[HIGHWAY BY THE SEA]

I thought I would share a funny story about my greatest (mis)adventure with this truck. Back in 1988 I drove way out into the country to visit my at-the-time girlfriend. The truck had not undergone its restoration yet, but was still very solid. It was very dark as I drove home from her house down a main highway. All of a sudden as I reached the apex of a hill I caught a momentary glimpse of a huge cow crossing the road from my left to the right. That stupid heifer was right on top of the solid highway divider lines and her head and neck was directly in the path of the front left corner side of the truck. And she did not seem even the least bit concerned about ANYTHING, not even this large lumbering loud beast with the glowing eyes that was bearing down on her at a deadly 60 MPH. It happened so fast that I did not even have time to react (unless you count my jaw dropping as a reaction). There was this GIGANTIC LOUD sound that I can only describe as a deafening metallic shotgun blast EXPLOSION accompanied by a tremendous shockwave that I felt all the way down to my toes. I had hit that cow with the front left of the truck and it ricocheted off the heifer and sent the truck careening to the right at a 45 degree angle off the highway over the ditch and into a field. The truck was violently careening out of control fishtailing, bouncing, and lurching and I was fighting to keep both control of it, AND my place in the driver's seat after it went airborne and jumped the ditch. This caused a HUGE cloud of blinding dust and dirt from the field that obscured everything in the immediate area for 100 yards or so behind me. I somehow managed to keep the truck from turning over during these Oh-My-God-I'm-Going-To-Die! moments. I somehow managed to get the truck back on the road, and suddenly a pair of headlights appeared throught the choking cloud of dust and doom directly behind me. The driver of this vehicle began frantically flashing his headlights at me and I PANICKED. I hit the gas so hard that the pedal slammed into the floorboard loudly and took off like a missile leaving him stopped in the road. I could just hear what he was probably saying in his car while flashing the lights: "STOP YOU SON OF A *****! YOU JUST KILLED A COW!" I was not about to get blamed in a traffic accident and have to pay for someone's stupid cow that he cared so little about that he did not properly contain it in a fenced pasture. I was also afraid to have to explain to my father what I was doing out in his truck at that late hour, and a police report would have the time of the accident on it. Well I managed to escape the scene of my unintentional disaster (probably due to the dust smoke screen I had created) and fled home. It was then that I noticed that the front left headlight was now angled 45 degrees to the left and pointed up so I could see the top of every tree that I passed on the way home. After I got home I borrowed my grandmother's car and drove back to the scene posing as an innocent passerby to see what had happened just to sate my curiosity. There was a group of four people standing around a very-dead cow with their hands on their hips like they did not know what to do next. And the owner of the cow was among them. This guy looked like he had just stepped from the pages of a redneck hick farmer stereotype catalogue. He had blue denim overalls, glasses, boots, and saber-like buck teeth that whistled like a cartoon beaver whenever he pronounced his "S" words. When I asked him what had hit the cow, his astute response was, "I don't know, it was a truck or something" (spoken with loud whistling "S" words). (Well, that certainly narrows down your suspects there Farmer Bob!) At this point I gleefully realized that I was not a suspect in the cow's untimely demise since the only witness at the scene was unable to identify me or the truck courtesy of the God-sent gigantic dust cloud. As for the cow, its eyes were wide open like it had seen all the hounds of hell converging upon it in its death throes, it had urinated all over the highway, and a bulldozer was used to remove it from the road. I checked the damage to the truck the next morning more closely in the day light and found that only the fender was dented. The bumper was fine, and the light was still aimed wrong, but nothing was major wrong with it. I lied my tail off and told my father that I had hit a deer that ran out in front of me so I would not get into trouble. I only confessed to him what had actually happed years later after I have moved out of his house and the statute of limitations on Hit and Run had expired. My friends still laugh their heads off whenever we revisit this story!! If you look at the picture of the truck in its tan paint form you will notice that the front right fender does not match. I have another picture (will post later) where you can see that the front LEFT one is also mismatched. This is the left fender that my father replaced the cow-damaged one with. He replaced the right one at the same time for some unknown reason (battery acid damage??). What a night that was!