Tickle Belly Road

I was reminded recently of something that happened when I came home with my first pickup truck. It was a grey 1992 Ford Ranger. It had a small 4 cylinder engine, and a full 7 foot bed. I was going to college in Kentucky when I had bought the Ranger, and my sister’s kids were still young enough to want a ride in the back when I came home to Pennsylvania for a visit.

My oldest sister’s three kids jumped excitedly into the back of the truck. Joining them was another one of my sisters and her dog. It was a Weimaraner, named Hannah and that dog was nuttier than squirrel shit. As we are driving around the neighborhood, I hatch one of my schemes. I take them up Gauf’s Hill and turn left onto Seidersville Road.

Seidersville Road is the road that we, as kids, would refer to as Tickle Belly Road. When my sisters and I were young, my Father and Mother would take us out for Sunday Drives every once in a while. There may have been an actual purpose to our drive, like heading to someone’s house, or we may just have been going out for a drive. The four of us kids would load into the back seat of the Galaxy 500, and with mom and dad up front, off we would go. We would all always ask, plead, and beg him to take us down Tickle Belly Road. And if we were going in that direction, he often would.

Seidersville is a winding two lane road that runs through a hilly area. Along this road there are a series of hills (more like humps really) that have sharp, though not very large drops. When a car is going at a decent speed and comes to one of these drops, you experience a sensation of free fall. It is almost like the brief feeling of weightlessness you get on a good rollercoaster, although it is to a much lesser degree on this road. Small children may come up out of their seats for a moment, but it lasts less than a second and you feel it mostly in your belly. At least humans do.

On this fine afternoon, I’m trying to get the truck up as fast as I can between these humps. I’ve got the pedal to the floor. Of course being a 4-cylinder truck, the resulting speed is not incredibly fast. It was evidently fast enough for what was about to transpire. Anyway, I had my seatbelt on so I knew that I wasn’t going anywhere. We hit the first hump, and I distinctly remember the kids squealing with delight. So I built up a little more speed for the second hump. This time I heard, along with screams of delight, the sounds of bodies returning to the bed of the truck. I look in the rearview and see children smiling and laughing, with the wind blowing their hair into their faces. The dog is prancing around nervously, but she was always doing that, so I thought it was all of the excitement and the screaming of the kids.

I built up speed for the subsequent hills. After hitting a few more humps, I’m not really sure how many or when I even noticed it, but the screaming in the back had changed pitch, and continued for what seemed to be a prolonged time. The first couple of hills were greeted with a short, surprised squeal, followed by screams of laughter. Now the screams were higher in pitch, and were continuous. I looked in the rear view and saw that the kids were frantically pushing their way to the front of the truck bed. I went over at least one more hump, which was no longer greeted with the sounds of delight. No, it was more the sounds of panic and fear.

I pulled the truck over at the first place that I could safely do so. Because, let’s face it, I am all about the safety of my passengers. Once I come to a stop, the dog dives into the cab through the rear sliding window. I don’t know how she got there, because in order to make that dive she has to go over the children who are still frantically screaming and pressing up against the front of the truck.

I leapt out of the truck and rushed to the back to see who is bleeding, who has the broken limb, whose fragile sense of self worth has just been shattered by ... oops ….that was me, but that is a much longer and sordid tale…

When I get to the back of the truck, I see the panicked faces of the children. My sister however, looks at me almost stunned. “What kind of cold-hearted person is she?” I wonder to myself. Can’t she see that these children have been traumatized? Why isn’t she aiding them and giving them comfort?

The screams have died down to a whimper by this time, there is no obvious blood on anyone or in the truck bed. At least whatever it was, it wasn’t arterial. And everyone seems to be looking in horror at the back of the truck. When I look, I understand that I was the cause of all of this distress. It wasn’t a simple broken bone, and it couldn’t just be chalked up to kids being kids. No, this was my fault…

Apparently after the second or third hump, the dog had dropped a loaf into the bed of the truck. When the kids saw it, they immediately screamed and tried to get as far away from it as they could. This of course did not include getting out of the truck, because I was driving at a speed that was… well, let’s just say it was too fast for the road conditions. The loaf was solid enough to become airborne, and had evidently been banging around in the back of the truck with my sister and my other sister’s kids as I speeded up over the last couple of hills.

My sister was extremely apologetic that her dog had just crapped in the back of my truck, but I just thought it was funny. She scooted the turd out of the back. I got the dog out of the cab, shut the sliding window, and drove home.

Of course I drove back down Tickle Belly Road in the other direction, and just as fast. But for some reason it seemed to have lost some of its luster. No matter how fast I would go, no matter how much air came between my passengers and the bed of my truck over the humps, the children’s squeals of delight just never returned that day…