The things it carried
Just to make things clear, this isn’t a resolution column because I usually rail against resolutions on the premise that life improvements shouldn’t be dictated by a specific date and I am not quite hypocritical enough to make a list of my own.I just happened to decide to clean my truck on New Year’s Day. Let’s leave it at that.I’d been thinking about wading through the contents since spring, but I figured I’d wait until after summer fishing season. Of course fishing season then became hunting season. It’s steelhead season now, but the lack of tidiness is starting to get to me.Another point of clarification is that my truck does not contain ten months of garbage. It’s more the detritus of a dude who lives in Alaska. Gas station hot dog wrappers get thrown away. My mid-sized, extended cab truck is more like an over-loaded tackle box in a state of chaos.The folding shovel I knew was in there, was in fact in there, but was under the army surplus blanket that belonged to my grandfather. I found Blue Fox spinners still in the packaging, a small plastic case of flies from The Fly Shop in Redding, California. I found a pair of fleece gloves and work gloves stained with mud and bark from the last loads of firewood I got with my buddy Josh in August. My snowshoes were in there as well as two pairs of sunglasses an orange beanie, three maps with hunting and fishing notes and a hockey puck. I found a receipt for gas I bought in 2013, and a CD made for me by one of my California students for the drive north. I found $73.36 in change.There was half a box of sporting clays along with the cheap orange thrower. The black rod tube for my 6-weight fly rod was in the back too, along with a coffee mug, a white chocolate macadamia nut Clif Bar, half drank bottle of water, an ice scraper, tow rope, emergency blanket and emergency fly fishing book - “Another Lousy Day in Paradise” by John Gierach.In my pre-truck days, I used to have an emergency collared shirt in the trunk along with my golf clubs incase the course we were about to play had standards. Most of the time we tried to find courses without standards because our standard golf game was pretty pathetic.A couple years ago I started using the roof of the cab as a fly box. When fishing the upper Sacramento River I used dropper rigs which is a smaller fly (usually a nymph or midge) tied a foot below the larger fly. These rigs can be difficult to keep from nesting in fly boxes, so I had a couple rigs ready to go and poked over head. Now I just have a couple steelhead and mouse patterns there.Other fly fishing truck treasures included 3x, 4x and 6x tapered leader, a spool of 6x tippet, three steelhead jigs and four strike indicators.When all was said and done, I hadn’t actually taken much out except the money and some of the gear. So maybe it wasn’t cleaning as much as it was taking inventory and reorganizing the things which clearly belong in a truck rather than on the shelf in a room or garage. A truck is a man’s, or woman’s, office, well, weekend office at least.Now that mine’s clean, that’s one less thing I have to worry about in 2015.