The Ranch Jewel

For most of my life, I collected the wrong kind of beautiful.

I come by cars honestly. My mother had a light blue sports car when she was young, and she knew how to drive — really drive. She taught me. So it made sense that I ended up with a long line of interesting, exotic cars over the years. Fast ones. Rare ones. The kind of cars that make people slow down at a stoplight to look.

And then one day, I didn’t want them anymore.

The reversal

I didn’t argue with the feeling. I just followed it.

What I actually wanted, it turned out, was a dually. A four-wheel-drive truck with six wheels on the ground, the two extras out back giving it those wide hips you can spot from a block away. Not a car pretending to be a truck. A truck.

I did my homework. I looked at Ford, I looked at Chevy, I looked at GMC. I looked at every dually line on the market, and the one that kept winning me over was the Dodge Ram.

So I called my friend Marty, who sells Dodges, and I told him I wanted to sit down and make a wish list. He said, “Okay. What would you want, if you could have exactly what you want?”

Black. 3500. Top of the line — the Limited. Sunroof. Mega cab. Short bed, because I didn’t want a long body — I wanted it looking a little compact, a little ominous, a little different coming down the road. But short enough for a gooseneck hitch, because my horse trailers are gooseneck, plus a bumper pull. Function first, but function on my terms.

I told him: this is going to be my ranch jewel. A present to myself for a shift in my life.

Five months in a white tent

I custom-ordered it. It took about five months to build. As far as I’ve been told, mine is the only build in the United States with exactly this combination of features.

When it finally arrived at the dealership, they had put it in a white tent out front, waiting for me. I pulled up, saw it sitting there, and it almost brought tears to my eyes. Black pearl paint. Black rims. Black grill.

The whole truck drinking in the light.

I climbed in and everything was exactly right. The seats were comfortable in a way trucks are usually not comfortable. The steering wheel turned easy. The gear shift moved like velvet — no wrestling, no forcing.

I’ve owned trucks where you had to fight the shifter every time. Not this one.

It has something like fifty cameras on it. When you hit the turn signal, the screen shows you the side of the truck so you don’t clip anything with those wide hips. You do have to learn to drive a dually — the back end sticks out about as far as the mirrors — but after a couple of weeks, it becomes natural.

There is one thing I still can’t do. I can’t take it through the Starbucks drive-through. The turn is too tight, and I am not going to scratch my rims or roll over the landscaping to save myself a walk. So I park and go in. It’s good exercise, and I’ve made peace with it.

“Is that your husband’s truck?”

Here’s the part that stayed with me.

When they brought the truck around from the tent, two gentlemen were standing there in the lot. They had been looking at pickups, I think. When mine rolled up, they both said, “Wow.”

Then one of them turned to me and asked, “Is that your husband’s truck?”

I said, “No. Actually, that’s my dream truck. I custom-ordered it five months ago. It’s my ranch jewel.”
They looked at me like I had said something in another language.

And I thought — why is the automatic assumption that a truck like this belongs to a man? I have horses. I haul big horse trailers. I’ve owned pickups for years. And if you actually pay attention on the road, there are probably more women out there hauling horse trailers than men. It’s not a novelty anymore. It’s a whole quiet phenomenon that the world hasn’t caught up to.

So consider this an invitation. If you are a woman who has been told, directly or by omission, that a truck like this isn’t for you — it is. It’s fun. It’s safe. You sit up high and see the world differently. You feel steady in weather that would white-knuckle a smaller vehicle. And you learn to drive it, the same way you learned to drive anything else.

You don’t have to stay in the cars somebody once decided were “for women.” Whatever that was supposed to mean.

The small realities

A dually doesn’t fit in an automatic car wash, so mine gets hand-washed. The fees are a little higher. The tires are a little more. None of it has ever felt like a downside.

The other day I hauled hay in the bed, and a friend of mine was surprised. She said, “I can’t believe you’d put hay in the back of that.” I told her the bed is coated with a proper liner, and when you’re done, you take a blower to it and it’s clean again. It’s a truck. It’s built for the job. Making it too precious to work would defeat the whole point.

I’ve had cars where the thrill wore off in two weeks — same old, same old. This one hasn’t gotten old. Every time I walk out to it, it still looks like the day it came out of the tent. Every time somebody sees it, they say wow. It doesn’t get boring. That is a rare thing for any object to be.

What the ranch jewel actually is

Here is what I’ve come to understand.

For years I thought the beautiful thing was the exotic car — low, fast, admired at the valet, impractical on gravel. And those cars had their chapter. I don’t regret them. But they were beautiful in a way that asked something of me: to perform, to preserve, to keep them separated from the actual work of my life.

The dually is beautiful in the opposite direction. It carries the hay. It pulls the trailer. It handles the weather. It sits at the barn with dust on the fenders and looks even better for it. It is beautiful because it belongs to the life I actually live — not to the life somebody else pictured for me.

That is the reversal. From what people would expect me to drive, to what I actually want to drive. From something that had to be protected from the ranch, to something that was made for it.

The ranch jewel isn’t a rhinestone. It’s a working piece — black pearl, six wheels, hay in the bed, dust on the boots — and it’s the best truck I’ve ever owned.
Ta-da.