Not a Road to Nowhere
The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks by Fred Haefele (Bison Books, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is and isn’t a book about pickup trucks. Yes, it fully engages the mythos of the American pickup truck, the way in which certain colors and engines speak to us and suggest an identity. But it’s not a book about automotive history, it’s about personal history. It is the story of Fred Haefele’s life, ordered around twelve trucks he’s owned. They are all working trucks, which come with a sense of purpose. Haefele’s first truck purchase in 1971 prompted a question for him: “is it possible to live my life in a way that will earn this vehicle’s respect?” (4) Each pickup represents some kind of turning point in his life, often either running away from responsibilities or stepping into responsibility.
The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is a without shock absorbers. After a failed early marriage in his twenties, Haefele set out to become the next Ken Kesey. As he explains, “if I would do this, I had much ground to cover. I would first need life experience worth writing about, and it would have to be vivid and daring, no holds barred” (xvii). For many years, that means a booze and drug-fueled journey. He moves to Colorado and rents a room where he sticks to a sleeping bag and tries to get through Ovid, while also working a little and partying and sleeping with one of the housemates. He is lured away by Montana, which he knows only by idyllic reputation.
Many passages of his life sound like passages from Denis Johnson’s short story collection Jesus’ Son. That early existence shapes him. Consider this description of one of his later trucks: “Sunny is an all-original: a ’67 Chevy ¾-ton with high-five cab lights, stock 327 motor, and a ‘Long Horn’ fleetside bed, extended four inches to accommodate a camper. The paint is a feel-good primary color that Chevy calls ‘Omaha Orange.’ It’s the same shade, coincidentally, as my once-favorite hallucinogens, the fabled ‘sunshine’ acid of the sixties” (123).
Early on, Haefele gets a job cutting trees, which he does on crews and for shady business owners and a little bit solo. It’s all meant to be temporary, to gather material for the kind of novel he wants to write. It turns out that trees will be one of the most constant things in Heafele’s life. Despite his serious accidents and moments away from the foliage, he will mature into an actual arborist and even a small business owner.
His life with trees is the thing that makes the most sense to him, even when he trades in Ken Kesey for Seamus Heaney. He sticks with it for longer than he should, even past the point when he says, “I don’t know if I’m a hard-nosed emeritus tree skinner or some aging fop on an endless self-discovery quest” (159). In the final chapters of the book, he finally ages out of appreciating the Gifford Pinchot quote he’s lived by for so long: “What better way can an old man die than doing a young man’s work?”
Apart from the trees and trucks, much of Haefele’s life seems unsteady. Though he gets an MFA in Montana, a Provincetown fellowship, and even a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, his path is anything but smooth. Yes, there’s hard partying, bad decisions, and broken relationships. That slows once he meets Caroline (also a writer), who will become his wife. But there are many years with challenging work, a desire to write complicated by the need to pay bills, the struggles of maintaining a relationship, the unpredictability of health, and the inability to find secure professional footing and stick to a place. Every time life seems happy and peaceful, something happens to throw it all off balance.
The trucks represent Haefele’s life in many ways. In the beginning he was looking for blue collar experience and material, but experience became existence. To Haefele then and now, pickup trucks represent a certain type of work. Pickup trucks now are much more ubiquitous than they were in the 1970s. These days, with their high cost and unchipped paint, we all know most of the trucks parking too close to us at the grocery store never carry more than groceries, perhaps the occasional mattress. But the popularity of pickup trucks has not diminished their hardworking image. As a result, it has made us judge many of their “lifestyle” drivers harshly. It seems unlikely that you could be a “bad” minivan driver or sedan driver or SUV driver based on usage, but we consider the unused truck to be a mark of shame. We doubt the character of a person in a pristine truck.
That first truck purchase in 1971 made Haefele wonder if he could earn the truck’s respect and earning respect seems to have been what much of his life has been about. Even into his eighties, Haefele is plagued by the feeling that he has been a disappointment to his father, who didn’t even read his successful book, Rebuilding the Indian (2005). When Haefele starts his first tree business and his father-in-law suggests he use his last name for it, he resists because “Haefele” is hard for people to spell. When “Jack explains to me that this is a good business move since it suggests I’ve nothing to hide,” he’s surprised. “For some time, I’ve led my life as if this was anything but the case, so it’s eye-opening to realize that, at least in Missoula, it actually might be true” (81). When Caroline convinces him to try again with a family, he thinks about “redeeming myself as husband and father” (121).
Haefele figures more things out as he gets older. He does not run out on his second marriage and family. He has some writing success. But this book does not neatly resolve with him having figured everything out. His good fortune is always muddied, sometimes by bad fortune and sometimes by bad choices. Yet he is always learning and living in defiance of his own odometer reading. So many of his trucks were from the sixties and seventies, like himself. Even in 2000, he purchased a 1974 Ford because “I’ve long believed that at their core, older trucks are essentially indestructible, that they’re made to be rebuildable, over and over” (149). It’s clearly also how he views himself.
Haefele is looking back across decades for this book, digging into the past century. At times, there is slippage into anachronism, like a small oil leak dripping into the driveway. A California neighbor could not have shown off pieces of the Berlin Wall in October of 1989, when it wouldn’t fall for another month. In memory, events can blur together. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to imagine he actually referred to anyone as a “barista” in the 1970s. But this is the kind of harmless flaw that is as tolerable as an inability to accelerate quickly in a well-loved older vehicle. It comes with the territory and the territory is good.
This book conjures up many other authors. His voice reminds one of Kesey and Heaney. His quest to understand the relationship between his work and his art and the role of Montana in his life recalls Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His saga to find himself is a bit like William Finnegan’s in Barbarian Days. It’s not a book about masculinity, but it’s a masculine book. There’s some NPR and Paris Review, but he was at the Montana MFA program when it was an under-the-radar spot for hard-edged writers who enjoyed hunting and drinking. His major success was a book about rebuilding a vintage Indian motorcycle. When we learn that he taught Steven Rinella—and has hunted with him—it’s not at all a shock.
The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is hard to put down. Haefele was shaped by the 60s and 70s, but he is not simply an emissary from them. His story may result in some nostalgia for readers, but it is not a nostalgic account of the past. It continues into the present. Haefele’s prose and story are often gripping. Though he never fully arrives, his understanding of trucks and himself deepens across the pages. He writes as someone aware of his inadequacies, even if he is not fully up to the task of conquering them. Haefele’s quest to be worthy of his trucks and of his loved ones is entirely engaging.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
