Last week I told you about the vehicle my parents and siblings took to California. Today, I introduce you to the sweet ride of my childhoot.
Chapter 3 - The Pickup Camper
In 1966, Dad bought an aqua-blue Chevrolet Pickup truck with a standard transmission, a white roof, and white stripes down the sides. The white stripes must have been standard on all vehicles in the 1960s because every car or truck we owned during that era seemed to have them.
When we went for trips in the new
pickup, Pat and I sat in the front seat between Mom and Dad. I didn’t know of
any extended cabs or trucks with backseats. One of us kids would use the wide
metal clip of the seat belt to “shave” the stick shift. We’d slowly move
the metal clip across the black ball of the shift, listening to the click,
click, click sound and feeling the vibration as we traveled down the road at 40
to 50 miles an hour. At such speeds, no one ever wore a seat belt or
thought of it as anything but a nuisance (if you were Mom) or as an electric
shaver (if you were a five-year-old).
Along with the new truck came a
Hiawatha pickup camper. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. It
had a small refrigerator, stove, sink, furnace, and toilet in a
closet. The dinette folded down to make a bed for Mom and Dad, and to this
day, I have no idea how they slept in such a minute space. Pat and I had
the best sleeping arrangements; we got the bed over the cab of the truck.
We not only slept there, we played
there, and when traveling down the road, we lay there on our bellies watching
out the front window, a magical land of the unexplored rushing towards
us. We waved at every passing motorist and pedestrian who would look our
way. Sometimes, we wrote up signs to flash at these people, something
benign and amazingly original, such as “hi” or “smile.”
It never occurred to anyone that all
it would take was for Dad to slam on the brakes and our two dense heads would
crash through the window. Our flailing bodies would fly through the air
straight into an oncoming Buick.
Mom and Dad were not, however, totally
unconcerned about our safety. They laid down one rule for us.
It was the law of the land, which we
were never to break, that when the truck was moving, the door at the back of
the camper was locked, and we were under no circumstance to get within three
feet of it. The edge of the dinette marked as far as we could
go. After that, the closet on the left, the enclosed toilet on the right,
and the door straight ahead meant certain death, for we were sure to fall out
onto the pavement to be crushed by a passing semi if we went near the door when
the truck was moving.
Other than that, we had free rein
within the camper. On rare occasions, we’d play cards at the table as we
rode down the road, but more often than not, we’d instead crawl to the bed
above the cab. To view all the wonders of our world.
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