to dad's red pick-up. This time my job was to cut burdock out of the horse pasture.
The plant grows prickly, pink heads that turn brown and stick to horses' and cows' tails. I was given an ax, and a half hour demonstration on using the clutch and gas pedals. I stalled and hopped around the field all afternoon.
By the end of the day the burdock and the clutch were almost gone. I found out later dad's clutch was in bad shape to begin with. That's how I got the job.
I never was a teenage hotrod. My only reckless accident was speeding 20 feet backwards in Marion's park at a teen dance. I hit both chaperones' vehicles.
I bumped into half of the husband's pick-up and half of his wife's car. There was no damage, but I got quite a lecture.
Here are some other adventures in driving.
Leona Waffle Clark (84) Ellsworth
I started driving cars
when dad wasn't looking.
First I drove in the hayfields.
Dad had what I called,
"a creepy-geared truck."
I didn't know how many gears
were in the thing,
but I got to drive that.
Only problem was
it had a clutch.
I pulled a hay wagon
with men on top
trying to keep their balance
while pitching hay in corners
and keeping the load level.
One day I backed them up
right into a stone pile.
First time I took the "creepy-geared truck"
out on the highway
I did the same thing.
There were too many stone piles.
Bruce McLachlan (81) Elk Rapids
Dad would never allow me
to have a bicycle.
He said they were dangerous.
Don't know why?
We had no traffic on the road.
I started driving when I was twelve.
I was thirteen when dad
put me in the truck
and said, "You're going to haul cherries
to Elk Rapids."
The co-op building
was where the marina is now.
The bridge wasn't very wide.
If you met another truck,
one would stop
and let the other go by.
One day I started across the bridge
with a full load of cherries.
The other truck didn't stop.
There wasn't a cherry pit space
between us.
Ruby Wooten Keehn (90) Marion
We were a wild bunch,
but never did anything bad.
Bill Gray had a car
with a radio.
We'd pool our money
and go out to Church Bridge
to have a weenie roast.
We didn't drink beer.
It wasn't available.
We had hard cider.
I didn't like it.
I never drank,
but I danced on Church Bridge
to the car radio.
It was a big old iron bridge
over the Clam River.
Evelyn Sorenson (96) Onekama
Few people had cars,
and the ones who did
had isinglass curtains,
a metal that's very thin and transparent.
There were no heaters in cars,
so people had buffalo robes.
Buffalo had roamed the plains
and got killed off.
The furs
from these poor animals
were scattered all around the population.
Sitting in the back of somebody's car
I remember a buffalo robe over me.
It smelled so musty
It was hard to breathe.
First time I rode in a car with a heater
it was my dancing teacher's Chrysler
with warm air
flowing like music.
How deluxe.
Poet Bard Terry Wooten has been performing and conducting writing workshops in schools for 28 years. He is the creator of Stone Circle. Learn more about him at www.terry-wooten.com.
