This is Jordan Carlson with another reminiscent “Bro Tale”. This particular event occurred just over 4 years ago. I was in my eleventh year of grade school and my Father had just purchased the lot next door to ours as an investment. His first mistake was to tell my friends and me that we could turn the backyard into a bike zone as he would be tearing the house down and rebuilding in the years to come. The sequence of events that followed was ridiculous and quite reflective of our lack of responsibility and planning skills.

Ross somehow got word that a family in Lynn Valley was giving away a miniramp. He called me and expressed to me that he felt this would be a great first feature for our backyard bike zone. I agreed and quickly we spread word to the bros. A plan was set into motion.

We trek out to the house to observe our potential acquisition and plan further. We find that the miniramp is very well built but a little smaller than we had hoped. We really should have reconsidered going through all the effort at this point but we were loaded with youthful optimism and decided to continue our pursuit. We decided that we would rent a U-Haul truck and take the ramp apart, load the truck up, drive it over to our zone and then reassemble the ramp.

Ross picks me up in the U-Haul one dark and cloudy afternoon after school. As a side note, I don’t know what kind of asshole decided it was a good business policy to let 18 year olds rent 12,000 pound trucks but at the time we thought this was awesome. The crew was Ross, Fraser and I. We disassemble the ramp with little problem and load all the pieces into our truck. We make a quick stop at a nearby Wendy’s for junior bacon cheeseburgers and continue.

We arrived at the house and realized driving an 11 foot tall U-Haul truck into the backyard was going to be difficult. These are the things that we should have considered at a much earlier point in time but that’s just the fuckin’ way she goes. There was basically one route to take. We figured we could probably squeeze the truck around the left side of the house, as there was a about a 10 foot wide space. It didn’t look that realistic but we had come that far and there was just no way we were giving up. I lacked a driver’s license and Ross quite reasonably decided he did not want to attempt this squeeze-play. Fraser was probably a little too confident and we should have pointed this out but we agreed to let him try.

Frase climbs into the massive truck and begins to drive around the side. He was actually doing a decent job and it appeared for a few blissful moments that it would work. He managed to get the front end of the truck through the tight space and really should have continued to go straight forward for a bit but he didn’t. He turned right into the yard much too early and had not adequately considered that the truck he was driving was 24 feet long. The top of the truck began to dig into the roof of the house and produce a resistance. Fraser, possessing a very tenacious character, decided to power through the resistance and consequently ripped a massive chunk out of the fucking roof. This literally left a gaping hole in the side of the house. I decided that I would inform my father of this later and that we should continue with our plan. We did, after all, have the truck in the backyard and it would be a shame to give up now.

We quickly unload the miniramp pieces out of the truck. We then decided we should get the truck out of the backyard and then go to work assembling the ramp. Fraser volunteered to be our driver using the logic that he was now used to the big truck and had learned from his mistake. This made sense to me and I agreed.

This backyard was quite big and Fraser wanted to conduct a massive three-point turn, using all of the available space. I did not know it at the time, but there was literally an underground creek that ran through the top left-hand corner of the yard, creating quite swampy conditions. Fraser drove directly into this corner and threw the truck into reverse. To our horror, the truck did not move back a single fucking inch. It instead sank about a foot into the yard. We could only see the top of the wheel. Not quite realizing the severity of the problem, Fraser continued to hit the gas pedal, only worsening our situation.

We tried just about every fucking thing we could to absolutely no avail. The truck just kept sinking further and further. We dug and dug and tried to create a ramp using plywood, but the weight of the truck merely pushed the ramp into the mud. We worked for about 2 hours and had not made any progress. All we had managed to do was create a huge hole surrounding the tire.

At this point my dad came home. I guess he heard us because he came to check out the situation. I don’t think he was quite expecting what he got. As he walks around the side of the house, I see his face go stone-cold as he first sees the corner of his newly acquired home on the ground and the hole where it used to be. His face then goes from cold to a confused shock as his gaze meets the massive U-Haul truck sunken into his yard. If I can recall, I believe his words were “How the fuck did you guys manage this?”

He goes inside to change and then comes out to help us. Now, my father is a man driven by values and his favorite pastime is to inflict these vales onto others. Soon we were receiving a lesson on how our current situation was a “great opportunity for teamwork and character building”. The man had been home for a bout 5 minutes and was quickly delegating roles to all of us. He called my mom and instructed her to order us pizza. “It’s going to be a long night and you boys must be starving”.

The pizza came and we took a short break. We were now well into our third hour of work and we had no idea if we had done anything to help the situation. The fact that it was now dark out really did nothing beneficial. The yard now looked like a war zone. There was no grass left at all and instead just a massive mud pit.
I won’t bore you with the details of our manual labor. Just know that it was another 2 hours before we got the fucking thing out. At that point it was 10:30 and we were a full 5 and a half hours past the time that Fraser drove the truck into the house. My dad’s enthusiasm for team spirit had been replaced with anger as he had realized that his son and his friends were true pieces of ungrateful shit.

The next day, Ross had to clean the truck. He told me that he spent an hour cleaning a full foot of mud off the top of the gas tank. We went back to the yard to assemble the ramp and survey the damage. We had truly fucked that yard up; there was just a gigantic messy hole. On top of that, once we assembled the ramp, we realized how small it actually was. It was literally unridable. When you dropped in your front tire would instantly hit the bottom of the ramp and your speed would die. The thing was barely more than a bike length wide. I think we tried to ride it for 5 minutes before abandoning it forever. We were all in bitter moods as we realized we had really just fucked everything up. There was not a single good thing to come of it. The ramp was later destroyed when the house was being torn down. I recall staring at its smashed carcass and feeling like a little piece of me was smashed with it.

Fuck U-Haul