The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth

I had to go to court as a witness sometime back and was asked to raise my right hand and to swear I would “tell the truth, the whole truth,” etc. I had to ask the nice man in the uniform exactly what that meant. He explained, “Will you answer all of the questions we ask you honestly?” “Well certainly, I would have done that without the oath. I was concerned about the whole truth thing.”

The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

First of all, I don’t always remember the whole truth. Secondly, I don’t always care to share the whole truth and third, they don’t really want me to tell them the whole truth.

The first question was,  “How long have you known Mr. X?” The truth is about five years.

The whole truth would take some time to calculate. Let me see, I met him in October 12, 2001 at 11:14 p.m. I have known him for five years, one month, 29 days and three hours, and “What time is it now?”

I am frequently asked if Rural Legends are true. Every word in these stories is true. I am also frequently reprimanded by the unnamed but real people who shared some of these events with me. “You left out parts,” they will say. Of course I left out parts; this isn’t a confession column. Even then, sometimes more of the truth leaks out than I intended.

One early one morning when I was 16, the Volkswagen I was driving slid on the loose gravel, rolled several times and landed on its top. I walked home and my mother asked what I had forgotten. I explained I had a small accident. She asked again, “What did you forget?” Even when I tell the whole truth, no one believes me. What I had forgotten was to “Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down.”

When the accident was investigated, I remembered at the last minute the accelerator had stuck to the floor causing the excessive speed that was responsible for the accident. I somehow forgot that accelerators have difficulty becoming unstuck when the driver’s foot is not removed from it.

As it turned out, nothing on the body with the exception of one door handle survived the incident but the car ran as well as ever. One of my siblings removed the fenders and hood and cut the top off with a hacksaw. The car was now a dune buggy.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a dune within several hundred miles. Fortunately, there were miles of logging roads to test it on. Unfortunately, to get from one logging road to the next required using state highways. Fortunately, there was little traffic on back roads in the 70’s at night. Unfortunately, when you remove fenders from a VW you also remove the headlights but fortunately, none of us were seriously damaged physically but, according to the passengers, some of the emotional scars remain.

We learned many things from this experiment, which I consider to be the only physics class I have ever attended.

We learned Dune Buggies have roll bars for a reason. We learned it is possible to do a wheelie as you catch second and if you don’t see the guy wire on a power pole. We learned mud holes filled with water might be deeper than the car. We learned that in a VW without a hood crossing a creek at high speed, due to the sloped front, a sheet of water would pass through where the windshield should have been and pick you up and remove you from the car.

In the end, I purchased a VW named Gretchen with a bad engine. Repairing Gretchen required a donor motor from our dune buggy, which ended our physics class. On a positive note, I now had a vehicle with all of those unnecessary accessories like fenders and lights. Somehow Gretchen seemed to like logging roads as much as the dune buggy but most of those stories would require “the whole truth,” which isn’t available at this time.