Flatland Holiday

Our first new car, the 1970 woody-wagon-green Ford Country Squire Wagon Ltd. with the 429 upgrade and “trailer towing package” arrived in late spring. Ultra-modern electric windows all around made me, to my mind, hugely superior to my friends…and all the other arm-twisting gauche motorists I could barely survey over the dash from the front passenger seat (I would be sick regularly if required to ride in the rear at length). My two elder sisters sitting long-blond-haired and blue eyed in the back might glare menacingly if I checked the rear mirror but they rarely punished me…physically. It might have helped. Who’s to say? Even the exercise might have helped.

But that June when my grade three school year had ended we immediately set forth on our “family adventure of a lifetime” (I’m sure someone called it that during the promotional stage), travelling from Vernon on a hot summer morning…those fascinating windows going up and down repeatedly until we were “spoken to”…heading for Lethbridge to collect our new Scamper travel-trailer in matching gold and green.

What a summer trip it would be! From Lethbridge we would cross the country, camping all the way, heading right for P.E.I. and the mandatory ruining of a “perfectly good pair of pants” in a soggy red playground, the return trip to be a wandering explorer’s path through the States and back up the west coast and to our Okanagan home. Eight weeks of “seeing our wonderful country” and…kaboom!

“Blow-out on the trailer! Damn @#^^%@^ ”…Scrreecchh!

“Donald! Your language! Try to stay relaxed, now… You can have it fixed and we’ll get going again right away.”

“Hasn’t been 50 bloody miles since we bought the bloody thing! GRUMBLE! Grumble! grumble”…slam!

“Shhh! Now, be quiet, dears! Your father is very upset and your laughing isn’t helping at all!” ZZZooooommmm! Ellen! Get out and help hold the trailer! It’s swaying terribly!”

“The wind from the bloody semis is going to knock us off the jack! Don’t send her out here!”

“Ellen, get out here or your father will be crushed!”

Dad continued to pick pebbles from the brake drum as semis thunder by, Ellen and Mom outside together bracing the trailer as Lona and I and Malpy (0.5 Maltese 0.5 Pomeranian) sat inside wide-eyed and worried…

Dad swapped the tire for the spare and we rolled carefully into the next nearest town for a fix. The “mechanic on duty” inflated the tire and “tanked it”, and we watched as not a single bubble rose to the surface (I’d been called to witness as my father figured to need moral support with Mom I think, but he’d actually mumbled about “learning something here”) The tire seemed to have no problems at all and held maximum rated pressure with ease! A mystery?!

Well, Dad had a fairly technical explanation for the lack of an explanation ready for the ‘girls’ on our return (as a managing mechanical engineer Dad could fabricate an explanation with ease!). We replaced the tire - to be sure to maintain a spare - and set off again hopefully...Perhaps another 50 miles…boy it was hot! No air conditioning (a mistake never repeated!)…windows going up and down and up and down again…territorial disputes in the back - there were always three of us there now and only two windows so true detent was impossible and …kaboom! Flat on the trailer! Rrrchhh!

Jack up trailer, remove pebbles from brake drum, mount spare, stow tire…tools…drive to next town…

“Tire’s been shredded, sir. You’re not supposed to drive on ‘em when they’re flat, ya know?”

What a look!…but what admirable restraint!

(and these were Dad’s more precipitous days…pushing Mom in her car down the highway - our front to her rear bumper - to get us all home earlier…using the .410 shotgun on squirrels in the house…that kind of thing)

And so…a new tire, holds air just fine on the old wheel, put ‘er on and off we go…!

Well, we didn’t go far, in fact fifty miles was about the longest trip we had could manage before a flat: at first only on the gravelly passenger side…then intermittently on the middle-of-the-road side where the semis were really scary but at least there was no gravel to get in the cursed brakes…then back and forth with no discernible pattern… nor an identifiable cause in sight! Eleven flat tires between Lethbridge and Thunder Bay, eleven times for Dad to endure mechanic’s pointed looks and shrugs as, time after time, each new tire…if not shredded by “his habit” of driving on them after they were flat…would hold air like a champ when re-inflated and placed in a water tank.

After a heated rolling series of greasy garage and pay-phone calls to Scamper Trailers in Lethbridge, Dad eventually extracted that news that the two-piece wheels on our trailer were undersized for the rated load (which we most indubitably would have been carrying, knowing my Mom, who has more spices in her 5th-wheel than most people could name or know); Our problem wheels “had been” or “were to be” recalled! Apparently, and the technical details were important, in a demonstration that, as usual, it wasn’t Dad’s fault, after about fifty miles of hot-tarmac prairie travel the tire would heat up and over-heat the wheel causing the welded joint to open and let the air out in a popping rush.
When the wheel and apparently offending tire (or a new one if Dad had “drove on it”) were removed and later re-inflated to be “tanked”, the wheel had cooled, shrunk and closed the crack and it all held air perfectly: not a single bubble ever rose.

Scamper did finally send us new wheels, which we received in Kakabeka Falls, I recall…after a few more pay-phone arguments about seven or so new tires and towing* and aggravation costs!

* we eventually ran out of spares, the next nearest town, by chance, lying 50+ miles away.

And so our trip eventually continued on brand new wheels…on into Quebec, the Maritimes, back though the States…and endless miles of hog farm air sheds at 35 Celcius where the windows went up and down again till tempers boiled…a quick trip into Mexico…thousands and thousands of further miles and not another single tire problem. The big Ford did overheat a little on some long hills (“Some bloody trailer towing package! Should have got the four-barrel!”) but we’d made it!

As we approached the Washington/B.C. border, cars started to honk at us and wave as they passed - seeing our B.C. plates, we assumed - and, just happy to be Canadians after a few weeks “down south”, homeward we drove! More wild and creative gestures (a passing motorist looking up at their own roof and appearing to frantically pull out their own hair, for example!) eventually got us stopped…to realize that the top had blown off our homemade roof-top cargo box and all our assorted treasures from the trip had been spilling out like from some ruptured piñata for the last twenty miles. My Dad’s new fly rod lay most recently fallen, driven over as we watched by the next passing truck & camper combination…who’d weaved with a careful wave through the chicane of eye-catching Mexican paper flowers yet failed to observe the rod where it lay…even with my father pointing, jumping and gesturing wildly! …yet unable to intervene…until it was all …over…ohhhh…

That was our “Trip Across Canada”, or being Farley Mowatt fans at our house… the story of …“The Trailer Who Wouldn’t Trail.” *

I think the little fire in the sleeping over-head was my fault (left a light on with blankets piled) so we’ll skip that mishap. Hey, I was eight! I remember sitting with my best friend Greg on our front door step that late August, me telling him that the trip must have cost us a million dollars! He laughed. My money skills are little improved, my accountant wife would say. But thirty years later, my son Duncan’s room is covered with my colourful collection of pennants from that and other family trips of my childhood in the 70’s. I was never much of a collector as a child (of anything other than bottle caps or aerodynamic rocks) and I am now glad my Mom so strongly “suggested” that I collect those pennants. The associated memories are all the brighter for their presence.

BTW, the kids and I had four flats and wrecked a new leaf spring on our boat trailer between Kitimat and Smithers as we were moving south from Kitimat to Oliver in late February of ’99. The mystery was solved as we finally reached warmer climes and water began to trickle, then ran in a continuous stream from the bung for about 100 km: I’d lowered the trailer tongue a few days before leaving and about a meter of snow had melted into the hull to freeze there. I spent a few hours under the trailer at a windy minus 15 to hammer the leaf-spring together with a big wrench…changed tires three times in the snow and blow…fortunately no great excuses were really required as the kids just sat happy and warm inside watching videos and nibbling travel goodies (times have changed).

Though it certainly wasn’t eleven flats and I’m yet to be truly tested, with no one out there on the ol’ Yellowhead but me I’m claiming I was the very model of verbal restraint! The few extra whacks to the spring could be delved forensically but since I seem to have given* that boat and trailer away who’s to ever know?

* it appears to have been given away, me having received no part of the $475 an unnamed good friend has promised to pay…Jimmy! Jimmy, me lad…it’s been a year!