Brother Dave and I knew the bridge over Juanite Creek had collapsed. We would have to park our pickup truck there and carry our gear the last couple of miles, which was not something my brother wanted to do. So before we left Charlotte he built a bridge, loaded it on an orange, U-Haul straight-bed truck he had rented, and off we went.
We were headed for Snowbird, a remote area in Southwest North Carolina adjoining the 531,148-acre Nantahala National Forest. And when we got there, sure enough, the bridge over Juanite Creek was impassable unless you had a four-wheel drive. Or a bridge. We slid our bridge out of the truck and laid it across the gap –three bolted 2×8’s on one side, three bolted 2×8’s on the other.
Most people would not have attempted to drive a straight-bed truck across a creek on wobbly 2×8’s, but my brother is not most people. I held my breath, so to speak, and he did it. And then we put the bridge back in the truck, drove on up the mountain, parked the truck, and camped nearby.
A couple of days later, early in the morning, we had company — three hunters in a Jeep, pulling a trailer with a dog cage. They were able to cross the saggy bridge because they had four-wheel drive. You know they were wondering how we got across. Anyway, they parked a little ways from us, unloaded their dogs, loaded their rifles, and walked into the woods.
I don’t know where those fellows were from but I’ve always imagined –hoped– that one of them was a local and other two were from some big city up North.
I imagined the local boy telling them:
This is the way Snowbird looks today, from the top of a tower on our land. Forty years ago it was even more remote.
“You come down here and go hunting with me and I’ll take you to a place in the mountains no white man and few Indians have ever seen.”
They came.
He loaded up his dogs, told those fellas to get in, and drove his Jeep to Snowbird, across the broken bridge laying in the creek, to the top of the mountain. And there, waiting for them in the wilderness, was a big, orange, U-Haul truck.
The trailer we were pulling was grossly overloaded, swaying side to side down I-85 from Charlotte into South Carolina and then right on I-26 toward the mountains.
The constant tugging back and forth on the rear end of the Ford Bronco had given me a queasy feeling –that trailer was trying to pass us. At then, at the bottom of a long hill west of Spartanburg, it did. It jackknifed into the inside lane and banged into the side of the Brother Dave’s Bronco, next to where I was sitting. Through my window I saw the trailer skidding sideways down the interstate.
And then, just like that, it turned the Bronco around. The trailer was in front, pulling us. We were going backwards down I-26.
* * *
The cabin at Snowbird
The four of us had loaded the trailer with everything we needed to finish building a 512-square foot cabin at Snowbird, in the mountains of North Carolina. Not the foundation and floor, we had already built that, and not the porches either, we added them later. But we had everything else–studs, plywood, dry wall, windows, doors, shingles, nails — the whole 40 yards.
We had already run into one problem, shortly after midnight when we stopped for gas south of Charlotte and discovered one of the four trailer tires was flat. Another tire had nails in it but hadn’t gone flat yet and a third tire had dry rot.
We had limped back Charlotte at 45 mph, hoping we didn’t lose another tire and hoping a sleepy truck driver doing 70 didn’t run us over. When we got back to Charlotte we unloaded the cabin, waited for the tire store to open, bought new tires, reloaded, and headed for the mountain.
***
After jerking the Bronco around backwards the trailer quickly slowed, drifted off onto the shoulder of the interstate, and stopped. Lucky for us no one was hurt and damage to the Bronco and the trailer was minimal.
A South Carolina state trooper, who happened to be passing, stopped to find out why we were parked on the shoulder of I-26 headed the wrong way. He did not write us a ticket. Maybe the trooper was in a hurry, or maybe there’s no law against dumb.
Dave headed for Asheville to rent a straight bed truck –we needed something bigger and heavier than the Bronco– while we unloaded the trailer again. When my brother got back he discovered he couldn’t hook the trailer to the truck because the ball on the truck’s trailer hitch was the wrong size. Dave’s solution?
He chained the trailer to the truck.
But our troubles weren’t over. We were only a mile or so from Big Rock, which was as far up the Sassafras Ridge as we could go pulling a trailer, when Dave took a turn too wide at a creek crossing and dropped the right side trailer wheels off the road. For the third time in 30 hours we unloaded and reloaded the cabin.
* * *
A few days later Brother Pop and a buddy of his went up there and carried the cabin up the hill at Big Rock on their shoulders. When it was wet, that that hill was slick on slick, impossible to go and up and down in a two-wheel drive pickup.
When I talked to him after he got back to Alabama Pop told me that none of the building material we had left by the side of that logging road had been stolen, thank goodness, but that’s not what I told Dave.
When I call Dave I told him to brace himself: someone had stolen the trusses. Dave didn’t say a word, but I heard a loud noise I couldn’t identify — he had thrown the phone down, hard, hitting himself in the foot. I was almost afraid to tell him the good news: “Dave, it’s OK. April Fool!”
He was not amused.
Postscript:
That I-26 incident was not Dave’s last trailer rodeo.
Later on, getting ready for another trip to Snowbird, he pulled that same trailer to a service station to get the tires aired up. I have tell you: I was impressed. Dave is not real careful about that sort of thing. Maybe you can teach old dog. Or maybe not. On the way back to his box shop that trailer tried to pass us again.
I look out the window of Dave’s Bronco and there it was, beside us on a on a long straight section of Brevard Street in Charlotte, a two-lane street. Dave had not secured the trailer to the hitch and now it was driving itself.
The trailer pulled up almost even with us and then veered left into a gravel parking lot and smashed into a car. Again, no one was injured. The car was heavily damaged but the trailer wasn’t so Dave hooked it up, correctly this time, and we went to Snowbird.
