In a 1969 print ad, Chevrolet described its new

TWO MEN
TRUCK
In a 1969 print ad, Chevrolet described its new Blazer as “the only
car/truck combination of its kind.” Tom Gamache bought one of those
Blazers, a 1972 model, and started hitting the road. A lot. To date, the
old truck has more than 1.5 million miles on it, and recently, Tom added
a few more when he and our writer took a road trip to Navajoland, a
place where trucks are treated with reverence.
BY MATT JAFFE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM GAMACHE
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NOVEMBER 2014
C
Tom Gamache’s 1972 Chevy Blazer has been through three engines and countless trips
around the Southwest, including a few visits to Monument Valley.
hecking in at Canyon de Chelly during a road trip through the Navajo Nation, I came
to the line on the registration form asking for vehicle make and model.
“Orange Chevy Blazer,” I wrote, which, though accurate, only began to hint at the
deeper truths of my friend Tom Gamache’s truck.
“I think you’ll know this truck when you see it,” I said to the hotel clerk from Kayenta before offering her a few details about the Blazer, most notably its model year
(1972) and mileage (more than 1.5 million).
“Oh, I love old trucks!” she said. “Can you take a picture of me next to it?”
Out in the parking lot, Tom and the Blazer were waiting: a boy and his truck.
The grill and its reflective blue Chevrolet emblem, recently scrubbed of 900 miles of
smashed bugs at a Chinle gas station, glistened, even on an overcast day, as the clerk
posed along the driver’s side.
In cities, the Blazer is more a curiosity than an object of desire. But on this trip
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RIGHT: Stands selling jewelry and other handmade items are
common sights in Monument Valley, where Tom Gamache’s
Blazer became an improbable tourist attraction.
and many others in the 20-plus years that Tom and I have traveled together, we’d noticed
that the Blazer is treated with reverence in Navajo country.
Here, a truck isn’t a fashion statement, and a backup camera is of far less value than the
ability to haul wood or plow through deep sand. And unlike our disposable culture, old
things, especially functional ones that leave new things quite literally in the dust, command
respect. Whatever the Navajo equivalent of “street cred” is, the Blazer’s got it.
Harry Walters, a retired professor of Navajo studies at Diné College, drives a 1995 Chevy
Silverado with nearly 432,000 miles on it. He likens trucks to horses.
“Trucks have been part of Navajo culture for 100 years, but people talk about them the
way they used to talk about horses,” Walters said. “I even gave my truck a name. It’s Molly.
And when it’s snowing and muddy and I’m sliding going up a hill, I’ll talk to her and say,
‘C’mon, Molly. C’mon, girl. You can do it.’
“With new cars and trucks, there’s no sense of control. But if something goes wrong
with Molly, I know exactly what it is. All I need are some pliers and baling wire.”
ld things,
especially functional
ones that leave new
things quite literally
in the dust, command
respect. Whatever the
Navajo equivalent of
“street cred” is, the
Blazer’s got it.
Tom may refuse to fly, but the Blazer has traveled the equivalent of three round-trips to
the moon. I’ve ridden shotgun for probably 50,000 miles of its run. During that time, the
air conditioning has never worked. Nor has the AM radio. But while I’ve been hot, I’ve
never been bored, what with endlessly changing landscapes and wildly elliptical conversations with Tom.
He has lived a few lives in his 73 years. A New Hampshire native, Tom pioneered freeform FM radio back in Boston during the 1960s while hosting a show called Uncle T’s Freedom Machine. After moving West, he worked at Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, designing album
packages and producing records for mostly forgotten groups like power-pop duet Vance
or Towers. Haven’t heard of them? They’re the band playing during prom in Carrie (Tom
still gets royalties).
When the music business and David Geffen’s yelling proved too much for the man, Tom
turned to landscape photography. So our conversations can veer from early rock ’n’ roll to
Coconino sandstone in an instant. Tom is extremely well read, with great recall. And what
he doesn’t know, he makes up. But I only realized that after our first 20,000 miles together.
On the drive from California, we were trying to figure out which Indiana city was headquarters for Studebaker (whose horse-drawn wagons were popular with the Navajos before
trucks became common). Still a few hundred miles from Monument Valley, Tom pulled off
Interstate 40 in Yucca to photograph an abandoned motel and its neon sign. The soft light
and a truck cab surreally perched 30 feet in the air atop a pole, like something out of René
Magritte’s little-known Peterbilt period, proved irresistible to him.
Across I-40 at the Honolulu Club, the parking lot was full and big rigs roared by as Tom
worked the scene. After making a few photos, I noticed Tom was bent over, improbably
scooping up cash from a tire half-buried in the sand. This conjured visions of us being pursued across the desert by some sinister cartel that had stashed the money.
Working title: No Country for Old Trucks.
I was relieved to discover that Tom’s haul was all of seven bucks in singles, plus a pair
of religious leaflets promising eternal salvation. While no longer fearing immediate earthly
retribution, my respect for karma did kick in. So I told Tom to just leave the money behind.
“No, I’m taking it.”
“What for?”
“Don’t know. Probably just spend it somewhere.” He put the bills on the dash.
The next morning we dropped from the Flagstaff high country along U.S. Route 89 into the
Painted Desert. The ponderosa-pine forest thinned, then quickly transitioned into stands
of piñon and juniper, which in turn gave way to expanses of golden grasslands, ruddy mud
hills and banded mesas out of Maynard Dixon. You can forget how big the world really is.
We passed abandoned souvenir stands with signs and mural art protesting the pro-
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NOVEMBER 2014
posed Grand Canyon Escalade project near the confluence of the
Colorado and Little Colorado rivers, and modest homesteads featuring a tableau common in Navajo country: a low-slung house or
trailer with newer trucks parked out front, older trucks in back
and a basketball backboard, typically with netless rim, off to the
side, sometimes near a hogan.
In Tuba City, we meandered past long-abandoned stone houses
and the old Indian school while searching for the weekly flea market.
At a stoplight, a guy wearing a Chicago Bulls cap gave the Blazer
a lingering once-over. His eyes moved slowly from bumper to bumper with a covetous gaze that most men reserve, though inappropriately, for women at the beach and, I suppose, women just about
everywhere.
You don’t keep a truck running for 42 years without replacing
parts (the Blazer is on its third engine), and while the digital age
makes it easier to buy spares for his analog truck, Tom wanted to
see what he might find at the market. But other than some Tupperware, there wasn’t a whole lot. So we drove off as one Tuba City
resident, arms raised in salute, yelled, “Nice, nice, nice!”
At Navajo National Monument, we pulled into the parking lot next
to a 1979 Ford F-150 Ranger, which — by virtue of its age, a whitestraw cowboy hat on the dash and water barrels anchored in its
bed — belonged to a local. We checked out the Betatakin cliffdwellings overlook, then returned to the visitors center, where
Navajo artist John Bahe Smith was painting in the entryway,
accompanied by a wiry, cowboy-hat-wearing dude named Chad.
“Yeah, we’ve been looking at your truck,” Chad said. “Trying to
figure out who it belonged to. And here you are.”
The old Ford belonged to Smith, who kept painting while Chad
and I reduced our degrees of separation. I’m from the South Side
of Chicago, and it turned out Chad is from South Bend, Indiana.
He clarified that South Bend was in fact the home of Studebaker,
and before long, we also figured out the restaurant that once served
seafood and frog legs outside Chicago (Phil Smidt’s, for the record).
Tom asked him about a good junkyard, but Chad, who has married into a Navajo family, couldn’t think of one. “Go down any
dirt road, and you’ll probably find whatever you need,” he said.
“People around here keep everything, hoard parts for themselves.
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until he could return home. Tom and I drove north the next morning and reached a roadblock at a bridge over the San Juan River.
There were police from all over the region, and a grim-faced sheriff’s deputy, wielding some serious weaponry (I know less about
guns than trucks), stood watch as the Blazer was inspected.
“Sir, we’re going to have to confiscate this vehicle,” he said, staring straight at us, eyes obscured behind mirror sunglasses. Tom,
rarely at a loss for words, sat silently. “I said we’re going to have
confiscate this vehicle!” Then the corners of the deputy’s mouth
turned up, almost imperceptibly. “You boys go on ahead. She’s a
beauty. What’s the year?”
This trip proved to be considerably less eventful. In the museum
at Goulding’s Lodge, we tried to piece together the evolution of
Monument Valley’s tourist vehicles over the decades. There was
ABOVE: Wispy clouds dot a blue sky above
Monument Valley’s striking desolation. Many
Navajos living here rely on their trucks to haul
water and navigate through sand.
and she grew up in Monument Valley. She showed us a recent pictorial book of the valley that used photos made of her in the 1960s
as a little girl wearing traditional garb. Of more interest to Tom
were postcards of Eschan by Josef Muench, the famed photographer whose photos Harry Goulding used to lure film director John
Ford to shoot his classic Westerns in Monument Valley.
Eschan still lives in the valley, at a spot about 15 minutes away
by rugged road near the Mittens. When I asked whether she ever
gets stuck, she smiled and said, “Well, when you know how to
drive in sand, you don’t get stuck.”
She bought the truck from a family member about seven years
ago, after her late-model Mercury Mountaineer kept breaking
down. The Ranger’s radio doesn’t work, but the heater does. The
driver’s-side mirror has been missing since one of Eschan’s granddaughters sheared it off.
ruckloads of
tourists turned their
cameras away from
some of the world’s
most iconic rock
formations to make
pictures of us.
OPPOSITE PAGE: Writer Matt Jaffe makes a photo
of the Blazer and one of its new fans.
Just be careful about knocking on doors.”
As we got ready to leave, Tom turned to me and asked, “What
do you think? Should I give him the money?” He pointed at Smith’s
tip jar.
“What money?”
“The money. The tire money!”
It did seem like an opportunity to right a cosmic wrong, and
after a run to the Blazer, Tom handed Smith the cash, plus one of
the religious leaflets. Smith looked quizzically at the writings, then
smiled as he fanned out the seven desiccated singles before putting them into his tip jar. Karma restored, we continued to Monument Valley.
It was in Monument Valley, 16 years ago, that I began to appreciate
the Blazer’s allure and the importance of trucks in Navajo country. Back then, it was an old, not-yet-classic truck, albeit one with
more than 900,000 miles. The Blazer boldly went where the valley’s tourist vehicles — those improvised contraptions with old
school-bus seats bolted down on a flatbed and a cargo of stunned
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NOVEMBER 2014
visitors getting banged around and mercilessly baked by the sun
— could find no purchase.
Out in Mystery Valley, we came upon one such vehicle listing
at a 45-degree angle after getting mired in deep sand, an obstacle
that Tom and the Blazer navigated with barely a pause. Our Navajo
guide’s conclusion? “I want this truck.”
On that trip, we also inadvertently found ourselves caught in
the largest manhunt in the history of the American West. A few
days earlier, a police officer had been killed in Cortez, Colorado, by
three presumed anti-government survivalists. Other law-enforcement members had been injured in separate incidents as the shooters fled into the Four Corners.
The region was under siege. Rumors ran wild, including that
the trio planned to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. We were with
Gene Foushee, a geologist and founder of Bluff, Utah’s, Recapture
Lodge, at Eye of the Sun, a 75-foot-tall sandstone alcove with a circular opening. A Navajo friend came over and said, “Gene, another
cop just got shot. This time in Bluff. They evacuated the town.”
With the Four Corners on lockdown, Foushee hung out with us
a 1957 shot of a Dodge Power Wagon with a stubby school-bus
body dropped onto its rear bed, and a picture of Harry Goulding
posing next to a Plymouth “woody” from the early 1940s. What
most intrigued us was a fleet of GMC Suburbans from probably
the early 1960s that featured the Blazer’s identical color scheme:
orange (although Tom always refers to it as red-orange) body and
white roof.
After exploring a few back roads, we drove into Monument Valley, where the Blazer became an improbable attraction. Truckloads
of tourists turned their cameras away from some of the world’s
most iconic rock formations to make pictures of us. And when we
pulled into Artist’s Point, a French tourist approached. “I like the
engine. The sound. Vroom, vroom, vroom,” a pallid, Gallic approximation of the 350-horsepower V-8’s imported-from-Detroit growl,
a primal hum somewhere between a rumbling freight train and a
purring lion.
Heading back, we spotted an old truck, a two-toned 1979 Ford
Ranger XLT, at the Mittens overlook. A woman making jewelry in
the passenger seat stepped out to greet us. Her name was Eschan,
Two of her grandchildren were sitting in a late-model black
Chevy Silverado parked next to the Ranger. They don’t really appreciate her truck, although Eschan said older people always do.
Much as I tried to get to some deeper understanding of the appeal
of old trucks, Eschan didn’t offer any sentimental explanations or
on-the-fly sociology. She likes the Ranger because she can haul water in it and do her own repairs.
Late that afternoon, I hiked while Tom edited pictures. When
I came back to our room, he was on the balcony as night came to
Monument Valley. “I’ve been watching her,” he said. “Watching
her pack up the jewelry and take down the tables and load everything into the truck. Then she drove down the road before turning off. You can still see her.”
The stars were coming out, and in the distance I saw a faint light
moving across the immensity of Monument Valley before the truck
disappeared behind a low rise.
“It’s a good work truck,” Eschan had concluded, which, in the
end, is what the Blazer has always been for Tom. And out here,
that’s all you really need.
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