Truck intro

TRUCK: A LOVE STORY (available October 17, 2006)

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INTRODUCTION TO "TRUCK: A LOVE STORY"

The story begins on a pile of sheep manure the size of a yurt. Dad stacked it alongside the barn one winter, and I climbed it, a fact documented in a thirty-something-year-old photograph of a miniature me waving from the rounded peak, clearly thrilled to have summitted the dung. My jacket is unzipped and the sun is bright, but the landscape is blank with snow, and the shading of the sky – bleached horizon rising to a zenith of cyanotic blue, and not a cloud to be seen – suggests the day was cold and deepens the green of the tall pines in the background. My hood is up, my pants are tucked inside rubber barn boots, and I am leaning on my sawed-off pitchfork as if it were an alpenstock. I am grinning like the hick spawn of the devil and Sir Edmund Hillary.

That spring, Dad hauled the manure away and spread it on the fields. The spot where the pile once stood was marked by a circle of earth stained dark by all the good juice that had percolated down. When Mom and Dad put in their big garden across the yard that year, they gave my brother John and I some sweet corn and pumpkin seeds to plant in the stain. The plants rocketed from the earth. In another photo taken later that summer, John and I are standing barefoot before the patch. It’s fairly early in the season – I can see the hay wagon docked at the elevator, meaning Dad was baling first crop – but the sweet corn has unfurled to the level of my shoulders and the pumpkin leaves are the size of a tractor seat.

I went through a long stretch of adolescence associating the garden with chores (specifically weeding), and then another long stretch of city living in which I had no garden at all, but when I moved to the village of New Auburn, Wisconsin, eight years ago and found myself in possession of a back yard, I began to get green urges. Beginning with a simple raised bed, I attempted to grow a portion of my own food. Eventually, the garden grew to include eight raised beds, a scattered collection of pots, and a mound of dirt left over when the raised beds and pots were filled.

I have proven to be not much of a gardener. For one thing, I spend too much time away from home. When it comes to gardening, there are distinct advantages to being present. For another thing, I lack specific knowledge and discipline. I tend to garden based on impulse and intuition. Apparently there are better ways. If my raised beds have any consistency it is that they are anemic and squirrel-riddled. My garden gives me inner peace and salad, but it also yields cat turds and wilt. Still, my desire doesn’t die. Every year, I want to plant again. And I credit the memory of that sheep manure garden. I keep believing I can duplicate it. That I can just slap some seeds in the ground and they will come busting up. If you drove down the alley behind my old house this past winter and saw the light in the basement window above my gardening bench, or saw me bent over the raised beds transplanting seedlings in the spring or yanking weeds in the summer, or if you saw steam on my windows as I blanched the skins off the last of my tomatoes, that was me living out the annual year of the garden, driven in part by appetite and thrift, but also driven by a desire to reconnect with the little boy who loved to crawl between the stalks to a quiet place where he could listen as the sweet corn leaves scraped in the breeze. To rest his chin on his hands and peek through the shadowy tangle of vines to that one spot where the sun pierced the green canopy in a bright bolt and lit a powdery pumpkin blossom up all electric orange.

That same little boy once rapped his head on the windshield of his father’s old International pickup truck with such force that a sparkly spider’s web appeared in the glass. We can only guess what effect this had on the little boy, although we do know he grew up to have trouble doing fractions and once on the way home from swimming lessons at the big green lake in Chetek he grabbed the shift lever on the International and tried to downshift on the fly, which made his mother say something very sharp indeed, and to this day he is better at upshifting than downshifting, but then isn’t everybody? Lately it turns out it might have been his brother who threw the shift lever and he is misremembering, to which he replies, Holy Crap, look at the size of the crack in that windshield. We do know that the little boy grew up to have an International pickup of his own which he loves very much but has to content himself with admiring it as it sits there, because it is not running and he does not know how to fix it. All in all he is content with this state of affairs because he likes to study the old truck as the still center of all the movement around it, something along the lines of “the sleep of trees or stones,” as Simone de Beauvoir put it when describing Jean Paul Sartre’s discussion of an inert chestnut tree, which we take to symbolize that the little boy is in way over his head. Returning to the adult version of me, prior to leaving on a recent extended road trip, I took my father aside and told him that were I to perish behind the wheel and the Iowa or some other state patrol were to return my belongings, he should know that while I was enjoying the 6-cassette packet titled Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, I was not completely buying the Meaning of Life bit. The amateur study of philosophy is like taking a few laps with a NASCAR driver. You’re not qualified to do it on your own, you have no business behind the wheel, but for a few laps or paragraphs, you’re right in there with’em, and when it’s all over, you’ve learned something. Or, as my local fire chief once said, you’ve simply exasperated the situation.

And it remains difficult to get a philosopher to deliver a load of pig manure to your garden. So I really should get the truck going. It sits there falling apart with a case of nuclear cradle cap, thirsty for paint and a gas tank that won’t leak. The project would give me license to make numerous trips to Farm & Fleet, where the livestock section feels sadly ever more the equivalent of a hobby section, but the sign over the drinking fountain that says Please no tobacco juice remains, and consequently, so does hope. I don’t expect much, and the little pleasures suffice. This morning for coffee I ground four scoops of Farmer to Farmer Guatemalan Medium and when I pulled the grinder cap and sniffed, it was all I could do not to flop right over and shake my leg like a dog.

So. The year is planned. Grow a garden and recapture my youth. That, and get my decrepit 1951 L-120 International pickup truck running in time for deer hunting season in November.