The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

Two lines

Righting a leaning trailer with live weight inside is mostly about the second line. Anybody can pull a trailer up.

The trick is not letting it come up too fast and slam down on its wheels when it goes over center.

When a leaning load comes past balance, it wants to fall the rest of the way. If it falls, everything inside it falls too.

Four horses get thrown against the far wall at once, and you have done in one second what the ditch couldn’t do in an hour.

So you run two lines. One to pull, one to hold. The pulling line lifts the low side.

The holding line, set on the high side, keeps tension the whole time, so the trailer can only come up as fast as you let it.

I wrapped round slings around the main frame rails on the low side, under the floor, through the openings in the crossmembers.

Never around the skin, never around a fender. The skin of a trailer will peel like a sardine can, and the fenders tear off.

I ran the pulling line from my main winch down to a snatch block and then to the slings on the low side.

That gave me the angle I needed to lift instead of drag. Then I ran the second winch to a chain bridle on the high side frame.

Earl came over while I was setting the block. He moved slow on his bad knees, but he moved. “You want me back with them?” he asked.

“I want you on the slats the whole time,” I said. “Talk to them like you talk to yours. If somebody goes down, holler, and I’ll stop.”

He went back to the trailer and put his bare hand on the aluminum again, next to the palomino’s window.

“Alright, boys,” he said, low. “Alright, sister. Nobody’s in a hurry here. Lord, give us a slow morning.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better prayer.

An inch at a time

I climbed back up to the shoulder, pulled my black knit cap down over my ears, zipped my orange high-vis coat to my chin over my coveralls, and put my gloved hand on the main winch lever.

Tiffany stood on the shoulder about twenty feet behind me with her arms crossed again. I don’t think she knew she’d done it. It was just how she held herself together.

I took the slack out of both lines first. You don’t pull until there’s no slack, because slack in a cable is a jerk waiting to happen.

The wire came up out of the snow and went straight and tight, and then it began to hum in the cold.

My dad used to say a cable sings to you if you listen.

Too high and too tight and you’re about to lose something. Low and steady and you’re doing fine. That morning it sang low.

I fed the main winch an inch. Then I stopped, and I held, and I listened.

The trailer groaned, the long metal groan of a frame taking load in a new direction. Inside, something kicked the wall once, hard.

Then it went still. Earl’s voice came up from the ditch, steady as a clock. “Easy, easy. That’s it. That’s nothing. You’re fine.”

I fed it another inch. Stopped. Let the holding line take up what it needed. Listened.

It went on like that. An inch, wait, an inch, wait. People who have never done it think recovery is power.

It isn’t. It’s patience with a lever in your hand, and it’s knowing the sound of everything before it breaks.

At some point I heard Tiffany take a step closer on the ice behind me. I didn’t turn around. I said, “Stay back of the line,” and she said, “I am,” and she was.