Karma Counters Darwinism or How I Hauled a Dead Lincoln Home and Lived to Tell the Tale - February 2005
by Mark Kuyrkendall
During an 1831 voyage of the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin espoused his now famous theory of "survival of the fittest". Without going into book report detail here, the theory was that sooner or later, the lame and the stupid in a herd will make it to the edge of said herd and be culled by predators or circumstances. I believe strongly in Darwin’s theory.
Sometime around 500BC, Buddha laid the foundation of the Buddhist faith. One of the important tenants of that faith is "karma", that all phenomena are linked together in a universal chain of cause and effect. If one were to look at karma in an easily understood modern metaphor, it is like a bank account. Positive karma (all the good deeds that you do) are the deposits. Negative karma (doing grossly stupid things, fibbing, road rage, putting a small-block Chevy in a Duesenberg, etc.) are the withdrawals. Although I am not a staunch Buddhist, I embrace a karmic view of my interaction with the world and have been well served by that interpretation.
This, however, is not a scientific nor philosophical treatise. The previous paragraphs are intended simply to illustrate part of my … uh … circumstance at the edge of our herd while retrieving the 1966 Lincoln sedan mentioned in a newsletter story a few months back about cyber-parting a car on eBay.
I can say with no pride, but much truth that I have limited experience with trailering anything much bigger than a motorcycle trailer. So towing bigger is just bigger, right? One of the OTHER fatal flaws in my equation is that all my trailering experience has been positive. Comfortable, but makes for an ugly, pointy bell curve. It wasn’t until much too late that I realized that my bell curve was about to be flattened out a bit.
Lincoln Retrieval: The Parts Car
All ready the proud owner of a pretty nice 66 Lincoln Convert, my daily Ebay search usually starts with Lincolns in general and 66's specifically. It was during this daily perusal that I first saw the Lincoln parts car in question. The car looked in pretty sad shape from the picture, but seemed to have some parts of interest. I didn’t really need anything for my 66, but it’s always nicer to have spare parts for a classic car than it is to need them. Upon further considerations, though, I identified this poor old derelict as a possible candidate for a cyber-parting scheme I had been hatching (see related story in the December 2003 Fender Talk).
So it was that after the auction had ended unsuccessfully for the seller, I continued to stay in contact and considered the car’s purchase outright.
Finding a note in my e-mail that the owner would part with the car for the princely sum of $375 prompted me to travel the few hours north to Dallas and have a first hand look at this ghastly Curb Creature.
I followed the owner’s excellent directions directly to the car and began the brutally honest (yeah, right) evaluation of it. Scott, the owner, was very helpful, honest and forthright about the car. Hell, let’s cut to the chase: he wanted it out from in front of his house. I felt, after looking the car over, that I could make it worth my while to part it profitably. The deal was struck for cash. $400 for the car and the coveted NOS 1966 Texas license plates and it had to be gone before Scott’s mother-in-law arrived for a visit on May 10. I assured him that it would be. Happiness reigned.
In what would become the first of many positively Karmic incidents over the course of the next couple days, I was shocked to find that the local U-haul agent just happened to have one of the very rare large auto transport trailers available for use the following weekend for $60 a day. Seeing as how they weren’t open on Sunday, I essentially got it for 2 days for the price of one. It just had to be on the lot when they came in Monday morning to get the rate. No problem, I said.
Picked the trailer up just before noon on Saturday using my sister’s new $35,000 2003 Ford F-150 and headed up I-35 the 4 hours north to Dallas under stormy looking, uncertain skies. Just south of Austin, I ran into Texas sheet rain that lasted all the way through Austin. Austin’s I-35 traffic is bad enough on the best day, but to do it in a blinding downpour pulling a trailer, even empty, was almost more than my limited trailer pulling experience could handle. It was good practice, I thought, if I run into rain on the way back. Ever the optimist. But I endured and was very happy to see sunny skies just on the north side of Austin. The rest of the trip to Dallas was dry and uneventful.
I had reservations starting out about hauling a car this big under any circumstances. I wasn’t real sure if the F-150 would haul something this heavy despite having the heavy duty-towing package. U-haul said it would and they, I assumed, would know. (I still ponyed up the $4.75 for the full coverage insurance.) Add to this a trailer max load of 3900 pounds and I started being very concerned about safety, considering a 66 Lincoln sedan weighs in around 4975 pounds dry and is 17 feet long.
Thank goodness it wasn’t one of the 5800-pound convertibles. Hauling it on this rig would be a challenge at best and a horribly public way to die at worst.
Arriving at the car’s resting place in central Dallas, I magically matched the angle of the trailer to the parking angle of the Lincoln. I’ll never know how it happened, but it was a virtually perfect angle on the first try. I had really anguished over getting the angle right as the car was sitting at an odd angle on the wrong side of a very busy street. Apparently I had made another automatic withdrawal from my Karmic account. Now all I had to do was get this monster on the trailer. The owner had told me that he wasn’t going to be around when I picked it up, so I was completely on my own to try to get it on the trailer.
Basking in the intoxicating joy of getting the ramp angle right, I pushed the car to the edge of the ramps in preparation for the Great Winching. U-Haul, in its obvious wisdom, doesn’t provide a winch on these trailers. And damn few places to hook one if it’s needed. I chocked the back tires and went to the front of the trailer to hook up my trusty fence puller that I use for everything from pulling engines to winching old dead cars around. Can’t say I’ve ever pulled a fence with it, though. Found a place to hook it and extended it to it’s full length, well short of what was needed. Still feeling invincible from getting the trailer angle right, I hooked 3 motorcycle tie downs ("we don’t need no stinking rope!") end to end with the final hook placed neatly under the front bumper of the car and started winching in earnest. The Lincoln obediently made its way up the ramps. "This is going to work!!" I thought, "I AM A GOD!" I stepped back from the winch to go replace my chock (singular) behind the rear wheels. That’s when I heard a pop and felt the wind whistle past my head. Wind made by 2.5 motorcycle tie downs traveling at just under the speed of light. I watched the Lincoln roll over my wheel chock and continue the 24 feet back to the exact place it started from. I heard the sound of the Karmic ATM printing another receipt. The Lincoln seemed to smile, the remnant of the red tie hanging down making a surreal tongue. Time to start over.
Another spot further back on the trailer frame gave me a good solid point to mount the puller. I doubled up the tie downs, got another wheel chock, pushed the Lincoln back into position at the start of the ramps and began winching again. Distant thunder announced the impending arrival of the serious black rain clouds I had seen well west of Dallas. The next 45 minutes were devoted to very carefully winching and chocking the car inch by inch up the ramps. I could have cut the time by half if I had someone to simply reset the chocks, but I had no one. Well, that’s not entirely true. At one point early on in the second try I looked around the neighborhood and realized that there were close to 60 people standing around watching me in yards and driveways up and down the street. I gave at least 12 of them whiplash when I tried to make eye contact and maybe get a little help. Not even a glimmer of hope. Bastards!
The Lincoln finally rolled neatly in place with not more than 6 inches to spare from the center of the back tire patch to the end of the trailer bed. But it was enough. I felt the first sprinkles of rain just as I was putting the last hold down chain on the frame of the Lincoln. Threw everything in the truck, walked around the trailer one last time to check everything out, presented the remaining onlookers with an impressive collection of classic Italian hand gestures, mounted up and pulled out.
A few blocks away, I filled up the truck and made a last check of the rig as I answered questions from some one-armed street person who was looking at the car like it was a new suburban duplex. It had been a supreme hassle getting the whole towing rig in the tight urban gas station, but I figured that it would be worth it not to have to stop on the way back to Canyon Lake. Minutes later I was on I-35 headed south. I was parked in traffic, but at least I was headed south. The rig hadn’t gotten up to speed yet, only crept along at about 35 mph so far and it seemed to be pretty stable but the rain had made things very slick. I was already in full white knuckle mode when I heard a thump from what seemed like the rear of the truck and looked up to see a guy getting out of the Mercedes that he had just customized all over the rear end of a Honda to the right front of me. I dismissed the sound/action discrepancy as the traffic started moving again.
The faster the speed, the more unstable the trailer got. As I said before, I don’t have a lot of trailering experience, so decided to make this a learning experience. I had felt from the start that the receiver I had used for the hitch was too long and too low for this application. I also felt that I must have way too much weight on the trailer tongue but there just was nothing I could do about it. It was back to raining sheets and my singular focus was getting south. Turns out 57 mph was it for a top speed in perfect conditions. These factors were on my mind the first time I stopped the trailer’s pendulum motion from jack knifing the whole mess. At 50 mph. So this is what the edge of the herd looked like. It was going to be a long trip home.
For the next 5 hours and 230 miles, I was simply terrified. Every inch was a major accident waiting to happen. Every time I had to go down a hill, hit an irregular surface, have a semi pass me or go around a corner, the whole thing started this throes-of-death thrashing fishtail action. You can’t imagine what it was like when two or more of those factors combined and, frankly, I don’t want to remember. All made worse by the driving rain that accompanied the trip for the first 150 miles.
But I was getting closer to home. The last real horror I had to face was Austin with its hills, curves and bad pavement at the height of the Saturday party travel hour. The last time I drove through Austin with a freshly purchased car under those conditions, I was following my sister who was driving my Dakota in front of me when a semi compressed a Chevy pick-up against a wall just in front of her. I have a vivid memory of a chunk of glowing, sparking brake caliper rolling across the road in front of me while doing bumper-to-bumper 70 mph. Arriving on the south side of Austin was a cause to celebrate. I rationalized that, should I have an accident, I would at least end up in a local hospital so that people I knew could come visit me. That may sound fatalistic, but my thinking had been substantially upgraded from ending up in a funeral home where people I knew could come visit me. Such was my mind at the time.
Thirty two miles from home as I entered San Marcos, I looked in my rear view mirror past the monster on the trailer to see cop car lights flashing behind me. Now what? Turns out his basic complaint was regarding the chunks of rubber bouncing off his windshield from the amazingly destroyed right rear tire on (relatively speaking "on") the trailer. I called U-haul’s emergency number and explained the problem. The cop tossed me my license and sped off when he found that he wasn’t going to bust the French Connection and the Cali Drug Cartel all at once tonight. I looked at the time. 10:55PM. The glazed Old Fashions come out of Shipley’s grease at 11. Hmmm……?
I sat by the side of I-35 for about 2.5 hours waiting for the repair truck to go through its comedy of errors to get there. The guy cut the remains of the old tire off (it had wrapped around the axle pretty bad) and replaced the tire on the rim, bolted it up and I was on my way. The trailer tracked perfectly the rest of the way home at speeds up to 70 mph. I pulled into the driveway at 2:30AM. Tomorrow the destruction would begin.
I spent about an hour before going to bed reviewing the insanity of how I had spent my day and trying to get my eyes to blink. I can only think that the thump I had heard in Dallas was the tire expiring under better than a thousand too many pounds of trailer weight. Trying to imagine the stresses that that one remaining tire suffered is mind-boggling. Needless to say I won’t be tempting the fates doing something like that again any time soon.
Looking in my billfold the next morning in a location much closer to the center of the herd, I noticed a piece of paper with my driver’s license that I hadn’t seen the night before. It looked like an ATM slip printed in an odd, vaguely oriental lettering font. According to the slip, my Karma account isn’t over drawn, but if I wanted to buy a safe Snickers bar, I’d have to kick in a quarter.