Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures

€œKnow thy gadgets; first step in restoring some kind of wholeness to one€s life.€ So observes John Jerome about his purpose for rebuilding a 1950 Dodge pickup. Yes, he needs the truck to haul manure, but Jerome also hopes that €œby knowing every nut, lockwasher, and cotter pin I could have a machine that had some meaning to me.€ Thus his year-long odyssey under the hood, among the brake shoes and valves, becomes more than a mechanic€s memoir; it is a meditation on machines, metaphysics, and the moral universe. Long after its publication in 1977, the essential dilemma of Truck still rings true: as Jerome dismantles the aged straight six, he also disassembles our reliance on €œtwo-hundred-dollar appliances that sport flaws in thirty-five-cent parts€ and decries the €œdeliberate encapsulation, impenetrability, of the overtechnologized things with which we furnish our lives.€ Despite gouged knuckles, a frigid New Hampshire winter, frustrating and inexplicable assemblies, and a close call when the truck rolls off its jacks, he perseveres. In the end, he admits, €œI did not find God out there in the barn among the cans of nuts and bolts.€ What he does find, however, is that he must make peace with technology; it€s a mistake, he says, to €œassume there is a point on that line between the caveman€s club and the moon shot that marks the moral turnaround, before which technology was somehow benign, after which it is malign.€ While Jerome gains a truck that runs€•sometimes€•we gain new insight into a technology that continues to encroach upon our lives.