Truck Yeah

The nation’s No. 1-selling truck for almost the last 40 years - the Ford F-150 - is manufactured in Kansas City. Maybe that’s why pick-up trucks are such an integral part of life in the Midwest. Everyone in the KC metro area knows at least one person who works at the Ford plant or retired from there, and that sense of ownership must ripple across the plains. 

Even being the home of the mighty F-150 can’t fully explain the ubiquitousness of the pick-up truck here, however. It is generally understood that if you live in the Midwest and do not own a pick-up truck or do not have an immediate family member or close friend who does, you are a sad sack who will never be able to move your stuff out of an apartment. Full disclosure: my husband and I don’t own one, but my dad does, and I can name at least four friends who would lend me the use of theirs.

The fascination starts early. My 2-year-old thinks my dad’s used, 14-year-old F-150 is the coolest thing ever. He talks about trucks often, and he likes to yell "truck!" as loudly as he can. Like in church. And in toddler dialect, it sounds exactly like the F-word. 

Then as soon as many Midwestern males can legally drive and afford a vehicle, they go straight for the truck. In high school, the guys who belonged to the “hick” crowd all bought big, old, rusty trucks. They parked them all in a row in the back of the school parking lot and stood around wearing big belt buckles and doing a very poor job of trying to conceal that they were chewing tobacco. For fun, they would take their trucks “muddin.” This is pretty self-explanatory, but in case you’ve never heard of such an activity, it’s where you drive a truck around in a muddy field. On purpose. It does not work with any vehicle that is more low-profile than a pick-up. The goal seemed to be to get it covered in as much mud as possible. After weekends of muddin, they would return to the high school parking lot with clods of dirt falling off their trucks and windows covered in dried muck. Rather than being appalled at their fellow truck-owners’ vehicle hygiene and need for a wash, they congratulated each other on whose truck was most nasty, holding up the lowest-visibility windshield as a redneck badge of honor. (I did not grow up in some agricultural village in the middle of nowhere, mind you. It was a smallish town just a 30-minute drive from downtown Kansas City. But trucks were and are pervasive.)

For as long as I have existed, my father has always owned a truck. He has wrecked and completely totaled several of them. But he never got hurt very badly, so I guess they’re fairly safe. He always buys another one. And then people always call him to ask him to help them move stuff. He’s doing so this weekend. That is the curse of the truck owner: constantly being asked to ferry other people’s crap from place to place. But that’s why you have to have one or be close to someone who does. What if YOUR crap needs ferried? What if you’re buying a sizable piece of furniture at a garage sale? How do you get that home without a pick-up? What if a crazy storm broke a massive tree branch in your yard? How are you supposed to get it to the brush drop-off when the city won’t offer curbside pick-up? (I speak from recent experience, here.) 

On a trip to Colorado a couple months ago, my friends and I counted 74 Subarus over the course of a four-hour drive. But there weren’t nearly as many pick-ups. You can’t get a refrigerator home in a Forester. Nor have I seen many trucks in other parts of the country like San Diego or Tampa or Philadelphia, and certainly not New York City. How do those people move from one apartment to another? Where do they put wet dogs when they don’t want their car to get stinky? And I guess they have no plans to tow an RV or boat anywhere.

There are so many when-you-need-a-truck scenarios. But not everyone needs one; like I said, you just need to know someone who does. The polar bears have less ice to stand on every day thanks to tiny women and people who never leave the suburbs tooling around in massive Dodge Rams. Then, those people try to park their behemoths in urban parking garages downtown and bitch about how they don’t fit. Or, like someone too fat to fit in a standard plane seat, they just spill over into the spaces around them, making it uncomfortable for everyone else. More than once I’ve had to suck in everything to squeeze out of my Ford Focus’s door because an obese truck couldn’t adequately fit in the spot next to me. And I’ve lost track of how many passive-aggressive notes I’ve left on the enormous Silverado that repeatedly parks in the “compact only” spot in the parking garage by my office.

The other thing that can be annoying about trucks is how some choose to accessorize them. I bet if you lived somewhere like Portland you would be blissfully ignorant to the existence of truck nuts. Yes, here in the Midwest, some people choose to hang facsimile scrotums from the backs of their trucks. Cute, huh? And obviously compensatory. I feel like there’s probably a big overlap between Confederate flag lovers and truck nut-displayers, and this totally proves my point. The one good thing about truck nuts is that they’re just about as good as a large flashing sign on the vehicle at conveying the message, “Attention! Occupants of this vehicle are ignorant, insecure about their masculinity and have a high propensity for road rage. Proceed with caution!”

All the trucks around here may have their drawbacks, but few memories will ever be as sweet as the many times my parents took me to the Dari-B as a child, and I sat on the tailgate of my dad’s truck between them eating a turtle sundae. You just can’t do that with a Focus.