Some wise guy once said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Whether it was Aesop or Pluto or some other philosopher’s proverb to start with, it quickly became mine when triangulating a plan to get my busted canoe trailer home. It lost a wheel going downhill on the dirt road between our family’s campground and the pickup point eight miles downstream, and after one failed attempt to retrieve it, we had to get creative. That’s where the t-shirt and the zip ties came in.
To set the scene, it was a busy day. Busier than any other day so far this summer. We were just a few hours away from our annual fireworks show when I saw my buddy Levi, who was shuttling the floaters back to our place, pull in with six people and no trailer. It was obvious something went wrong, and when he explained what happened, it confirmed my worst fear. It was done for.
Levi and I are both pretty stout fellers so we tried simply lifting the frame onto our 16-foot utility trailer. We couldn’t get it to fit after roughly an hour of trying, so we knew we had to craft a different approach. It would have to wait until morning as it was time to get back and shoot off some artillery shells, lest the crowd of antsy onlookers be disappointed.
I called on another friend of mine, Todd, to run up the road with me at 6:45 a.m. the next day. He’s an ex-Army mechanic who’s built all kinds of cool stuff, including a sick Willys wagon that rides on a K5 Blazer frame. He was the obvious choice for getting the canoe trailer back home as we knew it would require some… ingenuity.
We just had to keep the wheel on the trailer somehow. The bearing was toast, so there was nothing for it to roll on. Logic led us to believe that so long as we could pack some sort of material in there while attaching something to the end of the axle shaft so the wheel wouldn’t fall off, we’d be OK. I grabbed an old Missouri Stream Team shirt off the tractor, Todd snatched some zip ties from his camper, and we rode at dawn.
I had an electric Polaris Ranger XP Kinetic at my disposal, so that’s what we drove. A UTV might seem less than ideal at first, but the open-air cab proved great for visibility. Plus, it was a lot easier to control the pace in it than it would have been in my tuned 7.3-liter Power Stroke, which doesn’t do low speeds very smoothly unless you’re idling. We had three miles to go through hollers and hills, which felt like 100 by the time our journey was over.
We promptly began cutting the t-shirt into strips with a razor blade, stuffing them inside the wheel center and around the axle shaft. I have no idea when it was greased last, so you can bet that’s why the bearing failed. Anywho, once we felt it was adequately packed, Todd turned to the zip ties. We had quite a few, but he was smart and decided not to use them all just yet. We were prepared to apply this Band-Aid more than once on the way back.
It was Todd’s idea to loop one zip tie through another rather than simply running the end of one through its own fastener. That proved to be smart as we started slow but steady, expecting the wheel to fall off in the first 100 feet when it somehow didn’t. Speeds were slow—we maxed out at 4 mph—but we weren’t in a hurry. Our makeshift bearing assembly was working!
I focused on modulating the throttle as best I could up and down the Ozark hills, as well as around a couple of switchbacks. Each time we’d turn to the left, the broken wheel would lean all the way outside the fender well. “Take it easy, easy, EASY!” Todd relayed with equal parts urgency and tenderness while looking backward. We were really trying to coax this thing back home.
There was plenty of time to talk as it took a full hour to make the drive, even though it was a leisurely 10-minute trip on the way to the trailer that morning. Todd’s been camping at our family’s place for years and years, and we see each other every weekend, but the best part of all this was just catching up. Making memories, so they say. And it was only made better by the scenery as we drove the same old dirt road we’ve taken 100 times at a slower pace than usual. We saw deer, squirrels, cardinals, and all sorts of nature highlights you might miss on a normal day. The sun was already up, but the morning fog lifted off the hayfields right in front of us. Just good stuff, man.
Amazingly, we never had to redo the “repair” as the wheel stayed put the entire way. Sure, a few of the zip ties came off somewhere on the road, but that didn’t matter. The trailer was home and we made it back before the heat of the Ozark summer really bore down on us. We chalked it up in the win column, and you can bet I sent pictures to my buddies.
We made it, and as you just found out, we lived to tell the tale. Thank you, Lord.
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