VIN: JT4LN55D 6F5000989
It must have been around 1984 that the idea of selling
homemade ice cream at a premium price came to Margaret. She had become very fond of the homemade ice
cream that I made for her and various guests both before and after we were
married. It seems that her goals in life have always included being
“productive” and “accomplishing things.” To sell ice cream we were to buy at
least two more hand-cranked (actually equipped with electric cranking motors)
and a chest-type deep freeze. We would make as much as three gallons of ice
cream, three different flavors. These would be packed in pint and quart
containers and sold to the public at a high price that we thought was
commensurate with the high quality of our product. Hagen-Dazs had done it, why
couldn’t we?
To transport the pints and quarts to the parking lot
where Margaret proposed to sell, we had to have a truck or a van. There, at the
parking lot, especially on a hot day, people would jump at the chance to buy
ice cream, cranked in a wooden bucket of ice, with salt, exactly as was done on
countless family farms a generation or two ago. I preferred a good-sized van,
but Margaret favored a pickup truck, replete with a gaily colored umbrella. So
we looked for a truck.
Rodland Motors in Everett was a good place to look, as we
had already bought a Toyota car from them, and were well-treated. I was still
intrigued by the new Toyota van, but there was no hope of standing up in it,
and no easy access to the deep freeze it was to carry. It happened that
Rodland’s had a new long-bed pickup truck on the lot, 1985 model, 4-cylinder
diesel engine, white in color and just the thing for an ice cream truck. I had
thought a diesel truck would have a premium price on it, but the American public,
always carried away with the notion of high speed, blinding acceleration,
rejected the Toyota diesel and it was being sold at a reduced price.
This was at a time when General Motors, following the
Volkswagen example, attempted to make diesel engines out of their big gasoline
V-8’s, with not enough modifications. These GM conversions were bad, and I
hoped that this Toyota diesel was one that had been built that way from the
beginning, not just a gasoline engine in disguise. It sounded OK to me; it had
the loud diesel valve clatter at low speeds, and even hinted at sounding like a
Kenworth.
 |
| 1985 Toyota - unknown source |
So we bought it, owing money on it, of course, and when I
had built a frame to hold the bright colored sun umbrella and painted a few
signs, we were ready to sell, and probably make a fortune. No fault of the
truck or the umbrella, but our ice cream just didn’t sell at our high price
when soft Dairy Queen type ice cream was being sold nearby at less than half
the price we had to have. Margaret insisted on the very best ingredients, and
absolutely fresh every day, so what we didn’t sell was thrown away. Some days
we may have discarded more than we sold. Finally, we abandoned the ice cream
business after two summers.
The next duty for the truck was to serve as my commuter
car. The Country Club area where we lived on Camano Island, is more than thirty
miles from Skagit Valley College where I was teaching, so at sixty miles per
day for commuting plus trips into Stanwood for groceries and things, we piled
on many miles.
Since we were not using it for ice cream anymore, it
seemed wise to get a canopy for it. I bought a very light, cheap canopy from an
outfit in Everett. It was black, on the white truck, and it looked flashy to
us. Margaret and I thought it was big enough to use as a camping vehicle,
putting down foam mattresses in the back, with sleeping bags, we thought we
could go wherever we wanted at minimum expense and be safer than in a tent.
Probably we could have put Holly, Margaret and me parallel on the floor, and I had
a shelf built for little John athwart the box. We could easily sleep with our
feet under the shelf. Holly refused to try the three abreast arrangement in the
back and said she would sleep on the bench seat in the cab.
We set out for a state park near Gray’s Harbor, got a
place to park, had the usual camping goodies for supper and expected to have a
fine time. Not so; we just couldn’t sleep under those conditions, so next day
we left the camp. I did not want to give up so easily, so I persuaded the gang
to go to one of the tourist areas on Mount Rainier.
If I remember correctly, Holly and I had a rather glum
time in front (lack of sleep?) while Margaret and John were in back carrying on
with some kind of play. It came out that Margaret was terribly worried about
the State Patrol stopping us for having people “loose” in the back with no seat
belts. No seats, either. What to do? Why, lie down, of course, to become
invisible from outside. Margaret’s fertile mind came up with the idea of
playing ambulance with John, replete with sirens, engine noises, whatever, but
I couldn’t figure out what caused all the laughter and chortling going on back
there.
After all this fun on the ambulance we spent the night on
Mount Rainier and headed home in the morning to peace and comfort, washouts as
truck campers. Later, on solo trips with the truck, I found it to be tolerable
at worst, and fun at best. I had solo trips to Arizona, South Dakota,
Wisconsin, and a couple of trips from Haines to Seattle.
One trip to South Dakota was with Margaret and three year
old John who was fond of acting out the fairy stories that had been read to him
over and over. He and I had a good time while Margaret was driving as he loved
doing the dialogue in “Bremen Town Musicians,” “The Valiant Little Tailor” and”
The Fisherman and His Wife.” We would switch parts, sometimes in the middle of
the story, and John would change from being the donkey to being the chief
robber, or from being the tailor to one of the giants. A favorite was a story
involving young men striving to win the fair princess’s hand by climbing a very
steep slippery glass hill. Somehow we came up with the notion that a certain
boot butter, applied to his soles would give him enough purchase to get up the
hill.
The first couple of times we played that story, John was
the climber, and I was the boot-butter salesman. Then when we switched parts he
became the salesman. He and Margaret went into shrieks of laughter when I left
the “script” and complained bitterly about that lying, cheating, no-good John
Bootbutter Plucker who sold me the worthless stuff.
 |
Mom's house - photo taken in 2007 by Jean E. Straatmeyer
|
Both Holly and John learned to drive, using this truck
because I believed that a competent driver should be able to handle a stick-shift
transmission as well as an automatic. Also I believed that this diesel engine
was a bit harder to kill, on rough starts, or from a dead stop on an ascending
incline.
There were some notable times when the truck was used for
legitimate hauling, not just as a passenger vehicle. Delivering new phone books
on Camano Island was considered a difficult job as the roads and streets are
not paid out in neat squares the way they would be in a town, plus it was a
large territory. I took on the job for three summers, and it was quite an
experience to hunt up all the addresses, avoid the dogs, and get the job done.
The starting load on the truck was very heavy, down to the axles, as they say,
as I took on as many 2.2 pound books as I could jam in.
Later I took on a weekly job of delivering the “Little
Nickel” advertising paper on a route from Mount Vernon to La Conner to
Anacortes to Oak Harbor. There were many stops, including several on the
Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. But it was a pleasant drive over scenic
roads, plus there were several stops for truly superior coffee and cookies.
There was also an embarrassing incident in which I got ticketed for speeding in
Anacortes just after the ferry turn-off where the limit suddenly changes from
forty-five to thirty miles per hour. The ticket and its accompanying fine were
bad enough, but what embarrassed me was that young John was with me that day
and witnessed my disgrace.
 |
| Haines Harbor in 2012 - Photo by Jean E. Straatmeyer |
Not long after we moved to Haines, I met Bruce Gilbert
who talked boats and sailing, was a neat guy, and we became friends very soon.
We both had Washington connections; he had come from an apple-growing family in
central Washington. He invited me to come and watch an important football game
on television. I don’t remember if it was the super Bowl or the Rose Bowl game.
At any rate, it was in a cold January.
Since we had just moved into the Senior Village and were
within easy walking distance of nearly everything, we had not used the truck
for a week or more. On the day of the game the temperature had fallen
dramatically to a few degrees below zero. I was not about to walk to Bruce’s
house in that kind of cold if I could avoid it, so I got into the faithful
truck, let the glow plugs glow, and started the engine with some difficulty. I
let it idle for a short time, and then drove away. When I had gotten perhaps
half a block, the engine spluttered and died. I could not get it going again
and finally wound up calling a tow truck to get it off the road. It was towed
to Bigfoot Auto where they put it inside, allowed the frozen (or jellied)
diesel fuel to start flowing again and charged me $60. Now I know that in really cold weather you’d better fill
your diesel tank with what all Alaska gas stations sell in winter: diesel that
does not turn to thick jelly. I don’t remember how I got to Bruce’s house that
day; probably he came and got me. Our team lost – that much I remember.
Probably the most scared I had been with John at the
wheel was several years after we moved to Haines. We two were coming up a rather
long stretch of fairly straight road (Haines to Haines Junction?) where a
constant speed of 55-60 miles per hour was possible. I never allowed anyone to
over-rev the engine, so 60 was top cruising speed. John had become so
accustomed to the steady hum of 55-60 that anything less seemed terribly slow.
We were getting low on fuel, so I told John to pull over at a gas station on
the outskirts of the town. We saw the station a good distance off, and John
started slowing down, to about 30-35. He was fooled into believing that he was
going slow enough to approach the gas pumps. I yelled at him to slow down
several times, but in his own mind, he was
going slow. We got to the pumps, moving much too fast; even John got scared, I
think. He finally slammed on the brakes throwing gravel over the base of the
pumps. I remember gasping, “Slow down! Jesus Christ!” I would not deny that the
last expletive could have been a prayer. I was envisioning bashing into the gas
pumps, knocking down at least two, and disappearing into a hellish ball of
fire. Nope, just some stirred-up gravel.
John had some affection for the truck that Margaret and I
did not suspect. He and some friends (mostly girls) cut narrow pieces of duct
tape to make letters, then taped their names to the dash board. “Sarah” somehow
got mixed up and her name came out as “Sahar.” Lucinda’s “Lucy” was a somewhat
later addition; these names are still there.
Later, when John was a sophomore at the University of
Alaska, Fairbanks, Margaret and I drove the truck to that city to attend a
concert of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra which featured Gail Williams, a
horn virtuoso. Some of the players were invited to the home of Professors John
and Jane Aspnes, to meet and socialize with Ms Williams. John was invited, with
Margaret and me graciously included in the invitation. When the party was breaking
up, to our surprise, John persuaded several of his good music department
buddies to come out in the cold to see the truck. There was nothing on earth to
distinguish this particular white Toyota pickup from any other, but John must
have been convinced of its special qualities, including the 250,000 miles on
the odometer at that time. Now, there are 266,000.
 |
| Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra Photo on line |
Actually, there are several missing “special qualities”
that exclude this mobile Toyota from the ranks of Alaska trucks, Alaska license
plates notwithstanding. Most important, it does not have four-wheel drive.
Alaska vehicles have this. Real Alaska trucks in Southeast have a dog riding in
the back. Sometimes the dog is in the front so the dog can sit behind the wheel
while the owner is in the store, or wherever. It is not fitted with a head bolt
heater for very cold winter starts. A snow-plow blade cannot be fitted to the
front end; it has no trailer hitch, and no extra lights. The radio is still
working, I think, but not in the truck. John took it out and installed it in
his brother-in-law’s fish boat.
In another of these essays I wrote about John, as a
two-year-old releasing the brake, letting the truck roll backwards down the
driveway, across the road and finally stopping on the stub of an alder tree.
This stub did not poke a hole in the fuel tank immediately. It may be that
flexing a bit over thousands of miles finally caused the steady drip of diesel
fuel I finally spotted. I was able to stop the leak with some gummy stuff the
NAPA parts store in LaConner sold me.
It must have been more than ten years later when I
brought the truck in for a check on the brakes that the owner of the shop
pointed out the leak which had again appeared. This time it was more than a
drip, it was a thin steady stream. The brakes needed parts and adjustments.
There were other things that needed replacement and adjustment. This took place
just after Margaret and I had both run up some staggering medical bills. I told
the shop man I couldn’t begin to afford to have the truck fixed. I thought I
had a couple of buyers who wanted the truck for parts, especially the diesel
engine.
Can you believe this? My repair shop man said he just
could not allow me to have
the truck taken apart by a buyer, and then probably abandoned in some obscure
driveway. “Could you,” he asked, “pay for the parts?” If I could pay for the
parts, he said he would not charge me for the labor. Of course, I protested
that I couldn’t’ let him do it for free, but he insisted that he would do it in
his spare time. What a truck! To inspire such an action!
He took a rather long time to work on it, but I was still
attempting to recover from my sciatic pain and didn’t much care how long it
took. About six weeks later he was all through with his work, and the truck is
in good shape except for some regrettable rust. A few months ago I bought four
new tires for it, from my repair guy, of course, so I have confidence that it
will serve us, or John, or Holly and Matt, or somebody in the family until the
rust overcomes all our efforts.
No comments:
Post a Comment