Queen Mudder: Riding Shotgun
June 27th, 2008When I was eight my Dad bought a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle. It was in great shape. My two older brothers and I could just fit into the back seat, although my brothers were always trying to get Dad to fork over the keys or Mom to swap the shotgun spot. We lived on a small farm, and usually bought trucks, so it seemed like we were sitting right on the road, with the dust billowing around the windows.
To the locals, this was an unusual choice for my Dad, as there weren’t a lot of cars, especially foreign cars, among the barley and beet fields of southern Idaho. My Dad, who looks like Clark Gable and sounds like John Wayne, was quite a sight unfolding himself out of his bug, in his beat-up work boots, stained jeans and greasy baseball cap. But he liked the mileage, and got it cheap, so he could bear with the uplifted eyebrows.
That summer my cousins from California came to visit. Things were always exciting when city relatives were in town. They got allergies, chased the chickens, got chased by cows, and wimped out moving pipe. And they loved the Beetle. Even they had never ridden in one, so they were always coming up with reasons why we needed to go places. We would pile 6 or 8 of us inside (seatbelts were silly) and went to the reservoir 12 times day, drove 500 yards to see the neighbor’s horses, and got good at negotiating canyon roads.
On the evening of the 4th of July we were loading the car with as many as could fit in when my cousin Eileen, a big in the back with me and 3 others, asked my brother to pull his front seat forward. As he did so, she noticed something nice on the floor under his chair. It was a bone-handled pistol, a real cowboy weapon and my dad’s favorite. I had grown up with a healthy respect for guns, and was accustomed to them in the car, because you never know when a rogue rattlesnake might be in the pasture, a weasel in the henhouse or an outright outlaw in the back yard. Eileen, however, wasn’t so carefully raised. She grabbed that gun faster than anyone could speak, said “What’s this?” and pulled the trigger. With a stunning boom a .38 caliber slug tore a quarter-sized hole through the ceiling. We were utterly deafened, stunned limp, and within 30 seconds yanked out of the car by our arms, legs, and heads and thrown into the gravel and grass by a furious John Wayne, who at that moment was more frightening than a loaded gun. We never did make it to the fireworks.
But to this day, I love big booms. I love fireworks, cowboys (and their singing daughters), mixtures of big city and small town, and I love this country. An occasional brush with only adds to the pleasure.