The Farm Truck

The truck is parked where it quit, and the grass has taken over the rest of the job.

The pickup was the workhorse of the farm in the years after World War II, hauling feed, hay, fence posts and whatever else had to get to town and back. The farms themselves were already on their way out. The United States had 6.8 million of them at the peak in 1935. By 2022 the Department of Agriculture counted about 2 million, on far larger acreage. Plenty of the trucks that served the smaller farms simply stayed where they were parked when the work stopped.

Rust is how steel keeps a record. The orange here is bare metal that has met seventy years of weather, showing through where the paint gave up.

In the picture, a pickup in faded turquoise sits nose-forward in tall grass, its paint worn through to rust along the fender and hood. One round headlight catches the afternoon sun, the grille bars are dull chrome, and orange and purple wildflowers crowd the wheels under a warm, cloud-streaked sky.