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Oh, you made me think of another funny story.

Summer of ‘82 I was in between freshman and sophomore years at Mizzou, mostly chasing tail and drinking. Dad was cutting wheat on some rental ground southeast of Columbia. He called me and asked if I’d haul a load to the elevator so he could stay running. Yeah, ok, didn’t have anything else to do really so why not, right?

Anyway, that was on a Friday evening and he wanted the truck dumped as early as possible on Saturday, but one thing led to another and I wound up staying out all night long partying with friends. Came time Saturday morning to meet Dad I asked my two runnin’ buddies if they wanted to go along. Sure they did, so we stopped at the beer store, picked up another case, and went to meet Dad.

Dad was putting what should have been the first hopper full of a new load on the truck when we rolled in, already half lit from being out all night. When my buddies climbed out of the car Dad got this “Oh sh*t, what have I done?” look on his face but it was either haul it himself or send it with me.

Anyway, after exchanging the usual friendly insults with my buddies Dad proceeds to announce that MFA in Columbia was full and I was going to have to take the load to Auxvasse. No big deal there, right? Wrong. The weasels at Missouri hiway patrol knew that the Columbia MFA wasn’t taking grain and had set up a portable scale on 54 hiway north of Kingdom City. So Dad tells me to cut off at Hatton exit and take Rt. E to 54 and come into Auxvasse from the north.

So we head out. It was a generally uneventful trip on the way, but I noticed something on Rt. E in the Leeper Branch bottom that got my gears to grinding - a dead skunk in the middle of the road. A really big, really swollen, horrible stinking dead skunk on a day that was going to top out close to 100°. A plan started to come together.

I didn’t say anything and neither of my buddies noticed the skunk so I just rolled on by, went to the elevator, dumped the load and rather than go south to I70 I headed back the way we came in.

Dad’s grain truck was a ‘72 model Ford F600 that had been a flatbed delivery for LaCrosse Lumber. V8 gas motor governed to top out at 60mph. Coming down the hill on Rt. E I buried the throttle and let ‘er eat. My buddies were looking at me like WTF is he up to now. Then they saw the skunk. I popped that sucker with the driver side front tire and it exploded underneath the truck. They got a pretty good laugh out of the deal until I slowed down a bit and the smell hit. When I got to Hatton I had to slow down a lot to make the turn south at the four-way stop. That’s when the smell really caught up with us. Now mind you, it was hot outside, no A/C in the truck, been drinking all night and were drinking again. It was more than poor Daniel could take and he puked out the window all over the side of Dad’s truck. Jeff would have puked but he was stuck in the middle seat and his options were limited so he toughed it out. I couldn’t puke and drive at the same time, and there was no way in hell I was stopping, so somehow I managed to hang on until we got in front of the smell again.

I didn’t stop for ANYTHING until we pulled into the field where Dad was cutting. I shut off the ignition, kicked the tranny into neutral, and we all three bailed out with the truck still rolling. Dad was just pulling up with a load on the combine and saw the whole thing. He stopped the combine, got out and headed over to see what it was we’d done this time. Then he walked into the smell. The look on his face was indescribable. He dunked his hankerchief in the water jug from the combine, wrapped it around his face and went to look at the truck.

There was exploded skunk all over the underside of that thing, in the fenderwell, underside of the driver side running board, all over the exhaust, just everywhere. It was the most god-awful thing I have ever smelled in my life. Worse even than rotten soybeans. He was over there cussing a blue streak at us and we were rolling on the ground laughing at him.

He was a little bit mad at me for awhile but he got over it. Told me the next time he asked me to come help to leave those two no-good sons-a-bitches somewhere else.

Priceless...