When I was twelve, I told my stepdad that I wanted a job that actually paid a bit of coin. Not so much mowing lawns or anything like that…I lived in the more rural sections of Western Washington at the time, and lawncare either required a tractor with a bush hog on the back or a machete for the blackberry vines and a chainsaw for the Scotch broom. He looked bewildered, and told me to calm down with the idea of working at twelve, but if I was still gung-ho on the idea, next summer he’d see about getting me working. He was good to his word…once school let out that next year, I was told to get to bed early, because come six in the morning, I had a date with a pair of leather gloves, a double-bladed ax, a chainsaw, and a log splitter.

I went to bed excited. I woke up excited. I showed up ready to make shit happen. And I was not disappointed. I brought the ax and the gloves with me and as I hopped out of the truck, I found what had been a vertical Coastal Douglas Fir at one point in time with a Dodge D-50 parked next to it, with a log splitter set up nearby and a chainsaw in the bed. My only instructions? Don’t cut yourself, don’t come out of second gear, and get as much as you could get done before it got dark…or you collapsed. Whatever. I could take an hour for lunch and runs to get more fuel for the chainsaw constituted a free break.

I went for broke. I limbed the long down, then started cutting up rounds to send to the log splitter. Every time the mini-Ram’s bed was filled, it was up the hill to the back of the shop to stack up, and repeat as necessary. By the time the sun started to tint the sky into colors, I was soaked with sweat, had more splinters than I’d ever had before, and I absolutely reeked of the pitch. But I walked away with an admiration for the little D-50. Originally, I’d been hoping to use the old man’s Cummins Ram to move the wood, but the little D-50 was more than up to the task, even as I piled the wood taller and taller into the bed.

Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the smaller trucks. In Iraq it was all Nissans for the military folk, basically the world-market Nissan Frontier, though there were some older Hardbody-style hybrids running around like the white crew-cab turd that I kept alive during my second round. Here in Kentucky, the yeoman work truck seems to be square-body S-10s and old two-wheel-drive Toyotas in similar vintage to the one Dylan McCool recently picked up for a hundred and fifty bucks. No, they aren’t stump pullers. No, they aren’t even sexy. But they work hard and will always come back for more…somehow.