My Friend, the Planet Wrecker

They were thrilling images, bursting off the walls of the Southborough showroom, rousing promotional shots of monstrous trucks ripping through mud fields, cutting across deserts, tearing up swamps. One photo didn’t feature a Hummer at all, just a lithe young adventurer standing atop a summit, alone, surveying an entire world spread out for him below.

The men wandering the Long Hummer dealership didn’t look much like that guy. They were middle-aged mostly, their days of infinite potential behind them, their mountains already scaled. Nor did their Hummers, lined up a dozen deep behind Bob Upton and me, resemble the beasts on the walls. Watching these opulent cruisers sparkle in the morning sunlight, it was difficult to imagine the tires rumbling over anything but asphalt. But that’s the thing about the Hummer, as Upton doesn’t mind pointing out: It’s the luxury SUV that truly can conquer the off-road.

Which in a way explained the convoy waiting behind us. “These people are spending all this money on trucks,” said Upton, who knows this because, as the product manager at Long Hummer, he’d sold many of them. “Well, let’s take ’em somewhere and let them see what they can do.” So a couple of times a year Upton organizes off-roading trips for his customers, renting out old logging roads or hilltop trails or, our destination today, the sandpits of the A. D. Makepeace cranberry empire in Wareham, the largest expanse of privately owned land in Massachusetts. My interest in this trip, though, had less to do with what the men who drive Hummers choose to do with them than with who, exactly, is still driving these things at all.

There was a time, of course, back when a gallon of gasoline cost less than $2, and when the energy lobby could still purchase plausible deniability from a handful of compliant climatologists, and when fewer than two in three Americans opposed the war, that the 11-mpg Hummer was understood by those of us who didn’t own one as indicative of merely an outsized ego and an undersized sense of self. Today, the truck is generally regarded as the embodiment of pure evil. In July, two vandals took baseball bats to an H2 parked on a tree-lined street in Washington, DC (it was too large for the owner’s garage), smashing every window, slashing every tire, and, lest the symbolism go overlooked, etching “FOR THE ENVIRON” into the paint. All of that, however, was a loving embrace compared with the beating that buyers across the country were delivering to Hummer at that very moment. Though each of GM’s eight automotive brands posted a sales loss in July, none was as steep as that suffered by its Hummer line, which sold 30 percent fewer trucks than the year before. The anti-Hummer sentiment seems to have washed over even California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the first private citizen to own one; he reportedly once had at least eight Hummers but has trimmed his collection to just four.

So as Bob Upton punched numbers into the GPS, and our convoy rumbled off the Long auto lot, crossing Turnpike Road as we headed for I-495 and the Makepeace property, I was certainly curious to know just who these proud Massachusetts Hummer holdouts following us were. I was also looking forward to seeing Manny.