Category: Angry Ranting

I had to rent a pickup truck last month. I needed to haul some lumber and while I can fit a surprising number of pressure-treated 2×12’s into my Prius, its not a surprising enough number to finish my project. I grew up rural. I know trucks well enough to know what to expect. I expected four wheels, a nice roomy bed in the back, and an engine to get them around.

In the back of my mind, I knew that’s not really how they do trucks anymore, but it wasn’t until I reached the rental car lot that I realized how irritatingly off base my expectations were. It was a small lot on the edges of town and they had three pickup trucks to choose from. They all had essentially the same features: a massive double cab with too many seats, air conditioning, bluetooth enabled radios, other modern frills and fripperies… and a six foot bed.

The lumber I had ordered was eight.

I didn’t need a bluetooth enabled radio. I didn’t need room for five people. I didn’t need air conditioning (it had windows, after all). I didn’t need seat heaters or an electric key fob or a backup camera or any of the crap in the cab. I needed eight feet of truck bed.

“How?” I wondered to myself. “How can a vehicle be simultaneously too big AND too small!?!”

Sighing with irritation but without a better option, I took it. Clambering into the driver’s seat, I flashed back to my first time driving a pickup.

I was twelve and a horse girl, like you do when you grow up rural. Horses eat hay so once a year or so we had to go get it. Hay is cheaper when you go get the bales in the field instead of having them brought to you so that’s what we did. As the youngest (and the shortest and the weakest), my job was to keep the truck moving, slow and steady, as everyone else shifted bales up to the tailgate, then mom tetrised them up, four hight and five deep into the bed. I couldn’t reach the pedals without tying 2×4’s to my feet, and that’s with sitting on the very front edge of the seat. Once we had as many bales as we could wedge in back there, I clambered over the front seats to share the two tiny seats with my brother, several beat up tool bags, and a layer of gloves, hats, candy wrappers, receipts, shop rags, and other detritus I find inseparable from a working vehicle.

That truck features vividly in my memories of childhood. It hauled fence posts, heavy machinery, ran the plow in the winter, and brought home at least a dozen Christmas trees before it went to the big racetrack in the sky. It was white and had a hydraulic lift on it. It was scratched, dented, filthy, and beautiful. It was made to haul stuff, not people, and it did it’s job exceptionally well.

I felt the same sense of smallness in this chonky, shiny rental, but without the accompanying comfort. It should have smelled like degreaser and sweat. It should have had room in the bed for everything I needed. It should have been easier to get into. I only ever drove that truck a few times, but riding in it over and over made it comfortable. This one, so much bigger than it needed to be, and yet not big enough for what I needed, didn’t feel right.

Another truck that looms large in my childhood memories was older, but came along a few years later. With a cab even more spartan than the work truck, it got cold in the winter and hot in the summer. The shifter must have been a solid foot or so long and emerged from bare steel to sit directly between my knees whenever we had a second passenger. My short legs meant I always wound up (still do) in the smallest seat, the shortest one, the one with the least room in any dimension, and in that big old Clifford-red ford, that meant the center of the bench seat with one foot in the driver’s side footwell and the other in the passenger side.

The red ford became my brother’s primary ride, and part of the deal was giving me one to school every day. It was how we got to friend’s homes, and how we got them to the creek on hot summer days. This truck was all bed, no cab. Whoever he had a crush on got to sit in the front and the rest of us rode in the back, hot wind whipping past us, each bump in the road jostling us, giggling, back and forth.

Neither of these trucks had a backup camera. You had to learn where your ass was and try to keep it where it belonged, or get a friend to stand in your rear view and wave you back and forth as you wiggled your way back into wherever you needed to be.

Which is good, because that backup camera I mentioned earlier, the one on my fancy new rental? Yeah…. It’s mounted on the tailgate. Which is great! Unless the bed is too short to hold your lumber, and the tailgate is pointed at the ground.

The one and only time I needed to back up that stupid truck, the singular moment when a camera might have been a handy gadget, it was useless. It would have been better if it hadn’t been there are all, considering how distracting it was to have the screen tugging at the edges of my vision while, as I learned to do 23 years ago, someone stood in my rear view and waved me in.

Before this, I already had some strong opinions on people who drive pristine pickups. I feel like I’ve been seeing them everywhere: glistening late model 4x4s with lift packages and exhaust pipes in improbable places. My uncle joined the club some years go with a precious baby that runs on batteries as much as fuel, comes with a push start and an app, has every possible climate control and comfort option in the massive cab…. And hauls a boat twice a year. The driver’s hatred for millennials is probably the heaviest cargo it’ll every carry and god forbid it get a scratch.

These people, folks who value the appearance of physical labor, but don’t actually perform any, fall into the same category as people I call “cowboys with no cows.” Posers who adopt the trappings of people who actually work for a living, claiming the music, the style, the stuff, but none of the hardships, annoy me. There’s a reason cowboy boots have a heel. There’s a reason to drive what is essentially a big-ass wheelbarrow. There’s a reason to have a massive and powerful engine. Those reasons outweigh environmental damage, the space they take up, and some discomfort, but without them, these sorts of things are just a big old fuck you to everyone else. And to try to shoehorn a monster truck into a city lifestyle is just plain stupid.

I like hybrid vehicles, they’re better than the alternative. I like climate control, though opening a window is still the OG AC. I like having the means to build and move and shape, which means I like that trucks exist. And honestly, I probably like your truck, because if you’ve met me and you have a truck, you’re probably the kind of person who has it for a reason.

But I’ve been keeping an eye out, since my rental, and fuck me if I don’t see an awful lot of special snowflake pick trucks whose only serious cargo is the driver’s ego. If that one is yours, my friend I can tell you this: I don’t like your truck.

Last month I made a pilgrimage. It wasn’t spiritual, or at least, any more or less spiritual than any other travel for me. But it took me to a temple in a remote, dense jungle, and for a half a moment, it connected me to times past and future.

The Mayan ruins of Ek’ Balam are not well known. After the crowds at Chichen Itza, the Zona Arqueológica de Ek Balam was an oasis in the jungle. A low wall surrounds over 20 acres, includes a number of excavated structures, and hides even more still undiscovered.

It was the end of a long day. We’d been up since five thirty and wouldn’t be home until seven or eight. It was our last stop of the day so we already had a great deal of background on the Mayan Empire, its reach, and its eventual fall.

I am a lone wander, on occasion. I like to linger at my own pace, moving on quickly from things that don’t interest me and contemplating those that do. Guided tours, however, rarely offer that flexibility. I chose one that offered free time at each location, and for just a moment, I really got some.

We had wandered the city of Chicken Itza, swum in the cool green waters of cenote Hubiku, and been walked around the discovered perimeter of Ek’ Balam. We stumbled on an active archaeological dig and got nervous at some suspicious sounds from a not distant enough for comfort distance. And in the last few minutes before heading back home, I took myself to the edge of an ancient platform to sit, my legs dangling over the edge, a twenty foot drop into dense jungle below me, and contemplate.

Being high up gave me a sense of safety, so when the jungle rustled and groaned, instead of shrinking away in fear, I searched for the source of the sounds. I saw the ubiquitous lizards, some little scuttlers and a few big old iguanas, climbing trees in search of food and mates. I saw squirrels with their fluffy tails hopping about, being squirrelly. Far above, local birds of prey circled. And beneath my feet, a colorful assortment of plastic bottles, wrappers, and other human trash.

In answer to the question “Why did the city die?” Our guide gave us depressingly familiar answers. Overpopulation. Pollution. War. History repeats itself.

Which is why I almost laughed out loud to myself when I first noticed the trash. A bitter laugh. Where has humanity not touched? Corpses litter the highest mountains and the wasted husks of our food and drink sink to the bottom of the deepest oceans.

Can we ever learn from the lessons of the past? Certainly. Will we? I think not.

We have been warned. The warnings are old, ancient, and more insistent every day. Not content to poison our water, we have now belched toxic waste into the air, filled vast oceans with unkillable plastics of every size and shape, ripped mountains to powder and ground thousands of people under the churning wheels of industry. Corporations externalize the cost of picking up after themselves into debts that we pay in the currency of our lungs, our drinking water, our cancerous growths, and our guilt.

As a little girl of about ten or eleven, I once asked my dad why the economy needed to grow. (My mom listened to NPR a lot.) He replied that it needed to keep up with people having children. As the population grows, so does the economy need to grow, to keep up.

Even then that didn’t make much sense to me. I couldn’t quite figure out why but it has since become obvious. The world is finite. We cannot grow indefinitely, kids or not, and expect the planet to supply our needs. We have made some incredible technological leaps that have staved off the end, but they have also given us a false sense of our own ability to mitigate.

More accurately, perhaps, it has given us a false sense of when and how much to mitigate. We allow tourists to lug single use bottles into the heart of the jungle and when they toss them over the edges of centuries old structures, structures that themselves stand mute witness to the inevitable consequences of exactly that behavior, we shrug and get back in the van.

I only sat on the edge of that wall for a few minutes. Just long enough to tap out a few quotes. I wanted to remember what it felt like to feel awe, anger, despair, all at once, all only enough to squeeze out a rueful laugh.

I’ll spare you, my beloved reader, from the end of this train of thought. I do think it’s possible that things will turn around. My generation cares more than the one before, and the ones after are downright pissed about it. Vegetarianism and teetotaling is rising in popularity, as is a movement to hold corporations accountable for their shitty single use packaging and over reliance on unbreakable plastics.

There is hope. It can be hard to see, sometimes, but there is. Even in the worst case scenarios… the world has been through an awful lot and look where she’s come. She’ll be ok. Eventually.