Life without Pickups

In three weeks in Europe (Germany, Denmark, Netherlands and England) I saw but one vehicle that might pass as a pickup truck.

Very odd.

Because pickups are embedded in American culture (they are the largest single category of vehicle sold here), the lack of open haulers in Europe must be a cultural marker.

For starters, here's an entire continent without pickup OWNERS.

That’s huge!

Allow me to unleash a few stereotypes....No gun racks, no National Rifle Association window stickers. (Could Europe’s strict gun laws account for the lack of pickups? Help me out here, red-blooded gun lovers.)

No “God Bless America” signs (“God Bless France”?), no Golden retrievers (White Poodles?) hanging over the sides.

No tailgates.

(If only there were no tailgaters. In Germany they drive Mercedes Benz’s. They must call them something else in Europe. “Bumper chasers?” Don’t ask me what I called them. This is a “family” blog.)

And what about tailgate parties? Talk about cultural deprivation!

How else do pickup trucks define us in these United States?

We “throw stuff” into our pickups. We move a lot. We move stuff a lot.

In Europe, they don’t move so much. And when they do, it isn’t very far. And they have less stuff.

They do have these little vans (they aren’t big enough to be “moving vans”) that seem to substitute for pickups. I doubt anyone “throws” stuff into them because you can’t see what you might hit. The wife? The poodle? The kids?

Nor can you throw stuff out of your van. A van’s contents, not “stuff,” needs to be removed, carefully.

America is a big country and a pickup truck, parked in our expanse (deserts, plains, fields, driveways), allows its owner to load from the back, the sides and the sky (vis. the girder-dropping “Ford Tough” ads).

Vans, on the other hand, get parked next to hedgerows, frilly boutiques in alley-sized streets, or embankments on narrow country lanes.

Enclosed as they are, vans offer no “sides” or “tops” to load from.

I’ve done a little on-line sleuthing on this NO PICKUPS in EUROPE subject and somebody in a Fodor’s travel discussion mentioned the tax advantages the Feds give pickups here.

And someone else said that a pickup’s turning radius would be limiting in European tight spaces.

Another returned tourist mentioned prohibitive European gas prices, which run nearly three times what they are here.

All true enough, but no one got into the deeper anthropological significance of this difference. It seems like a rich lode for some PhD. candidate who is desperate for a dissertation topic.

As for me, I don’t want to judge these cultures based on transport preferences, but to any visitor to one or the other continent, the pickup difference is unavoidable and weird.

Consider being a confused European visiting Cheyenne, Billings or Waco from Rome, Paris or Amsterdam.

You’ve just seen a pickup truck for the first time. Here’s a vehicle that looks seriously deprived. Who would drive one of those?

And what’s with that rifle hanging across the cabin window?

And the three rangy dogs pacing around in back, drooling over the sides?

Very strange place, this America.

Undergrounding is good for the psyche

What do the three photos on the right have in common besides being from my recent trip to Berlin, Denmark, the Netherlands?

The answer: No overhead utilities.

You may not have noticed because you are blind to wires, poles and transformers on our own littered streets and highways. You automatically screen them out of your vision using some internalized mental Photoshop.

Since we no longer "see" such clutter, what’s the big deal?

I contend that whether we know it or not, when our view is free of such intrusions, we recognize that freedom subconsciously. We are more in tune with our environment, as we are when we view the European photos.

Admittedly it’s an unfair comparison, but take stock of your psyche looking at the European photos and then tune into your feelings when you look at the streetscape below of Capitol Highway in Hillsdale.

You don’t have to go to Europe to have the wire-free experience. When the City of Portland wants to bury utility wires, it does. Just visit the Pearl District or downtown.

We need a program here for undergrounding utilities in the places outside of downtown where wires, transformers and poles are most obvious.

I nominate Hillsdale, a Metro-designated Town Center, a pedestrian district and a Portland-anointed Main Street District, to go to the top of the list. The cost would be somewhere north of $2 million. The money should come from city-imposed utility franchise fees.

The utilities that litter our urban landscapes should pay to clean up the mess.