Louise was quite a sight - she had originally been equipped as a camper but had had the appliance and furnishings ripped out and had subsequently served to haul equipment for a vintner supplier. My father's friend installed and maintained communications towers, and he used her to carry all the heavy cables and wires and whatnot which went along with that work.
I bought Louise to be pack mule for the extensive work I was doing on my house. It was a fixer-upper to be sure, and looking back it is hard to imagine how I could have done what I did over the ensuing three years without such a truck. Or how I got through six months of it without a motor vehicle. And also how I, and she, survived as long as we did. But I am getting ahead of the story. Hang on.
When I bought my house I was an obstinate cyclist, with the accompanying sanctimonious self-absorption that I now so easily recognize in others, who never tired of smugly arriving on two wheels at the remotest of places in the most oppressive of climates and righteously proclaiming his heroism thus.
So Louise afforded me a better-than-just-hairsplitting rationalization for becoming a vehicle owner: she really was too clunky and awkward to serve as personal transportation in all but the most desperate of circumstances. And when she did, she could, and did, accommodate an entire family and their bicycles. So I tiptoed quietly backwards into the realm of vehicle ownership without doing any lasting damage to my self-image as a warrior for - for what?
Thus equipped, I soldiered on in my holy war, my trusty steed serving me well both to haul the debris from a hundred year old house to the transfer station and to deliver their modern replacements from the lumber yards and the big box home renovation stores.
She was a good girl Louise, and she served me well for three plus years, the really backbreaking years of that renovation.
There are far too many Louise stories to tell them all in this post but perhaps I will return to it one day and add them in. There was the time I got pulled over because the back door was swinging open and I was spilling shingle debris on the road. There was the trip to the ferry with my mortified girlfriend and her young children, not just without seatbelts, but without seats. There was the time I got stuck in the snow at the neighbour of my stepfather's farm. There was the times I loaned her out to people who were moving: to L., to P., to C. who left her in a midtown grocery store parking lot with a flat tire, to MF who left her on the side of the road 40 miles north of the city with a burned out clutch, to S. who drove her around the block and just dropped her back off and rented a truck. L. actually borrowed her to go to a job interview by the airport, and she got the job! I did the same thing once, near the end, and was offered the job but turned it down in fact, on the basis that I could not imagine driving that beast to the airport every day, and I had yet to get my head around the idea of another vehicle, of life beyond Louise.
The end of the road came when the frame actually snapped, and a quadrant of the truck collapsed, complete with a big honking spring poking several inches through the floor. Or you would think that would be the end, but in fact I drove her sporadically for several months beyond that. Sporadically because in fact one consequence of the collapse was the severing of the hydraulic lines for the brakes, rendering them all but useless at any reasonable speed. You would think that would stop you from driving, and in hindsight it really ought to have. But with a determination and a focus I could only describe as misguided, I hung on to Louise and continued to drive her, albeit only occasionally.
One of those occasions was when I was scheduled for a workshop in a neighbouring city and I had to get out there and back, during rush hour both ways, for several days in a row. The public transportation option would have been several hours over multiple means each way, and cycling was similarly impractical. So I busted out Louise, and we made that improbable trip, and back. At that point you could pour a quart of brake fluid in her, and that would buy you maybe a couple of taps on the pedal, or if you were lucky one good slam - but you could not count on it. I could picture the fluid pouring onto the road - easily, because I had examined it and watched it when the truck was at a standstill. So you saved that as a last resort - once you used it, you had nothing else other than the parking brake and downshifting. And the parking brake was on the floor beside the clutch pedal, so coming to a stop involved some clever shuffling with your left foot. I found out later during an incautious service attempt which almost resulted in the revocation of her roadworthiness permit, that the parking brake only worked on one of the rear wheels, the other side was disengaged.
I remember the incredible focus it took to manoeuvre her down a crowded suburban six-lane thoroughfare, through dozens of intersections with sophisticated traffic signals, having to simultaneously focus on the immediate surroundings but everything ahead as well. That was the last lengthy trip I took her on, and after a couple of brief local trips to the transfer station or the beer store, I retired her, selling her to a Russian tow truck driver named Vladimir with the limpest handshake I have ever experienced for a hundred bucks. I was not crazy enough to repeat the experiment of commuting to the suburbs in rush hour with no brakes, but I will never forget the intensity of the focus that such a ludicrous task took.