“I like big cars, like the one that’s sitting in my grandpa’s yard.” — Heather Myles

As I sat down recently to the television news, I heard a thud — a big thud, the kind that likely echoed all the way around the girth of this big old world.

The unsettling noise, followed by an uneasy feeling inside my stomach, was made by the flopping corpse of Henry Ford as it tumbled over in his grave at Ford Cemetery — the future of driverless cars is here now, expected to soon dominate our transportation lives.

According to the TV news, the technology’s advance is quickly outpacing government action to produce important definitions and rules necessary for its use.

Without getting into the pros and cons of this fascinating scientific development, something about the idea of not driving your own car seems to throw a big wrench into the flywheel of Henry Ford’s efforts to make cars available to everyone.

That industrial achievement, through the assembly line and low owner cost, brought not only four wheels, a chassis, an engine and a gas tank, but no small amount of freedom that fired the imagination of anyone who ever got behind the wheel of a car.

I remember an old 1950s-era blue Pontiac my dad used to drive. It had a moose tooth on a chain hanging from the rearview mirror. I remember being parked along the Escanaba River in that car as a young kid with my dad.

The windows had fogged over from our breath as we waited out a deafening morning thunderstorm. I was very young at the time. The storm never let us get out and fish.

I think even then I might have been wanting the chance to drive a car myself, like dad. I remember looking with wonder at the gauges on the dashboard, and the lights that blinked with turns. There was even a radio.

In the years that followed, that urge to have a car only grew as my younger brother and I would beg to be taken and dropped off to fish waters a good distance from our house. We could never understand why our parents were reluctant to do that — one of those things that would become obvious to us in a few more years.

Instead, we would grab what individual freedom we did have. Like all kinds of other young kids, we would get on our bikes and ride to small creeks or streams close to town. There we would have important early adventures in brook trout fishing, learning about the woods and the water, train tracks and waving engineers.

In those early days, my folks were fond of taking rides out into the woods to look for deer, bears and other types of animal life, often with a picnic lunch, and us kids packed along too.

My dad used to call a favorite route he had “taking a ride around the horn.” We also rode “out north,” or “out south.”

In those days, my dad drove a station wagon he’d push over the two-tracks back in the deep woods beyond the blacktop. That was back in the days of pull-top beer and pop cans and the Hamm’s bear telling you what time it was.

My own first car would come later, it too was a Pontiac — a car named for a famous Ottawa American Indian and the town where the machine was first produced in the mid-1920s.

Other vehicles followed for me, of course, including a couple of trucks I would come to consider family members given all the beautiful places they had taken me to and the rough weather they kept me out of.

In 1973, a few months before the big oil embargo, country singer Jerry Reed released a hit song bemoaning the problems cars had brought to the American consumer.

“Well, if you’re one of the millions who own one of them gas-drinking, piston-clinking, air-polluting, smoke-belching, four-wheeled buggies from Detroit City, then pay attention. I’m about to sing your song son,” Reed said in the open.

My dad had that song on an 8-track tape called “Country Sunshine” he liked to play on our woods road drives. Reed was no stranger to cars, trucks and driving. Beyond his hit, “Lord, Mr. Ford,” Reed played Cledus “Snowman” Snow in the “Smokey and the Bandit” movies and had another big hit about driving from one of those films called, “East Bound and Down.”

Years later, it would turn out, Jerry Reed was the last country concert I would see with my dad. Reed came to Baraga to play at the casino there. He held a meet-and-greet opportunity beforehand, the first and last one my dad ever attended.

Now, Jerry Reed is gone too.

These days, I often find myself sitting behind the wheel of my vehicle, before I start the engine. Just sitting there thinking about where might go. I know it’s going to be to the woods, but where? There’s so much to do, see, hear, feel and experience.

Before long, an idea presents itself. I turn the motor over and, even with a seat belt on, I feel free as a bird, dropping down into gear and turning the wheels out of the driveway, hearing the gravel crunching under the wheels.

The excitement of knowing I’ll soon be somewhere “out there,” with my hands on the steering wheel, reliving my past and finding the present all at once, is a fine form of satisfaction so profound, I don’t think I can put it into words.

At least I tried.

Editor’s note: John Pepin is the deputy public information officer for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the DNR on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.