Our family’s stay in Tok, Alaska came to a close with the end of the school year on May 23rd, and we packed up our belongings for the relocation. The beast of burden intended to carry our family to Fairbanks was our rusty bucket of bolts, a ’93 Chevrolet Silverado. This beater-with-a-heater is now dubbed, “a one-eighth of a three-quarter-ton truck.” Allow me to explain.
The Limitations of a Two-Wheel Drive Sedan
In 2021, many simple tasks associated with establishing a family in Alaska called for a larger means of transportation than my small Toyota sedan could offer.
For example, if we needed to buy a bed frame for the children, the long bed frame could not fit inside my car.
Our family also wanted to save on groceries by hunting for large game, such as moose and caribou. Towing home such an animal was not possible to achieve with this vehicle.
The local used-car salesman informed me that even a city truck with essentially no towing capabilities would cost just under thirty-thousand dollars. That wasn’t going to happen on our small budget.
I toiled away at a spreadsheet and came to the conclusion that if I was to obtain my steel stallion, I would have to buy something used — ultra used — and fix it up from scratch.
First Glimpse of My Ride
When the vehicle that was to become my ride showed up on Craigslist, it really didn’t look so bad. The burgundy body only had one or two large dents and the pickup bed had one of those shells over the top to keep out the weather. Although the paint was chipped off in several places, there was no rust — at least, not that I could see.
The make of this truck was a light-duty “K2500” model from the car maker, Chevrolet. By convention, people sometimes call a truck from the *2500 series “a three-quarter ton truck.”
This name has its origins in the early days of motor vehicles, when trucks were classified by how much they could tow. A truck that could tow a half ton was a “half-ton truck,” and this continued through the classifications of “three-quarter-ton,” “one-ton,” and so forth.
These classifications are no longer relevant, as vehicle design has improved. A three-quarter-ton truck can tow several times more than in times past, but the name simply remains as a part of conversational speech.
My experience with trucks was minimal at this point, so I did not understand the implications. All I knew was that I was looking at a truck that could, in theory, tow home a bed frame or even an ATV and a moose.
The seller listed the vehicle for two-thousand dollars. However, when I met him in person, the first thing he said was that he was lowering the price to one-thousand.
How often does an online classified-ad negotiator convince you to pay one-thousand dollars less than what he originally asked for it? Does that sound a little too good to be true? Perhaps for a reason? Hmm?
To his credit, the seller was fair and clear in his explanation that the trade was for a vehicle in poor shape. I had no experience rebuilding a truck, so the person who was clueless as to the nature of this exchange was me.
An Adventurous Barter
After agreeing to the purchase, we met later that day at a Department of Motor Vehicles outlet to make the titled sale.
The seller did not drive the truck to the swap. Instead, he had a friend drop him off.
Although I could not see the object of our exchange, I was feeling adventurous and went ahead and paid the seller. After he had the money and I had the title, he left and promised to drive the truck to me.
Many hours passed and I did not hear from the seller via text or phone. I was wondering if I had just paid one-thousand dollars for a piece of paper.
Then I received a text message with an address and a short message saying that he was too busy to deal with the matter any further, but he wished me luck.
The Bridge of No Return
The address belonged to a small burger joint, and just outside in the parking lot was my faded-paint, one-thousand dollar jalopy. The smell of cooking burgers matched my appetite for my new means for Alaskan freedom.
Being the proud used-car purchaser that I was, I hopped into the front seat and immediately turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life and I was pleased to see that there was no “check engine light” active on the dash.
Feeling convinced that the vehicle must be safe to drive a little further, I decided to go down to the local repair shop so that I could get a general diagnostic.
I shifted into gear and pulled out of the parking lot.
Did I think to drive the vehicle down an unpopulated back road first, to make sure it was safe? Nope.
Did I bother to check the oil? Nope.
Did I even think to check the brakes? Nope.
No, being the genius that I was, I turned out straight onto the freeway and began climbing up an overpass bridge.
Many things happened at once.
The first event had to do with the vehicle’s drive shaft.
This shaft is a long pole underneath the truck that connects the engine and transmission to the rear wheels. The shaft takes the spinning power of the engine and transfers it to the spinning power of the wheels.
This spinning shaft is secured to the vehicle by a circular bolt, called a u-bolt. The u-bolt on this particular truck was consumed with thirty years’ worth of rust.
As soon as the power of the engine chugging up over the overpass put pressure on the drive shaft, the rusty u-bolt popped off, leaving the driveshaft to gyrate wildly without a proper anchor.
With the shaft oscillating out of control, the truck began to physically bounce and rock, back and forth, from front to back, and side to side.
This motion caused the next event: the driver-side window fell off the motor inside the door and the window came crashing down.
Naturally, the banging of the window caused yet another catastrophe. The weight of the window, combined with the fact that some previous owner had taken apart the driver door handle and not put back it back together properly, made my driver door fling open into passing traffic.
As my driver door sprung out at the car next to me on the freeway, I clutched at my seat belt for safety, only to find that the springs in the seat belt were dead and useless. My seat belt was little more than a decorative piece of fabric strapped around my unprotected torso.
I clutched the steering wheel for safety as the truck continued to bounce and the door flapped open and shut like a bird desperate to stay airborne.
With the driver door and window open, I could now hear the sound of the engine more clearly. The metallic heart of my new machine was misfiring, making a rat-a-tat noise that sounded like a machine gun.
As I climbed towards the top of the overpass, the exhaust pipe fumed black smoke and the fan that drove the air conditioner screeched like a banshee.
Why didn’t any of these warning signs show up before I pulled onto the freeway, I asked myself?
At this time, the check engine light came to life.
Many Repairs Later
I did survive the trip to the repair shop. The repairmen kindly took a look at the machine and gave me a laundry list of items that, were I to pay them to complete, would cost more than the price of an entirely new vehicle.
That was okay, though, because I had no intention of paying someone else to render seaworthy my new yacht. I asked a tow company to take the truck home and set it in my gravel driveway for surgery.
The two of us, my rusty Silverado and I, then shared many a pale-purple-light romantic evening together. My knuckles gained a few scars from cranking wrenches in the wrong directions and the deet that I sprayed on myself to keep away the mosquitoes bled the colors out of a couple sets of clothing.
Loading Up the Beast
After perhaps thirty small repairs and a few test drives, as well as an engine swap and a transmission rebuild that have stories of their own, the truck appeared to be ready for its first test at towing a heavy load. The timing was synchronized with my need to move our personal belongings two hundred and five miles back to Fairbanks, Alaska.
My boys and I rented a 6′ x 12′ enclosed U-Haul trailer and parked it in front of our Tok apartment. As I packed up the trailer, the boys spent their final hours exploring the gravel-pit yard in front of the location that was no longer to be our home. In their explorations, they found little “gems” and “crystals” all around the house. These little treasures were simple translucent pieces of broken plastic that glowed in the sunlight. The boys fully imagined that they had found the prized possessions of one of their favorite T.V. heroes: the “chaos emeralds” of Sonic the Hedgehog.
In the trailer, I filled each nook and cranny of the available space no matter how tight or how high the location. I stacked the suitcases until they pressed tight against the ceiling. I shoved everything from the fridge into multiple ice coolers, then pressed the coolers in between the suitcases. I wedged my exercise equipment next to the coolers. My hand tools and power tools went into plastic tubs, which I then framed around the exercise equipment. When all of my large objects were in place, I took my clothing and squished each piece of fabric into the air gaps.
The final result of my efforts was a trailer packed to the brim and looking like it held a giant square brick made of metal, plastic, and clothing. With the help of the lever on the door of the enclosed trailer, I squeezed the door closed and slammed down the crossbar.
Then I repeated this process with the bed of my truck, until it too held a palette of solid junk.
Moment of Truth
Around eleven o’clock at night the packing process was complete and my boys and I slid into the truck cabin, pressing ourselves tight between the clothing hangars, alarm clocks, and other miscellaneous items that could not fit elsewhere. We fired up the engine and peered into the pale-purple light of the Alaskan midsummer midnight sky.
The truck was so packed, I was concerned that I had given it too heavy a load. As a light-duty three-quarter-ton truck, it was capable of safely towing up to five-thousand pounds. How much did the U-Haul trailer itself weigh? Perhaps three-thousand? How much did my personal belongings weigh? Another two-thousand, maybe? What about my boys? Another one-hundred? What about me and my big fat tummy? Another two-hundred and fifty?
I told the boys that we should be prepared for a long, slow trip through the Alaskan mountain range. The trip could take perhaps ten to twelve hours, as we might only be able to reach speeds of twenty to thirty miles per hour. We might even be sleeping on the car seats if I became too tired to drive.
Although I had repaired a dozen of the more important items on the truck, many issues still remained. Most importantly, the engine-temperature gauge sometimes flickered for no clear reason. I needed to know the temperature, in case the heavy load caused the engine to overheat.
There was no time to fix this issue now as “go time” had arrived. We pulled out of the gravel parking lot and turned directly onto the small-town highway. For the first hour, the boys and I nervously kept our eyes on the flickering temperature gauge as we tiptoed up to thirty-five miles per hour. When the gauge was steady, we could see that the engine temperature held at the normal range of approximately two-hundred degrees.
After an hour without event, we sped up to forty, then forty-five. Our burgundy bronco smoothly drove up and down the mountain road. If I did not have a truck bed full of items blocking my rear-view mirror, I would not have known that the truck had any load at all.
Our adventurous spirit returned. In the middle of a stretch of empty highway, we hit the gas and accelerated up to the full fifty-five miles per hour.
The truck didn’t even blink. We cruised over potholes and snow heaves, swerved around tight bends, and launched up dangerous grades. Every challenge that presented itself the truck conquered like a Trojan war hero, and the temperature gauge revealed that the engine didn’t even break a sweat. We sliced our way across the Alaskan wilderness and charged towards Fairbanks.
Around three o’clock in the morning we crossed into Fairbanks city limits. In the pale-purple light of the Alaskan morning hours, the boys and I sang our praises to the truck, all the while shouting to each other, “We have a three-quarter-ton truck.”
As we pulled into our destination, the driver door handle came lose and the door flung wildly into the passing lane. We yanked the door back into place and decided that although our work-in-progress truck is regaining its ruggedness, we needed to downgrade the truck’s title a bit to account for its current qualification. “It’s a tough truck, but it’s still falling apart,” we remarked, “so we can’t call it a ‘full’ three-quarter-ton truck. How about we call it, ‘one-eighth of a three-quarter-ton truck.'” The name stuck.
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