BURGER SCOOT

Growing up, my family was very active in various outdoor motoring activities. My father built custom boats (check out this old post for more about that), boating, dirt bike racing, trail riding, and running around Jeep trails in a dune buggy. All of these required towing these vehicles, which also needed a large, half-ton truck and a trailer hitch. Since my father built boats for a living, he towed boats year-round, so the beefy trailer hitch was on year-round.

Growing up, my sister, brother, and I learned the hard way to steer clear of the back of our father’s truck. I bruised my chin more times than I can remember on my Dad’s long and heavy trailer hitch. At some point, we knew we should give the trailer hitch a wide birth when walking behind our dad’s truck.

But that didn’t mean everyone was safe from the long steel trailer hitch. One day, my father was driving home from Berkeley on Interstate 80 late afternoon when traffic was congested, and the slow traffic abruptly stopped. My father stopped before hitting the car ahead of him, but he got bumped by a sedan behind him. In a half-ton GMC truck, it felt only like a tap. My Dad looked in the rear-view mirror to see the driver smile and shrug his shoulders—there was no way to pull over, and my Dad took the smile and shrug as a “Sorry about that, but what are we gonna do?”

He stood idle for about fifteen seconds longer with the traffic around him before the traffic jam loosened, and everyone started moving again. As he pulled away from the car that had rear-ended him, he saw that the long trailer hitch had caved in the sedan’s grill. He wondered if the driver would pull up to him and point to the curb, but he didn’t, and there wasn’t a curb or turn off for miles. The driver may not have known how much damage the trailer hitch had done.

When he pulled into his shop in Sacramento an hour later, he checked out the tail of his truck, but already knew what he would find: an intact trailer hitch with a little of the chrome ball disturbed and his heavy-duty metal bumper unaffected. A few years after my father told me this story, I rear-ended a car on Interstate 5. No one was hurt, but the grill of our Honda Odyssey was a mess. When I was talking to the insurance adjuster examining my car, I noticed a truck with a trailer hitch and thought, what if the vehicle I rear-ended was a truck with a trailer hitch? How much more would it cost to fix the Odyssey?” Quite a bit more, I was certain. Later, I thought, “Would if I had my Dad’s GMC bumper and trailer hitch on both the rear and the front of my car?” I would most likely be the most feared and hated driver on the road.