Living without the truck

As I wrote last month, I sold the 2008 Chevy 3500 Duramax diesel truck with the utility body on it. This was the truck that my old engineering job bought new in 2008, that had been our work vehicle during the years when my field geophysics career wound down, and that I purchased from the company for a song after the build had closed. By then the truck was largely forgotten about, and it became a rodent-infested mess.

Before I bought it, I had employee-favor-level use of the truck for years. I borrowed it to move my kids in and out of college, and towed cars with it multiple times. So my ownership of it, while extremely useful, wasn’t really that much more than a karmic extension of the access I already had anyway, but it became my financial responsibility to repair and maintain it—in other words, paying for what I’d previously been getting for free. But, yes, it was very convenient having the truck in my driveway instead of needing to drive 20 miles to where it was stored, and that was a godsend when my sister and I were emptying our mother’s house prior to sale and a seemingly endless stream of items needed to be delivered to other relatives or donated.

But let’s talk about towing cars. For many years, I was a serial user of beat-up high-mileage Suburbans. Their main utility was to take the family on the big annual Nantucket beach vacation and be able to drive on sand to the prime fishing spots at Smith Point and Great Point. The realization that I could also use the ’Burbs to tow cars home dawned on me slowly, but it was life-changing when it came. So, for a time, towing cars with the still-owned-by-work-truck was only when I was between Suburbans.

The utility of being prepared to tow a car you’re interested in buying isn’t just the original Bring a Trailer paradigm, where the car is a dead, needy, well-priced project, nor is it the more recent Bring a Trailer paradigm where the car is ungodly expensive and too mint and low-mileage to do something so banal as actually driving it home. No, the big advantage of having a tow setup is twofold. First, you can strike quickly and show unmistakable intent, purpose, and confidence—nothing says “I am here to do business and can end your Craigslist / Facebook Marketplace nightmare of deadbeats and no-shows right freaking now” than rolling into the driveway with a truck and a trailer. But second, it makes it so you don’t need to rely on anyone but yourself, another arrow in the quiver of the whole car-buyer-as-lone-wolf thing. My wonderful wife certainly has driven me to dozens of car pick-ups over the decades and would continue to do so if asked, but there’s an ineffable sense of independence that comes from doing it all by yourself. To paraphrase Carson McCullers, the truck and trailer owner is a lonely hunter.

Plus, there’s the distance part of the calculation. As I said a few weeks ago, if a car is an hour away, it’s easy enough to just drive there, check it out, decide if you want to buy it, and if you do, come back with either a second driver or a truck and a trailer. If a car is hundreds of miles away, however,  it really makes sense to go there prepared to do it all in one trip and not have to rope your spouse into giving up a Saturday to drive you back there to pick it up. Plus, loading the car onto a trailer removes the often legally gray issue of driving it home without registration and insurance (in Massachusetts, the legality of temporarily slapping another plate on the car requires a set of circumstances so thin as to be nearly impossible outside of trading a car in at a dealership). Unfortunately, I’ve never owned a trailer and thus needed to go to U-Haul and rent and return an auto transporter, so whether it was with the Suburban or the borrowed Silverado or the owned Silverado, the idea that I could drop everything and simply walk out to the driveway and drive off and bag dead cheap desirable cars never really materialized into reality.

But just because I didn’t wind up using the truck that way didn’t obviate the constant feeling that I might, or that I should. During the two-and-a-half years I owned the truck, the amount of time I spent online looking at cars was obsessive, compulsive, and unhealthy—a step change from previous years where it was merely excessive. Granted, the fact that I’m self-employed, work from home, and nearly all my income comes from writing tends to plant me in front of the computer in a quasi-professional mode for much of the day, and there’s a thin line between banging out content for my paying gigs versus time spent on social media, where I’m less verbose but perhaps even more entertaining. The point is that buying the truck and having it in the driveway seemed to kick what was already a high-OCD car-searching habit into overdrive, injecting methamphetamine straight into my automotive brain, but it was justifiable because the acts of searching online—for reference material for something I was writing, finding ridiculous cars I could make fun of on my Facebook page, and endlessly pounding the interwebs looking for that elusive rust-free Series 2 Fiat 124 Sport Coupe (or whatever I was infatuated with at the time)—all blended into one another.

When I wrote that I sold the truck but kept the little Winnebago Rialta RV (the VW Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on it), a number of folks asked me why I didn’t instead sell the Rialta, keep the truck, and buy a travel trailer and a car-towing trailer if that’s what I kept saying I needed? It’s a reasonable question. Some of it was driveway space (I simply don’t have the room here in Newton, Massachusetts, for trailers), but the larger part is that my wife and I like the little 21-foot Rialta. We like the fact that it’s closer to an old-school VW camper than to a real RV, and we appreciate the ability to drive and park it nearly anywhere. We’ve used it mainly to do a few days at a time at the beach. We’ve never done any real long-haul RVing in it. So thinking of using the truck to tow a well-appointed travel trailer was like opening up a blade on a Swiss Army knife that you never really have any intention of using.

Going back to the Suburban for a bit, you’d think that owning both the truck and the Rialta, I’d have covered all the bases of what the ’Burb did in a single vehicle, but that’s not accurate. I owned the Suburbans because I could fit nine people, coolers, a Coleman grill, chairs, plus boogie boards, fishing rods, a surfboard, and a windsurfer strapped to the roof and drive it all onto soft sand. ’Burbs did this astonishingly well. The RV certainly can’t do this, and it’s a forced fit for the truck. I had one geophysical survey in 2011 looking for unexploded ordnance on Martha’s Vineyard’s Cape Pogue where I had to put the truck on sand, requiring me to deflate the duallie rear tires, and it was not exactly convenient. And as a people-mover, the truck’s extended cab could fit five, but that was all. The RV appears cavernous inside, but it only has seat belts for three (the two front seats and a single seat in the coach).

Looking at it cargo-wise, obviously nothing came close to the truck with its 8-foot bed and utility body. But once my mother’s house was sold, the window of its use largely passed. Still, I kept thinking that, if I sold it, how would I snag a Honda tracked snow blower being sold way below market value in August? But then summer passed. And besides, there was no way to get a snowblower into the back without ramps, and I didn’t own them. Then I realized that if I was going to need to rent a little trailer to move a snowblower, I could use the Rialta, as that’s just about all its trailer hitch can handle.

I laughed when, two days after I sold the truck, my oldest son asked me about driving 80 miles each way to Springfield to buy a mattress, bed frame, drawers, and a nightstand. Although the Rialta has a full-time queen-sized bed inside, all that space has to be accessed through the small side door (that big rear window isn’t on a hatch and doesn’t open up). The Rialta did swallow the bed, but it had to be forced down its throat.

Of course, towing-wise, while the Suburbans were capable of hauling home a car on a U-Haul trailer, the Silverado with its Duramax diesel could’ve easily towed a ramp truck with five Suburbans on it across the country, and the fact that it was such massive overkill for the pedestrian tasks I subjected it to was one of the reasons I let it go. The final time I used the truck was when my wife said that a friend of hers was getting rid of all of her tomato grow boxes and related supplies. Maire Anne grows tomatoes on the garage roof and, like me when I see a well-priced car or guitar, wanted to pounce before someone else grabbed the goods. She wasn’t sure if she could squeeze it all into her little Honda Fit hatchback, so we took the truck. Hauling tomato boxes was one final example of what massive overkill this vehicle—which my old job had bought to tow a 32-foot trailer cross country—was for this kind of leafy-suburb errand-running.

But with all that rationalization of why I should let it go, immediately after I sold the truck I felt viscerally hobbled. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I found a cool must-buy vehicle, I was at a significant disadvantage, as I couldn’t show up in the hunt-and-kill position of power. Never mind the fact that I had the opportunity in August to do exactly that with a well-priced TVR 2500M on Long Island and bailed on the trip, a decision I now regret (in my defense, my wife’s recent cardiac surgery and the impending sale of my mother’s house were significant pre-occupying factors).

For a few weeks after the sale, I put a lot of effort into looking for a replacement truck. Rather than another Suburban, I gravitated toward Honda Ridgelines, as the fact that they’re unibody vehicles (the same platform as the Odyssey minivan and the Pilot SUV, and front-wheel drive until they need four-wheel-drive traction) with a significantly more car-like ride was appealing to someone who has infrequent towing needs. Used Ridgelines are as thick as flies on poo, and 200K examples show up as low as $3500, but as with any vehicle, finding one that’s at the knee of the curve of cost and mileage, and appears to be in decent condition, and is nearby (since, of course, I no longer have a truck to use to tow home a truck), made it a narrow needle to thread. At some point I had the epiphany that I was spending obsessive time looking for a truck I didn’t really want or need since I sold the last truck because I didn’t really need it. I put the whole matter on the back burner, at least for now.

So, I’m truck-less, in some sense for the first time since 2008. And I’m OK with that.

But if I see an ad that says “1963 Jaguar E-Type ran when parked five years ago no rust stored indoors sold house must go $5300 to the first one who shows up with truck and trailer,” hooo boy, am I going to be pissed.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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