How to stop your truck from fishtailing

(This began as a comment someplace else.  It didn’t end up that way.)

Many years ago, I had a 1962 GMC pickup (The Beast, for those of you who read my reminiscence of cars past) that was so over-sprung she’d fishtail and skid if you looked at her crosseyed.  She was also bad to get stuck in places, because she didn’t have enough traction due to the steroidal suspension.  This was not any fun.  I was running all over Comanche County, usually on the dirt roads, chasing cemeteries and getting stuck or spinning out was not on the list of What I Wanted To Do.  I couldn’t very well cut the suspension back down, so I asked my father for advice.

He had a solution.  We went down to the gone-out-of-business gravestone company he’d bought a year or so before, and out to their back lot, which was full of traded-in stones. We picked out two, one the bottom section of a huge pale-gray granite obelisk—about 1915 from the look of it—and the other a limestone base that would have gone with a late-nineteenth-century marble tablet marker.  The two stones, between them, weighed between 500 pounds and half a ton and balanced the back of the truck nicely. They were also heavy and rough-finished enough that they weren’t bad to slide on the wooden planks of the bed during panic stops, which was good because I also had the propane tank mounted in the bed right behind the cab, and I didn’t care to have several hundred pounds of rock slamming into a pressurized fuel tank just behind my back.

I drove probably twenty thousand miles in a couple of years, lugging those gravestones around.  They saw almost every back road Comanche County had to offer.  They were still in the bed when I went off to college in 1975.  At some point during the years I was gone, Dad took them out and did something else with them, because they were gone by the day we auctioned off the Beast in 2001.

Now I have Piet, another over-sprung truck that skids and fishtails if you look at him crosseyed, and I wish I had my tombstones back but I don’t know where to score another for cheap. Besides, I need the cargo space now.

The oatmeal cookie polishes a rubber air conditioner.  Fnord.