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My grandpa drove a Chevy Caprice. Brown. We called it “The Turd.” I think its color at one time was blue, and he spray painted it brown. Yes, spray painted. This was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in the very tiny town of McMillan. My grandparents, Nelson and Vera, had lived there nearly all their lives, and they had learned to do everything themselves—for better or worse.

Worse, when it came to the Caprice.

The Caprice, however, turned out to play a pivotal part in my teenage years. It was 1990—I had just turned 16 and I had a driver’s license. No one—meaning my dad—would loan me a car, but I got it in my head that we teenage cousins in the family should head out for a night on the town. Town being Newberry some 10 miles away. And I, naturally, would drive. It was my idea after all.

With dad’s refusal heavy in our hearts, we looked innocently at Grandpa. Would he loan us The Turd for a few hours?

He replied as he often did—with a laugh, a Holy Christ! and a slap on his knee—the crooked one, the leg that he’d nearly lost when the chains gave way on a lumber trailer, the logs rolling over him, crushing him, taking away two years of his mobility, nearly killing him. Leaving him with one stiff leg—it always stuck out in front of him. On his snowmobile, he would have to sit almost sidesaddle—his leg out, the throttle wide open. It never seemed to slow him down, maybe even when it should have.

My grandpa was famous for his outrageous stories. His bad leg all but proved everything he said. This man had survived that, why would he have to make up anything? He’d already lived the biggest story we kids had ever heard.

My grandma, standing at the stove—always, it seemed, making a bread-sized meatloaf that somehow fed 10 mouths, more if someone arrived unannounced—would listen with half an ear.

Grandpa would sit in his chair, his leg straight out—holding a space twice that of most men, but one he filled with ease—and when his story was tall, too tall, we would shout into the kitchen, “Grandma! Is this true?”

She would answer one of two ways:

Oh, Nels! (We shouldn’t believe him.)
Or
Oh, you kids! (We should believe the lie.)

And each time my Grandpa would laugh, “Come on, tell ’em, Vera!” and swing around in his chair, his leg sweeping a full circle from the kitchen and back to the living room audience—his grandkids, sometimes as many as eight at a time, on the floor at his feet. The story would get bigger and bolder on the rebuttal.

So it was, the night we asked for the keys to the Caprice, we really weren’t sure Grandpa had the authority to let us go.

Grandpa looked at my mother, “What’s the worst that could happen, Jude?”

My mother protested weakly. She had, after all, grown up in the backwoods of the U.P. She knew exactly what could happen.

But with Grandpa’s laughter, she relented: “Be back by 9 p.m.”

We were indignant about the early curfew—but we rushed from the room and barreled into the driveway and the front seat of the car, three teenage girls on the slippery vinyl bench seat. My cousin grabbed the phone book my grandma used to sit on so she could see over the dashboard and tossed it into the backseat. I grabbed the huge column gear shift and racked it down into drive. We were on our way.

Where? To the main drag in Newberry.

The tiny downtown was lined with just a few businesses, all of which were closed on a Saturday night—save the bar, which never seemed to close. The street was a ghost town. “Where is everyone?” became the war cry of the Caprice. We were looking for local action and, finally, with dumb luck, we found it.

Having reached the end of the main street and not wanting to cross the railroad tracks, nor having the ability to turn the boat around in the street, I swung the beast into the lot behind the grocery store where we’d taken granny to get milk earlier that day. There, lo and behold, we came across a lineup of local teens parked in their cars.

“Keep going!” my cousins screeched.

To which I slammed on the brakes, took a spot in the lineup, threw it in park and rolled down my window. Yes, rolled down with an actual old crank handle.

“Hello, boys!” I shouted to the pickup truck beside us. My passengers slithered down into the bench seat out of sight. The local boys, however, sat up straighter.

“You aren’t from around here,” they assessed, hooking their elbows out their windows and leaning out for a better look.

“Oh, our grandparents live here,” I said, unwittingly delivering the pickup line of the century. We were out to impress and simply being from out of town was plenty.

“How many of you are there?” one of the boys asked.

“Three!” I said.

“We know where there’s a bonfire in the woods, wanna go?” one of the boys said, having done some quick math to match the three in his truck to our three.

“Sure!” I replied.

The Caprice erupted in hisses of protest.

“Want to ride with us?” he offered.

I was no idiot. “We’ll follow you,” I said.

The Caprice exploded again with NO, NOT IN A MILLION YEARS and ARE YOU CRAZY.

With that, the local boys took off in their pickup and I threw the Caprice back into gear. As we roared out of the IGA, I knew we were the talk of the town, every car in the lot watching us go.

Five minutes out of town, the boys took a hard right onto a two-track into the woods. I hesitated. This looked dicey. But if we wanted to have any tall tales of our own, we’d have to see this through, right? And it wasn’t 9 p.m. yet, so technically, we reassured ourselves, we were still following the rules. No one had said we couldn’t off-road with this thing.

But as I drove the—did I mention—gigantic Caprice through the ever-narrowing trail, I started to sweat. The gals in the car continued to scream and we were, in general, in a frenzy. Branches were tearing at the paint and just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, the next turn in the road revealed a huge mud hole. I watched the pickup sail through it ahead of us.

“Don’t do it!” everyone, including me, shouted. But we had no choice, because there was nowhere to turn The Turd around. So, I did what I had to do.

I gunned it.

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With horror, we watched the muddy water crest over the hood—and wash down Grandpa’s freshly painted and much-beloved Caprice. With a thud and a jerk, we surged forward, clearing the mud hole, spraying dirt everywhere and landing, more or less, on the other side.

Absolute TRIUMPH filled The Turd.

We’d done it! We were women of the world! Grown-ups! Out on an adventure! Right? Too right.

Because the next scene was a little beyond our experience. We had finally reached the bonfire. It was in a field filled with trucks, plus little ol’ us in a big ol’ car. We came to our senses just about then. It was getting late at a mere 8:30 p.m., and we had to get home.

We all locked the doors, and rolled down my window just two inches, as the boys approached.

“Ladies, we’re here!” they said. One was in a ball cap, the other two in shirts with no sleeves.

“Actually, change of plans,” I told them through my mail slot. “We need to return my grandpa’s car by nine.” I was way past being smooth at this point.

“Aw, come on,” they said. “Are you serious?”

They looked so sad, our new friends, that I relented and had a stroke of genius: “Don’t worry, boys, my aunt has a minivan. I’ll ask her if we can come back in hers next!” My pickup-line game was back.

The boys brightened. “Yes, do that!”

I thought we were in the clear and would live to see another day, but no. As we waved goodbye, a huge jacked-up truck came and blocked our one and only two-track exit, blaring its music and the horn. We sat in the Caprice and, through the crack, realized our “boyfriends” were actually about to brawl with these newcomers.

“Excuse me,” I shouted through my window to the crowd that was forming. “We need to get going! We are just going to sneeeeakkk by you!” Casual, so casual as I inched the brown car forward. Every one of us in the Caprice knew we should have listened to my mother—and not Grandpa—at that point.

The new guys jumped in front of the Turd and stopped us: “NOBODY LEAVES UNTIL THIS IS SETTLED.”

What was THIS!? We didn’t know and didn’t care. We looked at our beaus. I tossed them a little, jittery, pee-my-pants laugh. “How about you tell these guys we have nothing to do with ‘this’ and let us leave?”

The boys saw our fear and did what any good ol’ boys would do. In a chest-to-chest standoff in our headlights, one of them bellowed: “THESE GIRLS ARE LEAVING!” I realized then that they had gone from strangers to heroes. We all fell a little in love at that point.

There was some scuffling and shoving, and then, a miracle. The huge truck pulled out of the way—driving over some small trees to do so. “GO THEN!” they shouted.

“Coming back in the minivan?” one of our boys called, moments before his own impending doom.

“Definitely!” we shouted, never to see them again, sailing through that water hole on our exit like it was dry pavement. The car, by the time we got out of the woods, was covered in mud. We did the only thing we could think of—we pulled into Pickleman’s Petro gas station in Newberry and used the windshield wands and little blue rags to clean the car. It was dark—nearly 9 p.m. by now—and it looked good enough to us. We drove home and parked it and snuck into the house without saying much about our little drive to anyone at all. In the morning, we left for home in Interlochen at daybreak, before Grandpa ever got a chance to get out to the driveway.

Two days later, my mother got the call.

“Grandpa says there are scratches on his new paint job?” She was holding the phone, one hand over the receiver, the other end to her ear.

“No clue how that happened,” I said.

She stared at me while she made her goodbyes—and didn’t stop looking at me until I confessed. She was in shock—I had been a very good granddaughter up until that very minute. She said she had to call her father back before she could deal with me. I was dying inside. I had let Grandpa down!

But from my room, I heard her relaying the story to him. And, I couldn’t believe what I heard: She was telling it with laughter, the tale getting taller, the mud holes deeper, the boys more heroic. I realized then, she was her father’s daughter.

In the end, that night turned out to be one of the best memories of my youth. One of simple times and simple boys, old cars and the wilds of the U.P. And the last part was the best part: By the time we went for our next visit that Christmas, my grandpa had tripled the story yet again, his buddies stopping into the house to ask which one of us had been driving The Turd that night and leaning over to check the paint job themselves. And I found myself playing along—with Grandpa’s version, the biggest one of all. It turned out that I had inherited a little bit of my Yooper Grandpa, too—for better or worse.

Kandace Chapple is a freelance writer and avid Michigan outdoor adventurer. 

Ross MacDonald has done illustrations for periodicals such as Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The New Yorker, and has designed and created props for more than 120 films and TV shows. He was born and raised in Canada and now lives in Connecticut.