Jasper Hanks

I read with interest the many letters full of good wishes and welcome to the new president. The Washington Post, now costing two dollars each for these inaugural times, is full of important and historical coverage--and is priced accordingly. I chose this peculiar missive among the many that appeared in its special "Letters to the President" section.

Letter to Obama (Washington Post)

It was back in 1958 and I was headed home to Nevada by way of Death Valley. My old truck was mostly wore out by that time, would overheat every ten miles or so and force me to stop. I pulled over by a Joshua Tree when I saw the needle go past the halfway mark—which was kind of hard to make out, on account of the gauge glass being cracked right where the needle would be in the too-hot range. My dad had gave me the Chevrolet after he was done with it. He bought it new in 1939, wrecked it once when a possum ran out in front of him, then drove it some more before handing it over to me.

The radio preacher was talking on the Emerson radio I carried with me. The truck didn’t have one, didn’t have much of anything besides what it needed to run. My old man told the Chevy dealer to give him a truck that wasn’t nothing but a truck. Nothing else. I remember he was mad and hollered something fierce when he saw the hand-crank vent at the front by the window, and thought they’d charged him extra for that. But the store man said no all the new trucks had them and you couldn’t get it without that window crank. It still took him a while to settle down, though. By now the hard springs were poking through the seat, hurt my butt on long rides. You had to sit up straight and kind of hunch forward to make the springs hurt less. But—like I said—every ten miles or so you had to stop anyway to let the truck rest and cool down.

The preacher was talking about what made us different from the other things that were alive, what set us apart. I was there in the shade of the Joshua Tree, and he said this—I remember it: “Can a cactus be President?” Then he said that no a cactus could not be president. Then he stopped, and the radio was quiet for a minute. I thought maybe the batteries had run down, but then he piped up again, like he’d just thought of something new to say. He said that a cactus was a prickly thing, and then he just let the matter rest, didn’t talk about the president or the cactus. But I was thinking that—from what he said—the main reason a cactus couldn’t be president was that it was prickly. I knew that wasn’t the case, that there were other reasons besides that.

Now it’s all these years later, maybe over fifty or so, and the new President’s swearing-in is coming over the television—the same one I’ve had for maybe twenty years, but still works okay. It doesn’t show the pictures in color, but there ain’t much color around here anyways. I set up the tv in the kitchen, moved away some beer cans to make space for it. These weren’t regular beer cans, like the ones I haven’t throwed out yet—these are ones from a long time ago, from olden times, have markings on them not like the new ones. One of them says, “Bullfrog Beer Our old Famous Brand.” Someone told me the can might be worth as much as ten bucks or maybe a little more, if the right person wanted it.

I looked hard at the screen, the little tv sitting on the counter with the beer cans on either side. They showed him, the new man that would live in the White House. He was not prickly. I turned off the set.

Out in the yard the old Chevy was still there. I didn’t think about it much, didn’t really remember if it ran when I parked it there, or if I just kind of pushed it out of the way and left it. It was part of the scenery, and after some years, maybe longer it just blended in, so that you didn’t have to really look at it to know it was there, but if you happened to be looking that way, chances are you would kind of just glance over it like you were staring out at the horizon—where there isn’t much of anything at all. So, in a way, the truck had become kind of invisible. I remembered the radio sermon out there in the desert, when I’d stopped to let the truck cool down. We had a new president and he wasn’t prickly.

So I’m writing this to thank you Mr. President for the good you have done and will surely do as you lead us in this great nation. And it doesn’t matter if we are alone all by ourselves with some beer cans and a old truck, or living high up someplace with offices and big cities and a lot of people around. You will do your best to help us all and I thank you for that.

Jasper Hanks
Beatty, NV