Truck: Rebuilding a worn-out pickup and other posttechnological adventures

About this book

"Know thy gadgets; first step in restoring some kind of wholeness to ones 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 "by 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 mechanics memoir; it is a meditation on machines metaphysics and the moral universe. Nearly two decades after publication in 1977 the essential dilemma of Truck still rings as Jerome dismantles the aged straight six he also disassembles our reliance on "two-hundred-dollar appliances that sport flaws in thirty-five-cent parts" and decries the "deliberate 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 "I 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; its a mistake he says to "assume there is a point on that line between the cavemans 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.