Letting go…of the Truck

We bipeds have intense and peculiar relationships with quadrupeds and their successors—our four-wheeled vehicles. This is especially true of the male of our species. I can still remember my first car and every car since then, each defining a special period of my life. The green four-door ’56 Chevy that I bought at 17 with a gift from my grandmother and never should have sold. The rambler wagon for my early married years, with children. Then another wagon. Another.  Down to the RAV4 suited for elderly people with occasional need for bags of fertilizer or groceries. 

But this bond is even deeper with trucks. I have had two: the Ford Ranger with which I began my mountain dwelling life in 1990; and then its successor, the 2001 Toyota Tundra, that I bought in 2003 and that has been with me ever since. Until last week. After agonizing over the decision for over a year, I sold it, hoping for a good owner and a loving home. It has hauled gravel, lumber, logs, mulch, dirt, furniture, trapped raccoons, and organ pipes. That’s just what I can remember. It has been in an icy ditch more than once. I could put on its snow chains in 20 minutes flat…on my back. It fought off mice at its wires and their nests in its intake filter. It only had a few major repairs. I kept the receipts for the past 22 years, talismans of care.

But it was time. Long confined to these mountain errands, I only drove it 500 miles a year. My gravel days, with all the rest of its burdens, were now over. There were no friends or family waiting for it with outstretched arms. The RAV could handle the rest. It was time, as the Hindus say, to pass from the season of the forest-dweller, with its pickup (or in South Africa, this bakkie) to the time of the sannyasin, the renunciant. While I do now renounce my beloved truck, I do not renounce the tasks of this period of my life. It is a time of gathering legacy, of passing on what evidence of wisdom I might have accrued, whether it is sitting with young children as they read to me at our community center, or laughing in conversation with all the sharp and insightful people now much younger than myself, some on the phone, some on the screen, some in exuberant physical presence. My attention shifts from extended futures to the present moment of appreciation and gratitude, which, after all, is always what we really have.

So the truck has been delivered into the marketplace of a younger man…and maybe a woman. As I shook hands with the friendly folks at CarMAX, while asking for some grief counseling, Sylvia assured me it was the right thing to do. They were kind…and fair. The lot was filled with gleaming new cars and hefty trucks, but none as noble and faithful as mine. It has a little dent on its roof from a falling branch (Sylvia was driving a back road that day), a clumsily patched hole in its rear bumper, and a clock that stopped reading accurately a dozen years ago—badges of honor and endurance that a good owner will understand. But its value had held. The market honored it. And now it’s gone. I honor the engineering skill that built it and the years of burden it endured. I step over a liminal margin and begin the period of my life-without-a-truck.