Of Miles and Men: Father, Son, and 1700 Miles in a ’71 Ford Pickup

I showed up in New Mexico with $500 in parts and an aim to drive this truck 1700 miles home to Tennessee in the heat of August. I’d fallen in love with the thing from across the continent, the photos showing a tired but honest 1971 Ford F-250 Custom Highboy, Chrome Yellow against an impossible Western sky. A good mule. The seller couldn’t tell me much about it other than it’d spent all its days in Idaho before finding itself in an estate sale, then on a trailer to White Rock, a stone’s throw from Los Alamos and the lab that brought the world The Bomb. He said the Ford drove. Sort of.

Good enough.

I called Dad.

“Want to go to New Mexico?”

Growing up, dreaming was the familial pastime.

We spent our Saturdays bent over the latest Hemmings, flipping through the back pages and scanning the classifieds for the treasures there. Or wandering the rows of the Cabin Fever car show in Knoxville, our reflections sliding over the candy-apple fenders of a ’32 Ford or the gleaming bumpers of a ’57 Chevrolet. More often than not, ambling the old junkyards of East Tennessee, the delirious lines of discarded cars like crooked rings of a tree, the years winding back the deeper you went. The good stuff at the fence line where the old man would point out a Road Runner’s wrinkled fender or the crushed bed of a beaten-down Apache. We’d imagine what they’d all look like if we could only drag them home.

We never managed more than that. By the time I was old enough for my own set of keys, we were buried under the effort of building his house, felling oaks and digging footers out of the hateful Virginia clay. If there are words for what’s born from spending 12 hours a day swinging a hammer next to someone for six years, I don’t know them. You learn to read a person, to stay a step ahead and hand over a tool before it’s needed, two halves of the same mind.

Now I’m nearly 40, he’s almost 60, and we don’t see much of each other. The nature of things. We share maybe two dozen words in a month, split by 400 miles and the bright mire of our days. The tangle of wives and kids and jobs. The endless labor of one hour after the next, one year after another. These days, we only spend time together if there’s work to be done. Hands to be lent. Fair. I needed help getting that old Ford home.

The truck had been sitting for a year when I got to White Rock. It still wore its bias-ply tires and split rims, its Idaho plates with their curling registration stickers from 20 years ago. The seller warned me that the truck was worse than it looked. There was rust. Dents. Well, that makes two of us.

When I told him my plan to drive the truck back to Tennessee, the line went quiet.

***

Even factory fresh, a 1971 F-250 wasn’t a kind place to spend time—the Highboy even less so. With its leaf springs, closed-knuckle Dana 44 stick axle up front, non-synchronized first gear, and 170 galloping horsepower under the hood, it was made to put its shoulder to a load and shove. Slowly. Over short distances. There is no power steering. No power brakes. No air conditioning. A one-speaker AM radio is the sole source of entertainment. The 4.10 axle ratio means it’s more at home crawling through rocker-deep snow than firing across America’s August plains. Comfortable cruising speed is a modest 55 mph.

All of that is also part of what makes it so appealing. This truck is a relic from a time when the only people who daily drove a pickup were the ones without a choice, and it is as far from the gilded trucks on sale today as White Rock is from the green hills of Tennessee. Every piece of the F-250 offers satisfying mechanical feedback. The click of the door handle. The timpani of the door closing. Every switch and knob. That long shifter. All of it conveys something real and tactile. In a world of screens and beeps, it is a balm.

But this truck was farm fresh, with horsehair stuck in the Ford badge on the hood and old hay still stuffed in the bed pockets. There was the usual evidence of mice, and a bird had attempted to make a nest in the headliner. But the brakes worked. The engine was free, the oil full. The clutch wasn’t stuck. The battery even had enough charge to turn the old 360 V-8. When I hit the brass key, the engine coughed to life, then died.

Hope is a jagged thing.

By dusk of the first day, I’d managed to put the truck to rights, or close enough. I’d sorted out the brake lights and swapped the split rims and bias plies for modern steelies and BFGoodrich KO2s, all accomplished in the shade of a borrowed garage. I changed the oil and filter. A new-to-me Holley two-barrel carburetor sat happily on top of the 360, and the Ford idled contentedly in the setting New Mexico sun. It was Monday night, and Dad was due in Santa Fe on Friday. That gave me four days to get to know the F-250 and sort whatever ghosts reared their heads.

***

I spent the rest of the week at a motel in Los Alamos, the kind of place with excellent breakfast burritos and management that doesn’t mind some lunatic rolling around in the parking lot under a school bus yellow F-250. I changed gear oil and replaced the weeping water pump. Swapped out battery cables, the coil, and windshield wipers. Reglued the rearview mirror. I safety-wired the old exhaust back in place. Cleaned off all the glass, replaced belts. Dropped a new Pertronix ignition in the distributor, carefully packing the old points and condenser away, just in case.

By Thursday, the truck was as sorted as it was going to get. It started on the first lick of the key before settling into an easy idle. It suffered through Santa Fe traffic and crushing heat without complaint. And everywhere it went, smiles weren’t far behind. I couldn’t get out without someone stopping for a conversation or asking for a photo. Just seeing it under a row of cottonwoods made me grin.

When I grabbed Dad from the airport Friday night, he hopped in the passenger seat and looked around.

“This is a good one,” he said. “We’re not going to have any trouble getting back to Knoxville.”

I cocked an eyebrow, but he’d know. My oldest uncle calls him Mr. Lucky. Says the man could get in any car, in any condition, and drive it anywhere. For years, our family hauler was a 1978 Scout II he’d pulled derelict from a field in Chicago, long before those machines became internet darlings. Long before the internet, for that matter. He taught me how to feel the pulse of a thing and know without a doubt what it’s capable of. Greatness or misery.

Even factory fresh, a 1971 F-250 wasn’t a kind of place to spend time.

In my mind, he’s the man I worked beside when I was a kid. All muscled back and bandaged hands. The weight of one impossibility or another draped across his shoulders. But when I catch him out of the corner of my eye, for a moment I see my grandfather on the bench seat beside me. His hair’s grayer than it’s ever been, his glasses on his nose, and the two conspire to make him look like his father in the dim light of the airport parking lot. Funny how your mind works. How desperately it reaches for the familiar, even when your heart knows it can’t be possible.

I don’t know how to introduce you to my father. Do I start with the lore? How he fought a bear hand-to-hand once, and lost? How he soaked a man in gasoline for threatening his brother? Maybe how he spent his teenage years outsprinting state troopers on Route 129 in an IMSA-inspired Fox-body Mustang before that road earned its now infamous moniker: the Tail of the Dragon? Or do I start with the pieces that are harder to fathom?

The older I get, the less I understand the man. The house he grew up in was a shade of hell, his mother bent on beating or cursing him to death. Both, some days. They say that kind of raising physically alters your DNA. The trauma of it mutating your genes until it’s something that winds up in your bloodline. A thing you can’t wash out no matter how many rivers you wade into. It’s all the excuse a man would need to turn cruel or vicious, to want to serve the world a taste of what he’s known.

Somehow, he did not. When I came along, his mother responded by throwing everything he owned into the front yard, shouting she never wanted to see his face or mine again. He put what he could fit into the Mustang’s trunk and left the rest where it lay. Drove across the border to North Carolina. Moved into a trailer without electricity or much of a floor and began making a home for his family.

He was 19.

What 19-year-old has that in him? What grown man does? By that measure, everything else seems like a small lift. Limp a battered farm truck across the country? Just another Saturday morning.

***

We agreed to avoid the interstate at all costs. It would add a day to the trip east but would be easier on the truck and easier on us, too. We ambled up out of the desert through Española and toward Taos. For all his wandering, Dad hasn’t spent any time in this part of the world, and I was eager to show him the West I love, far from I-40. There’s something about the expanse of it that can crack an East Coast heart in two, and as we watched the desert’s moods shift through the Ford’s wide windshield, I could see the beauty of the place wash over him. First, the wide, dry desert framed by jagged, purple ridges on the horizon, then the cottonwood and pinyon draws as we chased the Rio Grande into the hills. We could almost hear the trout down there, calling.

That corner of the world changes its clothes on a whim, dropping its desert dresses for soft green plains and alpine firs with a little elevation. Whatever fears I had about the F-250 began to ebb as we threaded our way up to nearly 9200 feet, nipping through the pass outside of Eagle Nest and wandering U.S. Route 64 through Cimarron Canyon. Dad was quiet as we went, eyeing the deep pools along the road.

“I could get used to living out here.”

I joke that he cloned me. It seems that way sometimes. Like he folded all his multitudes into my core. Watered and sunned them until they grew roots and branches of their own. Like him, I would set myself on fire to keep a stranger warm, but I detest a crowd. Neither of us has much patience for people or cities. Isn’t that what drove so many of us West? The hope of one fortune or another, sure, but also the very real promise of just being left alone.

That’s where my mind was when the vibration started. Slight at first, then intermittent. Then prominent, the thin black steering wheel shaking in my hands. In those moments, your thoughts sprint to the worst possible scenario. A failed U-joint? The transfer case giving up the ghost? But Dad was calm enough about it.

“Feels like a wheel coming loose.”

We have always been at our best with a bit between our teeth. Of all our languages, we are most fluent in work. The rhythms of a task—digging a ditch, raising a wall, or pulling an engine—have always managed to keep us from having to acknowledge how damn similar we are. And different. The split between an E and an E-sharp. But on the side of the road, we had the problem diagnosed and solved inside of 20 minutes. Sure enough, the driver’s front lug nuts had begun working their way loose, the wheel now trash. Dad had the socket and breaker bar I needed in my hands before I asked for them, same as ever.

I was frustrated at such a simple mistake and full of curses as I double-checked the rest of the lug nuts. Dad was unfazed, though. He knows what comes apart when you’re dehydrated, hungry, and in a rush. Seems like he’s spent the past 40 years that way.

***

We settled into the easy cadence of a long drive in an old machine. Fuel stops and oil checks. Roadside lunches and hotels. Gatorade by the bucket. The rest of the world may have been unraveling, but the old Ford was an isolation chamber. A refuge. We weren’t worried about the Middle East or an election cycle. Home maintenance or threadbare retirement accounts. We just watched the miles roll by, all our concerns swapped for something easier: Where’s the next gas station?

The truck was a miracle. Somehow returning 11 mpg and happily eating up the distance. It gave us no grief beyond a sleepy starter solenoid that woke up with a few taps from my knife. The 360 did not burn or leak oil, somehow. Dad and I may have been hot and tired, but the truck felt like it could go on forever, even through the considerable misery of a 104-degree day in Oklahoma.

Maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to machines like this old Ford.

The route dropped us through parts of the country we’d never see, otherwise. Into America’s working gut. Past horizon-spanning fields of soybean and corn, past slowly bobbing oil derricks. The days and miles clicked by until we began to see familiar country, the earth swelling in gentle rises, all draped green at last. The air was humid, and the smell of it bittersweet. We’d be home soon.

We worked our way through the Missouri lowlands and toward the Mississippi River. Dad and I have both crossed that demarcation more times than we can count, but neither of us has stood on its banks, watched the water slide toward the wide Gulf. So, when navigation suggested we take one of the only remaining ferries across the water, we jumped at it. Even there, we could feel the trip coming to a close, the door shutting on our time together. So we let the Ford’s big yellow hood point us to the river, ever farther from the rush of the interstate. But when we finally rolled onto those sandy banks, the Mississippi was treacherously low. The concrete loading dock dissolved into nothingness, and the Dorena-Hickman Ferry sat moored and uncrewed.

I parked up under a wide sycamore, the morning sun splashing through its sprawling leaves. The truck cooled in the shade, and Dad wandered down to the water. A thread of cell service confirmed what we suspected: There would be no ride across that river. The Mississippi was at a record low, the gauges all sitting at around minus 11.5 feet. It’s one thing to know that change is constant. That everything, from the air we breathe to the soil beneath our feet, is here for some unknowable sliver of time. It’s another to understand it. To see the Mississippi wither. To watch your father grow old.

Maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to machines like this old Ford. By their nature, they run against that inevitable current. They seem to have dropped out of time, and in doing so, let us believe that we can, too, if only for a bit. That as long as that 360 runs, Dad will be there in the passenger seat, his gray eyes shining as the world rolls by.

It’s a 90-mile detour, up through Cairo, Illinois, and the change will add another two hours to an already long day. One that will see us wander down through Kentucky, into Middle Tennessee, and eventually, home. When I tell Dad, he just smiles, laughs, and opens the passenger door.

“I’ve got nowhere else to be.”

***

This story first appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.