Howdy, folks. Glen Blamstead here. I backed the trailer up the other day. The trailer had other ideas. I do not know how much of my life I have spent trying to reason with inanimate objects, but I know the number is going up and I know the trailer is winning.
The job was a small lean-to add-on out west of Mora, off one of those roads where the mailbox numbers stop making sense somewhere around county line. I had a load of purlins and a bundle of trim on the flatbed, and I needed to swing that flatbed backward about forty feet up a slight grade to line up with where the crew was working. Forty feet. In a straight line. On a gentle slope. This is a task I have performed, and I say this without exaggeration, several thousand times in my life.
Should have been ninety seconds.
It was, and I want to be exact about this because the crew will want to correct me if I am not, twenty-two minutes.
Now, here is the thing about backing up a trailer. Everybody thinks they know how to do it, right up until the moment they are doing it in front of an audience. Which I was. The customer was standing on his porch with a cup of coffee, watching the whole production, and the two young guys we've had on the crew for a few months now had stopped what they were doing to also watch. There was a dog. Even the dog was watching. Every eye in Kanabec County, it felt like, was pointed at me and my flatbed and the very simple task I was failing to complete.
The trailer went left when I asked it to go right. Then it went right when I asked it to go left. I have driven this exact trailer for eleven years. It has never developed opinions before. But last Wednesday, apparently, it decided it was tired of being told what to do.
I straightened out. I tried again. This time I got about twelve feet before the trailer jackknifed at an angle that I would describe as artistically dramatic. The customer took a slow sip of his coffee. The crew foreman, who has watched me back a trailer more times than either of us can count and has never once said a single word about it, cleared his throat in a way that carried.
I got out.
I walked around the trailer. I looked at it from the back, then from the side, then from the other side. There was nothing wrong with it. It was a perfectly normal flatbed with a perfectly normal hitch and perfectly normal wheels. I got back in. I said, out loud, to nobody, "Alright. Fine. Have it your way."
You know what the trailer did? It backed up straight. First try. Forty feet. Right where I needed it. Like the whole prior twenty-two minutes had been a warm-up act.
The crew unloaded the purlins without comment. The customer went back inside. The dog stayed to keep watching me, because dogs know when a man is holding a grudge against a piece of equipment and dogs think that is entertaining. I gave her a bit of jerky from the truck and she wagged her tail in a way I chose to interpret as sympathetic.
The Theory
Here is my theory. I have had a lot of time to think about it, mostly while lying in bed at night reviewing the whole event in vivid color. Trailers are like teenagers. They will do the exact thing you ask them to do, as long as you are not watching, not in a hurry, and not trying to look competent for an audience. Add any of those three conditions and the trailer becomes a jazz musician. Improvisational. Unpredictable. Occasionally beautiful. Mostly baffling.
You would think, after enough years in this business, I would have made peace with this. I have not. I still expect the trailer to comply. I still get annoyed when it doesn't. I still get out of the truck and walk around it and pretend to check something, which is a thing every man in the trades does when a piece of equipment has publicly embarrassed him and he needs a minute.
My father used to say that in every job site there is a moment when the tools are running the show and the humans are just there to hold the coffee. That moment, for me, was 10:47 last Wednesday morning, out west of Mora, on a slight grade, with the whole Kanabec County peanut gallery paying close attention.
We got the lean-to framed by supper. Wooden trusses, treated posts, all the pieces exactly where they needed to be. The customer came back out around four, looked at the work, looked at the trailer, looked at me, and said, "So. Ninety seconds." I told him that was cold. He laughed. Good customer. He is going to get a beautiful lean-to.
If you're thinking about a pole barn or a lean-to or a shop or anything else that involves us backing a trailer up your driveway — holler at us, or stop by Sherman in Mora. Ninety seconds. Guaranteed. Give or take twenty-two minutes.
