Really, in retrospect I feel a little silly for not finding it earlier. Scattered. Almost, at times, the fool.
The following will not be a paid announcement, and no goods or services will have been purchased, traded, or bartered in exchange for this message.
Seriously.
If you know me, you know that Ford pickups have both literally and figuratively meant a great deal to me, pretty much my whole life.
If you don't know me: Hi, I'm the guy with cancer and the rapidly thinning mohawk who insists on blathering on about his each and every day: how the hell did you get in here? And do you have any potato chips?
It all started in Montana, which feels comforting and solid to even say. The first Ford pickup to claim me was and is a 1969 Red F Series Explorer--god, after all these years I may be getting it wrong. The names have spread out over the years, and words that in the 60's and 70's only meant option packages have become entire model lines unto themselves.
This truck, and most of the ones that captured my imagination, belong to my uncle and still either work or populate his ranch all these years later. Red was his daily driver then, and I remember it pretty fresh and new, and every useful and wonderful bit in between until now. Now, it still helps out on the ranch, its main job these days to haul the enormous fuel tank that lives in the back for keeping the other vehicles, spread across the acres and the chores, running.
But the real grabber, the first Ford truck to quite literally loom in and own a memory and a sensation, is a bright, bright yellow 1960 F Series Ranger Explorer--two whole vehicle lines have fallen off that option package and onto America's roads.
This was the truck I drove for the first time. Staying with my uncle--he has always been patient and generous enough to refer to what I did as 'helping,' maybe even 'working' but at this age I think was mainly ballast. Let's say I'm 11. I cannot remember exactly, and I couldn't even have been much ballast because at 11 or so I probably weighed 85 pounds and looked a lot like a little girl.
It was extremely winter on the ranch land my uncle was leasing. He had to feed the section of the herd that was in the pasture closest in to the house--pastures get closer and closer to the house as winter gets uglier and uglier; you plan to have to travel the least to keep the herd healthy in the harshest times.
I am out from Baltimore for a visit, and it is just white everywhere. But we bundle up and take the yellow truck to the hay pile and load up whatever amount my uncle understands to be needed for feeding. Then he turns the truck along some ruts it seems he is capable of seeing in a road he must remember from before winter claimed the creek basin up which his ranch was located.
He leans forward, sets and pulls what at the time seemed to me like seventy or eighty knobs, and then looks at me:
"You got it?"
"Wh-hwadduyumean?"
"Can you just keep it in the ruts? Just steer. We're in 4 low, so just hold the wheel and try to keep along this line. But don't hold too tight, or you'll get tossed around."
All life's lessons. Right there. Full stop.
He indicates out the window, at the blankness crawling by at a mile an hour. I see nothing to differentiate, and I am thrilled and terrified, and not warmed by the heater just yet--you can always trust a Ford truck's heater, but it still takes a little time.
"Just along there?"
"Yes, that's fine. Remember, you don't need to touch the gas, just steer. OK"
"..."
"..."
"OK."
And he opens the door and steps out of the moving truck. Granted, moving a mile an hour, but still.
He stands still for a second, unaware of the perfect memory-picture he is creating of himself sliding whitely past and out of the passenger window, and then he levers himself into the back of the truck and begins the process of breaking bales and throwing them out in the ruts we make in the new snow.
I have since done this with and without my uncle dozens and dozens of times. And it never is not beautiful. The herd coalesces out of coulees and shadows, fog and snow, and this line of hay becomes a line of shuddering necks and backs and bodies as they line the tracks of the pickup, eating and eating and steaming and snuffling and tossing their huge long heads.
But that first time...I was DRIVING! All I did was clutch the wheel like a condemned man clutches the edge of the injection-table and let it hammer back and forth in my tiny gloved hands as the truck did 98% of the work, wheels tumbling along in the ruts.
But I was driving! I was helping!
God, I was present. I'm crying now.
I have Ford trucks of my own, now. Not a 'collection,' not a 'sampling.' Nothing that obnoxious, though that I have more than one is obnoxious, and I guess wasteful, and I guess part of the fantasy-man aspect of me and what I do that I will have to be a little ashamed of...but do anyway.
The youngest, the freshest, is a 1996 Ranger. That's our daily driver, our family car. We cleared two hundred thousand miles before I got sick. We've driven that one to Montana and back around 8 times, California a couple, and any number of other wheres.
It is in Baltimore right now, traded out for a Ford Escape Mom and Jim own, which would be a little more comfortable for me and my non-ass if and when they ever let us out of here and I get driven home. Yes, Mom and Jim have whatever filial disturbance my uncle and I have.
My oldest Ford Truck is a 1950 F47, bought in Canada on the set of a film and slowly (s l o w l y) restored ever since. Not flashy, not expensive, not a show vehicle: it is a place to labor, to figure out in simple terms and structures what mechanical knowledge I have and do not have. It is, to some extent, the first church I built.
Then I have The Bronco. This is a 1978--the F-series' best body year, for those keeping score--Bronco that was purchased new by my grandfather. By about 1982 I was nipping at his heels asking if I could 'have it when he was done.'
I was annoying back then, too.
My grandfather is a man of honour, empathy, and kindness. He's also nobody's fool, so about twenty years later he sold me the Bronco for a fair price. The Bronco lived in California for a while, where it was the most amusing way in the word to make tiny men and their tiny sports cars screech and wriggle in terror. It is a gorgeous brute, lumbering and over-powered like the era from which it roared...and I put in a sick stereo.
And last, but not at all least, the newest addition to the family, sort of. A 1992 Ranger short box we bought from friends in the South a few years ago, that had been a patient and capable garden truck and a patient and capable everything-vehicle for years before that.
4 cylinders, surprisingly good mileage, insanely tight turning radius, and just beat up enough to be something you won't worry about. Buying it and fixing it to full driveability was economical and created a snse of accomplidhment and pride: priorities, value, knowing what to feed in your life.
A friend once borrowed the black truck for a day of errands in the city and was screaming to me on his cell phone within twenty minutes: "This is the best vehicle ever. I just parked in one move! I loaded everything in two minutes. I scratched it with a box and you don't care! I LOVE this truck!
Whenever I have purchased a vehicle, the first thing I do is find a spot on the paint job and scratch it with my knife tip. Just get it over with. Then you don't have to worry about it. Like a Buddhist potter making sure each finished product is flawed; there's no reason to attempt perfection, so why ruin yourself trying?
It is this black truck--similar in model but not freshness to the photo above--that revealed itself to me last night in a moment of peace. And I have needed peace.
Jim started it, telling me he had a place he went to when the chemo was bad. Others have followed, ether reiterating his suggestion that I find a 'place' when things are hard, or even suggesting places either I or they have been. To some extent the flurry of Rob Halford heavy metal talismans and passing ghosts of Ronnie James Dio served that purpose--attempting to find somewhere comfortable for me to stand, a place from which to lever the bad life aside and maybe just look at the sunset. What the poetry professor who introduced me to N would have called 'the still point of a turning world.'
I just wrote that and then went to see exactly from where it came. To be sure.
TS Eliot, Burnt Norton
I just read it again after a few years, and am shattered. Lovingly, happily shattered, by the poem. I had forgotten. I do not want to forget again. Eliot has been my favorite poet since I was in 9th grade. I have never varied from that. I just remembered why. That was nice.
Back to pickups. Last night, after watching the season finale of Lost with N snuggled in the mechanical bull next to me, I started to try and sleep. I had timed the Ambien badly, and the Ambien has been getting less effective. I am happy about that, and as I seem to be off the pred for now I am going to stop the Ambien as soon as I think I can.
So I was drifting but not yet sleeping. And, unbidden, into my mind rolled the black truck. Near our driveway, our tiny driveway, with a little plow attached. And again, near our house, our little house, with a wood splitter attached to some hydraulics Gerry-rigged to the back.
A project. Rig the black truck with a hydraulic setup. So we can use it to keep house. Split wood. Plow the little driveway.
Maybe a winch on the front in case we get stuck. Maybe I'll have to finally learn to weld, to attach a base-plate for whatever tool goes in back. A wood-splitter, a cable winch, a plow.
Forward, reverse, clear the snow, clear a path, in our little black truck. Make a home, split the wood, forward, back, in our little black truck. Make a home.
And then I was asleep.
I had found my place.
