By Neil King Jr.
I will always remember the first time I saw her. The clerk said, “She’s a big one. You’re going to like her.” And I said, “How big?” And she said, “XL big.”
The clerk brought her out from her space so we could take a 360-degree view and snap some pictures of her haunches and her rear end just in case we got into a scrape over the next month, and I thought, “She really is a beauty.”
“Enjoy,” the clerk said, handing me the keys. And off we went into the world, that XL and us, for adventures unknown and to parts faraway, smack in the middle of a global pandemic.
The rental car business really is one of the wonders of the modern world. I had sauntered up to the Hertz booth in Union Station in Washington D.C. and plunked down two pieces of plastic—one bearing a photo of my face and the other a series of numbers connected to my bank account—and cruised out minutes later in an 18-foot long, three-ton truck that could carry seven people plus a dog over 100 bumpy miles in less than an hour with the smoothness of a skater breezing over fresh ice. Or, in our case, two people, a dog and most of our worldly belongings.
She was a mere baby, this white 2020 GMC Yukon XL. Born a few months before Covid-19, she had traveled barely 4000 miles. She was shimmery white, smelled new, felt new, and the tread on her tires showed not a millimeter of wear. Most astonishing of all, she was ours for a month for a mere $1,400. Over that span we could go anywhere we wanted, even all the way to Oregon and back if that struck our fancy.
To make that same one-way trip in 1845, a settler would have paid around $800 for a covered wagon, two oxen, a spare wheel or two, and other fixings—or about $25,000 in today’s money. All hail the Industrial Revolution! Which explains why I whooped with joy as I patched out while taking a right turn from the parking garage onto H Street NE.
As I stuffed her with duffel bags and fly rods and hats and boots of all kinds, plus a cooler, and still more duffels, I admired a few things about the Yukon. How she had, for instance, three entire rows of seats before you even got to the commodious final section, where the dog went. How her running boards provided a nifty step up. How her console between the two front seats was big enough to be its own cooler.
We set out early one morning, my wife and I, from our house a mile from the U.S. Capitol to go see see friends in Twin Bridges, Montana. A town in a wide valley where two fabled rivers met. Lewis & Clark country. A mere 2,200 miles west to the birthplace of the mighty Missouri.
We drove our first day to Michigan and barely noticed the hours. Barns, fields, silos, Breezewood, the entire state of Ohio—everything just slipped away like rainwater. I stepped out of the Yukon after 625 miles like I was stepping out of bed. In that covered wagon I’d barely be forging the Susquehanna. We were nearly on the shores of Lake Michigan. I called her The Mile Muncher.
We’d arrive at friend’s places, give air hugs and air high-fives, then say: “Come see the ride.” We were that proud of our Conestoga. We swanned to Chicago, cut a ribbon across Wisconsin, blazed into Sioux Falls. That’s when the trip truly began, that next morning early, when 265th Street turned into State Road 42 and all we could see was a ribbon of asphalt gobbled up on both sides by early summer wheat. We were in South Dakota. The Yukon exhaled and shot straight West, already in love with the Great Plains.
Life is made of moments, snapshots, little pointillist happenings. You can boil a day down to one thought, one joke, one encounter in Aisle 7. We were on a dirt road, nicely graded, barely wider than the Yukon. The sun hanging high and amber waves forever on both sides. We stopped and the heat was still, the afternoon hushed. Wind rustled through the wheat more luxuriantly than it ever blows over water. We marveled and took photos. Man and wife standing in front of their mighty conveyance. Road, wheat, cumulus, Yukon. For an hour we raced along that road toward an ever-receding horizon and no tractor, no oncoming pickup, nothing got in our way.
It was on that road that the Yukon began to take on some of its proud patina—its first sheen of dust that would later be layered with hardened mud splatters from Wyoming and Montana. A Kodachrome of massacred butterflies, beetles, wasps and grasshoppers built up on the hood and grille.
I will admit to resorting to a little Yukon porn from time to time. The grain elevator that rose up four stories high in Wood, South Dakota, was a totem of gorgeous faded grey and russet roofs, the block letters ROSEBUD GRAIN CO barely visible on its sides. That silo made for a fine portrait all by itself, but still I had to squeeze in another with the Yukon proudly splayed in the foreground. Look at her there in the Badlands, or along the shimmering Yellowstone River, or wow how her lines juxtapose well against the soaring spire that is Devils Tower.
On our nation’s birthday we put her to the test on a rocky, muddy drive three thousand feet up on a jeep road to Branham Lake in Montana. Snowmelt was still pouring down from the granite heights, but still my daughter and I had to cap the visit with a heart-racing swim. By then the Yukon’s interior was a welter of fleeces and fishing boots, water jugs and floppy hats, packets of dried fruit and bags of tortilla chips. When I stuffed my wet socks into the perfect little cavity in the driver’s side door, I knew that we were truly on intimate terms. She was one with the family now. We tossed our damp towels on top of everything else in the far back seat.
Three days later we pulled into a Sinclair station in Kemmerer, Wyoming, after a full day of cavorting with rainbows on the Hams Fork. I squeegeed some of the bug goo off the windshield as we peeled off our waders. We had already turned south and east of our westernmost destination in Montana. The trip was entering its last legs. A tiny strain of sorrow was seeping into my spirit. But right then we were footloose 20-year-olds with nowhere in particular to be, tossing our wet waders into the back of our truck and heading on down the road. The ecstasy of that moment swamped the seeping sorrow.
We blew down gravel roads, graded roads, bumpy roads, roads that shot straight into the sun. We crossed a thousand rivers and each time I snapped my neck to catch the river’s flicker, its contours, its brevity or grandeur. In Ohio we crossed the Ohio and much later again, while looping home, in Kentucky. In South Dakota we crossed the Missouri and then later in Montana and much later in Missouri itself, fatter now and much muddier. For one heart-aching day we drove from Cody, Wyoming to Twin Bridges, Montana along the Shoshone, then the Yellowstone and the Madison, with river to the right of us, then the left of us, but with no time to fish or swim. My pulse ran twice its normal rate.
Where the Jefferson, the Madison and the Gallatin all meet at Three Forks, Montana, to create the Missouri—that is one of America’s truly sacred places. Water runs in all directions there in a vast delta of little rivers before they all become one and head toward that other Delta at the end of the Mississippi. I watched the Yukon’s shadow run across those waters.
She drank 344 gallons of gas getting us there and back across 6,200 miles and 20 states. When I was filling her up the last time at the station two blocks from our house, a guy came around the back of her and said, “Man, how on earth did you get this Yukon so dirty? I’ve never seen anything like it.” And I told him about the dusty road through the wheat in South Dakota and the muddy drive to Branham Lake and how all of the miles were splashed across her like medals of honor. “That’s something else,” he said.
The same clerk was there when I brought her back. No one batted an eye at the bug splatter on her hood or the hardened muck on her sides. “How’d she do?” the clerk asked. “Mightily,” I said. “Beyond all expectations.”
I looked her over one last time but had to turn away when the lot attendant drove her off to be scrubbed. That would have been too much to bear.
–Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and a writer who, when not at home in Washington DC, is very happy to be elsewhere.