When he climbed into the pickup cab and turned the key, the big Chevy 350 V-8 fired up immediately, the exhaust note a low throaty rumble in the quiet night air. Monty had started driving tractors on the ranch when he was 10, trucks a couple of years later, and he had always loved internal combustion engines. This truck was older now, but he kept it in good shape outside, and in excellent shape inside. He'd stripped off the emission controls, bolted on a set of tubular headers with low-restriction mufflers, added a big 4-barrel carb, and tuned it to take advantage of the power unleashed by his modifications. This, too, required that he flout the law, for the state had decreed a few years earlier that all vehicles in all areas, not just in highly-polluted urban areas, must pass mandatory smog inspections every 2 years. Like most country people, Monty had felt this to be a ridiculous imposition. Out here, people lived a couple of miles apart, and their vehicles usually only traveled the road once a week or even less often. Sometimes a whole day went by without a single car, except for the rural mail delivery vehicle, passing on the paved county road.
So Monty illegally converted his truck engine to have it perform like engines in the '50's and '60's. When registration time rolled around, he took it in to a garage in King City, owned by a high school chum. The friend's father had a stock Chevrolet pickup of the same year as Monty's, and it somehow always was in having a smog check on the day Monty had an appointment to have his check done. The paperwork Monty was given always indicated that his truck had passed the test with a clean bill of health. There were many people besides Monty who appreciated high-performance vehicles, and who felt that a sparsely-populated rural area did not need the same controls as did the Los Angeles basin.
He let out the clutch, and the truck rumbled along the packed trail leading to the wide spot in the river where the gravel base, shallow sloped banks, and shallow flow of water had provided a ford for many years. In the winter, unusually heavy rains could cause flooding and make the river impassable for several days at a time, but there was a dam upstream which regulated the flow the rest of the year, releasing enough water from the reservoir all summer to maintain the river at a level which provided water for ranchers' cattle and also replenished the supply of water from shallow wells near the river. In some locations, year-round springs had been tapped to supply household water, but most ranches used wells for domestic water.