I photoshopped the picture I used on Sunday’s blog, to make the old trailer look closer to the way it was back in 1972, when the events in today’s blog happened. I now realize that using an “untrue” photo is a good way to premise the story I am about to tell, where I had been forced to lie about the utility trailer.
I had gotten the utility trailer from my father, who gave it to me when we had to haul all of our possessions up to Canada when we officially immigrated. Once we had officially entered the country, I had the trailer, full of all our possessions, shipped up to the lumber mill camp where I was teaching school. Once there, we unloaded all of our things, and put them into the new teacherage where we lived for the next two years. The trailer was just parked unused, beside the teacherage for those two years.
After those two years of teaching in the one-room school, we had enough of the isolation, of living in the lumber camp without any roads in or out. I resigned the teaching job, and sought a position in a location that at least had a highway going to it. I was hired to be the Head Teacher in a two-room school in Avola, BC, which was on Highway 5.
I realized that when the school year ended, we would have to move all of our possessions out of the lumber camp. Again, shipping the trailer loaded with all of our things out of the camp on a BC Rail flatbed car, to Ft. St. James, BC, where our car was parked. I also realized that once I got the trailer out, there would be a problem, something I needed to deal with before any of that happened.
The trailer still had the two year old Indiana license plate on it, and I needed to get a BC license plate, before we started to haul our things to the teacherage at my new job in Avola.
During the Spring Break before the end of the school year, we were in Williams Lake, and so I took the opportunity to go to the BC License Branch there, to get a BC license plate for the trailer . At the counter told them what I needed, but I was confronted with a big complication. They told me I would have to show the bill of sale from my father, and also a card from Canada Customs showing I had brought the trailer into the country , before I could get a BC license plate. This presented a huge problem for me, and I didn’t know how to solve it.
Two years earlier when we had immigrated with all of our things, I hadn’t even thought about putting the trailer on the list of items we were bringing into the country; I had only listed the stuff we brought in the utility trailer, totally overlooking the trailer itself, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the needed Canada Customs card. I pleaded with the license branch bureaucrats, but they were unsympathetic and unbending.
What could I do? I needed a license for the trailer. It was a real dilemma, and I could see no way out.
The next day as we drove up to Prince George and I came up with an idea. I went to the License Branch there, and told them that I had made a utility trailer, and I needed to license it. No sweat, they quickly gave me the license without any trouble.
I am an honest person and I really hated lying, but sometimes you just have to.
You can see my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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