Michael D. Davis.

Well, the family bought a truck. Now, this was no quick decision. It wasn’t like last week one of us said, “Hey, we should buy a truck.” And then this week it’s in the driveway. No, this was years in the making.

The first mention of getting a truck was back in my high school days. As a fat man, in most cars, I can do the lion’s share of steering with my stomach. I get wedged in there, then my gut holds the wheel like it decided to drive.

Back in high school, I was shoved in this tin can of a Dodge Omni, which if you’ve ever seen one you already know the problem. There are golf carts bigger than this vehicle. Anyways, my ma had seen me struggling with it, and she said that she thought a truck would be better, that it would give me more room.

Cut to nearly ten years later, we hadn’t got a truck due to money and a few other reasons, but it’s still in the back of our minds. And then last year happened. I make a lot of different art projects that vary in size.

Last summer, I painted a six-foot frog for one of Windy Goat Acres’s many awesome strange events. Creating the Six-foot amphibian was just amazing, but then I hit a snag. I had to get it out there. So, I called on the help of the old one, my father, and his friend, previously mentioned in this column as Colonel Mustard. Col. Mustard showed up with one of his trucks, and the two of them strapped my frog to the back.

Here comes the bad part, Mustard gets in the driver’s seat, I get in the passengers, and the old one sat in the middle. My father sat on the hump in the middle, as we were all squeezed in there like three pigs in one sausage casing. I never realized just how many bumpy gravel roads were on that route. Between this event, and the fact that I tweaked my back last year and it now hurts to crawl into my LeBaron, that brought up the truck idea again.

My ma looked for months online for the perfect truck. One day she’d be looking at a tiny Ford, the next day she’d have a line on a monster Chevy with a wench on the front and two extra wheels on the back.

Finally, last week, she had it narrowed down to two at a lot over in Waterloo. We made our way over there to take a look at them, after swimming through a few roads from last week’s storm. They brought out the first truck for us to test drive. Let me be honest here, I am a confident five-foot-three, a tired five-foot-two, and a depressed four-foot-seven.

The truck had no running boards, and that was a problem. After several minutes of trying I was able to pull myself up into the passenger’s seat. My ma, on the other hand, well, the saleswoman brought her a stool, and it still was a pull. We went around the block, zipped through the Home Depot parking lot, and then came back to look at the other truck. We walked over, and the bottom of the truck started at my waist, my ma wasn’t even going to attempt it as she was the same size as one of the tires.

There was some negotiating, and we came home with truck number one. The next day, I had to go run some errands if we were going to be driving this thing. My main stop was down at Ace Hardware. I got a forty-foot length of cheap rope for a few bucks and went out to the parking lot. Out there, I put it together.

To get in the truck now, without using every muscle in my body to crawl inside, we have another multi-step solution. I pull out a stool from the back seat and place it in front of the driver’s side door. I step up in the truck, get settled, and then I grab this large knot of rope and pull the stool in after me like a treehouse’s rope ladder.

Eh, it could be worse, I could be sitting on the hump between the Old One and Colonel Mustard.