The Trailer With One Wheel

             Finally, I will explain the photo that was on Monday’s blog.  It is the last of my utility trailer stories, and it occurred in 1978, just a week before I took the cedar mill job.

            Purden Lake was a long way to travel for firewood, 152 km ( 94 miles), but it would also be a visit with Ebba and Severn, our neighbor Kjell’s parents, whose company we always enjoyed, plus they had offered us some birch to cut up as firewood, and I was always eager to get birch firewood.  I hooked up our utility trailer to the Scout, and we drove through a snowstorm to get to Purden Lake.

    After doing some visiting, sawing up, and loading the firewood, we were ready to haul the load back home to McBride, but Severn and Ebba insisted that we stay for supper, so we didn’t get off until 5:30 which meant driving in the dark.  All went well until we pulled onto our road in McBride.   Just a few miles from our house, I heard a noise and felt a jerk in the Scout which slowed us down, then I watched in dismay as one of the wheels from the utility trailer rolled past us, and come to rest in the ditch.

    I slammed on the breaks, stopped the car, got out and saw that the driver’s side trailer axil was wheel-less and resting on the road surface.  Not having ever experiencing such a thing, I retrieved the runaway wheel and discovered that its lug bolt holes were damaged beyond use, so I would have to figure out some other means of getting the trailer home.  Luckily, I was able to unhook the trailer from the car which allowed us to drive home, leaving the trailer where it was.

    We endured a heavy rain overnight and into the next day, but it didn’t stop me from having to deal with my abandoned utility trailer which I had left on the side of the road.  First I emptied all of the birch from the trailer and hauled it back to our house in the Scout. 

           Fortunately, I came up with a novel idea for getting the trailer back to our house.

           I positioned a long thick pole under the trailer axle where the wheel had come off, then pried up the end of the pole and lashed it to the corner of the trailer.   The bottom of the pole rested on the road, thus supporting the trailer on the wheel-less side.

           So with the trailer supported by the remaining wheel on one side and by the travois-like support on the other, I pulled/dragged the trailer back to our place.  It’s a good thing I didn’t have to go any further because the road-end of the pole began to quickly wear down as it scraped along the gravel road.   Fortunately, enough of the pole remained to get me to all the way to my driveway.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca