The two sweetest words a fifteen-year-old gal could ever hear! Cleaning stalls, grooming, and feeding horses at a local horse trainer’s wouldn’t be a job; it would be paradise! With a horse around every corner and maybe even a chance to ride a few that didn‘t dump me off every five minutes like ol’ Ranger the Terrible at home, life could never, ever get any better.

When I announced to the family that I would be working after school each day, Dad had to get a little realistic and rain on my parade by asking how it was that I would be transported to and from my new place of employment.

Just a little technical difficulty I hadn’t thought of; after all, what teenager thinks past their nose, much less plans a day or a week ahead?

It was recommended that “Old Blue” be my mode of transportation, and, looking back, I suppose Dad figured if I were going to wreck a vehicle, I couldn’t do much more harm to the truck than my brothers had already done.

Old Blue was a –”he”—at least that’s what Dad called the truck when it ran decent. “He’ll take me through the swamp, or he’ll pull the tractor out of the mud.” Mostly held together by a roll of barbed wire and two-by-fours screwed on the sides in place of long-lost fenders, Old Blue was an embarrassment by anyone’s standards, much less as a young gal’s first Cadillac workmobile.

Despite the lack of paint and body parts, the apprentice position and beautiful horses on “the other side of the fence” outweighed any crude stares or smug comments that might come along. So I agreed in a flash to drive the old beast to and fro.

Not quite the get-in-and-go type, Blue’s driving mechanism consisted of a clutch and a three-speed shifter on the column. There was no D for drive, or R for reverse—just a “wannabe blinker” on the right side between the steering wheel and the dash.

As I received the quick-shifting tour from Dad, he explained that first gear was “up here,” second “down there,” and third gear “up an’ over that way.” He made it clear that reverse was towards yourself and straight down, but his “Do you understand?” went in one ear and right out the other as my mind was on grooming a hunter-jumper at my new place of employment.

All shined up with jeans tucked inside my boots, I was off the school bus and in the truck lickity-split, shaking my head at actually getting paid for a job I would have done for free.

Now, where did Dad say first gear was again? If Old Blue would have had a side window, I would have banged my head against it for not listening closer to the shifting instructions, but with no one around, I was on my own.

I figured if I could just find first gear, slow going would be just fine as my new occupation was just a few miles away. Up and over? Over and down? Sliding the shifter into a gear position that seemed right, I let the clutch out as the “chug chugs” advanced Blue about ten feet. As I tried again, my head bounced from the back window to the steering wheel and back again in a pattern I will never forget since the “chug chugs” lasted a good thirty feet.

After a momentary thought of saddling up Ranger the Bronc for transportation, I figured my time was better spent finding the gears than face down in the dirt.

A mere half-hour later and suffering from a humongous headache, I was out the driveway and down the road to employment bliss.

First gear wasn’t bad as the slow going allowed me to see, up close and personal, what the rear end of a skunk looked like just before the little black and white beauty sprayed Blue’s tires.

Passing the swamp that Dad drove through to chase in the cows, I wondered if he’d ever seen the monster snapping turtle which kept right up with me alongside the road, threatening to chew Old Blue to pieces.

As I pulled up to cross the highway, the teenage “not thinking past the nose” theory kicked in real fast. With cars and semis passing in both directions, I was about as stuck as stuck could be, wondering how the heck I would get through the “chug chugs” to cross without being smashed to oblivion.

By this time, I couldn’t care less if twenty of the state’s most well-trained champion horses waited at a stable for me just a mile away. Pretending to fix my hair in the mirror, I smiled and waved to passing traffic while taking a deep breath and letting out the clutch when the coast was clear. At 20 miles per hour in reverse, Old Blue took out the railroad crossing sign, the deer crossing sign, and the “curve ahead” sign all in one gigantic “chug.”

With a good fifty feet of runway now between Blue and the highway, it took every inch as we chugged along in first gear, crossing just before a semi-load of cattle whizzed by.

It took better than an hour to get turned around and back across the highway. Blue had no headlights and I had to be home by dark. Mom didn’t believe I never made it to the stable and cursed my “previous employer” up one side and down the other on the phone for letting me ride a wild horse, getting nasty black and blue bruises on my forehead and huge snow cones on each side of my ponytail…