What do bear crawlers and Metallica have in common?

Trailering, hauling. . . Whatever you want to call it, is a skill. I don’t care what anyone says, when you’re pulling a trailer of any kind behind your vehicle, it does tend to spike anxiety levels. When it’s a trailer full of hay, I always worry about a rogue bale falling off, hitting the road, exploding in a display of my rural incompetence and causing mayhem – or at least consternation – for the driver behind me.

It’s a lot worse when the trailer has some of my beauties in it. Alpacas, horses or sheep, driving with a trailer loaded with heartbeats makes for a cab full of “yikes!” Every turn, every brake, every acceleration is as wide and as gentle as I can make it. When some highway numbnuts screams up on my backdoor, it brings out my feral “I grew up driving the 401, you buck eejit!” and suddenly all the iron-willed ancestors that survived plagues and famine long enough to pass on their stubborn DNA are crowded onto the driver’s seat with me.

What I’m saying is, when you’re moving animals, you may find the veneer of civility is suddenly stripped right away and you discover – certainly any human passengers will discover – an unfamiliar person in control.

The discombobulating stress is compounded if you as the driver discover that your driving skillset isn’t quite what you might have hoped. I’m speaking specifically about backing a trailer.

When I first got horses – they preceded the sheep by a good few years – I determined that learning to load, haul and unload horses was a necessary skill. In my naivety, I sort of thought horses, when everything was reasonably explained to them by their clearly doting human, would cooperate and pop onto the trailer, mind their business and then pop off again. How wrong I was. Truly, my ivory-skulled inability to grasp the depths of “Nuh-uh” when it comes to horses is kind of breathtaking. But getting horses off and on – riverdancing all the while – is nothing, nothing I tell you!! compared to the absolute cluster backing a trailer can cause.

Now before we get into how I cracked this particular chestnut, let me just start by saying that my husband Bob has some kind of weird innate ability to back a trailer. I think it might have to do with driving his grandpa’s car down the laneway to the cottage when he was barely tall enough to peep in the gap between the steering wheel and the dash. Careening down the laneway, Bob got a head start in the automotive skills department that would grow to include backing the boat down the ramp and into the murky sludge of Puslinch Lake.

I was not so blessed. My childhood home featured a large looping driveway which made backing up unnecessary. So we didn’t. As a teenager relocated to the industrial rust-belt hellscape of Cambridge, trailers weren’t really part of my world and backing up was just routine – although if there’s anyone from Preston High School who wondered how in the hell their bumper got dinged so badly in the school parking lot one autumn day back in 1989, yeah, that was me. Sorry.

Fast forward to 2019, I’m now the proud driver of a Dodge Ram with a two-horse, slant-load trailer attached. I was delighted but I also knew that while my darling husband might be gifted, I resolutely was not and it was time to tackle the challenge.

Like every modern person, the first thing I did was watch YouTube videos. How hard could it be? As it happens, YouTube is not great when it comes to actually doing the thing. I reached out to a friend, a heavy equipment operator, but it turns out that people who do this kind of thing for a living are not great at breaking it down for someone who’s never done it before. Jack watched my progress with growing alarm before finally whipping open the driver side door, barking “OUT!” with buggy eyes and taking over, parking the trailer in front of the garage and telling me as kindly as he could “Just leave it there for now, Okay?” Needless to say I slinked back to the house covered in shame and embarrassment.

Screwing up my courage, I tried the trick some people swear by, holding the steering wheel at the bottom and watching which way my thumbs were pointing but the more I thought about my thumbs, the less I watched the trailer. Bob bravely watched me practicing from the verandah, the end of his cigarette glowing like a tiny volcano, smoke puffing like a steam engine, knuckles wrapped and white around the railing.

My confidence was taking a heckuva hit.

Feeling very small one day, probably 15 minutes into an inching back-and-forth attempt to park, trying so hard not to feel like a total raging fool and failing miserably at both, my youngest son stood, fists on his hips and watched. This didn’t improve matters for me – my youngest son is one of those humans who seemed to come out of the womb with a fundamental understanding of mechanics. From his tiniest, Malcolm has been interested in the way things worked — not always something that thrilled me, it must be said. The stories of his escapades are legend – the interrupted toothpaste tube autopsy; the mysterious trail of outlet covers, screws neatly set beside them on the floor like some sort of electrical crime scene; the day his 5 year-old self disappeared with a hammer drill, a drill bit and a 2ft length of 2×4 (Dale, we are going to talk about that one of these days. I felt the grey hairs pop out of my scalp on that one); the bizarre sitar-like sounds coming from his father’s beloved baby grand piano and the discovery of Malcolm’s feet waving out of the top while he plunked on the strings with spoons pilfered from the kitchen – Malcolm has been fascinated by how things worked since he could tell the difference between a Robertson and a Phillips. And now, all these years later and newly returned from Churchill, Manitoba, there he stood watching his mother struggle.

“Mama,” he said, strolling up to the window, “Mama, steer to your mirrors.” And then, in what I have always cherished as a display of total confidence, he walked back into the house and left me to get on with it. He didn’t offer to do it for me, he didn’t climb in beside me, he simply gave me a principle I could understand and then let me take it from there.

And do you know what? It worked. It worked better than any YouTube video. I was able to park the trailer that day and have done every day since. I don’t look out my rear window, I exclusively use my side mirrors (I am told this is the mark of a true trailer backer-upper aficionado) and I can navigate that sucker through anything, around anything and between anything. Anywhere a trailer will fit, I can put it.

Backing up a trailer is one of those skills that, when you’ve mastered it, can make you feel like a sultan, entirely out of proportion to the actual achievement. I’ve backed trailers for other people when asked, sent the eyebrows of neighbours skyward in surprised approval – this is a very gratifying sensation – and tucked the trailer away at the end of a long day, disconnected it from the truck and let my hand rest on the hitch for just a second, the tiniest little glimmer of a second, to be proud of what I can do.

“Steer to your mirrors, Mama.” Every time I back a trailer, I think of Malcolm, the only person who was able to teach me how to do this. For this skill, for the sense of confidence and competence, for the way he made it immediately understandable, I am deeply grateful. That’s how I learned how to back a trailer.

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This is a Living post, a post to share my thought processes, where my priorities lie and the philosophy that underpins our activities here at the homestead. It is not a how-to, “expert advice” or meant to reflect a wider experience than just my own, on my farm, here with my sheep.