How Much Truck Is Too Much Truck?

This lasted until I began looking at trucks.

Four-wheel drive. Trailer brakes. An extended bed. Leather seats. A moonroof. The list of possible features went on, along with the increasingly difficult question of which ones I actually needed.

The truck would eventually have to tow a trailer and reach five acres of desert near Terlingua. The land is served by roads that vary considerably in their commitment to being roads, so four-wheel drive felt sensible. A proper towing package mattered. Enough space for tools and building materials would be useful once construction began.

It would also spend a fair amount of time in Austin, where its duties would be less heroic and more likely to involve groceries.

I needed something capable of working in the desert without being so enormous that every trip to the supermarket became a low-speed maritime operation.

This distinction became increasingly difficult to maintain.

I visited several dealerships with a friend, going back and forth between them like a yo-yo in a 1950s Christmas stocking. It was similarly repetitive, briefly entertaining and carried a small but genuine risk of striking someone in the face.

Every truck appeared to solve one problem while introducing a completely different one.

One would have the towing equipment but lack four-wheel drive. Another would be perfectly suited to the desert but less suited to fitting into anything resembling an ordinary parking space. A truck could have the right cab, the wrong bed or an interior apparently designed for someone who considered wiping mud from their boots a personal failure.

Then there were the features.

Some were clearly useful. Others seemed to exist because, at some point, somebody had asked whether a pickup truck could contain more buttons than a regional airport control tower.

The difficulty was separating what I might genuinely need from what looked appealing after several hours under dealership lighting.

Leather seats were not essential, although they would be easier to clean. A moonroof would contribute very little to towing a trailer, but would make the cab feel less like a mobile equipment locker. An extended bed would carry more building materials, while a shorter truck would be easier to live with when it was not hauling half of West Texas.

Every sensible decision had an equally persuasive argument standing just behind it.

Eventually, I settled on a 2016 Ford F-150 Lariat with four-wheel drive and the full towing package.

It should be capable of towing the travel trailer, handling the desert roads, pulling itself out of a ditch and remaining comfortable enough for driving around Austin. In other words, it needed to be both a working truck and something I wouldn't resent every time I went to the supermarket.

The Lariat sits in that slightly peculiar territory between work vehicle and comfortable road car. It can tow and carry things, but it also has leather seats and enough electrical controls to suggest that manual adjustment is an indignity from which modern society has finally recovered.

It came with every conceivable button known to a seasoned airline pilot.

My pilot's license is presumably pending.

Some of the controls are obvious. Others invite experimentation followed by a quick check of the dashboard to see whether I have accidentally altered the drivetrain or launched something.

Among its many features are spotlights built into the wing mirrors. I am not entirely certain how often the average driver needs to illuminate something directly beside the truck. Perhaps this is a common requirement in Texas and I have simply not lived here long enough.

They may prove useful on the land, where darkness arrives properly and artificial light is in short supply. They could help while setting up camp, checking the ground beside the truck or trying to work out what has just made a noise in the scrub.

Still, their intended purpose remains open to interpretation.

Should I ever take up dogging, at least the audience won’t need to bring torches.

The F-150 is almost certainly more truck than I need for driving around Austin. Once it is towing a trailer toward Terlingua with tools and supplies in the back, it may feel considerably less excessive.

That is the difficulty with buying a vehicle for a project that has barely begun. You are choosing it for jobs that do not exist yet, on roads you have not driven, carrying materials you have not bought.

For now, I have a truck capable of reaching the land and hauling what the build will eventually require.

It can also collect groceries.

Provided I can find somewhere large enough to park it.

Have fun. Go wild.

Jack