Trailer Trash

You know all those mattresses you see strewn along the highways and byways of this great country...well they all fell off the back of someone’s trailer. Mostly, you just see them lying damp, stangely folded and forlorn on the hard shoulder, taking their secrets to the grave with them and with a bit of luck you won’t have to do much swerving.

After years of noting all these mattresses, and in lieu of actually seeing how they got there, I used to think they were discarded by UFOs until the day a mattress actually flew off a trailer in front of me, cartwheeling past my shoulder causing a certain amount of panic from not just me, but from everyone behind.

Another time, riding the Sonoran desert in the USA, a haybale fell off a Ute indian’s ute and I missed it by a short stalk.

Cuppa has never shut-up about the dinghy that came loose from a trailer and nearly took her head off, and another mate was forced to jump a bag of concrete at Allambie. It wasn’t pure Chad Reed, he confessed, but he managed to keep the bike on its wheels.

There’s a theme here.

Since the decline of the Boy Scouts, the art of knot tying has died. Tie-died, in fact. No-one knows how to secure a load. Where do you think the expression “it fell off the back of a lorry” came from?

So the moral is, when you’re out on the road never, ever, as God is your witness, follow along behind a trailer loaded with moving stuff tied down with slippery washing line rope by people who were irritated and exhausted at the time they did it. “She’ll be right, let’s go..” you can hear it can’t you.

Hanging back is not an option, since from the previous stories most stuff that falls off bounces up and over. You might be hanging back just enough to cop the finish of the bounce.

So if you see a trailer ahead, get past it as quickly as you can. And if you see the sofa inching its way off the back give the driver a signal so some other poor biker doesn’t end up sitting down someplace they did not intend.