"Well, we can still see the headlights..." by Troy H. Cheek on May 04, 2005

Back last Spring, I was getting ready for work when the phone rang. It is not unusual for me to get phone calls. It is unusual for me to get one at 10:30pm. Most people know better than to call me after my nominial 9pm bedtime. That's about the time I become very grumpy, adopt the vocabulary of a drunken sailor, and develop the diction of Francis the Talking Mule. The only reason I was awake that night was because I had been called in to work 3rd shift. I answered the phone, hoping it was somebody from work calling to tell me to cancel.

It was my younger brother, T2. (My mother gave us all names beginning with the letter 'T' to make the names easier to remember.)

"Hey, you got time to come pull me out of the river?" T2 asked.

"Can't you just walk out?" I asked back.

"Nah, man, not me," he huffed. "It's the Jeep."

"How did your Jeep end up in the river?"

"We were trying to get the boat out of the river when the Jeep rolled backwards, trailer and all. I'm afraid to start it because I don't want to suck water into the engine. Can you bring a tow chain and pull me out?"

"How far into the river did it roll?"

"Well, we can still see the headlights..."

I thought for a few moments. "I'd love to, T2, but I'm about to leave for work. Also, I don't know where a tow chain is around here. Sorry."

"Is Dad there?"

"No, Dad and Mom are in Cades Cove this weekend."

"That's okay," T2 said. "I'll check with T3. I'm sure he has a chain. I would have been better to use your or Dad's big truck to pull the Jeep, but I'm sure T3's little truck will work."

"Let me know how that turns out," I said before I hung up.

A few days later, I noticed my brother's Jeep parked over at the old house. It had buckets and cut-off milk jugs underneath it, apparently catching various fluids which were leaking out. I looked inside and saw something I'd never seen before: a clean Jeep interior. In fact, it looked like someone had hosed out the entire Jeep.

A few days after that, I noticed that the Jeep was gone and a black truck was in its place. I called up T2 to see what was going on, but he wasn't home. I called T3.

As the story was related to me at that point, T2 called T3 to beg the loan of a tow chain and some horsepower. T3 had other things to do, but decided that this couldn't take too long.

"How far into the river did it roll?"

"Well, we can still see the headlights..."

So T3 packed up and drove to the river. He found T2, his girlfriend, and a fishing buddy standing on the bank. "Where's the Jeep?"

They pointed to the river. T3 looked out, expecting to see a Jeep flooded up to its gunwales. Instead, he saw nothing but water.

Then he looked down.

"Well, I'll be... You can still see the headlights."

Months before, T2 had come to me with a problem. That problem was that when he was fording creeks, sometimes his lights were shorting out and blowing fuses. I swapped a few cracked bulbs with newer ones, replaced some wires that had worn insulation, and hosed down the battery terminals and every exposed connection with some silicone waterproofing spray I'd picked up at a flea market somewhere. I'd solved the problem better than I'd thought. All reports indicated that the headlights were still burning brightly after forty minutes under six feet of water.

As T3 hadn't been told to bring any scuba diving equipment, it took a while to figure out how to connect the tow chain. T3 discovered that if it stood tiptoe on the hood, he could keep his head out of the water as long as T2 (who is a bit taller and stockier) braced him against the current. By holding a double armfull of tow chain against his chest, T3 could sink down to the level of the front bumper and hook up the chain before running out of air and having to be pulled back up by T2.

They only had to do this three times before getting a solid hookup. T3's fingers kept going numb from the cold and he'd drop the chain. Though it had been a warm Spring day, the nights were still cold and the water from the river was coming from snow runoff.

Back in his truck with the heater going full blast, T3 tried to ease the Jeep out of the water. No go. Finally, teeth still chattering, he floored it and fishtailed up the ramp, rescuing the Jeep and getting a scattered round of applause from all the participants in this little drama.

After adjusting the chain for road towing, they brought it to the old house until they could work on it.

Some time later, I got the rest of the story from T2. Apparently, he'd had trouble with the parking brake since he'd first bought the Jeep, and recently the gearshift had taken to jumping out of gear when the Jeep was left parked on a hill. As such, he didn't want to leave it just sitting on the ramp while securing his boat to the trailer. He yelled to the fishing buddy to throw a rock under the front wheel.

Fishing buddy, not knowing about the parking brake or the gearshift, but definitely having had a beer or twelve, grabbed a rock about the size of his fist and told T2 that everything was taken care of. The girlfriend, not being able to swim and being cold already, sat in the passenger seat and dozed off.

T2 eased the boat into position but couldn't quite get it far enough up on the trailer. Fishing buddy decided that he would help out by jumping up and down on the trailer hitch, in spite of T2 yelling at him not to. T2 watched in horror as the front wheel rolled over the rock and the Jeep started coming toward him.

T2 dove out of the boat and raced to the back of the Jeep, bracing it to keep it from rolling into the river. He looked to fishing buddy for help, but fishing buddy apparently thought the best way to help would be to climb into the boat and back it out of the way. Girlfriend couldn't get to the brake pedal thanks to the bucket seats and that huge console. Besides, she was too busy screaming about how she couldn't swim and was going to drown. T2's strength finally gave out and he had to let the Jeep go. Then he had to wade into waist-deep water to carry his girlfriend to shore. The current caught the trailer and the Jeep was carried out of sight.

Except, as noted before, they could still see the headlights.

T2 called me, then called T3, as detailed above.

"Nice story," I complemented T2. "But where's the Jeep now?"

"I traded it for that truck over there. I found a guy looking for a Jeep to restore, and he was willing to trade even on it."

"Did you tell him it had been in the river?"

"Of course. I warned him that it had been in the river and that I didn't know how much water had gotten into the engine. That was okay with him. He just wanted to know how deep it had gotten."

"And what did you tell him?"

"Well, that we could still see the headlights..."

Copyright 2005 by Troy H. Cheek. Reprint with prior written permission only. Comments and questions to