Rabbit Box Blog

The first time I met my cousin Robert, I knew he was different.

We were both children, he about five, me about seven. His father, my mother’s brother Jack, had moved to Chicago in pursuit of better work, so Robert had spent most of his young life away from the rest of us. 

Now Jack moved the family back to North Carolina, and we got our first look at Robert.

The youngest of my uncles on that side of the family, Leroy, lived with my grandparents on their farm. He was still in school but preparing for a career as an auto mechanic. He already had various cars sitting around the place while he worked on them.

Bud was a true shade tree mechanic. One of the large old oaks in the yard often did duty as a makeshift garage. Not only did it offer shade, but it also held the block and tackle Leroy used to hoist the engines out of cars.

When Jack and his family arrived from Chicago, Robert piled out of the car with his parents and brother and sisters. While the rest of them hugged my grandparents and went inside, Robert stood transfixed at the sight of Leroy and two of his brothers working to pull an engine from a car he was rebuilding. It took several attempts to hook up the engine and balance it so they could safely lift it. As the engine finally rose free of the car, Robert turned and ran inside to join the rest of the family.

Barely able to contain his excitement, Robert yelled for everyone to come and help.

“Why do they need help?” my grandfather asked, thinking there might have been an accident. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes, Grandpa,” Robert said. “They tried and they tried, but they could not pull that tree down!”

That was the thing about Robert. He never saw things the way most people did. 

When we were a few years older, Uncle Jack bought some land on Grandpa’s farm and moved the family into a mobile home on his mini-farm. His family and ours became very close, and the five boys were almost constant playmates. When our cousin Chuck spent two weeks with our grandparents every summer, we were constantly building or rebuilding something.

One summer, it was “go carts.” We didn’t have access to any sort of engines, so these were actually coasters. Chuck’s dad owned a machine shop, so Chuck had lots of firsthand knowledge of how metal was formed into machine parts. Even if we didn’t have many metal working tools, we could often find usable parts lying around the farm, and we were all fairly handy at basic carpentry using the scraps of wood that were free for the scrounging.

We started with one go cart, but Robert quickly decided we were doing it all wrong. He scavenged some additional wheels and more wood and started putting together his own design. By the time we completed the first cart, his was almost finished. We helped him put the wheels on the axles and finish up some other minor details.

Next it was time for the first test drives. Uncle Jack’s trailer sat on a small hill, and a dirt driveway ran straight down the edge of a field into the private road that ran to Grandpa’s house. That road, too, sloped down a hundred yards or so to the end at the Shelton place. As a result, you could start at Robert’s house and theoretically coast all the way to Grandpa’s, if you could keep your speed around the right angle turn at the end of Jack’s driveway.

Both driveways were in many ways typical of private country roads. From one end to the other, the driveways went through stretches of white sand, hard-packed red clay, and rocks of sandstone and quartzite. Parallel tire tracks ran on either side of a central strip of grass. Ditches – shallow in some places, but as deep as three feet in spots – ran on each side of the road. The ditch banks were covered with a variety of weeds, mostly blackberry brambles.

For the initial test, we decided to start at the point where Jack’s driveway met Grandpa’s, and coast just a little way down toward Grandpa’s house. That section was fairly smooth and not very steep, with white sand and not too many rocks. There was just a gentle curve, so there would be no major stress on the steering. 

The one disadvantage was that the ditches here were at their deepest and the blackberries at their thickest. But we didn’t expect to be going very fast down the shallow hill, so the risk was slight.

Chuck was the first driver, being the biggest. He climbed onto the committee-built car, and we pushed him to a decent start. Everything went fine. He steered neatly down the road and came to a gradual stop where the hill leveled out. We pulled the car back to the top of our test track.

Now was Robert’s turn. He got onto his cart and we pushed him just as we had Chuck. He rode along smoothly for a few yards, then suddenly veered into the blackberry-covered ditch.

“Ouch!” Robert yelled.

We ran and pulled him out of the brambles.

“What happened?” we asked.

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “I think something broke.” That’s what the NASCAR drivers said when their cars suddenly turned into the wall, so we all figured it was logical.

We pulled the car out of the ditch and checked it over. Nothing obvious was broken.

“Wait a minute,” Chuck said. “I think I see what’s wrong. Turn that wheel for me.”

One of us turned the steering wheel while Chuck held up the front of the cart. At first, the front wheels did not move. Then, as the steering wheel rotated a couple of times, the wheels turned sharply to one side.

“Robert, how did you hook up your steering?” I asked.

“I used this rope,” Robert said, pointing to a rope tied to each front wheel and wrapped loosely around the metal rod that held the steering wheel.

“But that’s backwards,” Chuck said. “When you crank the wheel left, the wheels will turn right. And it won’t let you hold the cart steady in the road. You have to crank the steering wheel two or three times to take up the slack before the wheels will turn at all. You’d have to crank back and forth constantly just to stay straight.”

“So?” Robert answered. “I think your cart’s steering is boring.” Robert was famously touchy about criticism, and he was getting defensive.

“No, our car is right,” Chuck said. “It’s how a real car works. Let us fix yours the same way.”

“No, I like mine better,” Robert said. “I can control it. Give me another push and I’ll show you.”

We set Robert up for another test, and he did better this time. He got three-fourths of the way down the test section before he lost control, and he was able to roll off the cart before it hit the blackberries.

“Let me try,” said Chuck. The obvious challenge of controlling a perverse steering mechanism was beginning to outweigh his sense of mechanical rectitude. 

He got on Robert’s go cart and we pushed him to a fast start. He hit the ditch after just a few yards. Naturally each of us had to take a turn to see why they were having so much trouble just coasting down a hill.

It was crazy, but Robert was right. His backwards steering was more fun. Pretty soon the “proper” cart sat ignored while we took turns trying to get down the full track on the uncontrollable cart. We each had to retrain our tendency to turn in the direction we wanted to go. Bumping down the hill, it was hard to spin the steering wheel fast enough to keep control, especially when you usually started spinning in the wrong direction. 

As a result, the faster you went, the harder it was to keep the cart between the ditches, but the more fun as you yelled “Geronimo” and bailed out to avoid a crash into the brier patch.