Pickup Trucks: "The World's Only Beer-Guided Motor Vehicle," plus an I-swear-I'm-not-making-it-up personal reminiscence

Just re-reading, this evening, P.J. O'Rourke's classic essay, "High-Speed Performance Characteristics of Pickup Trucks"...

An experienced pickup truck driver is a person who's wrecked one. An inexperienced pickup truck driver is a person who's about to wreck one [I have long qualified as experienced, having personally killed off three of 'em before I turned 18, but two of those were not my fault - RP]...The foremost high-speed-handling characteristic of pickup trucks is the remarkably high speed with which they head from wherever you are directly into trouble. This has to do with beer. The minute you get in a pickup you want beer. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but I blame it on Jimmy Carter having been President.

...You may be wondering where Jimmy Carter comes in. Well, Jimmy Carter was a redneck just like we all are trying to be, but he was a sober redneck. Most of us had never seen a sober redneck, and we have the Reagan landslide to testify that none of us ever want to see one again. It was a horrifying apparition...

...A pickup truck is basically a back porch with an engine attached. Both a pickup and a back porch are good places to drink beer because you can take a leak standing up from either. Pickup trucks are generally a little faster downhill than back porches, with the exception of certain California back porches during mudslide season. But back porches get better gas mileage...

...There are usually five gears on a pickup. [P.J. wrote this back when he and I were both a lot younger and pickup trucks were the good old-fashioned manly trucks with the three-speed H-pattern gearshift sticking out from the steering column where degenerate modern society puts a windshield wiper control cleverly disguised as a second blinker.] One is a mystery gear which is illustrated on the shift knob but cannot be found. Then there is first gear, which is good for getting stuck in the woods. When you aren't stuck in the woods it's good for yanking your bumper off while trying to help a friend who owns a pickup when he's stuck in the woods. First gear has a top speed of three. Second gear has a slightly higher top speed but you can't climb a speed bump without downshifting and the truck still gets only eight mpg. It is not known what third gear is for. All normal pickup driving is done in second. Pickups also have a reverse gear, which is good for getting more completely stuck in the woods than first gear can do alone...

That essay can be found in P.J.'s Republican Party Reptile, along with another fun piece he wrote in his Car and Driver days, "A Cool and Logical Analysis of the Bicycle Menace." (But I cannot recommend the one after that, "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your..." -- um, ahem, actually, just forget I brought it up.)

Some of my boyhood friends may still remember that for a while I actually drove an old pickup in which I habitually avoided our town's main street in favor of the back streets. This was because only the main street had stoplights, and four-way stop signs could generally, given the generally light traffic and good personal relationships with the local police, be run with impunity. And it was important for me to run as many four-way stops as I could, because in those old three-speeds second gear was geared high enough that you couldn't start from a dead stop in second gear without stalling the engine. "But, Kenny, why wouldn't you just shift down to first?" I hear you cry. Well, that was a bit of a mechanical challenge -- not because the steering column was held together with duct tape (though that is actually a true statement). It's because the teeth on the rod that ran from the gearshift on the duct-taped steering column down to the lever on the outside of the gearbox...you know what I'm talking about, right? Anyway, over the years that rod had gotten worn down so smooth that, though you could shift up from second to first from the driver's seat, you couldn't shift back down again. You could only shift from second to first by turning off the engine, getting out, opening the hood, reaching down to the gearbox, and popping it back into first by hand. Then you could close the hood and get back in the truck and start it back up and head out again. Which I could take with philosophic equanimity; but people stuck behind you at a red light tended to start using sign language at you. So I stayed on the back roads and coasted through the four-way stops...