This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [105]
The job was to drive a grain truck, and exactly at an impatient time in my growing up it fed me all the velocity and throttle-power I could ask for. The rancher's grown son, a lanky grinning man named Ron, drove one elderly red truck, I drove its mate. By gunning along the narrow graveled dike of road as fast as we dared, we could make one haul to the grain elevator at Cut Bank in the morning and another in the afternoon. There was a very long breakneck hill in the middle of the run which Ron and I traded jokes about. 1 had the world moving on my last load, he would drawl; By the time I hit the bottom of that sonofabitch hill I must have been going a thousand miles an hour.
Near the end of the summer, I was slamming my truck into higher gear on a flat stretch of the road when I saw a shallow trench of potholes ahead. With no traffic coming, I swerved at a slight angle across the holes to reduce the jolt. There was a bounce, and a second, and the horizon plunged away as a concussion crumpled the rear of the truck down into a howling tilting skid, dust fuming into the cab, metal screaming on gravel.
At last I sat, stopped, looking straight up into the air, gripping the steering wheel which now haloed above my face. I groped the door open and bailed for the road. The truck angled above me like a monstrous being with a broken lower back. I looked blankly toward where the rear wheels had to be, and there were none.
It took me long minutes amid the spilled wheat and strewn gravel to track out what had happened. The rear spring on one side of the truck, weakened from an old break, had snapped entirely when the wheels struck the potholes, and the following force of the other side hitting the depression wrenched away the truck's underbody, springs, axle, wheels and all.
When the rancher arrived and had a look, he said I was not to blame myself and it was time he bought a new truck anyway. I was behind a steering wheel for him again the next morning. When the chance came to spend a Sunday with Dad and Grandma, I showed them the newspaper clipping about my accident. You were lucky that once, Grandma said in judgment, as if I hadn't been thinking it every instant since. I'm no example to talk, Dad offered, but no job is worth your neck. The next summer, when I was working fields for a farmer near Dupuyer, I came in from the tractor one sunset to hear that a truck had been wrecked on the breakneck hill, killing its driver: Ron.
Now that I had gone across one line of decision in the summer of the storm-hit sheep, it began to dawn on me that I was edging across the next one. Ranching no longer seemed what I wanted. That clarifying idea, and likely Mrs. Tidy-man's gale-force enthusiasm, pointed toward college. For Grandma, my first mention of it was the knell that one more person she had labored for would be on his way from her. But: If that's the how of it for you, boy, you better do it. Dad came around to the idea so rapidly and entirely that he began to think of it as his own. By God, yes, you want to get into some other sort of living. Ranching is a hard go unless you inherit a hellish amount of land and have the health to work it. I never had those, and maybe you won't either. One of his brothers had managed to send a son to college to become a pharmacist; Dad suggested that I think about the same. I didn't know what livelihood I wanted, but pharmacy didn't sound like it. Dad shrugged. Do whatever it is ye want, son, and we'll back ye just as far as we can.
Any backing to be drawn from a life divided between the Jensen ranch and