Ohio Connections Literary Exhibit
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The Elegant Redneck
By Richard Hague
With no fanfare and no fuss, my pickup turned 100,000 miles last week. Fittingly, I was on the way to work; to have hoped that the magic moment would come when I was bound for pleasure was too much, given the ration of pleasure to work in my life. So, at the foot of Erie hill, the zeros rolled around, and that was that. But now I have to think seriously about saying goodbye to his piece of machinery that has served me so well.
I make fun of people who lavish attention on their vehicles. I see them in their driveways, weekends, bent over Corvettes and Cutlasses like lovers, buffing with expensive chamois until the sweat rolls down their faces and they squint in the glare with delight. It’s the height of the pathetic, this mesmerized fascination with the lifeless mechanical, the fancy and expensive gizmo; it bodes ill for the nation. Yet, I am not without a kind of tenderness toward some machines, machines which, like famous swords or rifles, acquire a legendary, almost anthropomorphic grandeur.
The first great pickup I became familiar with belonged to Mr. Swartz, the father of my best friend. Mike, as he allowed us boys to call him was a coon hunter hellgrammite gatherer and general runner of the ridges in the country outside Steubenville. In his garage—where, by the way his truck never reposed, it being a sturdy Chevy, unafraid of the weather, and fitted with its own tent, a canvas cap that always smelled like camping—Mike had installed an old Bulova watch display case. He’d shagged it from somewhere down in Mingo Junction, and in it he dried his ginseng. Roger and I would sneak looks at those roots, like dried-up men, some even sporting tiny, brittle phalluses that made us giggle. Later, when Roger and I became interested in collecting insects, wasps and beetles took their places next to the roots: intricate jewels athwart dun and twisted shrivels.
Many of our best insect-collecting trips were made in the back of Mike’s pickup. He’d installed wooden seats over the wheel-wells; Roger and I sat facing each other, hanging on to the pipes that supported the canvas. We were both skinny, hard-butted boys, and a good thing, for the roads Mike traveled were pickup roads, not your wimpy blacktop; after a summer foray we ached like soldiers and could not sit for long.
Mike liked to take us out the creek past Goulds, Ohio, to a place known locally as Third Bridge. The riffles there ran swift and cold: perfect hellgrammite water. While Mike waded, turning over stones, Roger and I climbed the bank toward the pier of the bridge, a slab of concrete set against the hillside. There, we’d been told, a wild man lived; Mike honked each time we passed, and portentously slowed down. Roger and I would lean gaping over the tailgate, horrified and excited. All we saw up there, though, were the scattered bones of small animals, which, we knew, spelled out secret messages in the man’s crazy language.
Strangely enough, the most intense memory I have of that pickup in which I spent so many fine days is of cutting myself one afternoon. We were near Costonia, Ohio, fishing in the river below the dike stretching between the Ohio shore and the bank of Brown’s Island. A thunderstorm blew up; Roger and I clambered into the back and broke out our lunches. I was slicing an orange, and the blade went too deep, nearly to the bone of my middle finger. I still carry that scar today, a milky crescent moon, thin and vivid as the edge of the embedded fish’s scale.
I do not know exactly when, many years later, that pickup made its last run. It must have been after I’d gone away to college, and Roger had enlisted in the Air Force. While I was studying in Cincinnati, and Roger was serving somewhere in Libya and later in Vietnam, Mike cranked up the old truck one final morning and came home without it. I think I’m beginning to know how he must have felt.
For, though it only distantly approaches the venerable dignity and absolute trustworthiness of Mike’s, my own pickup has earned a brand of greatness. Soon after buying it—off the lot in Steubensville, after angrily abandoning a foundered Pinto on the interstate 250 miles away and hitching home in a rage—I took it on the first of what came to be an endless, wonderful confusion of journeys. My dog named Dog was still alive then, an aging border collie I adopted at the pound, and together we broke the truck in. We camped in the mountains of Pennsylvania, wandered idly and easterly across New York, rushed through the madness of Connecticut expressways, and wound up aboard a ferry headed for Martha’s Vineyard. The number of stripped-down shortbeds that have gone marine, piloted by adult runaways and their dogs, must certainly be small. But through it all, the dog and I and the pickup thrived.
A hundred subsequent adventures ensued. They are all now pleasantly and richly confused in my memory, bound together only by the frayed twines of place names, people, moments. I remember Fly, Ohio, and a certain pool table there, and a silent man in a red hat who, sitting at the bar at the stroke of midnight, commenced to grin, and had not ceased even when I staggered out two hours later. I remember the road from Hazard to Hindman, Kentucky, and a turn-around there, just inside the Knott County line, where for three consecutive visits I stopped to drink a bootleg beer and listen to the frogs. I remember hanging up in a ditch, alone, after dark, outside Graysville, Ohio, and the miraculous appearance of a man on a tractor with a log chain and time on his hands. I remember riding out Hurricane Belle at Cape Hatteras, my wife and I huddled in the camper, the truck awash to its axles. I even remember specific loads of mulch and topsoil, hauled as many as five years ago, whose tinders and dusts still stain the corner of the bed. And I remember my dog’s last ride, her stiff and voiceless decline on an old blanket beside me in the cab and the sad weight of her as I lifted her off the seat and carried her into the vet.
Things will, if they last long enough, if they are rooted in the memory and meaning, become parts of our lives. They will become a part of the household we build for ourselves out of the timbers and shingles and salvage of our lives. I used to believe that if I put two pieces of wood together and didn’t move them for a couple of years, they would somehow blend with each other, become one. This was when my knowledge of the nature of things was a blessed mixture of fact and fantasy. It seemed reasonable to me that if atoms were always in motion, then anything placed on anything else would, indeed, move. And part of that movement would be together.
I know better now, sad to say. Rocks I have piled into dry walls do not magnetically fuse; each spring I pick some of them up and put them back again. Words I try to join fall ungrammatically asunder; old loves disappear. But all movement and blending are not merely physical. My pickup and I have, in some way, grown together. It has been my sole transportation, my only means of getting from one place to another, through a decade of my life. And it’s been a notable decade, spanning divorce, self-imposed exile, solitude, remarriage and most recently the birth of my two sons. Certainly the changes of 100,000 miles have shown up on the truck, I only hope that I have worn so well, so mellowed in my scars and rust.
I imagine an old farmhouse, far down Brown’s Run, below the place I lived in for a couple of seasons long ago when my pickup and I were younger, still bachelors. I never drove there; greenbrier and sumac thicketed the hillside so intensely a half-crawl was the only way down. But that old house and my pickup have something in common—an ethos, a quality that expresses the complexity of a place, rather than a mere thing. Once I spent half a summer, each evening near twilight, sitting, in my mind, on the porch of that old house. Bindweed lashed the railings, thistles crowded the dooryard. I could look out over the creek to an outcropping where a family of foxes lived. Deer browsed at the edge of the former garden. Finches and buntings flashed in the last light up the hollow. Old crockery pots, filled with green water, leaned against the foundation of the barn. An antique harrow, weather-stricken and noble, disassembled slowly in a field. And in all of it—in the house’s every board, in every wild rush of weed toward the door, in every bit of declining debris—there came to me a sense of the continuance of things; even, in the midst of gradual decay, a sense of their stubborn endurance.
So it is with my pickup. A few years ago, after blowing a head-gasket and suffering ill-repair,
it ceased its usefulness as a full-powered vehicle, but assumed another, more important function. It became a
kind of place in itself, a sort of mobile homestead, a moveable attic of treasures. Over the years,
though mindless and inert, it has accumulated meaning. Behind its seat have been stored—or more poignantly,
abandoned—a dozen heirlooms of adventures, a hundred rattling relics of good times. There’s a Busch beer can,
part of a mad pageant arranged for a departing editor and a friend in the mountains of Kentucky; there’s my
old Zebco rod and reel, much the worse for wear among pipe wrenches, wreaking bars and a copy of Mandingo. There’s a raingear I haven’t worn since a long canoe trip down the river and whose mud-bronzed fossilized folds bring to mind some ancient Roman sculpture.
So it’s going to be hard to say goodbye, goodbye to this elegant redneck of a thing, this burdened peasant in a city rank with the lithe Audi, the chic Mercedes. I am not looking forward to parting; I’m not in any hurry. Its valves clatter (and so do mine); its skin is scabbed and scuffed. But, as they say on the cash-and-carry lots, it runs.
And with any luck, so do I. Pulling its groaning door open every morning, I step gingerly over
the hole in the floor below the clutch, and clamber again into a tentative continuance, surrounded by momento mori. I turn the key, listen to the engine falter, choke, clear its throat and rumble alive. “Hang in there, good buddy,” I murmur. “Old ridge runner, rust-house, beer hauler. Old back stoop of the cheapest motel. Hang in there.”
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