Northern deLights

Truck-cessories
By Ashley Keeble


I’m writing this on my blackberry in the waiting room of Andy’s Auto Glass.

My assignment: to blog on the current explosion of culture in Canada’s fastest growing, Fort McMurray, Alberta. My employers assure me this frontier U-turn will soon rival the likes of Thunder Bay, Sherbrooke, and Brandon as a Canadian cultural epicentre.

Highway 63, connecting Fort Mac with Edmonton, is a veritable runway whereupon the latest trends in truck fashion are flaunted. On this runway, it’s all about accessories. I compare it to dressing up a suit: A man needs the right tie; the right pocket square; the right shoes and cufflinks, because every suit is essentially the same (I’d be going to fashion hell for making that statement if I weren’t already here). Likewise, when outfitting his truck, a man needs the accessories that best express who he is because he has such a limited choice in body style – Chevrolet or Ford only! Foreign trucks are so gauche here.

The current hot trend in truck accessories: Truck Nutz, because there’s no better way to express manliness than a set of metal testicles hanging off your trailer hitch. Andy here at the shop says Truck Nutz are uber chic this season (my words, not his). He goes on to say that while such things are not his bag (his words; I would never make that joke) it is not at all overkill to attach a giant set of copper cajones to a truck with sixty inch tires, two snowmobiles in the bed, and a cowcatcher/winch on the front bumper.

Do they look good? I admit I was so entranced by the shiny set of stones adorning the monster Ford in front of me that when it came to an abrupt stop, they tea-bagged the windshield of my Prius. The damage was considerable, because as the website touts, Truck Nutz are guaranteed not to break under the lifetime “Takes a licking” guarantee.

Andy predicts that next season’s discriminating truck-cessorizers will opt for semi-truck-style exhaust stacks.