In my thirties I lived four years in a once-thriving Ohio River town, now with just 800 living souls whose numbers fall steadily. In a district of pine-covered hills extending 400 square miles, the burg and the territory had during my time just 4,000 inhabitants in total, major part living in backwoods enclaves, each claiming a tiny Baptist, Pentecostal or Presbyterian church. Republicans held complete political control. If you wanted a job anywhere — in the nearby prison or grammar school, at a dam, on a coal barge — you registered with the Republican Party and voted that way no matter your true thinking. The citizens were mostly elderly; lots of kids had emigrated seeking more money and broadened educations, thus it was rare for a week to go by without a fresh cadaver being delivered to the undertaker, whose mortuary stood directly across the street from our house. In a village where you knew everybody’s name and most of their business, you might say hello to an older person on the sidewalk one afternoon and find yourself attending services in her memory one week hence. These encounters with dead-people-walking and those follow-up rituals became a routine part of life.

I wanted a picture to encapsulate and memorialize those provincial years in my life. Many subjects presented themselves: townspeople, mid-western architecture, rocky forest landscapes, agricultural ground featuring antique barns, winter scenes — yet I settled on this one. It has the strongest resonance for me. Avoiding the picturesque and the journalistic, I looked hard for the symbolical. The pickup is an emblem of rural culture from Tennessee west to Texas, the Dakotas and the Rocky Mountains. It is a specific kind of masculinity on wheels. This beauty rides high enough on serious tires to clear the deepest gullies and flooded roads, so that nothing may impede hunting and fishing trips, or joy-riding with a weapon hung out the window. Owning a versatile rugged vehicle like this means no obstacle will spoil your delight in using a handgun to pick off rabbits and squirrels as you roll down country lanes, or diminish the exhilaration an intoxicated man feels when shooting up and desecrating Speed Limit and No Trespassing signs. It well embodies a culture of poor and mostly Caucasian folks, left-behind but proud (note the fancy chrome exhausts), living in small towns or on sparse acreage, spread across states from Southern Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico.