Mishap on the road

Son number two and I planned a fishing trip for Stockton Lake. As I was getting the boat and trailer ready, I thought maybe I had better take a flashlight along in case I broke down, since I was heading east from Fort Scott at 5 a.m. That turned out to be an unnecessary precaution.

We toured the upper end of the lake and managed to catch some walleyes. My son headed back to Bolivar, and I went into town to have lunch. It was after I finished eating that things started going downhill. As I pulled out onto the highway in Stockton, I heard a clang behind me and looked around to see that the left wheel on the trailer had come undone. It was standing on its edge and rolling gently down the highway, while the 1978 trailer was scraping along the road. I pulled as far to the right as I could and leaped out of the truck onto the highway, trying to catch up with the wheel. Fortunately for me, the first car behind this calamity was a Missouri Highway Patrolman. He pulled up behind me and stopped the traffic while I tossed the wheel into the back of the diabled boat. We decided I would pull it down the street to an empty lot, which I did, all the time making a lovely groove in the Stockton asphalt. I finally ground to a halt in the parking lot just west of the post office. My comment to him was, "Well, at least I can't say where is a policeman when you need one?" because this guy was "Johnny on the spot."

I removed the valuables from the 28-year-old boat and trailer and went in search of Stan, who the natives told me was the kind of guy in town who could fix things like this. Stan said he couldn't get to it until next week.

I crawled back in the truck and headed home, glad that the wheel had come off in the middle of town rather than 60 miles an hour whizzing down the highway.

Last week I talked about the end of the trail for my tractor. Maybe I could do like the Indians and use a travois to drag the boat around. On the other hand, It is almost hunting season, so perhaps it is time to see what sort of bad luck that will bring.