The Kick-Off Sketch

Whoever told me the story once about the bourbon in the wahser reservoir, props, hon. Had a friend in highschool who had a similar interior cabin set-up. Alright, enough beating about the bush. Here goes-- Remember, it's quantity over quality until 50,000 or 11/30. Hopefully, we get to both.

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Tonic in the glove box, limes at the corner market, and sodas for Sis and me: that’s the shopping list what came to commence our Sunday ritual by the end of our Missouri bootheel summer.

With a bit of clever Ozark engineering, my uncle Tom had rigged up the tubing from his windshield washers through the interior of his dash. With an extra dose of Ozark practicality, he also filled the fluid reservoir with gin. It was an old bronco. He’d taken the top clean off, and we’d tear hollerin and laughin through muddy patches of land, my sister and I hanging on (literally for dear life, now that I look back on it) to whatever we thought might prevent us from bouncing right out over the door. Even a roll cage was a thing of fancy-pants racecar divers. The only real charm for this old hunk of metal was the holes rusted out through the floor of the cab, which when we’d hit a real puddle would turn into geysers and dot our faces with earthy dark freckles.

Crazy uncle tom! What was he doing with two teenage nieces drinking and trespassing? (Or so the family would have questioned if we had ever let on to the true activities of our Sunday drives to the river.) We loved it in our tomboy world – he was the only one of the family who gave in to our desire to play in the mud and fight and curse and hunt and generally avoid all demure and ladylike things we hated so much. Learning to drive a rusty hunk of steel through backcountry roads in the dead heat of my 15th summer seemed a wonderfully unladylike adventure to me.
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