I called my little truck Max
Make: Mitsubishi
Model: Mighty Max
It (‘he’) was one of a kind.
I am unoriginal. His name was set and I in no place to change it.
I have not written about Max since we took our last road trip together. We made it to the American Southwest. After going up and down California’s coasts and mountains and up and through the Pacific Northwest’s damp regions and its surprising dry eastern regions. We were expanding our reach.
This road trip to Arizona, Maximo, we almost pulled it off. I think I let you down.
After all those road miles solo, you and I, I had a companion, Ariana. A vital lady up for the task, rubbertramp savvy, and more spontaneous than myself. She ran up and around the Joshua Trees, bought pints of Jim Beam and beef jerky on 395, and took me through the stars in Death Valley. She brought smiles, she loved the bench seat because it meant snuggle-access even while driving. She liked peach rings and she even tried my chewing tobacco. And somewhere on that highway 40 road, there must still be a pair of birkenstocks, a screaming burro, and me, pants around me ankles, staring into the sparkling carpet of the sky.
I think about that last ride west from Prescott, Arizona. I think about the pink and orange sunset as we passed south of Las Vegas, Bill Withers “Lovely Day” playing through the speakers. I think about the last moment I had with you, in that gas station parking lot in Barstow.
Barstow… that vehicle graveyard, any words put down about the place are overvaluing it. But it does exist live out its town motto “Crossroads to Opportunity”
Picture Ariana and I perched inside the cab of Max on top of a tow trailer riding through the desert like extraterrestial tour guides. Giddy with the novelty, shocked by the sputtering death of a vehicle I bought with cash tips and immediately loaded with all lifestyle belongings and moved to another state. She immediately saw your appeal and revered you almost as much as I did. After all those solo trips with you and I, Max, I’m glad she joined us.
The moments get all mumbled Maximo because of the highway white lines. The headlights. They blend. They string out along one another.
I remember changing your oil for the first time. The first time I had changed oil. In a slanted driveway in Bend in January. Freeze climbing from the ground into my hips. But I drained ya and I refilled the ya and ya turned right over.
I learned how to change your belts and adjust the tensioner in a barn in Sonoma. I put you on the racks and change the oil filter and oil, much more accustomed now to the task. I bent my neck bending under manifolds, flipping manual pages, troubleshooting why you would leak so much coolant. I always felt a mild nausea dropping you by the auto shop.
I would take your camper shell off the two summers I had you, thinking it would be good to air out and show off your frame a bit. Go cruise down the Great Highway the last year it was open. A nice loop down Sloat, across the Great Highway Dunes, up Lincoln, and back on Sunset. Smoothly shifting and coasting in neutral.
You were my first manual car Maximo. A true companion. You didn’t like moving into 1 or 2 very much, but you would hum right along with a smooth shift. I had to learn the feel of it. I caught on quickly from the first ride back to SF from Sacramento.
Remember when your clutch pedal lost all pressure and I couldn’t shift? After the first big winter storm in Central Oregon in 2019? The day I left on the return trip home for Thanksgiving- we spun out, we pulled over into a ditch to help someone else in a ditch. Then another person pulled in front of my ditch to help me out. It was dark at 5pm and we coast downhill, unable to accelerate or shift, and had just enough oomph to get into the parking lot of the first motel and stop, with frozen wheelwells, right in the middle of it.
I didn’t write much about you Maximo. And I am going to miss you. When I think of you, I think of pulling down your finicky tailgate, push the whole thing in while pulling the handle out. I think of sitting down, caked with dirt, pulling a cold beer out of the cooler after getting back to the trailhead. I think of ducking my head into the cramped shell, fishing through bags of clothes, boxes of food, and finally finding what I first meant to grab.
I didn’t write much because our rides were the poem. With your white paint and blue leather. I was there to shift the stick and depress the clutch, roll down the windows and air you out, to look in the rearview at myself with a trickster grin and then keep on going down the road.
