Drop The Tailgate

In our driveway sits a 24 year old pickup truck that my Dad gave me.  Russ drove it to college for four years and Benjamin drove it to and from high school after being home-schooled.  Although it currently has a rear engine oil seal leak, it still runs.  I just have to check the oil frequently.  I'll get it fixed one of these days.  Tricia and I like to drive it down the back roads to a gas station about 5 miles away and buy some boudin balls and a soft drink, sometimes a greasy brown bag full of cracklins.  Then we roll down the windows and play old country music and sing along as we drive about 35 miles an hour on the way home, eating our boudin balls and drinking Dr. Pepper and looking at the scenery on either side of the dirt roads.

As I walked by the truck the other day, I dropped the tailgate and sat down.

In our modern society, we have many apps and tools that help us save time and money.  If we optimize our time, well, we'll be more productive and squeeze more minutes out of the day, right?  But what do we do with those extra minutes we've saved?  What if we did nothing better with a few minutes but sat down and just did some thinking?

And I dropped the tailgate and plopped down and did just that.  I dangled my legs and swung them back and forth and thought at first about nothing in particular.  In my childhood, we did a lot of riding in the back of pickup trucks.  We'd sit on the edge, or we'd sit on the toolbox with our backs resting on the sliding glass back window, but mostly we'd sit on the tailgate as we'd drive down country roads at the farm, spitting on the blacktop road as it passed beneath us.

You don't much see people sitting in the back of pickup trucks anymore.  You never see people sitting on tailgates.  I wonder why that is?  It used to be so commonplace in our neck of the woods.  I'm sure there's a law against it or something.  It is pretty dangerous, I guess, but none of us ever fell out the back. 

In the back of a farmer's truck, there were always several things present.  First, there were a lot of empty Dr. Pepper cans rolling around.  You had to be a little careful during the time that we were water leveling, because we'd catch snapping turtles and put them in the back of the truck to bring to my Dad's cousin.  He would make a turtle sauce picante and we'd go to his house when we'd break for lunch and eat those turtles.  The empty cans in the back of the truck were like an early warning system.  If you heard the cans rustling, it meant a snapping turtle was back there and you'd better be careful.  If they bit you, and old wives tale said, they wouldn't let go of you until it thundered.

There was the ubiquitous shovel in the back of the truck, used to patch holes in levees in the rice field so you wouldn't lose all your water and also for killing cotton mouth water moccasins.  Hanging upside down between the tool box and the cab, was always a pair of Lacrosse rubber boots.  Sometimes you stepped in some deep water or your boots developed a hole and hanging them upside down did the trick of drying them out.

Back then, they hadn't invented fancy steps or ladders that come as attachment or option to tailgates these days, nor did they have a camera mounted on the back that helped you back up to hook up a trailer.  Those inventions had yet to be discovered back then.  The tailgate was merely something you'd drop and plop your bottom down onto to do some high-powered thinking on.  I'm convinced if we'd drop the tailgate, many of the world's problems could be resolved overnight.