When I was about 14, my brother and I loaded up a steer to be taken to the market. The — we’d sold the beef to some people. And we load it in the back of our pickup truck, which had side racks that you would use for transporting animals. And partway to the market, the steer decided he didn’t want to be in there and he kept trying to jump out. There was no roof on the top of it. And so it was just side rails — side racks that went up, and he was trying to jump over it and we had to stop the truck and my brother told me, “Get out and get on the rack and uh, keep him in,” you know, “Use –” we had, um, an ax handle, not with an ax on it — an actual ax head on it, but you have an ax handle and if you tap them on the nose, they don’t like to be tapped on the nose and we would use that to make cattle back off.
But anyway, I said, “I can’t do that. I’d be terrified to do that.” And so, and so he said, “Well, you’re gonna have to drive then.” Of course, I didn’t know how to drive. I was only 14, but he quickly showed me. It was a stick shift on the floor, and — in this truck, and so he showed me how to, to put it into gear and to get it going and stuff, and I got it into gear but I could only get it into first gear. I couldn’t figure out how you shifted up to second gear after you were in first gear. So here I am driving this truck with a steer in the back jumping around, my brother hanging on the side rails trying not to get himself killed, and we’re chugging down the road. And then we had to turn on to the road where the meat market actually was. And when I tried to make that turn, of course, I don’t know how to drive to start with and this thing is jumping around. So the, the vehicle is lunging back and forth and stuff and I overshot the corner and then I had to figure out how to get it in reverse to back up and go around and we finally — we chugged in first gear up to the meat market and the guy who ran it came out and he says, “Just back your truck around to this loading chute.” And I said, “You’re gonna have to do it because I don’t know how to drive.” And he looked at me like, “What are you talking about? You just got out of the cab of that truck. You were the driver!” And I, “I don’t know how to drive. I just — I — we barely got here.”