and by that I mean visible to others on the road with you. No fair having a dead hooker hidden in your back seat under a blanket.
The one other thread got me thinking: I haven’t seen much of note but I’ve been guilty of the other side of the coin. I used to haul a full sized 6 pound cannon behind a 59 Edsel back in the 80s and I once took a live 6-or-so-foot Christmas Tree home by tying it off to the sissy bar on a Sportster like some really odd passenger. And those are the ones I want to admit to.
You ever haul something that would make folks today reach for their cell phone cameras?
Some of the remains of a crashed single engine GA aircraft in the bed of my pick-up. It was obvious what it was as the rudder was sticking up, mostly intact.
Cargo not seen - Truck load of bras. My 17 year old male self got a snicker out of that.
I used to work for a company that, among other things, made hay feeder rings. We bent the square tubing into about a seven foot diameter loop. We sold them as kits to FFA shops all over East Texas. It was not unusual to stack up to 1,000 of these on a trailer and deliver them to a high school shop. The trick was to get to the school before 3:00 so the kids would have to unload them.
A friend had some ostrich on his farm years ago. One died and had to be transported for an autopsy in order for the guy to collect on his insurance policy. I helped him lift the dead thing into the bed of his pick up, but he hurt his back when we did this. As a favor to him I drove the bird to its final destination.
I don’t know if this counts, but I once pulled the front passenger seat out of a VW bug (a real one, not the cutesy reboot) so I could transport a string bass, a bassoon, and a bassoonist to an orchestra concert.
Well, it was in the trunk, and not visible, but for one job I transported a pretty big and complex solid-state laser in my car. It wasn’t until I got to where I was going that I was told the thing was valued at $1 million.
The most interesting cargo I visibly hauled was on my bike (I had no car at the time). I was bringing some props for our Shakespeare company, and figured it was easier to wear the armor, helmet, and sword than to pack them. I looked like one of Mark Twain’s bicycling knights from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Bicycling while holding a long, shiny sword is cool.
I know, not that unusual in the bed of a pick up truck, but said pick up was in a small caravan of other trucks and trailers cleaning up a wood lot and taking loads of pecan and mesquite from SE Houston to the northwest side of town during rush hour. A crew cab truck of construction workers pulled up beside me at a light and asked where the barbeque was.
One time I hauled 23 twenty-foot lengths of 2" plastic pipe home on the passenger side of a Volkswagen Golf. Fortunately, most of the drive home was on country roads.
I was once a necropsy assistant and part of my job was acting as a courier so I drove all over Connecticut to pick up dead animals for necropsy. The smallest I picked up was a cat and was in a box. The largest was a cow, I think. It might have been a buck. I did my best to cover them but it wasn’t always possible, especially since the vehicle was a regular pickup truck.
Oh and two weeks ago three of us were hauling dog agility equipment. The pickup filled with jumps, the tunnel, weave poles, and all other kinds of stuff probably looked odd to people not involved with agility.
Y’all know what a hula hoop looks like, yes? Dance hoops are made of much larger diameter piping, usually covered in gaff or duct tape for grip, and often much, much bigger than the things you get at the toy store. A local performer was cleaning out her collection and gave me about half a dozen of them, ranging from 32" to 46" in diameter.
I got them home on the subway. All of them. At once.
Hoops are feisty things and have a mind of their own sometimes. I’m short, so the biggest one comes in right under my arm when it’s resting on the floor. The little ones don’t even come up to my hip. This is something of a challenge when you have to keep them all together, so you don’t lose your grip and let them roll into everyone else in your train car.
They’re also great conversation starters, whether you like it or not. An old man stopped me on Massachusetts Avenue to ask if I was with the spinners. (“Spinner” is apparently circus-speak for “person who juggles weird objects”. Covers the traditional clubs, canes, and rings, things like poi and fire fans, and locally at least is usually taken to include the hoopers and contact jugglers, even those those things are technically categories of their own.) The biggest hoops are covered in white gaff tape right now, and a couple of Cambridge cops first thought I was marching down the street with coils of firehose over my shoulder. Amaluna was here at the time, and a guy on the train asked if I was with Cirque du Soleil. Surprisingly, only that last one was drunk.
Not me, but someone in my family was diabetic and had to have a leg amputated later in life. They were driving home from getting her new prosthetic leg which had a sock and shoe attached. They stuck it shoe-up in a paper sack in the back seat of the car. After a few miles and several odd stares, they realized it looked like they were hauling around some severed body parts.
That is odd, I will admit. But for full disclosure we must admit to being in a state where dead deer sitting in the passenger seat, wearing a coat and smoking a pipe, isn’t all that unusual.
When I first started raising pigs I would haul them to the butcher in the back of my pickup. I built some wooden rails for the sides and a gate for the back. Admittedly, the sides weren’t very tall and it was pretty amusing to see the pigs with their front feet on the rails and noses in the wind as we drove along.
When I drove up to the butcher, the guy on the dock’s eyes bugged out and he said he’d never seen anyone do that before.
