memoir chapter one-continued.

I already said how Redmondville was a place of mud and wood.At some point during our stay there,my father bought an old truck,bigger than a pickup.It was a Dodge of late 1940's vintage,so it wasn't really that old at the time,but its dark blue paint was faded,it's windshield cracked and it's body rusting through.To put it another way,it looked right at home in that rough country,like something indigenous to those muddy New Brunswick back roads.It sat out in the yard between our house and our neighbors trailer.I'm not certain why my father bought it,but I believe it was for hauling wood.That's the only thing I can ever recall seeing him load in the back of it.He drove off in it,and a while later returned with what seemed like a mountain of maple logs,mixed in with a few birch,with their curling white bark.

The truck seemed to be able to go where the car could not.Or,at least to those places where my father was reluctant to take it.Roads were rough in those days and there was a very real possibility of damaging something beneath the car if you went off the main roads.But there was no worry about that in the truck.

One day I went for a ride in that truck.It was not a family car.Most of the time we went anyplace it was in my fathers car,a 1960 Valiant.There was really no room in the truck and I think my mother would have considered it beneath her dignity to be seen as a passenger in such an automobile.Trucks were really not trendy in those days,like they are now.You owned a truck if you worked in the woods,or were a fishermen.Not if you went to the city often,or for that matter,even to the smaller towns.Think the opening scene of the Beverly Hillbillies here.That truck was so big I could not climb up into it.I had to be lifted in.My feet would not nearly reach the floor and there were no seat belts either,so I kept sliding off the seats,down by that great big stick in the middle of the floor that my father used to shift the beast into gear and that shook and rattled when it wasn't being used.

Route 11 is really a coastal route.Or,at least it was in those days.Not far down the road it would be the main streets in all of the little fishing villages.But where we lived,it was a ways back from the ocean.You could not see the water even though some of the houses had lobster traps and even fishing boats up in the front yard.It really wasn't so far to the ocean.Maybe ten or fifteen miles at the most.But it seemed a long way off and,once you got there,like a very foreign place.To get there you had to take some really bad roads,some of them slick with red or brown mud,seemingly all the time.It was easy to get stuck.Moreover,once we got down by the coast,I couldn't understand what most people were saying.They were speaking Acadian French.And they seemed to be poorer by far than anyone I knew.A lot of their houses were tiny and covered in tar paper.Ot the ones that had real driveways,many of those were littered with sea shells and had broken old cars and boats where grass should have been growing.We even visited a place one time where there were chicken in the house,on the floor.It was a very different world even though it reall wasn't far from the highway.To get to such places,we usually took the truck.