Portrait of a First Truck
Author: Todd Hoskins Issue: 2024-02-07
Portrait of a First Truck
by Todd Hoskins
I sold my old 2010 Toyota Tundra this past week. She was my first truck. If you would have asked me ten years ago about owning a pickup, I would have laughed, especially if I knew it had a 5.7 liter V8 engine.
My adult life involved more public transportation than trucking around, living in large cities until 2016. Even when I moved to a rural area, I had my suspicions about people with trucks. What type of insecurities would lead to large payload capacities and large engines?
In the country, it didn’t take long to develop a need for something with hauling capacity, whether it was aged horse manure for the garden or buying an oven off Craigslist. It started with borrowing a friend’s truck. Then when we bought property that was more wilderness with dirt roads and logging paths, we finally said yes and I found the Tundra for sale eighty miles away.
She was more truck than we needed, but I liked that we had the option of pulling a full size trailer in the future, or that we could attach a snowplow. I didn’t need to worry about what she could do. The answer was likely, “yes.” Plus, she was relatively old with a lot of miles but not too many. I didn’t need to worry about scratches or rust or keeping the interior spotless.
I started to develop a relationship with this truck that I could not quite explain. When she drove twenty miles across an old truck trail in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, she took a beating. Rocks, steep grades, and water were traversed with ease. Truck trails, I learned, were built during the New Deal era by the Civilian Conservation Corps. They are common in rural areas where there is an abundance of government land, and now I wish there were more of them.
The Tundra pulled out shrubs, carried appliances, transported firewood, towed a tractor on a flatbed, and did so much more than get me from one place to another. She was dependable. Useful. Tireless. I started to realize I was bonding with a machine. I cannot imagine how attached people must be to their working horses.
Her last mission was escorting 1,500 pounds of rocks 500 miles. She now has a grand new home where her people have 100+ acres and countless projects. She’ll be much happier than waiting idly in a garage.
I don’t judge people with trucks anymore.
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