Photo by Jean Rukkila.
If you’ve never listened to the Hot Country Knights singing “Pick Her Up,” you may not be interested in reading any further because this Letter From Home is basically a paean to pickup trucks, including the lyrics they inspire. An example of this brilliance is: “If you wanna do right on a Saturday night/This is all you’ve gotta do/…Pick her up in a pickup truck.” And: “Yeah, buddy, she ain’t got no use for a BMW/Or wine from a hundred dollar bottle/She’d rather bounce around in the outskirts of town/Shotgunnin’ in a muddy Silverado.”
To watch the Knights perform this song is honestly a pretty worthwhile endeavor. A lot of hip action and bad wigs, and of course a damsel who’s in no distress at all. It’s a peek into a different world than the one I travel in, unless of course I’m in my truck, and then it all makes sense. That’s when I feel like I need a sleeveless denim jacket and an electric guitar, and a layer of mud halfway up the side of my Tacoma. I need giant tires and no muffler, and a bobble-head Buddha (well, maybe not a Buddha) on the dashboard. Why is it our trucks inspire us to become someone different for a while, someone surer and wilder and not quite so law-abiding? Someone who’d do up her hair and put on her pointy boots and snap-button shirt and cruise around on a Saturday night looking for trouble? That’s not exactly me but it’s not exactly not me either.
I grew up in a pickup-free time and place: the ‘50s and early ‘60s in New York City. Our family car was a Rambler station wagon with two seats facing forward and one facing back. We’d drive out to my grandmother’s place in New Jersey in the days when the Garden State still had gardens and seemed light years from the city. Her house was surrounded by farmland and my earliest memory of a pickup was a truck belonging to the farmer, a man named Martin Mulhare. It was dark green with a wood-sided bed, and Mr. Mulhare used to drive with his right hand on the wheel and his left elbow out the window. Years later, when I finally got my first pickup, I drove it exactly like Mr. Mulhare.
Maybe you know the history of pickups. I didn’t and I was surprised to discover that despite a few endeavors in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, pickup trucks didn’t really appear on the market until 1925 when Ford manufactured the first Model T Runabout with Pickup Body. There were 34,000 made that year and you could buy one for the whopping price of $281. It had a four-cylinder 40-horsepower engine, an impressive amount of power for that day and age. Other car makers followed, and after a lull during the Second World War when trucks were being made for military use only, the sale of pickups took off as popular rather than commercial vehicles. Besides their practical use, they embodied the mythology of the Wild West. After their particular brand of horsepower put horses out of business, we needed a new symbol to replace the equines that had for so long captured our imaginations, representing the freedom of the open range. Enter, the pickups.
My first truck came to me after I totaled my car on an icy stretch of highway 180, rushing home from the Grand Canyon on my way to a yoga class. The accident was mild but my car wasn’t worth the fix. Within a week I’d answered an ad for a white Datsun pickup with a camper shell, and a few dollars later it was mine. It’s the only vehicle I’ve ever given a name to. I named it after a white horse I’d also given a name to. I lived off of what was then called Leupp Road and is now Townsend-Winona, and for some reason I liked sleeping on the ground outside my house. All winter long I did this, and one night, a night with a strong moon that appeared after a dusting of snow, I was awakened by the scent or maybe the feel of warm grassy breath on my face. I opened my eyes to the muzzle of a white horse just inches from my forehead. Pure Thought is what I called that horse afterwards, and gave the name to my first truck as well.
That truck did many miles between Arizona and Iowa where I was in graduate school. For a month, while looking for housing in Iowa City, I slept in Pure Thought which was at the time packed with all my possessions, including a keyhole desk and a motorcycle. Besides one significant breakdown on Interstate 80 somewhere in Nebraska, when the truck simply stopped running and I had the great good luck of enough momentum to steer it onto the shoulder where I could walk for help, Pure Thought was a reliable and willing workhorse and I was sad to meet the patch of Iowa ice that did her in. Again ice, and again an insignificant accident in a vehicle not worth the fix.
After that it was one blue Datsun after another, followed finally by the four-wheel-drive Toyota Tacoma I have today. It’s forest green, dependable, and these days often full of wood or straw or someone else’s furniture on its way to a new home. And just last week I went out and got a truckload of manure from Eric. Camels make a very nice manure. I have to jump out and manually lock the front wheels in order to be in 4WD, and the paint is peeling from close to 30 years in the sun. As one bumper sticker peels off, another replaces it. It’s like watching the different layers of my life come and go. Clinton for President (but which Clinton?). Promote the Goat (but why exactly?). Keep Fish Wet. Save the Verde. Capitol Reef. And others too faded to read, like a pause in the conversation.
My truck has known me, if such a point of view is possible, for longer than my friends. It has carried me along back roads that have themselves carried me into canyons and up into mountain meadows and fields of sunlit snow. I’ve taken a picture of my truck as it sits before beautiful views, the machine in the foreground that makes the journey to the background possible. I have an affection, a wild affection I’ll admit, for this vehicle and the likes of it that carry us and demand so little in return. The Hot Country Knights sang it true, after all. It’s a love song—not to the damsel, but to the truck.
