COLUMN: Guys and their trucks
Have you ever been sitting at a stop sign, waiting for traffic to clear so you can cross the intersection, when a gigantic wall of steel and chrome pulls up next to you blocking the view for you and anyone else on the block and creating enough noise to drown out all audible sound at a human level?
This is the phenomenon of the pickup truck in the 21st century.
When you live in a farming community or even a post-farming community, you will often see pickup trucks adorned with a gun rack and a row of spotlights that rival those used by the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And a girl I believe is not allowed to sit on the passenger’s seat, but must sit in the middle next to her man who is piloting his rig.
Trucks are not only a country occurrence, the city folk have their version too. They call them SUV’s, and spend all that four-wheel-drive power in rush-hour traffic and all that horsepower on valet parking.
But what exactly is the connection between guys and trucks? Well, at any given moment, guys want to be one of three people: James Bond, Bob Villa or John Wayne.
The James Bond side of guys typically comes out when they are dressed up or using their latest techno-gadget. It also comes out in every guy’s need to drive fast, exotic cars and attend formal events with a beautiful woman on their arm. Trucks don’t really have much to do with the James Bond alter ego, except for those times you need to pull around your horse trailer with the collapsible spy plane inside.
The Bob Villa side comes out when a male is doing home repair. It’s the tool belt they have to wear when replacing a light bulb. It’s the 400 tools they have in their garage that have never been used and it’s the truck they require to do anything really manly in life.
According to advertising, the truck is there for you when you need to go and pick up an entire forest of logs and take them who knows where and for who knows what, but it’s there. The reality is that if you own a truck, you spend half your time in it hauling around stuff for those of us who don’t have one.
The John Wayne side affects truck ownership in the largest way. Every man who watched westerns as a kid wants to be the hero. They want to charge into a situation on their trusty steed, rescue the needy and ride off into the sunset in quiet perseverance.
In today’s world, the truck, for all intents and purposes, is our modern horse, and those who drive them often do so to find some of that same rugged, back-country adventure feeling that has been lost in our technological, asphalt-covered world.
With this in mind, the cowboy with the best, toughest horse always won. It’s a status symbol which has rooted itself deep within our culture. But these days it’s shown by just how little of a parking space you can leave after you pull your wide-bed, four-door extended cab, double-rear tire, fifth-wheel capability, 40-ton winch in the front, auto-mechanic-shop in the back, tinted-glass and more exterior lights than most houses during the Christmas holiday, into the local Texas steak house.
So next time you’re driving down the road and come across one of these modern-day mavericks with his cowboy hat on and his girl by his side as he drives 25 miles an hour down a busy two-lane highway that has a speed limit of 55, please don’t judge him too harshly, because they are really just looking out for danger as they mosey on down the trail of life.