D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     March 2005

Pickup Lines

Owning a pickup truck is definitely a New Mexico thing. But it's not just a guy thing.

We are true New Mexicans now. I'm not talking about eating red or green chiles, taking whiptail lizards in as pets, getting a zia tattoo or any other official-type Land of Enchantment activity. No, I mean something permanent and far-reaching, a fundamental lifestyle shift that's as quintessentially New Mexican as the Rio Grande.

Click the mage to see a big picture of our big truck.

We now own a pickup truck.

You may think I'm jesting or exaggerating when I say that owning a pickup is the true mark of a New Mexican, but the US Census Bureau and the Department of Transportation Highway Statistics back me up: Across the United States, Americans own approximately one pickup for every eight people and one pickup for every five licensed drivers. In New Mexico, however, we boast roughly one pickup per four people and one for every three licensed drivers. New Mexicans, in short, are almost twice as likely to have a pickup as other Americans.

Think Texas is big on pickup trucks? The Lone Star State is not even close, with a measly one pickup per seven Texans and one for every four licensed drivers.
When Terri Clark sings about pickups and how it's "better in the Southwest" in that new TV commercial, she's singing our song, folks. Nowhere else are pickups so much a part of the fabric of daily life, so omnipresent, so—well, sexy. (Though this is not the place to get into my infatuation with country crooner Terri Clark, whom we saw live and in person at the Grand Ole Opry. Even though I'm not a country music fan by any stretch of the imagination, her voice and attitude and trademark white cowboy hat. . . . Is it really too much to ask my wife to wear a white cowboy hat around the house?)

But it wasn't sex appeal that led us to join the throngs of New Mexico pickup owners—at least so my wife claims. It was pure practicality. (Sure. Right. Of course it was.) Living on the edge of a small town as we do, we frequently need to haul "stuff." Like plywood, for instance. Being able to fit a sheet of plywood in the truck bed was the number-one criteria for selecting a pickup, to hear my wife tell it. (If you see a blue pickup truck cruising back and forth with a load of plywood in the back, odds are that's us.)

We can now haul recycling to the bins at the edge of the dump, no problem. Shortly after we got the pickup, we bought a cord of wood for the fireplace and, yep (or is that "yup"? I'm still getting used to pickup talk), piled it right in the back of the truck. My wife was even suggesting that now we could go get our own bags to feed the pellet stove, instead of having them delivered, until I pointed out that, pickup or no, we'd still have to heft a zillion 40-pound bags.

And did I mention being able to haul plywood?

A strange thing happened after we got our truck, however. (And no, we did not buy the brand that Terri Clark advertises.) This is my wife's pickup, you see—make no mistake about that. And pretty soon she discovered that there are a lot of other women who have pickups, too. As soon as she started driving around town in her "pretty" blue pickup, which is sort of a metallic bluejeans color, other female pickup owners began coming out of the woodwork. They admired the color of her truck. They compared notes. They gently competed over how much their pickups could haul. For all I know, they ran races down Bullard Street with pickups packed full of plywood.

See, I always assumed pickups were basically a guy thing. In fact, if you do the math, I'd figured that two out of every three New Mexico guys must drive a pickup, presuming that the female 50 percent of the state's licensed drivers are tooling around in coupes, sedans, SUVs and, of course, soccer-mom minivans. Not owning a pickup hereabouts made me feel like a wimp, a failure as a New Mexico guy. Maybe I should at least get a gun rack for the convertible?

But it wasn't my fault—I blame my upbringing. We were not, to put it mildly, a pickup-type family. My parents always owned cars—lumbering, safe, American-made cars. A Nash Rambler, back when they made such cars, and later Chryslers, Plymouths and one short-lived Cadillac, the only car I can ever remember my dad buying used. The Cadillac leaked oil onto the garage floor from the moment we brought it home until the day he got rid of it. The oil shortages of the 1980s may have had their origins two decades earlier in that car; somebody might want to try drilling under the garage floor of our old house, to recapture all that oil.

My dad was not mechanically inclined—as somehow I think pickup owner oughta be—so fixing the dripping Cadillac himself was out of the question. Likewise unthinkable was any automotive divergence from the Detroit straight and narrow—or, I should say, square and boxy. A convertible or other sports car? Never. A pickup truck? Unimaginable. We would have bought a rocketship or, heck, a gun rack first.

I learned to drive in a white Plymouth Valiant that I teasingly nicknamed "White Wind," after an old cowboy hero's noble steed ("Scratch gravel, White Wind!" was the Golden Arrow's version of "Hi yo Silver!"). Good ol' White Wind had all the aerodynamic verve of a shoebox. You can just imagine how the "chicks" flocked around that car when I was a teenager, zipping around town in what looked like an overgrown PlaySkool toy.

If I'd had a pickup back then, I could have piled my pals in the back and we could have all gone to the drive-in. Or I could have just parked by the high school and waited for the girls to climb in. Heck, I could even have hauled stuff like, I don't know, plywood.

Never mind that this was South Dakota, where it's winter for roughly 11 months out of the year, and my pals would have frozen to death in the back if I could have gotten them in there in the first place. Or that it would have been a long wait, the gas tank slowly emptying as my pickup idled in front of the high school, for any girls to be tempted to ride. Let's just say I would have needed a lot more than just a pickup truck back in high school, and this was before those "Extreme Makeover" TV shows.

And neither my dad nor I would have had a clue what to do with a sheet of plywood once I got it home, anyway.

But still, pickups were a guy thing—and now that my wife owns one and I don't, it seemed like yet another blow to my guyness.

Evidently I was wrong about that, however, or at least decades out of date. Just try telling the gals racing their plywood-packed trucks down Bullard Street that a pickup is a purely masculine vehicle. They'll run you right over and throw your sorry carcass in their truckbed to haul out to the dump with the recyclables.

If one out of every three New Mexico drivers owns a pickup, I'm willing to bet one out of every three New Mexico female drivers owns a pickup. Look out, boys, comin' through.

I wonder, though, if the ad gurus who are marketing pickup trucks realize that this gender gap has slammed shut? Maybe I'm interpreting those Terri Clark ads all wrong, and the idea is really, "Hey, cowboy-hat-wearing gals like me, come on and buy this here brand of truck." See, I'd been viewing it more along the lines of, "Hey, big boy, buy this here brand of truck, and cowboy-hat-wearing gals like me will climb all over you to ride in it." This may explain why I'm not working on Madison Avenue. I'm obviously behind the times.

Now that I've been enlightened about women and pickups, I can ride shotgun in my wife's truck without feeling my masculinity oozing out the tailpipe. Yes, I'm married to a pickup-drivin' gal, and darned ("durned"?) proud of it. Do you think that if I bought her a white cowboy hat and left it on the driver's seat, she'd take the hint?

David A. Fryxell is editor and publisher of Desert Exposure. That's him you see in the passenger side of the blue pickup with all the plywood in back.

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