A tale of a tight squeeze on I-94

The plan was to move Taylor into the apartment in north Bismarck on Sunday, June 1. By the end of the month, Scott and Taylor would be married and then he would move in.

Derek and Mark are on opposite ends of this photo. 

Scott was working that weekend so he asked Derek to help me and Taylor’s dad Mark move the furniture, most of which was in her parent’s garage.

There was one item in my garage. A new gas grill that Scott’s Godparents had purchased as a wedding gift. As luck would have it, it was the same model that Derek and Camila had purchased earlier in the spring. The grill was still in the box, but Derek said that he could assemble it in quick fashion because he had just put his together a couple of weeks before.

So we backed both of the cars out of the garage, took out the grill, legs, wheels, grates and a hundred little nuts and bolts. Derek was true to his word, in about a half hour the grill was assembled. We put the canvas cover on the grill and it waited to be picked up and transported to Bismarck

On Sunday afternoon, we loaded the Fischer’s horse trailer with all the heavy stuff in Mandan. Then we stopped at our house and we loaded the grill into the back of the Fischer’s club cab pickup. Mark handed me the rope and told me to make sure it was tight.

Well, I wanted to show him just how tight I could get the ropes and what an expert I am at tying nautical knots. The rope was so taught that you could pluck it and get a middle “C .”

So we took off from our house in Mandan to the interstate and then on to Bismarck about five miles away. Derek and Mark were in the front seat of the pickup and I was in the back.

Just a little after entering the interstate, Mark saw that the canvas cover on the BBQ grill was about to fly off, so he told me that he would roll the little window down in the middle of the larger back window and perhaps I could reach back and grab the canvas before it flew away completely.

I did as he said and soon half my body was hanging out of the window and into the pickup box, but I had grabbed the canvas just as it was about to come completely airborne. With the cover safely in hand, I tried to get back into the cab, but alas, my girth was stuck in middle of the little window.

Here’s a white pickup followed by a horse trailer sailing down the interstate and a chubby man in his mid-50s is stuck in the window. It must have been quite a sight.

My ribcage was through the window but not my waist. I couldn’t move in and I could move out. I was stuck like a pig.

So Mark started to slow the pickup down and pull off the side of the road, when I gave it one last shot to wiggle my body through the back window. Okay, one rib was through and then another. Finally, I got my shoulder, neck and head in the window plus the canvas cover.

“Darn,” I said, trying to distract everyone’s attention from me being stuck. “I thought I tied those ropes nice and tight.”

Once we got to the apartment complex, I jumped out and tested the ropes. Yep, still as tight as I had tied them. In fact, the middle C might now have become a C sharp from all the movement.

“Well, I guess the wind just caught the cover and away it was going,” I said, to no one who gave a darn.

Worrying about the canvas cover had become a thing of the past as everyone wondered what would have happened if I hadn't been able to pull myself back into the pickup cab.

When the moving was done, we went McKenzie River pizza and dined on some delicious Italian food. Everyone was relaxed and the incident in the rear window was nearly forgotten by everyone but me. I thought about an important question, “had I eaten this pizza before the move, would I still be stuck.”