I had started the truck successfully after only a few tries. This was an improvement on the first day. The nineteen seventy something Ford started up almost every time after a little coaxing on the first start of the day, but it didn’t seem to want to hold an idle. I was itching to look under the hood, find the carburetor and stick a flat head screw driver onto what is called—without mystery—the idle screw. A quarter turn of that sucker might fix the problem. But I didn’t because it wasn’t my truck.

I was revving it up to go into town to buy some lumber to replace broken or rotted beads in the ‘board and bead’ siding of my friends house. It was his truck. As I waited for it to warm up / calm down / hold an idle, my eye caught the ashtray in the dashboard. They were so big back then. A prominent feature, necessary and oft used by Marlboro men and working blokes who’s filterless Pall Malls dangled with unbridled insouciance from chapped lips. I had nothing better to do, I was waiting for the fuel mixture to find a sort of equilibrium, so I reached for the handle and opened the mammoth ashtray.

An astonished face peered at me, unsure of what to do. I assume it was an astonished face even though I have not made a study of what a field mouse’s face looks like at rest, but from all signs astonishment was a reasonable assumption. After all, his house had been yanked forward what must have felt like twenty feet in human terms. He made a few jittery movements, not sure what to do. I also was not sure what to do but made a quicker decision than he, I shut the ashtray.

A few seconds went by before I decided that maybe I had been rude. Remember I had been alone on this mountain for a few days already. I could be potentially shutting the door on a budding friendship. So I opened the ashtray again. Nothing. It was if I was a magician who had put a lovely lady into a box, closed the box and she had disappeared. Only it wasn’t a lovely lady, it was a mouse. And I am no magician.

I became worried that if I didn’t encourage the little guy to abandon ship that he would have to endure the long ride into Roscoe and may then escape in the parking lot of the lumber yard far away from familiar surroundings. So I opened the glove compartment figuring there must be some mouse-sized passageway from ashtray to glove compartment. I was right.

Thankfully, before opening the glove compartment I had opened the passenger door. My potential-friend-not-to-be took another look at me and then made a Peter Pan leap to the floor boards and scurried out the open passenger side door.

This all might have been unsettling, or at best unique if I hadn’t already seen, the day before, a cousin of my field mouse friend trying to negotiate the changing space in the hinge well of the driver side door. This was very disturbing because as I opened, and potentially closed the door, I was moving a great giant metal thing that could, at any time, catch him in the wrong spot and…

On two occasions I had successfully encouraged two would be passengers to abandon ship, but I felt, as I began to drive to Roscoe that I was more of a bus driver than a lone ranger. Who knows how many small passengers I had on board, holding onto concealed cables or hunkered down into tight spaces, enduring the bumpy ride.

I enjoyed the imagined company.