Connections

October 31, 2008

I opened the paper at the local diner, turned to the Style section. There—jumping from the page--was a brilliant photograph capturing a scene in the West, with a man and his pickup truck and his dog. In the background was a weathered and splintering old building set against the vast Montana landscape. The scene imparted an emotional impact that went beyond the simple images contained on the page, and it is for that reason that I first thought the work was that of a painter—someone who’d colored the scene through their own eyes and views of the world. I dwelt on the truck, a Ford from the nineteen-sixties—the same model I’d owned several times over the years as a casual collector and admirer of the style. Then I traveled back over the roads, to a scene played out along old Route 66 somewhere in Oklahoma, where a man had talked to me about his old truck, in pristine condition, parked there in his driveway along the remnants of the old road. As the Oklahoma afternoon’s light gave way to the softened hues of a late summer evening, he spoke of the differences in the trucks, the way you could tell one from the other—stuff that only a person who’d spent his life around hard work and pickup trucks would know. He pointed to the front bumper, explained that the number of bolts holding the thing onto the truck was different from 1964 to 1965. I listened with half an ear, was really taken with how his old Ford, which he’d owned since new, looked as though it had just rolled away from the dealership on its very first day on the road.

Then, traveling back to the diner, with my waffle and order of bacon and iced tea—a thousand miles and more from that driveway out west along an iconic highway--I looked again at the front of the truck in the photograph, counted the bolts attaching the bumper to the front. It was a 1965.