Here's To You, A Good Friend for Bad Roads

A toast to a good truck with happy memories

The Turks have this saying: "A good companion shortens the longest road."

In this instance, here's this Nissan Frontier we've owned since November of 2005, and just this week she rolled 100,000 miles. Everything ticks just fine, too, despite the weight I've strapped to her saddle and the amount of whips and hee-yas I've dealt out between heavy loads, hard washboard miles, rocky roads, wrong turns, hot deserts, cold snows, steep mountains, sandy washes, barren locations, a scrape here and there on the undercarriage, and every combination thereof.

On a whole, the mind of American adventure kind of snarls at Nissan vehicles - they're not a Jeep, they're not a Toyota, they're not a Land Rover, they're not a Synchro Westfalia.  And that's exactly the point. A quick mental tally in my ownership sweeps up almost 10,000 hard miles south of the border down in Mexico. I once drove from Arizona to Colorado to Texas to Louisiana and back on a leaky water pump that never completely let go.  The worst failure so far has been a dead battery at the most inconvenient of times.  Admittedly, when is a dead battery convenient?  I turn on this truck, and she just kind of whirrrrrs up with a sound, every time, that I now associate with the voice of an old friend saying, "Call in sick, bozo, we're road tripping."

That's why I can't drive this truck during the Monday-through-Friday grind. I'd probably skip work and find myself heating up a thin slice of filet minon over a small mound of coals somewhere in southern Utah while watching the good light over a crazy-ass canyon and sorting my carabiners and slings and cams.

Here's to a good adventure vehicle. Raise your goblet! To old friends!

Always remember to forget
The friends that proved untrue.
But never forget to remember
Those that have stuck by you.

And then another: It is one of the the blessings of old friends, wrote Emerson, that you can afford to be stupid with them.

In just a few days now, I'm headed off on a multi-day back road trip in southern Utah.  Just the two of us - in one manner I'm sad to be leaving my family behind for a week.  In another, I'm kind of giddy at the idea of going out to the desert to just be, well, stupid, with an old friend.