Road America

This column is about driving in America. Those words were written by an American. It is thus perhaps best to begin with that most American of topics: the upcoming political election and how your opinion of it is wrong and stupid.

Kidding. We are here instead to discuss another deeply American subject, and no less contentious at that: the pickup truck.

If you haven’t thrown a ton of construction trash over a tailgate and watched the suspension not so much as wince from the load; if you’ve never used a shift lever as long as your arm to tow some rusty barn find across a time zone; if you haven’t hucked a funky old long-bed sideways over snow or dirt just because you can… Well, you may have done a lot of things in your life but you have, if I may paraphrase Braveheart, not truly lived.