Most Americans, I suppose, call a tow truck when they have a disabled vehicle and need to move it to a place where it can be fixed. Growing up, I was never in that situation except in the dust storm in Arizona during our move from Arkansas to California. (See The Dust Storm...A Story in May, 2011.) Of course, Daddy didn't call a tow truck in that situation. He couldn't. There were no cell phones in those days, not even car phones. We just prayed and went on into Winslow and the Lord made the trailer wheel stay on and rolling until we entered the fix-it place.
Fast forward ten years and I found myself married to Dave Goins, who was an Adventurer to say the least. We drove hundreds of thousands of miles around the U.S. and several times between California and Alaska, including a number of very long distance moves. We always drove old cars and trucks. They had to be fixed more often than newer ones. Something was always going wrong with them. I had no clue what to do, but Dave... Well, he fixed things, especially vehicles. He called himself a "shade tree mechanic" but it was not the times he fixed things while parked under a shade tree that I remember as much as the terrifying process of getting to the shade tree from whatever bridge or highway or icy, winding, mountain road we were driving on when the clunker clunked.
Sometimes we bought vehicles, especially trucks, from the County (or, in Alaska, the Borough) at auctions, and if the vehicle was not running, or if we bought two of them, there was towing involved. We never called a tow truck. We just towed one vehicle with another. We didn't always have a proper tow bar. Sometimes we did it with a rope, in which case someone (usually me) had to drive (or steer) the Behind vehicle while someone else (usually Dave) drove the In Front vehicle. I hated it. I prayed my way through several of those kinds of scenes. When we would finally come to the end of the journey, I would be pale and shaking.
I remember once we hauled an open trailer loaded with all our household furniture (including a piano) from San Diego to L.A. The car was a Volkswagen Bug, the first one of fifteen Dave drove during the next twenty years. As you may know, VW Bugs have the motor in the rear, the weight of it being over the rear axle. That's great for gas mileage, but if you tow a heavy weight (like a heavily loaded trailer), it presses down even more on the back of the Bug and makes the front wheels lift up a bit so you don't have much steering control. If you ever get the rig going forty or fifty miles an hour down the freeway, another impatient driver who wants to go eighty miles an hour will swish past you without a backward glance or thought, and the "wind" from their big, long, low, and wide mid-sixties Ford or Chevy or Chrysler will blow you away, literally, away from the lane you are desperately trying to keep the Bug within... And once that happens, and the wind dies down, you correct your direction in order to stay on the freeway, and the trailer begins to "wag" from one side to the other. So you try to slow down to correct it, but the steering wheel seems to have a mind of its own. If you brake, it gets worse. It's awful. It's like the tail is wagging the dog.
Of the many times I have been in those kinds of situations, I have to say the worst ones happened on our move from San Diego to Anchorage, Alaska when Rachel (our first child who lived) was four months old. We towed a three axle 15-by-40-foot mobile home that closed up to 8-by-40 from San Diego to Anchorage, 4400 miles. We left San Diego (actually Chula Vista, which is right on the border of Mexico) on the 12th of November and arrived in Anchorage on the 4th of January, 1970.
The trailer was actually a very nice mobile home, filled with heavy furniture and everything we owned. We had bought it in the Los Angeles area and moved it (with a car) to San Diego a year or so before, so we thought this would be easy enough if we pulled it with a trailer-hauler type of truck, even though the truck was nineteen years old and built for hauling the light type of mobile homes built in the early '50's. After all, the truck didn't have a lot of miles on it, and the tires were pretty good. We had a couple of spares. We thought we were set.
We didn't even get over the mountains to Bakersfield where we planned to stay with Daddy and Mama for a day or so... In the middle of the mountains, the truck was running so bad that Dave had to pull off the highway into a cleared space, and hitch-hike into Bakersfield to buy the parts needed to fix the truck. The problem was that the cleared space was not big enough to hold the trailer without the back end of the trailer kind of sticking out in the truck lane.
The job assigned to me (holding my four-month-old baby) was to stand behind the trailer and wave big trucks to move over and not hit us. So I did the best I could. Talk about stress... I didn't even have any red material or paper or anything to wave but my free hand. My other arm and hand was holding Rachel. We didn't have a car-seat or anything to place her in, and besides there was no place for her to be except in my arms. There was hardly any place for me to be. It was very, very dangerous.
The good news was that it was day light. Approaching truck drivers could see me from quite a way before they came near because they curved around the open space where we were. But they could not see their lane was ending and they better get over to their left or brake hard to avoid running into our trailer, which I was standing behind.
Are you stressed, hearing this convoluted story? I was really stressed, living it. I was there for several hours before Dave and Daddy returned in Daddy's truck. Dave brought parts to fix the truck and Daddy took me to their house. Dave came a few hours later. We stayed with them a few days until Dave got the rig in better shape.
He called that first leg of the trip a trial run. We stopped in L.A. and bought gas at a bulk plant for $.21/gallon. It was pumped into five 50-gallon drums. The truck only had a ten gallon gas tank in it. Dave rigged up a rubber hose from the drums of gas to the gas tank. There was a clothespin on the hose just outside my window. My job was to open the clothespin when the gas ran low and let some more flow into the gas tank so we didn't have to stop. Otherwise we would have been stopping every half hour, and lose our momentum.
That gas lasted all the way to Bellevue, Washington just before the Canadian border. When we filled those drums with gas there, the attendant saw the clothespin and asked about it. When Dave explained our system to him, he just shook his head, and then said, "You will make it. This is a crazy time to be going north with this rig, and you're crazy to attempt it, but I think you'll make it..."
He was right. It was crazy. But we made it. I wouldn't ever want to do it again, though.
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