All good pick-up trucks go to heaven

If memory serves me, and at this late stage that is one big if, it was the summer of 72, in Fairbanks, Alaska, when I had my most convincing encounter with the paranormal. My good buddy Davey had gotten his hands on a Honda something or other, and we were headed down some nameless dirt road, him driving, me on the back hanging on for dear life. It must have been late in the summer and even later at night, for the sun was actually far enough below the horizon to cloak the landscape in deep twilight, enough so to have to use the headlight. We had heard there was some party going on at a gravel pit somewhere down that road, and kids our age NEVER avoided a situation involving girls and intoxicants.
Anyway, I'm peering over his shoulder, hoping to be able to perhaps leap from the bike should I see Davey heading for some immovable object, when an old pick-up truck drove across the road maybe fifty feet ahead of us. It was one of those old bulbous streamlined beauties of yesteryear, circa early fifties I imagined. Although I don't think I noticed at the time, the truck wasn't using it's own headlights and it was just out of reach of our own puny headlight, but it was clearly visible, albeit in a sort of colorless moonlit sort of way. It wasn't until we passed the location of the trucks' crossing did we realize something was amiss.
As we roared past, we both looked to the right and saw an old, abandoned, rotting, falling apart filling station that had seen better days, those days apparently being long before either of us were born. Old rusting pumps, the kinds that had the glass bowls, were still standing, if not exactly straight, in front. The attached garage had collapsed into itself, the peak of the roof now inverted and sitting in the bed of........get this.........the very truck we had seen driving across the road ahead of us. The rubber of the tires had given up their mission long ago, sitting collapsed on the rims. Both headlights busted out, the windshield cracked and filthy. A neglected relic of another era.
A chill went down my spine, and I leaned forward and yelled over Davey's shoulder....."Davey, did you see what I just saw?" "Yea, man, that's just too fucking weird!" He yelled back. OK, I wasn't convinced we were on the same page, so I poked his shoulder and yelled at him to stop the bike. He slowed and pulled over, and I got off the back and stood next to him. "What did YOU see, Davey?" He looked at me a tad bit wild eyed and said, "I swear to God I saw that truck drive across the road!" I stared at him and said, "Let's go back, I gotta see this." His eyes got a bit wider and he shook his head..."No fucking way, I aint going back there!" "Awe, comon, piss ant (I didn't usually have the luxury of calling Davey a piss ant, but I suddenly had license if he of all people was scared), what, you afraid that trucks gonna run you over? I want to see where it went!"
Well, no way was Davey gonna wimp out in front of me, so we turned around and puttered back to the station, and stared at the old wreck, and then to the other side of the road where we'd both seen the truck go in the dim light. We could make out what might have been evidence of an old driveway or something leading into the woods, but it had been long overgrown. So we both shrugged our shoulders, got back on the bike, and continued our journey to the gravel pit, both of us silent, pondering the mystery of our shared experience. If I had been the only one of this motley pair to have seen this apparition, I would have chalked it up to a trick of the dim light, but I had not told Davey what I saw, and he had confirmed on his own what had transpired ahead of us. So, there you have it, my encounter with the paranormal, not with an ethereal human figure, but the ghost of an old pick-up truck, which in retrospect, HAD to have been a Ford. I have yet to have owned one that gave up on life that easily.