Southerners love pickup trucks.

When Is a Truck Not a Truck? In Belgium, where open-bed pick-ups are scarcer than hen’s teeth.

Driving across Europe on my way to the small town of Well in the Netherlands, a bizarre disorienting post-flight fog caused by an unerring sense of “strange but the same” washed over me like summer toad-strangler. Yup, ya’ll — I was a displaced Southerner traveling through a foreign yet familiar land. Farmland formed the landscape which lined the heavily trafficked highway. We had to head north in order to go east. I’d flown back-asswards to Europe from America, traveling south-west from Raleigh, North Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia then east across the Atlantic to Brussels, Belgium and my brain couldn’t register my location. I flew west to go east.

Now I somehow found myself in the backseat of a small car with a mother and daughter from Hinkley, Ohio.  Hinkley as in Vulture Day. And that, I’m afraid, is a whole nother story. Back to the one at hand : Driving out of the city and past farmland. Fields of hay don’t need a translation. Neither did the stick-shift of the Volkswagen Golf we’d leased for our journey. Speeding down the highway at what appeared to be super-sonic speed, I noticed semi’s, great big tractor trailers covered with German, Dutch, and Spanish logos. Lots of English advertisements slammed past me too and a bunch of French thrown in for good measure. Delivery vans crowded the parkway, horns honked, fists waved out of open windows and loud curses in languages needing no translation filled my jet-lagged brain with an abundance of same-yet-different scenes. Yet, something was missing… Mercedes Benz, Toyota, Volvo, SAAB… major European and American manufacturers whizzed by me but wait…

…there were no pickup trucks on the highway. No pickups.

No familiar silhouettes of the ever-present Ford F-150’s to soothe my frazzled traveler’s nerves… it quickly became apparent that “truck” in any language across the big wide ocean did not mean “truck” in Southern US language. How can a people exist without Ford F-150s?

Quick transition, huh? I mean, from me traveling through Europe at breakneck speeds to a cultural comment about the relative lack of pickups in a foreign land? Bear with me. Ford F-150s and the American South are synonymous. Sure, you got your Chevy’s, your Dodge Hemi’s, and your *cough* Toyota’s and Nissans… but say “F-150” and the people in my town know you mean a pickup truck. It does not embarrass me to tell you — the first vehicle I ever owned was a 1972 Ford F-150. Brown inside and out, it was a 3-speed column shift with no A/C and sporadic cantankerous heater.

I went to New York City once. They don’t drive pickup trucks in New York City. Too many people steal your stuff in big cities like that. You can’t leave your chainsaw or your coon dog out in the open bed of your F-150. You got to have a bed-cover and door secured with heavy locks and chains.

The 1989 edition of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture has a section “History and Manners” and right after Patriotic Societies comes the heading Pickup Truck. There’s an article there written by Gordon Baxter of Car and Driver magazine. Here is what he writes:

The pickup truck in the South has a variety of uses, most of which do not involve hauling cargo. In fact, the pickup is next to worthless for anything but light hauling on paved roads. Being front-end heavy, it bogs down on wet grass, spins out in its own shadow, and can even flip on a straight, dry stretch of roadway. The cab offers little storage space, and anything carried in the bed is open to theft.

Beginning in the second decade of this century the pickup (essentially a car with the back sea and truck removed and replaced with a wooden or metal platform) proliferated on farms. In the last 30 [now 50] years, despite its limited hauling potential, the pickup’s popularity has grown. About half the new vehicles sold in the South are pickups. Often constituting a second family vehicle, the pickup has become a status symbol for many. In a historical and literary context, a ‘good old boy” without a pickup is like a cowboy without a horse. “Work” (or “rat” or “bad”) trucks, battered and rimmed with rust from long-standing farm or construction work, carry lock boxes full of tools and materials of the owner’s trades.
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More particularly, the pickup is associated with the male southerner. Usually the second vehicle in a family, the pickup most often is the man’s to drive and care for. Men drive them to work, whether that work occurs in a factory, medical center, or courtroom. For the younger man not tied to a family, the pickup becomes his chariot, in which he cruises around looking for women. Apparently, the higher riding the pickup (jacked up with large frame-extending shock absorbers and buoyant on over-sized mud tires), the more likely the southern boy will land a date with a cheerleader. Of course, the ever-present gun rack (with rifle of shotgun prominently displayed, or, in more urban settings, simply an umbrella) reflects ties to the rural mystique of southern culture.

Understanding both its lack of utility and its importance as a status symbol, the pickup has changed drastically over the last 50+ years. In 1950, Ford introduced a handsome pickup with styling of its own, the F-100. Ford still uses the F-series designation on trucks, but the company turned pickup sales around with the slogan “Where men are men, trucks are Ford V8s.” Ford dominated pickup sales for several decades until Chevrolet countered with its “built tough” trucks with cowboy names.
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Trucks imported from Europe never caught on in the United States. The Volkswagen suffers from having the truck bed preloaded with its own engine and transmission.
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If the pickup reflects southern culture, its very popularity may tend to whittle away at the “southerness” of its heritage. As with the trucking culture in general, the pickup truck is becoming subsumed in a more general American culture, becoming a common sight in urban areas far removed from the South.

So, you can see why the absence of pickup trucks, of Ford F150s, caused me to feel disoriented for a bit. I got over it after a few days.

Some day, I’ll write more about farming in southern Holland, but I gotta’ tell you this one story. There were no pretty tulips or peonies growing in the fields across the moat from where I stayed at Kastel Well. Agriculture equaled growing foodstuffs, real crops, and herds of cattle near Venlo, Holland. Open windows in August meant awakening to the smell of manure. Thinking nothing of it, I dressed and walked across the courtyard to the dining room for some breakfast. Two women from Chicago, Illinois sat nearby and complained about the “odor”. They asked the waitress, “What is that horrid smell?” and the woman shook her head in an “I don’t speak English” way. I giggled and couldn’t stop from smiling. A few minutes later, as she poured me another cup of coffee, the waitress leaned over and whispered, in flawless English, “Shit smells like shit no matter what language, eh?” We both laughed.

Buy a used Ford F-150. Feel the tradition and the spirit of a pickup.