by James McGirk
My wife and I live in Oklahoma. But for the past few months it's felt like we haven't really been living here. That's because you need a car to live in Oklahoma, and until recently we didn't have one.
Actually, what you really need to live here is a truck. Maybe not in the cities, but out here, in the foothills of the Ozarks, where the roads flood when the creek overflows its banks, and even traversing a parking lot means tumbling into tooth shattering ruts and axle scraping bumps: you do. Given that my 'job' is being a freelance writer, and my credit is shot to pieces and my income is totally erratic, buying or leasing a new one was out of the question. So that left buying a used truck. And buying a used truck in Oklahoma—especially when you don’t know the first thing about them—is downright scary.
That's because people out here use their trucks. Take my neighbors as an example. There is a family of fishermen (and –women and –children) who live across the street from me, and they have at least a half-dozen trucks and truck-like sport utility vehicles parked in their lawn, and they drive the hell out of them. At the crack of dawn each morning I watch them hook huge boats to the their trailer hitches, and pile huge people inside of their huge trucks, and form a convoy and go wheeling off toward the Illinois River. They return around noon, caked with mud, with a dozen of the neighborhood cats in tow. My neighbor is a nice man, but there was no way I wanted to buy a truck that was used the way he used his.
I wanted a mall crawler. An off-road vehicle that had never been off-road. So I started looking at the auto listings in California, where my folks live. My thesis was this: that a California car would be more gently used and have much lower mileage than its Oklahoma-equivalent (enough to justify flying out there and driving the thing back).
I found one that met our requirements: a 2004 Grand Cherokee Laredo. The seller was selling it on behalf of his son’s fiancée, who was moving to Europe to become a champion cyclist. This was her beloved “Daisy”, according to the ad; Daisy was painted a glossy, sparkly black, had 4×4-wheel drive, and the famously reliable six-cylinder Jeep 4.0 engine, was big enough to fit my wife’s paintings inside of it (or her stretcher bars), had under 100,000 miles on the odometer, had an automatic transmission, and best of all fit, comfortably in our meager budget (which was about $6,000, generously loaned to us by my folks). A comparable car in Oklahoma, according to my hourly scans of Craigslist, was going for about a $1,000 more and had at least another fifty thousand miles on it.
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