Friday, August 18, 2006

Moving On



I’m standing in the middle of a hot parking lot at KEO apartments on Main Street, Brigham City, Utah with a broom in one hand, a can of wasp killer spray in the other. Before my mother and father built these apartments in the early 80’s, this lot was empty, but for an old abandoned house and a shack which served as someone’s clandestine Blue Boy magazine archives. Now it’s home to twenty-four “households,” many of whom receive government assistance for their rent, and until my father sprayed them last week, also home to several hundred wasps.

The wasps had been living in my grandfather’s pickup for several years, keeping it company and serving unawares as a low-cost security system while the truck waited in the corner of the lot in the sun, rain and snow for someone to make it legal again and take it out into the world of pavement and dust and other vehicles.

Like all well-designed chemical weaponry, the bug spray kills the inhabitants, but leaves their dwellings intact. There are still dozens of small nests in the nooks and crannies around the doors and in the frame and larger nests under the hood and fenders.

The first time I saw this pickup was the summer of 1972 when my family was visiting relatives in Chinook, Montana. We were sitting out front of Grandma Opprecht’s house when grandpa Haugen drove up in a shiny red Ford half-ton with grandma Haugen by his side. “Ah, that must be Harold’s new truck,” someone said, and everyone generally agreed that it looked sharp.

In the rural west, your vehicle is your calling card, visible from a distance, and an indicator of where you are and where you’ve been, even if you happen to be out of sight. Three years after grandpa had passed on, I spent the summer of 1994 in Chinook, living on the farm and using the pickup to get around. Grandpa’s reputation came with me everywhere, for better or worse. People who didn’t know me instantly knew something of what I was about because that was Harold’s truck and they had seen it on the dyke road and maybe out on the highway.

Grandpa could be an ornery cuss, but he was an honest rancher with a big heart and he and I got along just fine. I felt good about having the truck and using it as a truck, making trips to the dump, or hauling lumber and supplies for fixing up the farmhouse.

Still, it is only a truck, and it surprises me how much it tugs on my soul to see it there among drifts of leaves in the corner of the lot, kneeling, as it were, on its flat front tires. Today I have come to replace the tires, the battery and anything else that might keep this old guy from passing Utah safety inspection and emissions requirements.

I’m not sure why I want to go to the trouble and expense. The engine is a hefty V8 and it gets roughly ten miles to the gallon. There is only an AM radio and certainly no air bags or air conditioning. There are older trucks with more graceful curves. The finish has long since lost its shine and it’s barely even red anymore.

There is a utilitarian beauty to this model, though, embellished by the dents and scratches that come standard with twenty years of farm life. And the finish now is a priceless pale orange matte that could never be reproduced in an auto body shop.

But I’m neither a collector nor aesthete enough to justify restoring any truck to working order. There is something I don’t fully understand, something deeper in my psyche behind all this. This big red truck features in recurring dreams, as does grandpa. I suspect it represents the macho side of myself that in my literary life and times I’m not willing, able, or permitted to be.

The no-nonsense pickup is the standard-bearer of the spirit of the modern American West. It’s a powerful machine, fueled with essence of dinosaur. Just driving such a vehicle, let alone owning it, confers enough testosterone caché to turn city girls’ heads or get that nod of respect from the corner cop.

I’m an unpublished novelist with no wife, no real job and no real estate. My permanent address is an apartment in Manhattan, and our family sold the Montana ranch five years ago. It’s my psyche that needs this truck, and who am I to stand between the two of them? Besides, I do need transportation.

Dad comes back from collecting rent to find me in ready combat mode, eyeing the circling fighters that had been out on a run and survived last week’s assault. “I’ve been known to knock these out of the air,” dad says. I hand him the can of spray, but keep the broom.

After the air battle is over, we get to work on the tires, the engine, the battery, the tail lights. A few days later we drive it through town for a brake job and to have some tests run. The next week, we take it to a specialist who runs a compression test and we get the bad news. Twenty pounds in cylinder five, ten pounds in cylinder six, zero in cylinder eight. It will need a new engine, at roughly four thousands bucks, all in.

While the news is soaking in, the mechanic diplomatically suggests the truck must be of sentimental value. He is experienced in these matters; there is enough unsaid there to bring his meaning the rest of the way home.

Our bonds to material possessions aren’t always tied by greed or laziness or the need for comfort. We invest our inanimate objects with personalities and memories and we make talismans out of them. But they are burdens, nevertheless, and they ultimately will stay behind with our bones and the suit they bury us in.

I’m afraid to let go of the truck, but it’s clear that the time has come. I’m tempted to hold on, to put it in a lot somewhere, but ironically, now is the time to “be a man about it” and let go of one of the things that makes me more of a man.

Next week, I’ll take it to a junkyard, where other men with trucks they care about can take the parts they need from this one. And no matter where they put it, I know the wasps will find it again.

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