Decline of trucks could have major cultural fallout in trucky Kern County
| Saturday, Oct 03 2009 09:38 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Oct 03 2009 09:38 PM
Some people might look at declining pickup sales and wonder what it means for the economy. With sales of high-profit, low-gas mileage vehicles dropping to their lowest levels in 25 years, automakers are closing plants and tens of thousands of assembly-line workers are facing transfers or unemployment.
That's bad enough.
But look at the societal implications. I have. I wonder how I'll haul my stuff to the dump if, in a few years, I don't have any more neighbors with trucks I can borrow.
This could get serious. Just six years ago, the New York Times reports, automakers were selling roughly 2.5 million pickups per year in the United States. By the end of 2009, they will have sold only about a million. Given the increasingly serious push toward fuel efficiency and hybridized propulsion, the nation could soon be facing a dump-run crisis.
This has particularly profound implications for Kern County culture. We're not exactly Nebraska, where more than one vehicle in four is a truck, but per capita we're the second-truckiest county in Southern California, behind only Imperial County, which does not actually contain roads or people. Only trucks.
We're still Old West out here, not fully integrated into the 21st century, and we find that trucks are the next best thing to horses. Even those of us who have not actually seen a real horse, much less fallen off one, sense that.
Trucks are to Bakersfieldians what cliffs and treetops are to predatory species: strategic high ground. Many pickup drivers like the perspective their rides afford. Whether they're hauling lumber, or oil-pump parts, or poodles, or Perrier, it's comforting to know you have the edge over that guy in the less-virile Saturn one lane over.
"They're comfortable, easier to see what's around you," said Taft oilman Les Clark, who'd have a hard time squeezing into a Ford Focus with help from the Jaws of Life. "No matter what, some guys are going to drive a truck, and I'm one of them."
They don't write songs about Toyota Camrys. But do a Google search of "songs about trucks" and you'll be inundated with playlists. The country genre, obviously, is particularly rich with truck imagery, from Toby Keith's "Big Ol' Truck" to Brad Paisley's "Mud On The Tires."
It's probably no coincidence that the greatest truck-song writer in history (well, next to Red Sovine) lives right here in this humble burg: Red Simpson, who gave us such classics as "(Hello) I'm a Truck" (1965), "Roll, Truck, Roll" (1966), "Truck Drivin' Fool" (1967), and the one we pull out every Dec. 25, "Truckers' Christmas" (1973).
Those songs aren't about pickups, of course, they're about big rigs and life between the interstate guard rails, but the attitude is similar: You're at the controls of something powerful and significant, and you therefore matter -- even if the only thing in your truck bed is a black lab with his tongue flapping joyously in the 45 mph breeze.
But the ball-cap cowboy who drives a pickup to work or school when an economy sedan would work just as well is disappearing from vehicle showrooms. The guy who hunts or fishes or works an oil field job will keep buying trucks. The guy who just likes to accessorize with mud flaps featuring chrome, silhouetted naked ladies, might not.
The times, they are a-changin', but not necessarily all for the worse. A truckless environment is a little more egalitarian, with everyone at more or less the same eye level.
But let's hope the pickup market makes a modest rebound at some point anyway. Some of us have some tree limbs we'll be needing to haul away, and we'll be looking for truck people. "Just put some gas in it," Red Simpson tells the guys on his approved-to-borrow list. Can I get on that list, Red? "I better stay out of that," he said.
E-mail Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.
