For a year or so, our plan evolved into various stages before we spontaneously jumped into the truck, accepting that come what may come, we would figure things out, and return home by sunset.
Our task: To deliver a fifteen-year old truck in Pampa, and to return home with a twenty-year old truck.
It was the day of the year when the winds at Perry Lefors Field in Pampa did not howl at thirty knots; the kind of day you choose to fly there in your little airplane to land with winds at ten knots. Oh, well.
The sky had just enough clouds to embellish the photographs I took along the way. I lugged a Nikon D3 that Ben Jacobi had just assisted me in converting to an infrared camera. My first time with it, and all the images grabbed from the passeger seat as we sped by, I give thanks to Nik's plug-ins in Photoshop, for I managed to find some shots pleasing to my eye.
I love the Panhandle Plains, and I love making images of every corner of them. The infrared images make the plains all the more fascinating to me.
Foliage is still turning green along the way.
Cattle munch on the native grasses.
An old windmill still brings water to the well.
A butte in a cotton field.
Cotton stalks after the harvest.
Uh oh. Fire in a wheat field. To the right, an oil drilling unit.
Silos.
A widening road cut through a barn in Quanah.
Perry Lefors Field old hangars.
The dash of a '92 Chevrolet Cheyenne covered in layers of dust and dirt.
We found the old truck in the hangar. MyMrMallory connected the battery, gave the engine a good look, declared it safe to start, and then turned the key. The motor started right away, shaking the entire truck, and with a cloud of dust blowing out of its exhaust pipe.
Inside the truck, twenty-years of North Texas dust and dirt cover the dash. I pulled the lever and opened the passenger door, tossed my bag on the bench seat, and sat down, testing the air with my nostrils. Would I breathe in the dust and suffer a spasm of asthma, or would I survive? I could always hold my breath for the three-hour drive home. I looked for the button to roll down the window, discovering that it had none, and that the reason we say "roll down the window," is because back in the old days, vehicles had levers that people grasped and turned in order to open the window. I carefully cranked the lever to roll down the window. It came down nicely, and let fresh country air into the cabin. I breathed in deeply.
Someone years before had covered the back and driver's side glass with a dark plastic that now bubbled in the middle and pealed along the edges. A crack struck through the windshield on the passenger side, reminding me of the way lightning looks in pictures. Along the driver's door, smears of brown oil colored the gray panel. I looked at my door, and noted that no oil field worker or cowboy had smeared the passenger side.
The bed of the truck had no tailgate. In it, a roll of barbed wire and a shovel lay on a thick rubber mat long enough that it hung out of the bed, where once it had its tailgate. Placed over the bed, against the cabin, sat a long, white, scratched, and dented toolbox. I reached up to unlatch it, and the cover bolted upwards, startling me, making me jump backwards a couple of feet. I held my nose and peered in. The toolbox contained a large wrench, a hammer, paper towels, and several cans of WD-40, all of them covered in a layer of dust.
The truck we delivered in Pampa has not endured the hard life the old truck did. It runs well and reliably, and the reason we wanted to swap them. Back at home, I asked one of my favorite mechanics about the old truck:
Me: "Well, I'd like to keep this ol' truck to run errands in."
MyMrMallory: "Ha, if you can get Paul to look at it!"
Me: "Paul, would you look at this old truck to make sure it'll keep running?"
Paul: "As long as there's no cow poop, yes, I will."
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