truck love

Notes from hometown visit:
In the past two years, the Cheyenne city council and land conservation department have built a miles-long “greenway”: a concrete sidewalk vivisecting a stretch of tumbleweeds, several cottonwood trees, and a long, cattailed marsh. The path follows several major boulevards, crosses behind a Barnes & Noble, and overlooks the Frontier Mall. If you look west on the greenway, a billboard reads, “Straightforward. It’s the Wyoming Way.” A small but consistent stream of cars pass, but most vehicles are extended cab pick-up trucks, the width and length of a trailerhome, and most are brand new, and I breathed in their fumes while trying to jog. Nothing like the fumes you inhale running down Flatbush but lung-choking nevertheless.
The trucks signify “macho shit,” as my dad put it to me, describing his 2005 Dodge Ram– macho shit and all the same testosterone-affirmation that some people (both genders) glean from owning large cars, large chains, large record collections. Ownership, period. But there is also a sense of claiming space, not just because in the country there seems to be so much space to claim, but because, simply, people can. Dodge Rams, to me, look like moving parcels of land, the homesteader lifestyle mutated for mobility.
Dierks Bentley, a masterstoryteller in that country way, is super-popular in Wyoming. He gets the truck appeal with his song called “Cab of my Truck,” the lyrics of which would be more believable to my knowledge of “the actual country,” were it not for his line about the glove box full of parking tickets — because parking tickets are an amenity of cityfolk, obviously. It glamorizes the dolo lifestyle of livin in said cab of truck, truck-cab as altar. But it doesn’t get at the meat of proper truckonia (word to Kandia Crazy Horse) — ttruck worship — as much as Toby Keith’s “Big Ol’ Truck,” which immortalizes a truck-driving woman almost to the point of fetish and you wonder which he likes more: trucks, chicks or America.
I never met a real cowboy who listened to Wilco, Richmond Fontaine, Neko Case. Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette sure, for old time’s sake. But real cowboys listening only to Haggard and Cash is exactly like New York rap fans listening only to Run-DMC, or LA punkers rocking Black Flag exclusively: a case of misguided purism, cast in amber. The good ole days happened once, and they will happen again, only somewhere else; the cowboy predilection for simplicity should not be confused with nostalgia. The roster for Cheyenne Frontier Days, the “daddy” of all rodeos [or the American cowboy’s world cup] is dotted with CMT-fodder — Martina McBride, Dierks Bentley, Montgomery Gentry — all sold out. In Frontier Park, a tour bus with Rascall Flatts, Martina McBride, and Tim McGraw was parked next to a replica of a homesteader camp, with real 19th century wagons and beans baking in a cauldron over a spit, the air, pungent with leather, furs, horses.
One day my dad and I drove a gravel road following the back end of FE Warren Air Force Base. He pointed just beyond a chain-link fence to what looked like an oversize barn, woodsiding, thatched roof, and said, “That over there is a nuclear warhead repair facility.” Which is scarier, the idea of warheads needing repair, or the fact that the facility appeared slightly less secure than my Brooklyn apartment?
Meanwhile my aunt told me that when non-Mexican people ask her what she thinks about “the immigration problem,” she cackles, “I think they should send us all back!”