Lament of a half-ton hypocrite

We lent the truck to a friend for a couple days this past summer. It’s a smallish truck, and a few years past its best-before date, but it served his purpose, which was to pick up a piece of equipment from the local rental place, and return it 24 hours later. It’s a machine he only needs once a year, so renting makes sense. No depreciation, no maintenance issues, no storage requirements. Plan ahead, and get the job done in one go.

Similarly, he has no need of a truck most days, so it wouldn’t make sense to own one. Heck, 95 percent of the time I have no need of the truck, so I’m happy to share it. Given the choice, I always take the car, because it’s way better on gas. (I have heard people remark on the fact that I am driving “her” car, though neither vehicle belongs to one of us specifically, and neither has gender-specific design features.) When the car is not available, the truck must be used for all manner of errands, often with gangly teenagers crammed in the jump-seats – and usually with no cargo in the back except the residues of whatever load it carried a few weeks previously.

Such was the case when the truck broke down recently at a totally inconvenient out-of-county location. It would start, but it was misfiring pretty badly. With some aggressive revving and judicious operation of the clutch, we managed to limp a few kilometres to a nearby auto garage. (It was a good opportunity for pontificating to the kids about the merits of a manual transmission.)

The truck ended up being in intensive care for a few days while some anonymous mechanic worked away at it – seemingly taking an approach that was more trial-and-error than diagnostic. In the meantime, we actually needed a truck for the first time in weeks, to take chickens to the kill plant – so we had to borrow the neighbour’s truck.

When our truck was fixed – and equipped with quite a few new parts that may or may not have required replacement – we had to go fetch it (and pay the bill). Not exactly a joyful family road trip. “When this truck dies, what kind is our next truck going to be?” asked one of the kids.

“This is our last truck!” I replied, feeling combative.

Maybe it’s an idle threat, but I have been weighing the costs and benefits. For households like ours, whose transport requirements are usually light-duty, it bears consideration. I keep remembering George Fullerton’s article about Marc Spence (“An electric car in the country?!” in RD, Oct. 2019, pg. 27), a New Brunswick carpenter who uses a Nissan Leaf as his “work truck.” The rear seats fold down to accommodate tools and even some building supplies. Spence only takes jobs within a 40-kilometre radius of his home in Baie Verte – and when he needs to move something bigger, he uses a trailer hauled behind his VW.

I have been reading a book called Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way, by Lars Mytting, which is an entertaining and informative examination of small-scale firewood production in that part of the world. It illustrates the Nordic talent for elevating a practical task to a minimalist art form. “For personal use, all that is really needed are a chain saw, an axe, and a car with a trailer,” writes Mytting. And sure enough, there’s a photo of a little utility trailer loaded with birch. Presumably it could also be used to transport a bunch of poultry crates, or a stock box for sheep or goats.

Many North Americans would view this as kind of cute, or even embarrassing. Judging from many of the new-country songs you hear on the radio, pickup trucks are still a fundamental fashion accessory for those who aspire to the rugged, get’er-done, rural lifestyle. Then there are those truck advertisements depicting some guy driving through the mud like a 12-year-old on a bender – voiced over by someone who sounds as if he just gargled with testosterone. It makes me think that some people move to the country just to have an excuse to go ripping around in gigantic pickup trucks. (You never know when you might encounter some rough terrain on your way to the Sobeys.) Nowhere else on the planet do people do this. I can only conclude that we’ve got some masculinity issues – or else gas is still too cheap here.

Don’t get me wrong. (Maybe it’s too late to say that?) I am not immune to the pleasures of the pickup truck. We all like to raise ourselves up above the crowd, right? That’s what we call “visibility.” And I can understand the sense of safety people get from being surrounded by a couple tons of steel while barrelling down the highway. But vehicle safety, like wealth, is a relative thing; it depends upon how you stack up compared to others travelling the same road.

You might think our society would be ready to call a truce in this arms race of torque and displacement, but it continues. A recent news item describes the deployment of a new assembly line at the Ford plant in Windsor, Ontario, where they are manufacturing a 7.3-litre V-8 that is being dropped into Super Duty pickups. Nicknamed “Godzilla,” the engine generates 430 horsepower. An equivalent diesel would be more efficient, but this gas engine is being produced because it is affordable to more consumers. “It goes up against everything happening on climate change,” says Dennis DesRosiers, an auto analyst who takes an overall positive view of the industry. According to the Unifor Local rep, “This is a good-news story.”

Commercial farmers, unlike me, actually need pickup trucks – although most do not need one that powerful. (For Godzilla-grade haulage, it might make sense to hire the services of a tractor-trailer.) As for P.E.I.’s new legislative amendment allowing the use of marked (tax-exempt) fuel in farm trucks, it’s a nice perk but a poorly conceived policy, running counter to the logic of fuel taxes going toward road infrastructure. Farmers deserve more support, but it would be better to just put more money in their pockets instead of more gas in their trucks. For all those trips to town to pick up a hydraulic hose or a jug of ivermectin, they might be inclined to leave the truck at home and take a more economical vehicle. It could be “her” car or “his” car, or maybe the neighbour’s car.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting everyone should get rid of their pickup. In the absence of a local rental outlet or auto-share service that has trucks available, I’m going to need to borrow one occasionally. DL