Last year we bought a boat that weighs about two tons, and I needed a pickup truck to haul it. My son-in-law’s dad had one sitting in a barn up around Forest that had not been started in over three years and was there for the taking. My daughter had warned me that it’s no beauty, not as far as trucks go these days. But bless her female heart, she was only judging it by the way it looks which, as any guy in good standing can tell you, has little to do with pickups. The way it sounds? Sure. But how it looks? Way down the list.
It’s a twenty-two-year-old Dodge Ram 1500 extended cab, metallic gray but badly faded, and it’s got a dent—more like a gash — that runs waist-high the length of both passenger side doors. The rear bumper is chrome-plated but it’s rumpled — the result, I’m told, of past miscalculations involving some trees on the ranch – and it has a trailer hitch with a two-inch ball, haphazardly mounted, that appears to have been stuck on as an afterthought and not even welded to the frame. It’s never had a plastic liner, and the bed has acquired that rusted/scoured appearance that comes from regularly hauling bricks or firewood or other such abrasives on an unprotected surface.
In other words, it’s a real truck, one that I don’t have to worry about scratching or denting or staining if I haul a load of oyster shells, or let my slightly wet dog ride in it, or drive along some seldom-used logging trail and scrape up against — or run slap over – a pine sapling or two. This baby’s already got plenty of battle scars; so what’s a few more?
My father moved to Pascagoula in 1932, and over the course of his 91 years, he owned more boats than he did cars. He always kept them clean and always in top mechanical shape. But they were working boats, not showboats; not one of them ever had so much as an ounce of Gel-coat on it, and the closest any of them got to having what could be termed “upholstery” were vinyl-covered seat cushions either straight off the rack or mail-ordered from Sears.
“Don’t baby your boat,” he’d always say, “you can always slap a little more paint on it.” And now, many years later, I feel the same way about a pickup. If you’ve got to pamper it, it ain’t a real truck, it’s a “lifestyle statement.” I mean, how many shrimpers or plumbers or pulpwood haulers are going to buy a pickup made by Cadillac? (And, yeah, there are such things.) Can you imagine some investment banker in a $3500 Armani suit hauling a load of manure in the bed of his $125,000 Cadillac “pickup”? (And, no, that $125,000 figure is not a misprint. Neither is the $3500.)
Now, the truck’s not perfect, not by a long shot. For one thing, it doesn’t have four-wheel drive, which doesn’t matter very often – I’m not into mud riding – but there are times when having it would ease my mind considerably, such as when I’m backing 4,200 pounds of boat loaded with 58 gallons of fuel down a concrete launching ramp that’s a little too steep and darkened with just enough algae to make it kinda slick.
But what I’d want even more than four-wheel drive is a manual transmission, a four-speed mounted on the floor. I’d even settle for three on the tree. Unless you’ve got a manual transmission, you’re not driving a truck, you’re pointing it. When I’m going up a steep incline – or more importantly, when I’m going down one – I want to be the one who decides if I need to shift into a lower gear, not some mini-computer that I wouldn’t even know how to locate. You don’t see any automatic transmissions in a NASCAR race; that ought to tell you something.
Plus, I want to be an active participant in driving, not just some spectator. Driving is an art, not a science, and my truck’s not some video game. But it’s getting harder and harder to find a four-speed these days – and the price on this truck was right – so I’ll have to live with it. Besides, the imperfections just add to its appeal, at least for me. And if somebody asks me where I got it, I’ll have a story to tell, which is a heck of a lot better than saying “I bought it on Carvana through the internet.”
Anyhow, the truck doesn’t have a name yet, but I’m sure some female in my family will come up with one. Naturally, it’ll be their attempt to ridicule or deride, but I’m sure I’ll embrace it, and I might even end up shelling out an extra forty or so bucks to put it on a vanity tag, one of those black-and-white numbers. But as of now, it has no name; all I can say is I’ve found my rescue truck, and it’s found its forever home.
