I
ran into an old friend last night at Costco who reminded me about a
time that she and I and another friend blew up my dad's truck. Truth
be told they actually didn't have that much to do with it except for
being passengers. My friend Jordan, the girl I would meet much later
at a local Costco, and I had driven up to Salt Lake go clothes
shopping for school. That means this story would've taken place about
eight months before spring break so some sorrys are in order, and now
the story is too. Anyway, we had driven up there to the VF factory
outlets which purport to have various outlet stores but I've never
seen Lee jeans actually sold anywhere else. I think it's just a
front. We shopped a little and we hung out a little and we were
heading home in my dads newer truck when we were heading up the hill
at the point of the mountain I put the truck in cruise control at
about 70 mph (1.21 megajoules for the international audience). That
was a pretty good idea, until the engine exploded. I don't mean
exploded in the sense that a cooling hose came off and a bunch of
steam came into the cabin and that made us all scared but there was
no harm done. I mean exploded in the sense that a piston broke off
from the crankshaft and came out of the top of the engine and almost
out of the hood. The other half of the piston still attached to the
crankshaft had somehow got flipped around inside the engine and
jammed about 200 holes through the oil pan before it to came to a
halt. Was it exciting? More like terrifying. All I could think was
that I had to tell my dad that his truck exploded. Of course none of
us had a cell phone at the time so we had to pull off to the side of
the road and wait for some passersby to help. After a few
well-meaning but useless Samaritans stopped a police officer came by
and let us radio to dispatch who then called my dad and told him the
bad news. My friends Jordan and Jessica got in a call to her sister
and a little less than an hour later she come and picked them up and
they abandoned me to my fate. I had to sit and wait on the side of
the freeway for two or three hours while my dad organized a get the
truck home party. His brother is into truck repair and had access to
a towing thing to get it home. When he got there he said never seen
anything like the engine coming out of the hood and the oil pan. The
whole time we were loading up the truck to tow it home to see if
there was anything we could do about getting it fixed my dad was
running a constant nonstop stream of things he thought I did wrong to
make the engine explode until my uncle finally stepped in and said
that actually something like that was just bad luck and there was no
way I could have prevented it or caused it. That shut my dad up for
the afternoon but he forgot the next day, and week, and month and if
it is mentioned still to this day he remembers that I was , to quote
him, 'romping on that engine' to make it explode. The moral here of
course is if you romp on engine your friends will abandon you and
your dad will be mad at you for the rest of your life.
