TOWNSHEND — You see them in backyards, their hoods propped open. Sometimes you'll catch one sitting in a field up on blocks surrounded by high grass, sunning its rusty body.
When you least expect it, you'll find one in the woods, its axles sunk into the forest floor, the bed that once held cinder blocks or lumber filled with dead leaves. There's a smell of used motor oil and rain.
You look at the odometer and wonder where the truck has been in its life, and for one fleeting second you feel the presence of its soul.
Like old soldiers, trucks never die, they just fade away. People seem reluctant to part with them they way that they so casually discard worn out cars.
“There's just something about a truck that's different,” someone once told me. “Getting up in the morning and heading out out in a truck just feels good, better than in a car...” he said, his voice trailing off. His eyes had a faraway look to them; they were focused on some distant horizon.
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The problem with trucks is that they don't last forever. Rings and pistons wear; steel bodies rust.
You can lose a lot of time working on old trucks - a lifetime, really - with engine rebuilds and clutch replacements, body work and wiring.
It's hard to let go of a good truck. People will go to great lengths to save one. When I lived in Maine, there was an old truck in town that was famous for its odd sound. The owner had put in an engine from a fishing boat when the original V-8 had gone bad. The truck moved slowly, with the deliberation of the very old.
Its owner had repainted it a deep blue and written the words “In Rust We Trust” on the hood.
An old truck's best friend is the weekend mechanic. Few others will take the time to listen to an old engine, or care when it misses.
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Many people believe the day of the shade-tree mechanic is over. “It's just too complicated now,” they say. “Everything is computerized....”
I'd like to think that's not true. The backyard mechanic is part of who we are as a nation. Independent and untrained, he struggles forward against high odds. His knuckles bleed, and his repair manual is covered with greasy fingerprints.
For some people, working on old trucks becomes a way of life, a shamanistic journey to the underworld of automotive repair. The amateur mechanic must undergo a thousand trials before he can emerge victorious. he must survive the agony of rusted bolts and seized engines, the frustration of washers dropped into snow. A few persevere. They become priests of the iron gods.
But what about the ghost in the machine?
“A truck is just a collection of parts,” a Tibetan monk once told me in thickly accented English. “Take all the parts apart, and where is the truck?” he asked. It was all impermanence and emptiness, he gently argued. There is no self, only rust.
But I have spent too many hour under the hood to believe that. I'd like to think that all good trucks go to heaven.