Fuel costs fail to drive down Hummer passion

Character building
The low rumble of timpani drums stir from the Hummer's speakers. French horns join in, rising above the engine's growl. The solemn notes are unmistakable: Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."

Vickie reaches for D-Man's collar, which hangs down from the rearview mirror. She tugs the chains twice, rubs the gray links between her fingers.

"It's his truck," she says softly. Howard Schultheiss reaches across from the passenger seat and takes her hand.

Threading through branches and over stumps, the group reaches a winding river of boulders. They're not going to cross it. They're going to try and drive it's full third-of-a-mile length. A Prius would've been long gone by now.

Even in a vehicle marketed as the automotive equivalent of Godzilla, this takes nerve — and a durable wallet.

"I've come down on a rock so hard that my windshield cracked across the middle," says Jason Oplinger, an electrical contractor. When he and wife, Steph, married two years ago, guests were ferried to the mid-trail ceremony in a procession of 40 Hummer H1s.

Today has its own drama
Before it's over, the Schultheiss' truck will break in three places and have to be yanked off the rocks by winch. In one of the intermediate caravans, drivers will plunge through a mud pool with the color of cement and the odor of a pigsty. Two will dive so hard that water licks at the engines' air intakes before they make it across.

By evening, back at the hotel, there are new stories to trade over barbecue.

"I'm going to get out while I'm ahead," says LaForgia, whose street-pretty Hummer bears its first scar.

"I always say another scratch means another story, or adds some character," counsels a fellow owner, Mike Schoch.

Hummer stories echo each other after a while. Tales of the way a Hummer draws a crowd in a parking lot, or swallows ground in a snowstorm. Stories of beers shared around the tailgate, spare parts shared on the trail, and friendships built to last.

But the gut-level lure of the machine itself isn't easy to quantify.

Maybe the most powerful comparison is the one Vickie Schultheiss draws between her Hummer and the German Shepherd whose memory it honors.

"To me it had to be just as capable and just as brute as Dikas," she says.

In the woods, she narrows her eyes, studying the terrain ahead, then climbs the Hummer bearing D-Man's name over a mammoth boulder. The truck slams down, bashing steel against stone. Schultheiss swings out of the driver's seat to check out the wheel hanging in mid air.

Her forehead is fringed with sweat. She's beaming.

"Welcome to D-Man's world," she says.

'A true truck'
Schwarzenegger got his first Hummer just as consumers were falling for SUVs.

When the Jeep went civilian, so-called light trucks were a fraction of the U.S. car market, bought mostly by businesses who needed their power and capacity. When Congress set strict fuel economy requirements on car makers in the 1970s, lawmakers went easy on trucks, allowing regulators to set less stringent rules.

Detroit responded with vehicles classified as trucks but designed to win over car buyers. By 2004, light trucks claimed 55 percent of the market.

Regulators exempted trucks with a gross vehicle weight of 8,500 pounds or more from any fuel economy requirements, a loophole that critics say encouraged manufacturers to build mega-SUVs.

The first Hummers "raised people's eyebrows," says Tom Libby, an analyst with J.D. Power & Associates. Their in-your-face image appealed to buyers seeking pure utility. Libby cites his cousin, an avowed truck buyer, who declared SUVs "fake."

"He said the only one he'd ever consider would be the H1. For him, that was a true truck," Libby says.

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