"This truck has given me 20 years of faithful service: nobody can put a price on that. Now who's gonna tow me home?" - Hank, King of the Hill

Wondertruck getting forest first aid.

This weekend was about saving the life of an old friend. Wondertruck. Wondertruck is a 1985 short-bed F150 4x4. It’s grumpy, and as a person who’s driven stick shift vehicles most of my life (they’re way cheaper), this particular stick shift is perhaps the most cantankerous I’ve had the chance to drive. It guzzles gas at a prodigious rate. The AM/FM/Cassette is installed upside-down. “That’s the only way it would fit,” Bill told me. Bill sold me the truck, up in Alaska.

Wondertruck has an exterior that can best be described as bits of flaking paint tenuously held together by bits of rust.

Houston hasn’t helped with the rust part, though Wondertruck (amazingly) still starts on the first try (except for that whole “dead battery in the woods as the hornets were taking turns stinging The Boy because he’d tramped on their nest incident”).

When moving from Alaska to Houston, I couldn’t bear to leave Wondertruck. It had helped me haul over twenty cords of wood, and it’s been loyal to me. I thought I could return the favor.

Turns out that when you move to Texas they want the vehicles to be inspected, for such pesky things such as meeting emissions (which Wondertruck passed in Fairbanks) and making sure all the various safety features work.

So, back in February I took Wondertruck in to get tested. Like a surgeon coming in with bad news, they told me that Wondertruck needed major surgery.

In the case of Wondertruck, the tail pipe and muffler had rusted through so utterly completely as to make it unlikely that there’d been more than a suggestion of metal holding them together for years. No wonder the vehicle passed the tailpipe test in Fairbanks – it was pretty unlikely that any emissions were making it to the end of the tailpipe.

Wondertruck also needed an emergency brake cable, which is odd, since in all of Texas (outside of an overpass or two) I have yet to see one place one could park a vehicle and worry much about it rolling anywhere – there’s just no up and down to this state.

I waited until June. Did I want to spend $340 on a vehicle that was worth maybe $400?

The Lexus driving guy made up my mind for me.

Something about a rusty old hulk of a vehicle seems to drive some fraction of luxury vehicle drivers just a bit insane. Perhaps it’s the graceful way that Wondertruck shudders to a start from a red light? Perhaps it’s the fine lines of primer and rust? Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s the fact that they don’t have enough self-confidence for a ride like Wondertruck.

So, with only a week left until Wondertruck’s Alaska tags expired, I took it in to get the repairs done.

The Boy has told me on several occasions that he wants to have Wondertruck available for him when it’s his turn to start driving. Wondertruck has that effect on people.

Until 2016, then, Wondertruck is mine.