When I hear ravens squawking and making strange clicks I tend to stop and listen. They like to cruise along our road, Lolo Pass, which leads into the Mt. Hood National Forest, a corridor through the woods. Across the road sits a regrowing clearcut, which the ravens now ignore for the lack of tall trees. The ravens remind me that I live in the mountains, and their company replaces the human connections that go missing here.
Then, suddenly an oversized, red mid-90s Chevy pickup races up Lolo Pass, two hundred feet from my house, with 4-wheelers and gas cans in the back. A stench of diesel drifts through my forested backyard, lingering long after the truck’s roar has faded.
Mt. Hood has always harbored recluses, and its history since “settlement” has made this area home to giant pickup trucks and the red-necked men and women who stomp on their gas pedals. The truck traffic that passes by on Lolo Pass provides entertainment like raven listening.
Illustration by Lori LaBissoniere O’Neil
Yes, some trucks serve utility purposes such as hauling trailers or construction materials, but most are meant to make a statement. I’ve come to appreciate, in a scientific sense, the statement-makers the same way a birder might prefer to train binoculars on, say, rare migrating species.
With Lolo Pass bordering my home, I don’t need binoculars to truck watch. I don’t even need to see the trucks first. The behemoth Dodges, Fords, and Chevys that haul ass past me make their presence known. It’s part of the purpose, something like a vulture spreading its wings to intimidate others hungry for a piece of roadkill.
Stranded on the side of the road, in front of a neighbor’s house, a classic late 80s red Ford pickup with overhead KC light bar and big mud tires rests with a (permanently) flat tire. Some of the big-truck passersby like what they see in that vintage model and give it a rev of diesel stroke as a sign of respect and admiration. This always makes me laugh like a mischievous raven.
Our section of Lolo Pass is a thousand-foot straightaway with a moderate slope, which invites big trucks to open the throttle going up or down. Sometimes I’ll hear one ripping up-road, then recognize it by sound coming back down later. It’s a guttural sound, literally emanated from the depths. Trucks like these celebrate fossil fuels. Some have oversized tailpipes or smokestacks on the side, and the speed at which they rumble past suggests intentional overuse of fuel. Almost all are dirty with mud or highway filth, flouting the power of internal combustion. I’ve come to identify their owners as dinosaurs.
The connection between dinosaur fossils and the fossilized remains of zoo- and phytoplankton, which gave us oil, is obvious. But closer analysis of the drivers, who I also see in the grocery store parking lots, tells me that their political and cultural views are also grounded in the ancient past.
Many resemble loggers, “pave the Earth” types who consider Nature to be here for our taking and use. Others look like gearheads or hillbillies, people who value motors over clean rivers and tall trees, white lives over all others. Sometimes stickers on the trucks announce these opinions. “Pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Jesus.” NRA member. Timber Unity (a logging community group with far-right ties). Plenty of American flags, and occasionally a Confederate. The other day I saw a six-by-six-inch green sticker in the shape of Oregon, with Fuck Kate Brown (our Democrat governor) written in the middle — the driver of this 80s-era pickup looked in his late 70s, very white, like a ghost belonging to a past era.
These dinosaurs seem stuck in a pre-twentieth century world, clutching to a glorious past of environmental destruction, conquest, segregation and slavery, and a strong white majority across America. Their man, the current president, upholds this rearview approach to the future.
How dominant the dinosaurs were, until they met their meteoric fate. Unable to adapt, to survive through trying times, the oversized reptiles croaked. Today’s carbon-worshipping dinosaurs face the same fate. Fossil fuels are staging their final surge in the face of replacement. Oil companies can read the writing on the wall — renewable energy will ultimately convert cars and trucks to battery-powered — but the big-truck drivers aren’t known for their literacy or scientific understanding.
Electric pickup trucks already exist, made for yuppies, yes, but they’re forging a new path regardless. Sputtering, the dinosaurs feel threatened as they see their culture disappearing, so they cling to it with all their steel and might, exhibiting a tour de force each day on Lolo Pass. But think of how much more raven talk I’ll hear when Dodge and company run on batteries. Such foresight keeps me calm when another truck drowns the sound of caws and clicks.