The Best Backer Upper in South Dakota

That is the part everybody is scared of, even the big men in my class. It is the backing, with the whole rig, cones on each side and no room for anything but getting it right.

South Dakota uses the newer test now. First a forward stop, pulling up as close to a line as you can without crossing it. Then straight line backing, then one more backing exercise the examiner picks.

You get a limited number of pull-ups and a limited number of times to get out and look. Every cone you touch costs you.

I made the forward stop with a foot to spare. Then the straight line: back the whole rig down a lane of cones without touching either side. A trailer that long wanders if you so much as breathe on the wheel.

I backed it slow. I backed it so slow that a man could have walked beside it reading a newspaper. I kept my eyes on both mirrors and made the smallest corrections of my life.

It went straight. It went right down the middle.

Then Mr. Hagen told me his pick: the offset, backing out of one lane and into the lane beside it. That one had cost me cones in practice more than any other.

I set up for it. I took a breath. And then, before I started back, I leaned out the driver’s window of that red tractor and looked back over my shoulder.

My instructor used to say the mirrors tell you where the trailer is, and your eyes tell you where it is going. So I leaned out into that cold gray air with my braid down my black vest, and I looked back.

The long silver trailer started to swing. I eased it. I let it come around. And it crept back between the orange cones, the way water finds the low spot.

And through the glass, across that whole wide lot, I heard them.

I did not think I could hear them. Mrs. Ostby had said the cab would drown everything out. They must have been very, very loud.

Three kids with their paper cups of cocoa pressed up against that big window, cheering like it was the state tournament and their mama had just hit the free throw at the buzzer.

Cal had both arms up. Mira was jumping. Lula was awake now, finally, and she was banging her cocoa cup on the glass. And Mrs. Ostby and Tessa stood right behind them, not stopping them one bit.

I didn’t touch one cone.

I took one pull-up at the very end, which was allowed. I got it in and set the brake. All three of them were still pressed against the window, and Mira had her hand flat on the glass.

Mr. Hagen walked over and looked at where I’d stopped. Then he walked to the back and looked again. Then he wrote.

“Road test,” he said.

Then the road test, with Mr. Hagen in the passenger seat watching my speed, my mirrors, my lane and my following distance.

Out the gate, onto the county road, up onto the highway for a stretch, then down a two-lane past a farm with forty head of black cattle bunched against a windbreak.

At the railroad crossing I slowed, rolled the window down and looked both ways twice. They want to see you look, every time.