If you have been reading some of my recent posts, you are probably aware that I have been talking about some of my exploits and experiences after being assigned to the JITC at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. My story today centers around a subject that I have written about a few times in the past. You may even remember reading about some of those stories such as an ill-fated camping trip that occurred at Riggs Flat Lake located along the top of the Pinaleno Mountains near Safford, Arizona all pertaining to that problematic Tempo from hell, as I liked to call it. That car gave me nothing but consternation and pain. Actually, it gave my wife consternation and pain. Cuz that was actually her car. My car was a Jeep Wrangler. I never had issues with that. My car was as reliable as the car it replaced, my red Chevy van. Well, you know the old adage: “burn me once, shame on me; burn me twice, watch your ass.” Well, even knowing that the Ford Tempo had kind of burned us, my wife and I decided to go to the well again and replace the Ford Tempo with another Ford. This time, we replaced the Ford Tempo with a Ford F150 Super Cab pickup truck. The super cab was also known as an extended cab. The pickup truck had a standard six foot bed, and it had a rear seat in the cab that would seat two adults and one child comfortably or three children comfortably. Access to the rear seat could be gained via a third door on the cab located on the passenger side of the vehicle. The color that my wife chose for the truck was known as Portofino Blue, which is basically a light blue or sky-blue color. As colors go, it wasn’t a bad color. It beat colors such as black or white or orange that my wife swore she would never buy and drive. She doesn’t even like true yellow. However, if the color looks like gold, which is a sort of yellow, she likes it. Her logic is that a gold color makes you look rich. Of course, when I am out of earshot of my wife, I like to call bullshit on that. Cuz yellow is yellow is yellow. I really don’t give a good goddamn what shade of yellow it happens to be. And I really don’t think that a darker looking yellow makes you look rich. Being rich makes you look rich. But I digress. We decided to test the new Ford F150 Super Cab pickup truck by driving up to Benson to the dairy farm to buy a load of cow manure for the garden. I thought that the truck bed could hold more manure than the little trailer that we had. Additionally, since getting rid of my Chevy van, I really didn’t have a way to tow the little trailer. I would have to rig a towbar to my Jeep Wrangler and add a wiring harness for lights. After driving up to Benson to the dairy farm and getting a load of manure, we drove back to our house to unload the manure into our garden. While we were unloading the manure, I learned a valuable lesson. I learned why everybody purchased bed liners for their pickup truck beds. Cuz, while I was shoveling the manure out of the back of the truck, I managed to put two or three scratches into the paint of the truck bed with the shovel. Oops (cheeky Deuce edit: I mentioned to dear old dad that he should have gotten a bed liner before he did all this…but did he listen…NOPE, and look where it got him). Then, I had to listen to my wife yell and scream at me for about a half hour about how clumsy I was. Like it was my damn fault or something. Well, technically, it was my damn fault because I was shoveling that shit. But it’s not like I did it on purpose. I didn’t start out shoveling shit with the intention to put some scrapes and scratches into the truck bed. I didn’t say to myself, “okay, self, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to show that shit and scrape the hell out of the truck bed so that it scratches just so that it doesn’t look new anymore.” Yup. Oh hell no. That never happened. It was an accident. But try convincing my wife that it was an accident. Yeah. That wasn’t happening. When she finally let me back out of the doghouse, she told me I was going to get one of those “black thingies” to put in the back of the truck bed to hide the scratches. She didn’t know that those “black thingies” were called bed liners. As a result, I checked around for some pricing. I found a place up in Tucson (notice back then pretty much everything was up in Tucson), that sold bed liners and camper shells. I made an appointment with them to get a bed liner installed the following Saturday. When we arrived at the truck outfitter in Tucson to get the bed liner installed, we noticed that the dealer also sold camper shells and custom toppers. One camper shell that the dealer sold was manufactured by a company called A.R.E. What was unique about their camper shell was that it had its own rear hatch door that latched on each side and could swing up to open like a rear hatch door on a vehicle. When that rear hatch door was mounted, it would replace the tailgate on the pickup truck. Additionally, swinging that rear hatch door upward to open would give the owner/ operator easy access to the truck bed for loading and unloading. That rear hatch door could be securely latched on both sides and locked and entry could be gained to the rear of the truck bed via a camper door. The camper door was a glass mini-door option that provided easy access to the truck bed and allowed for better line-of-sight through the rearview mirror for the driver. When my wife saw that topper, she decided we had to have that particular camper shell and rear hatch door so that we could take the truck to the beach in San Diego whenever we went camping. As a result, we ordered one of the A.R.E. camper shells, custom painted in the Portofino Blue color to match her truck. Other than having our bank account set back an unexpected few thousand dollars, we experienced no exercises in futility while upgrading my wife’s new truck.
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