We are traveling a red clay road in dry September. Dust roils though the car windows. We close them only to suffocate in the heat. The Henry J coup has felt seats. With every rut and bump we hit, they exhale a choking plume of dust. The car vibrates on the washboard road.
Baby is driving slowly and carefully though the bottoms, where sand has collected – deep enough to grab and twist the front tires so that the steering wheel in Baby’s hands jerks to one side and the car leans and tilts over on its side, like a horse, lazy and slow, and we all fall to the driver’s side.
Baby’s hands clinch the steering wheel as we look at the bare dirt road only inches from our faces through the side windows. My father is a strong man. He climbs out the window toward the sky and I follow .Together we push against the roof of the car. An old truck stops ahead. A whole family of five gets out. Dressed in bibb overalls, they stand in a row and watch our struggle in sllence.
Leaning agaist the roof of the overturned car, my father and I push and rock the car. I am a small boy, so my effort counts for little. Miraculously, the car rights itself and bounces, stretching its legs like a horse getting up from a roll in the grass. We get in.
My mother is still griping the steering wheel, ignoring what happened. She offers no comment. The motor is still running and my father says to drive away. We pass the idle gawkers standing barefoot beside their truck. My father says, “Don’t wave at them.” He is a proud man and occasionally unforgiving.
Now, I look back at this event though the lens of decades and ask myself, “What would I do if my car turned over on a lonely dirt road?” Would it occur to me to try to right the car? What would you do? My father faced danger with a shrug. My mother just tried to hold on. It was what she had been taught by her parents and by life: to endure hard times and carry on.
Thank you for this wonderful trip down memory lane. What a great example of your parents character and resilience.
Thanks Peggy. Hope you saw the connection between this story and the re[ront of my review of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.
Joe
The grit and determination that made America great. Do we still have those characteristics? Hopefully so.
Hi James,
My parents grew up in the smallest of towns (Gough, Georgia) and we often drove from where we were living to spend an afternoon with my grandparents when we were growing up. An undercurrent in this story of the overturned car is that my father (the son of a bankrupted banker caught in the mire of post-World War I inflation) and my mother (the daighter of the owner of a small tractor garage who had been raised in Augusta) often saw themselves as from a seperate class of people compared to the sharecroppers and small famers of the region. My father was a construction engineer and I recall he earned the pricely sum of $500 a month when I was about 12. Since we were living in a cracker box in a “subdivision” of thousands of cracker boxes and were driving a Henry J (which cost about $1,200 new) we were not exactly dining at the Ritz. Hope you will keep this idea in mind if you have time to read my recently republished review of Hillbilly Elegy -his explanation of his success in life is I think based on the characteristics of this class of floks who get ahead through self denial, self discipline and hard work-the old Protestant Ethic!
Again, thanks for reading.
Joe
Joe, I’ve been through Gough many times on the way to UGA. I grew up in Brooklet, a small town just east of Statesboro in Bulloch County. Thank you for your prompt response to my comment. I enjoy your Longleaf Journal; keep up the good work please.