It is often said, usually by a man leaning on one, that real Americans drive trucks. I agree with this completely. I have agreed with it all my life. I begin there because I am about to tell you that I do not drive, and I would not want my readers to draw the wrong conclusion, which is the one they are drawing now.
Let us start, as always, with first principles. The truck is the most American of vehicles because it is a vehicle of work. It carries lumber, feed, fence posts, and a cooler that has never once been emptied. The Founders, too, were people of work. They carried things. They carried muskets, and quills, and the weight of a new nation, and, on at least one occasion, a very large bell, which cracked, and which they kept anyway, because they were not quitters. A person who carries things is a truck in spirit. The Founders were trucks.
Now consider that the Founders did not drive. Not one of them. They never held a license, never merged, never once adjusted a mirror. They were driven: by horses, by coachmen, and by history. So if the Founders were trucks, and the Founders did not drive, then a truck is not something you drive. A truck is something you are.
A lesser columnist would notice, at this point, that a truck no one drives is a very large lawn ornament. I noticed. I sat with it at my kitchen table for most of a Sunday. And then I did what the Founders did whenever an argument stopped making sense, which is that I kept going, in a carriage.
If the most American thing a truck can do is carry, and the most American thing a Founder can do is be carried, then it follows that the real American is not the man behind the wheel. He is merely the horse. The real American is the cargo.
I want to be honest about what this has meant in practice.
In April I purchased a three-quarter-ton pickup truck in a color the dealer called Heritage Maroon. It has 11 miles on it, all of them from the dealership, which delivered it to my home on the back of a larger truck, a truck carried by a truck, which I consider the single most patriotic thing I have ever seen on my street. It has not moved since. It sits in my driveway, facing forward, which I consider a statement.
Each morning at 7 a.m. I climb into the bed of the truck with a folding chair, a thermos, and a pamphlet, and I sit there, parked, being cargo. I am hauled nowhere. I am hauled there with dignity.
My neighbor, who has driven trucks for 40 years, came over the first week to ask what I was doing. I told him I was hauling myself. He asked where to. I told him “forward, in spirit.” He went back inside, and he has since begun waving at me in the mornings the way you wave at a float in a parade, which I have accepted as the correct response.
When I must go somewhere, I am driven by my sister-in-law in her sedan, a vehicle I consider foreign in spirit if not in manufacture. I ride in the back seat with my hands folded and my handbag secured beside me, like freight. She has asked me to stop calling her “the horse.” I have told her that I mean it as an honor, which it is, and she has told me that she does not want it, which is also, in its way, very American.
Some will say I have missed the point of the truck. I say the point of the truck is to carry what matters. I matter. I am in the truck. That truck has never been more American, and it has never once gone anywhere, and I believe that when the Founders looked out at the nation they were building, that is exactly what they saw: a great machine, standing perfectly still in a driveway, full of a woman who believed in it.
Next week: what the Founders would have said about the drive-thru, and why I have been asked to stop walking through it.