The Grasshopper Trap (4 page)

Read The Grasshopper Trap Online

Authors: Patrick F. McManus

S
hortly after man invented the wheel, he invented the trailer. Ever since then, he has been trying to figure out how to hook up the lights.
I know a man who claims the lights on his boat trailer once worked twice consecutively. Anyone with one or more trailers will instantly recognize this as an outrageous claim, but the man is a member of the clergy, and for that reason alone I believe him. On the other hand, he's also a fisherman, so he may be exaggerating a bit. Possibly his trailer lights worked only once consecutively.
Over the course of his life, any sportsman worthy of the name will own a dozen or so trailers of various kinds—utility trailers, tent trailers, boat trailers, house trailers, horse trailers, trail-bike trailers, and snowmobile trailers, to name but a few. That is the reason researchers estimate that one-eighth of a sportsman's life is spent trying to hook up trailer lights.
The trailer comes equipped with a rectangular light,
whereas the plug on your car is round, or perhaps vice versa. In any case, you can be sure the two plugs won't match. Therefore you must replace the original trailer plug with one that matches the car's, a task that seems simple enough. You reason that since only four wires lead from the trailer plug and four wires lead from the car plug, there exist only a limited number of wrong combinations. True. The limited number is 4,389.
Once you have wired the new plug to your trailer and plugged it into the car plug, the standard procedure for checking the trailer lights consists of having your wife, Alice, if that is her name, stand behind the trailer and call out reports on what is happening to its lights. The dialogue goes something like this:
“I've got the left turn signal on, Alice. Is the trailer's left-turn signal blinking?”
“No.”
“What's blinking?”
“Nothing's blinking. But the other light got real bright. Then it went out.”
You switch a few wires around.
“I've got the brake lights on, Alice. Did the trailer brake light go on?”
“No. But the left-turn signal is blinking. Is that good?”
The check-out procedure continues throughout the day until it is too dark to work, Alice goes in the house and phones a divorce lawyer, or you are dragged off to an asylum. The divorce rate among trailer owners, by the way, is nine times that of the rest of the population.
Trailer lights have little insidious tricks they like to pull on you. For example, the left-turn signal will start blinking of its own accord. The drivers of the cars following you
think you are about to turn left, of course, and thus are hesitant to pass. Noticing the line of cars stretching out behind, you drive slower to make it easier for them to pass. The other drivers think you are slowing down to make your turn, and they are now even more hesitant to pass. Eventually, some of them become irate. The others merely hope you will pull into the next rest stop so they will have the opportunity to beat you with tire irons. While hauling a trailer, I avoid rest stops.
Another little trick of trailer lights is to black out entirely, particularly on dark and stormy nights. The emergency procedure requires Alice to ride in the trailer and shine a flashlight to the rear. Since it is illegal for passengers to ride in trailers, however, she must be fitted out with a disguise. Wrapping her with a tent works fine, although there may be some difficulty explaining to a highway patrolman why a tent should be holding a flashlight and cursing.
Trailer hitches can be a problem, although they are nothing as compared with trailer lights. The hitch simply clamps down over a steel ball on the car. The steel balls come in three sizes—too large, too small, and just right. The just-right ball is the one you lent your neighbor to haul a trailer to Nova Scotia, because he had one of the other two sizes.
Once you have placed the hitch on the ball, you pull back a lever that activates a locking mechanism which always jams for a reason no one has ever been able to understand. Here's a tip. To clamp the hitch jaw against the ball, insert two fingers up between the jaw and the ball and then press down hard on the lever. The two fingers volunteered for this operation should be minor ones for which you have no immediate plans, or better yet, those of the neighbor who borrowed your just-right ball.
Trailers seldom come equipped with spare tires. Naturally, you assume you can purchase a spare. The trailer's wheels, you then discover, are of a size and style manufactured only by a small firm in Lower Tibia before the revolution. This creates the suspense of hauling a trailer without a spare tire for it. Getting a flat on a trailer without a spare rates as one of life's great predicaments. Your options are few. You can leave the trailer parked by the road to be plundered while you haul the flat to the nearest town to be repaired, or you can try to persuade Alice to run along holding up one side of the trailer, provided it is of the lightweight variety. If the latter course is chosen, I suggest you keep your speed at no more than five miles per hour and even slower on upgrades. Sure, driving that slow can be boring, but Alice deserves some consideration for doing her part.
Speaking of boredom, here's something guaranteed to relieve it. Going down a steep grade, you glance out the side window and notice some idiot trying to pass you on the wrong side. Then you see it is your trailer! Oh, it is a thrilling sight, I can tell you, especially if the trailer is carrying an eighteen-foot boat. Some people are thrilled right out of trailering. Others vow never again to try to get by with the too-small ball when only the just-right ball will do.
Safety chains, by the way, are required on all trailers. Their purpose, should the hitch come loose, is to rip the rear end off the towing vehicle, thus further punishing you for using the wrong ball.
I bought my first trailer a few years after getting my family started. Like any outdoorsman, I needed to haul stuff but couldn't afford a pickup truck in addition to the family sedan. The trailer served as a compromise.
A World War II surplus trailer, it was designed to be hauled behind a jeep. After much dickering, the proprietor of Grogan's War Surplus, Henry P. Grogan himself, finally threw up his hands in exasperation and sold me the trailer for practically nothing. It was a steal, the only one I ever got from the shrewd, tightfisted Grogan.
As a kid, I had distinguished myself as the most loyal and frequent customer of Grogan's War Surplus, which looked as if some minor battle of the war had been fought right in the store. It was a delirium of fantastic war stuff—helmets, fatigues, web belts, canteens, sleeping bags, guns, bayonets, machetes, rubber rafts, jungle hammocks, jerry cans, landing nets, and the like. During the years of my youth, I bought several of each item, with the exceptions of machine guns and tanks. Not that Grogan wouldn't have sold me machine guns and tanks if I'd had the cash. I was, after all, his favorite customer.
The war was long over now, and Grogan no longer prospered as he once had. The day I walked in looking for a trailer, I noticed him giving a customer the hard sell on a piece of merchandise.
“But what do I need a flamethrower for?” the man said.
“Why, it's good for all sorts of things,” Grogan said. “Ridding your lawn of weeds, for example. You just go
whoosh
with this thing and the weeds is gone. Never come back, neither. You can burn out stumps with it, too, and let's see, ah, it works good for scaring off prowlers. Yessir, works real fine for that.”
Grogan looked disappointed when the man walked out shaking his head, but he brightened at the sight of me.
“My gosh, boy, where you been? Haven't seen you in a year.”
“Hi, Mr. Grogan. How's business?”
“Bad. But I expect it to pick up right away. What can I do for you, boy? Got anything you need burnt up real quick?”
“No, but I saw a rotten, rusty, old beaten-up trailer grown over with weeds in your back lot. How much do you want for it?”
Grogan scratched his chin stubble. “You must be referring to my little Sadie. That's what I calls the trailer, little Sadie. Got a sentimental attachment to her. How much was you figgerin' on spendin'? Not that I would let her go for any price.”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“Twenty-five dollars! It cost me more than that to have a coat of rust put on her to protect the metal! No way you're gonna get that trailer for twenty-five dollars!”
Four years of college education gave me an edge over Grogan that I had lacked in the old days, when he constantly took advantage of me. At the end of some heated dickering, he finally gave in and sold me the trailer for not one penny over twenty-five dollars. It was a sweet deal, if I do say so myself.
When I got home, my wife could scarcely believe I had dickered Grogan out of the trailer for a mere twenty-five dollars.
“What's all that stuff in it?” she asked.
“Just a few helmets, bayonets, jerry cans, web belts, a landing net, and a few other things I bought from Grogan that might come in handy sometime. Now you take this contraption here—if we ever have a lawn and it needs some weeds burned out of it, this baby will do it!”
The first thing anyone does with a new used trailer is to paint it. Typically, the previous owner will have slapped a
coat of leftover house paint on it, brown or white being the favorite colors. I would not degrade a trailer with such a paint job. I painted mine green and purple, but mostly purple, since the can of green paint was almost empty. It was not unattractive. The one green fender made it stand out from all the other purple trailers around.
“Let's go camping,” I told my wife. “You go toss our camping gear in the trailer and I'll wire up some lights for it.”
That night as I lay on my back under a sky ablaze with stars, I said to Bun, “Okay, now I'm touching the little green wire to the big red and white one. Which light goes on?”
Scarcely a week later, I had the lights working and we took off on the camping trip. As we wound up a narrow, winding road in the mountains, we entertained the kids by playing Twenty Questions.
“Is it a bicycle?” Kelly asked.
“Nope, not a bicycle,” I said, chuckling.
“A wagon!” cried Shannon.
“Nope, not a wagon.”
“A train!” yelled Peggy.
“Nope, not a train.”
“A logging truck!” shouted my wife.
“Nope, not a …
LOGGING TRUCK
!”
By the time I had ground our old sedan into reverse, I could count the smashed bugs on the grill of the logging truck, a fate we seemed about to share. Expertly, I backed the trailer three hundred yards down the road to a wide spot, into which I swerved with several nifty little whips of the steering wheel.
“Good heavens, that was close,” Bun said as the logging truck thundered past. “And to think, you've never even backed up a trailer before. Wow! That was wonderful!”
“Cut the sarcasm,” I said, “and let's see if we can get the trailer out of the trunk.”
I kept that first trailer for nearly thirty years, as kind of a memento of my introduction to trailering. It served me well, hauling my firewood, camping gear, rowboats, rubber rafts, and the fruit of my big-game hunting (usually apples, but occasionally pears, given me by sympathetic farmers). Last summer I finally offered to sell the trailer to a young man who needed it more than I. And for twenty-five dollars, too.
He tried to hide his appreciation. “Twenty-five bucks for a purple trailer with a green fender? You must be crazy, man. You should pay me twenty-five dollars just to be seen with it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it's still in great shape. Of course, the lights need a little work. Ever hook up trailer lights? Oh. Well, don't worry, you'll get the hang of it in no time.”
“Gosh, I don't know,” he said. “Maybe it is worth twenty-five dollars.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “And don't forget all the extra stuff I'm throwing in with it. See this thing here? You got any weeds in your lawn, pal, this baby will get rid of them fast.”

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