Ryan McFarland

Some time in 1993 my parents helped me out by buying me my first car. It was a 1998 Chevy S-10 pickup. It was red, manual transmission, had an AM radio and the rear window slid open. The bed didn’t have a scratch on it, everything was manual, no cruise control, and it had a bench seat. Over the next few years i put a fabric seat cover on it, added a toolbox, changed the AM radio to a tape deck with a 10 disc CD changer behind the seat. I also added fog lights and two 1,000,000 candle power lights behind my grille. I broke off the fog lights a few times taking it on back roads at Camp Cutler. Someone stole the stereo out of it (without the face plate) and in doing so damaged the glove box door. I salvaged one from an auto wrecker but it was blue. I drove it between my parent’s house in Fairport and Naomi’s house in Himrod quite a bit. One time I hydroplaned on slush and ended up nearly missing a telephone pole and driving through a farmer’s field for a few hundred feet until my heart started beating again and i was able to pull back onto the road without ending up in the ditch. Another time a deer jumped in front of me and scared me enough to make me slow down to the speed limit the rest of the way home. A mile later i passed a State Trooper - one of only two times i can ever remember seeing one man a speed trap on my road. I was hit by a car once while in it. They crumpled the driver’s side enough that the door wouldn’t open. For a few months i got really good at crawling into the cab from the passenger side, putting the stereo faceplate on, and putting the key in the ignition all as one move. It finally annoyed me enough that i kicked the door open from the inside and the door worked just fine. I did have it repaired though. I built a console for the center of the bench seat using two 6×9 speakers and a couple of plastic supersize McDonald’s cups. It even had a slot in it to run the center seatbelt through.