I learned to drive a standard shift near Bakerton, Pennsylvania, on a winding rural road called Number 6. My dad had put in a bid on a well-used mine truck, an olive-green Ford pickup. He got the thing for $250 and then brought it home so we could hose out the interior. If my research is correct, it was a 1968 F-250. We opened both doors and sprayed the floorboards until most of the coal dust was gone. The black water splashed and trickled onto the gravel driveway. Maybe that truck was a disaster, but it was love at first sight for me, a recently licensed driver. It probably took a day or two for Leo and me to hop in and take it over to Number 6 for a lesson.
Number 6, named after a long-abandoned mine, curved up a mountain with all the consistency of a kite in a hurricane. The road was familiar to me: the pipe jutting out of the mountainside brush and spewing ice cold spring water all year long, and the pavement near the railroad tracks that once caved in because of mine subsidence. The steep grade of Number 6 was a perfect place to figure out that sweet spot where the clutch and the gas pedal won’t let you drift backward. My dad was a good teacher, and I was determined to get it right.
In predictable fashion, I stalled, lurched, and suffered gravity’s force, more than a little frustrated that I wasn’t an instant expert. I can hardly remember how many tries it took to make the Ford go up the hill instead of down, or how much practice it took to perfect my takeoff, but I did master it. My dad probably told a few stories while I struggled. And then, when I was finally deemed competent, I rode that disaster around with more than a little pride that I could make the damn thing go.
Whether the truck was a piece of junk or not was immaterial to me. It was a truck, and it had a gearshift on the floor. I can remember embarrassing my younger sister by delivering her to band practice in that gorgeous, cantankerous Ford. She didn’t want to be seen in it. My sister and I had different ideas on how reputations were built at Northern Cambria High School.
As accomplishments go, learning to drive a stick shift was right up there with firing a rifle at a fast-moving deer in deep goldenrod (and hitting it), or figuring out that you could catch a football on the run just by looking over your shoulder and continuing your forward motion. There was some coordination involved in driving a standard—a little bit of skill, and little bit of muscle memory.
As with most things, I can hardly consider my teenage years—or that truck--without considering my daughters. The thing that’s at the forefront of my mind tonight is the idea that my teenage years would look absolutely foreign to them. If I were to somehow drop them off on Number 6 road, circa 1979, they’d be lost, and it wouldn’t be a matter of simple geography.
They’d wonder at a world with junky pickup trucks and noisy coal trains; at mountain springs where people fill glass jugs with fresh water; at rural roads that just cave in one day; at their peaceful father standing in the forest with a rifle on his shoulder. It’s entirely possible that they wouldn’t know how to operate the AM radio in the truck. If they got the radio turned on, they’d be amazed at all the static and empty space on the dial. If they managed to find a gas station, it wouldn’t be self-service. Maybe the attendant would offer to check the oil. Maybe he’d clean the windshield.
Maybe that world would seem a lot smaller than the one they inhabit in 2022.
Maybe that’s one of the strange things about fatherhood for me. I’ll be sixty in December. At this writing, my kids are eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. They talk to me about everything, and I tell them my stories. All of them. And they’ve learned that I repeat stories, just like my dad did, and I think they’re okay with that. They’ve come to understand that stories are an important part of a family.
But it’s a little bothersome to me—another kind of frustration, perhaps—that their teenage minds can’t quite wrap themselves around the world as I understood it in 1979. Despite any stories I might tell, I can’t plop them into northern Cambria County in the late 1970s. I can’t make them appreciate all the complexities of that world. Or that my perception of that world was miles away from the idea that it was small or limited in any way.
The things I hold on to from that world live inside of me, though. Even if I don’t have the capacity to make my daughters see what life was like when I was in high school, I can exist in a way that speaks to the place that helped to build me. Somehow, as we encounter real world problems and the emotional hurdles that young girls face, I think they recognize that world, even if they can’t touch it. I don’t want to pat myself on the back as some model father—I’m far from perfect—but those girls trust me. I do know that. I know it, partially, because all of our important conversations take place around the kitchen table, after dinner is finished.
In those moments, I can’t help but think about a different kitchen table and its inhabitants, the table I sat down to when I was sixteen. There were stories and conversations. There was laughter and love, or arguments. Sometimes we stayed at that table for hours. They were joyful hours that built something indestructible.
And now the same thing happens at my house. When I do that with my daughters—just sit around the table and talk—I can only guess that they do know my 1979 world, and that we’re constructing our own unfailing foundation. They live in that world every day, even if its outward trappings are a just a little different. If all is right with that world, if I’ve done my job in a sensible and forthright way, they’ll carry it with them for a long time.
Nice piece. I have filled many a milk jug at that spring on #6 Road.
Wonderful, heartfelt writing