I have a rather embarrassing confession to make. I like driving trucks. Not just any truck though, it has to be an old truck: a beaten, rusted truck; a truck that has passed through countless careless drivers and survived horrifying accidents and mishaps. Yes, that's right, I love driving rental trucks.
My sister rang me the other day and asked for assistance while she was moving house. We agreed that I would supply the truck (naturally) along with a day's worth of box picking up and putting down. You might be getting the picture about how much I like these trucks; I'm willing to (occasionally) help people move house just to drive one...
Unfortunately for us, this weekend proved to be an extremely popular moving weekend. I started on the Monday ringing Hertz and Avis, pleading in a vain attempting to secure something relatively modern. My sister lives on the Central Coast of New South Wales and I live in Sydney, a shortish distance away (about 70 kilometres), but far enough away to make the intervening drive something of a challenge to the trucks I normally like to hire. But Hertz and Avis informed me that every second house in Sydney and on the Central Coast had decided to swap houses that weekend and all their trucks were gone. Dispirited, I started moving through the medium sized ads, down to the smaller ones. By Thursday, I had exhausted every truck renting avenue in the Sydney area. Finally on Friday afternoon, I was informed of a cancellation at a small outfit near my house.
Renting a truck from this establishment included a tour of the vehicle so the attendant and I could mark all the pre-existing damage. We started with a poorly photocopied image of the truck, scribbling dents on it until the original picture disappeared under the multiple layers of pen... This truck was in bad shape. It had been driven numerous times into overhanging objects until the container on the back was slightly wonky. This had then been repaired with a combination of pop rivets, old road signs and silicon, occasionally (but not always) painted white. The cabin itself was scuffed from various indeterminate accidents and had visible rust. This was sure my kind of truck, but the idea of punting it up the Pacific Highway was starting to give me pause for thought. The tyres were mostly bald and neither rear vision mirror seemed to reflect anything useful, their knocked-about state indicating many meetings with tree branches and other solid objects.
But I had no choice. I signed up, locked my own car and climbed into the cabin of the truck.
Sort the gearshift first. I always like to find the gears before I start any vehicle, just in case the clutch is frozen and the handbrake is weak. The clutch seemed OK, poking out from the floor at the angle that means you step on it rather than push it forward. The gearshift itself was a long delicate walking stick whose connection to the gearbox wasn't immediately apparent. I did eventually find five gears (and reverse) hiding in there, although the spring-loaded mechanism that returns the shifter to the 3rd/4th plane had long gone to Busted Truck Part heaven. It was a diesel, so I paused a little before twisting the key through to the start. The glow plug warning light disappeared and she rattled into life.
She? I already liked this truck! It was also about the seediest, dodgiest piece of transport I'd ever sat in - let alone driven on the highway. The engine sounded gruff but idled as smoothly as could be expected. Confidence rising, I pulled out of the carpark and gingerly prodded the brakes to see what they were like. Like nothing, is what they were like. I pushed a bit harder, still nothing. Harder again, gritting my teeth now. Reluctantly, the truck slowed. With a grunt I pulled out onto Pennant Hills road (no power steering either) and did my level best to keep up with traffic.
The truck was not too bad in the outer suburbs, but keeping up with traffic on the highway was a whole different experience. The engine was willing but weedy. The speed limit seemed unobtainable, except down hills. Those drivers who have cars capable of driving at the speed limit, (but don't) are so easily dispatched with the flex of your right foot in a car. In a truck, you have to be wily, picking your overtaking points and trying to conserve momentum and revs without causing an obstruction. Where the road is busy, it's hard work. It's also frustrating to get stuck behind some slow, gesticulating idiot whose main concern is a conversation rather than making some progress on the highway.
For the first 20 kilometres or so, I nervously kept my eyes on the gauges, waiting for the engine to overheat. It was a hot day and some of the hills are spectacularly long and steep. This part of the Pacific Highway is a magnificent piece of road, rising and falling over the undulating mountains like a giant ribbon casually cast aside. Epic sweeping corners cut through mountains, long uphill and downhill sections with equally epic views of the Hawkesbury River and the ocean in the distance. When you're hurrying along in a car, it's all somewhat of a blur, but at the more relaxed pace that was being enforced, this road seems to toss up an entirely different and rather beautiful character.
My driving, however, wasn't initially to the same standard as the road. Up the hills, I often found myself struggling for third gear, the missing 3rd/4th gear spring mechanism proving to be a real hurdle to smooth gearshifts. Eventually I did train my hand to push straight to where the gear was hiding, but some of the initially-missed gears resulted in huge losses to speed, requiring an urgent hunt for second before the truck rolled to a halt. The little truck and I started falling into a rhythm after about 10 kilometres or so as I got better at judging where the engine's useful rev range was.
By the time I reached my objective, I wanted to turn around straight away and do it again. Mostly because the idea of spending a day lugging beds and boxes around is pretty unappealing when you get down to it - especially in the summer heat. We did get everything shifted though, the little truck doing several trips without complaint, the temperature gauge never shifting from just under half way.
Time to go home and it was getting dark. I stopped at the huge Caltex service station near Wyong and parked with the other trucks in the truck parking area out the back. It would have easily fitted into a normal car park but damn it, it's a truck and I'm a truck driver for a day....
The truck parking area turned out to be almost completely empty, a huge gravel area that dwarfed the little truck and made me feel pretty foolish. I grabbed some junk food for the drive home and skulked out of there. Munching on chips with a drink between my legs, the radio crackling and the rhythm of the road pounding through the flat seat, I was a pretty happy guy in that little truck. I was sure much happier than the last time I flew down this stretch of road, cursing at slower drivers and never really appreciating the capability of the vehicle I was digging my spurs into.
To be a smooth driver in a truck is to be well rewarded with steady forward progress. Try fighting it and suddenly you're scrabbling for gears, mistake compounding mistake and costing precious momentum. It's a lesson not so easily understood in a vehicle with plenty of power and agility, but one worth learning. I often wonder if modern cars, as competent and effective as transport as they are, haven't robbed a generation of the romance of the road, that sense of achievement of coaxing a not-so-dependable machine to your destination in reasonable time without breaking anything. Mechanical sympathy is hard to generate for a refrigerator, and increasingly so for a blandly competent modern car. I'll gladly take the modern car if I'm in a hurry next time, I don't think I'll enjoy it as much as that little beat-up truck....
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