I probably haven't made it as clear as I'd like so I'll clear it up now. I am a car dude. A died in the wool car lover. It's not an obsession, cause I can't really afford any obsessions right now, but I have been a car lover since I was four years old. That's the first time I remember riding shotgun (that's front seat, passenger side for you Yankees and liberals) in one of my dads immaculate automobiles. As a Marine, he was so disciplined by the experience that everything he owned looked like brand new money. His shoes were all polished to a fair-thee-well, suits and shirts all pressed perfectly, and every accessory he sported was as if brand new. And that perfection included his car. Every car he has ever driven to and fro, hither and yon, back and forth, looked new. It was a very rare occurrence when he sold any car he owned that he didn't get as much for it as what he purchased it for originally. I guessed it originated from the hardscrabble life he led in the Appalacian mountains of his youth. It's where everything was rough hewn, and it left a deep impression on him. He told me that he remembers the first perfectly symmetrical thing he ever saw in his young life. I didn't think much of it until I was older and spent some time on the farm of his youth. It was there I noticed that their weren't any perfect 90 degree angles on any living space, no perfectly straight lines, no perfectly square door openings or windows. It was indicative of the type of construction afforded in the mountains of North Carolina.
My grandpaw, my fathers dad, was a WWI veteran and contracted polio while overseas on duty. It was obvious to me, looking back on it, that Rotary Club International hadn't eradicated Polio as of yet. And what a shame. My grandpaw died from complications of polio, leaving six kids behind and my grandmother to survive on the farm he has constructed from the dirt acres he purchased with his "gettin out money", the separation pay he received from the military. He took that money and purchased between 200 and 230 acres with it. He hired out a mobile saw mill and he and a few of his close friends harvested and mill cut the lumber on site, building the home that still stands to this day. My grandmother lived in it until she turned 99 years old and spent the last nine months in a nursing home where she was treated like royalty until she passed. She and I were very close, and I think of her hourly. I'm not sad about it knowing she is reunited with my grandpaw.
When grandpaw left the military, he wanted to move to where it was peaceful and quiet. He chose to buy his land 14 miles outside of Murphy, North Carolina in the small community of Unaka, the forth named community heading west on Route 3, now known as Joe Brown Highway. There was Texana, Hanging Dog, Grape Creek, then Unaka (pronounced U-Neck-Uh) named after a tribe of Indians who had inhabited the area before the white man made his appearance as the first illegal immigrants in the New World. Now I will tell you this, I believe in God and the biblical story of creation and here's why; there is no possible way that the beauty that is the Appalacian mountains was made by chance. To me, it is evidence of a creator who was the originator of all things beautiful and lovely. God must have started in the Garden of Eden, then jumped over to what is now North Carolina, then worked his way out from there. It is just captivating in its grandure and raw beauty. My grandpaw recognized that fact when he bought the land and settled on it. He died when my dad was but a young man of twelve years old. He became the man of the house, farm, critters, everything. He conducted himself in such a manner that his brothers and sisters all love him with a worship status, knowing they owe their survival to him. It's movie of the week stuff, but save for me writing it here or sharing it, it will be lost. So I share it here.
I started this day by telling you I crossed paths with a critter and that bares out an explanation. I said earlier I am a car dude and I'm sure that's clear. I was at a building my pilot brother in law owns approximately 60 miles from me. I go and check on its status for him once ever two weeks or so. As a bonus he lets me store a few of my project cars there, enough for me to continue to go bi-weekly and inspect. I have my 69 Camaro convertible stored there along with all the parts for my 70 GTO convertible project, so there's a good sixty thousand dollars worth of goody sitting around up there. That's incentive enough for me to spend seventy-five bucks in gas a month to protect that investment. I was there yesterday in the AM, before it got blistering hot and humid like it has done in the 53 years I have made Georgia my home. I usually drink a gallon of water a day to keep the pipes flushed and myself hydrated. Not every day, but close. What that means is I've usually gotta take a monumental, volunteer fire department style piss when I get to wherever it is I am going, and that right soon. This place is in the proverbial middle of nowhere, but out of instinct, I usually walk around the side of the building to take a leak and that day was no different up to that point. Here's where it gets interesting...I rounded the corner at the same time a giant Armadillo was rounding it, but in the opposite direction. I mean we were rounding towards each other. It scared the two-toned shit out of me. I jumped up in the back of my truck hollering like a little girl, hoping I wasn't being filmed. It was a certified sissy stuff moment. The critter in question, the Armadillo, made some strange noise that I assume meant he was scared shitless too, but he just rolled up into a ball like a rolly-poley. If you don't know what a rolly-poley is, just keep reading and Google it. I've seen many a Armadillo flattened out on the high ways and byways in the South. They've migrated east from Texas, seemingly replacing the possum population within a few years. The locals now call Armadillos "possum on the half shell" and I think it's accurate. My Armadillo, the one who I met up with, laid there until I did my inspection on the building and its contents, the unfurled himself and went on his merry Armadillo way. Me? I dreamed about the damn thing last night, me so close I could smell his Armadillo breath.
I'll end this story with what I know to be the origins of my Dad's obsession with cars, a trait he genetically passed down to me, my son, and my grandson. I spoke earlier here about symmetry, and how nothing in my dads young days were perfectly straight or curved or intentionally angled. That was until the day my dad said he saw something imprinted in the dirt road that ran in front of the farm he tended, long before the road warranted asphaul paving, that luxury saved for big towns like Murphy. He told me what he saw rocked his small world in ways that led men to go to the moon and E=MC2. He told me, for him, it was what it must have been like for African tribes to see white men for the first time, or airplanes and modern technogy introduced in third world countries. He also said he stared at his discovery for hours, going back to inspect the imprint on the dirt highway as he worked his daily chores that lasted from sun-up to sun-down. He didn't call his brothers and sisters, or even his mama to come look, as he didn't want to cast fear onto them. As the man of the house, he felt it his duty to protect them from everything, especially the unknown. He kept it his own secret till it was told to me and I am sharing it with you. Now, this might sound silly to you, reading this on a computer in the air conditioned comfort of where ever you might be sitting, but here it is.
He was staring at the first perfectly symmetrical thing he had ever seen in his life. It was a set of thin tire tracks from an A-model Ford (he didn't know it at the time), with the zig-zag three inch wide tread pattern, perfectly straight and perfectly equidistant as far as my dad could see in both directions up and down Route 3. He said the adventurer in him wanted to follow the trail so he could see what made them. But, he also knew that if whatever made the tracks ate him, then how would his family survive. As far as he knew, it might have been the footprints of the Devil himself.
You think about that.
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