Published: September 24, 2009 09:14 pm      

The message was for her, but she missed it

I have no idea who she was, but she followed me for several miles.

Each time I glanced into my rear-view mirror, I could see her talking energetically into a cell phone she was holding with one hand, and occasionally waving and otherwise gesturing with the hand that should have been firmly connected to the steering wheel, but was not.

Eventually, she turned onto a side road, and the pickup truck that was behind her narrowed the gap between us and took up station behind me.

It wasn’t a brand-new truck by any means, and the Yankee Government would have been proud to give its owner $4,500 for it, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for aging pickup trucks and will simply say it had developed a character appropriate for its age.

It was a great truck. Across the front edge of its hood, the owner had painted in reversed letters that, when read in a rear-view mirror, spelled out HANG UP AND DRIVE, IDIOT!

My suspicion is that the young woman who would most have benefitted from this message never even noticed it.

Pity.

——————

Some years ago when it became time for me to say good-bye to an old car and hello to a new one, I actually considered buying a pickup truck. I love pickup trucks just as much as anyone can, who does not have a pickup truck of his own.

A friend of mine has an early-1960s GMC pickup that’s green and totally unrestored, and it is a thing of beauty. It has a three-speed manual transmission on the column, no power steering or power brakes, and ... it rides like a truck. He adores it and uses it for its designed purpose, which that of moving large things from place to place.

What little research I felt like doing revealed that the first pickup truck was made in America by Ford, which introduced its Model T Runabout in April 1925.

By that time, though, many previous Model Ts had been converted to a configuration resembling a pickup truck by their owners, who decided such vehicles would be cheaper to maintain and less cantankerous than the horses who had been pulling their wagons.

Ultimately, I did not buy a pickup truck. I have long been a practical man and after some thought came to the same conclusion that I often reach today when I see an attractive woman who is more than a few years younger and probably far more energetic than I am: Very nice, but what in the hell would I do with something like that?

Instead, I bought another of the full-body, four-wheel-drive vehicles that I have been driving since about 1970.

It’s no longer politically correct to drive four-wheelers, although all-wheel-drive crossovers are somewhat acceptable — particularly if they are hybrids.

When people ask me why I drive a vehicle that’s not as eco-friendly as they might like, I tell them that I live in a place where it snows, and my employer doesn’t call off work when that happens.

Hybrids work for some people — another friend who spends a lot of time on the road has one, and he gets well over 40 miles per gallon — but not for everyone.

A few years back, while wrapped in a warm glow of let’s-go-green-and-save-money-while-doing-it, officials in Philadelphia traded in a number of the city’s conventional vehicles for gas/electric hybrids.

Eventually, someone figured out that each hybrid cost about $4,000 extra because of the engine/motor combination, and the type of driving they encountered would prevent them from ever saving enough in gasoline bills to pay for themselves.

Recently I saw a true veteran pass by, a Jeep pickup truck that dated from the mid-to late 1970s. It was somewhat rusted and battered, and its bed was full of stuff that would never fit into the trunk of a car. That truck had seen a lot of service, and I’m sure its owner is proud of it. It made a statement that only some folks would understand.

I once owned a Jeep Cherokee station wagon of the same vintage. It got 10 miles per gallon whether I was driving in town or out on the highway, but gas was cheap and it would go anywhere I wanted to take it during deer season.

It’s likely that the fellow who owned this old Jeep pickup probably heard about the Cash For Clunkers Program and turned his nose up at it. Anyone who is practical enough to drive a vehicle like his would probably suspect the motives, the honesty or the sanity of anyone who would offer him $4,500 for it.

Even if he did get that $4,500, he’d still have to drop big bucks to buy another truck that would replace it.

There would be monstrous monthly payments to make, and if he lived in West Virginia, where people pay personal property taxes on all of their motor vehicles (and their dogs), he might end up paying more taxes on his new truck than he does on the house where he lives.

Were we to ask this gentleman why he continues to drive this truck after all these years, he’d probably tell us he has developed a certain fondness for it. We Americans do get attached to our pickup trucks.

And he’d probably add this:

“It’s paid for, and it runs.”