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PrintThat First Truck
A man and his pickup: initiation into a uniquely American tradition
ILLUSTRATION BY Aude-Noëlle Nevius
Here in the West, many of us have particularly fond memories of owning our first truck, as much because of the experiences associated with it as that feeling of invincibility you get from a growling V8 and more than two tons of steel beneath your butt. Mine was a two-tone blue 1972 Dodge—a 4x4. It provided the assurance that when I found myself mired in mud or high-centered in slush, I was surely more stuck than if I were driving a sedan.
Years before I moved to Jackson, and just months before my first elk hunt, I bought the Dodge off a body-shop worker in Missoula, Montana. He had bought it new, then totaled it before its first birthday. He unabashedly told me this. The newspaper ad that reeled me in stated the odometer read only 11,000 miles and the asking price was just $3,200, a true fire-sale deal. How could I resist?
As it turned out, he’d replaced most of the sheet metal, the radiator and fan, rear bumper, axle, and a few other essential parts that failed to dissuade me as the list he recited grew. Then he crowed, “The engine and tranny are like new. She’s a pullin’ mule.”
I waltzed around the pretty blue beast a couple of times. He’d done a nice job on the paint, all right. I checked out the bulging 16-inch tires, the gauges and controls inside (especially the AM and FM radio—top of the line in those days), and asked, “Can I take it for a test drive?”
“Sure,” he said, and handed me the keys.
Compared to the Pontiac Firebird I drove then, the truck felt like a Sherman tank—an appropriate analogy, I’d later learn, given the truck’s stiff ride and steering by Armstrong. I returned to the shop and paid the man $500 cash. He agreed to hold it until I sold the Pontiac. I didn’t haggle over price, knowing the truck had sold for more than twice as much new. Surprised it lasted on the market a week, I congratulated myself.
As I tooled back to my college apartment, visions swirled in my head of unexplored two-track roads, loads of firewood, and newfound fishing and hunting spots. This fine machine deserved a name, and I soon settled on “Old Blue.”
There’s just something about trucks. Both workhorse and recreational rig, they haul everything from building materials to landscaping plants, the kids’ toys to oversize pets, and loads of junk bound for the dump. They ferry our play things and homes away from home—boats, snowmobiles, horses, campers, and trailers. They help define who we are. With chrome running boards and freshly washed, a half-ton looks impressive in the driveway.
You get attached to an old heap, but you don’t worry about it like you would a shiny new one. I had both … a shiny new one that was already totaled! A stroke of genius, I told myself.
One day, however, I was asked by a friend who happened to follow me in his car, “Do you know that Dodge of yours goes down the road sorta sideways?”
“Uh, no,” I replied.
“That’s what a bent frame will sometimes do,” he grinned.
Old Blue was dependable, if not a little hard on tires. It moved my belongings in U-Haul trailers to six career stops in four different states. Chained at all four corners, it could buck deep snow with the best of them. That proved handy after I landed in Jackson, where the truck extracted more than a few snowbound cars that strayed from plowed roadways. Blue became a weekend fixture at backcountry trailheads and familiar to merchants at the local lumber yards. That truck and I bonded like boards sandwiched with Gorilla Glue.
One fall, I loaned it to my friend Tim who wanted to haul a few cords of firewood from the national forest east of the Elk Refuge. On the first load he made a rookie mistake by stacking several ten-foot logs higher than the bed. He figured that was fine because he’d staked the bed rails so the logs couldn’t roll over the sides. But his foresight ended there, failing to consider what might happen if he hit a pothole descending a steep stretch of mountain track. He found out.
The top log entered the cab through the rear window and stopped just short of exiting through the windshield. Thankfully, the log split the difference between Tim and his young daughter seated with him in the cab. He apologized profusely to me, replaced the rear window, and never asked to borrow the Dodge again. I got one of those fancy sliding rear windows out of the deal. Old Blue looked better than ever.
For seventeen years I drove that truck wherever it would go. I religiously touched up each new dent and scratch with various shades of Rust-oleum blue. Then, in 1990, I sold it to my friend Bob. He just had to have that old heap when he learned I was upgrading to a new used pickup. And for $1,500, we both thought we scored a steal.
Bob had experience with and a personal attachment to the truck. We’d made expeditions up what passed as roads to bag grouse and some of Wyoming’s highest peaks. But he had different plans in mind when he wrote me the check. I moved from Jackson Hole half a decade ago, so I can’t be sure if that old truck still has its giddy-up.
But if you spot a blue-blotched, ’72 Dodge cruising Wyoming’s byways with a brace of llamas corralled in the bed, that’s probably Bob and Old Blue!
