That evening and the next day saw fine weather and they hauled the trailer across Ontario and Quebec without incident.
When they got to northern New Brunswick, however, Dad felt the car bouncing around and could see that a tie-down had come undone. He pulled way over to the side (this is a fast and well-travelled divided highway, large shoulders) and, just in case of some worst case scenario, he told Conor to get out of the truck and stand even further off the shoulder on the snowbank. Dad crawled under the trailer and was having trouble reaching the dangling end of the broken strap when, all of a sudden, a semi-truck went blasting past, his horn blowing and startling my Dad, who jumped and hit his head, hard, on the bottom of the trailer.
Cursing the truck driver -- "I'm over as far as I can go, why would he be blowing that *&^%%@ horn at me, etc" -- Dad laid back down, struggling to reach that dangling strap, and another semi zoomed past, his horn blasting. This happened a couple more times, my Dad getting madder and madder, his curses getting louder and fouler, and he scrambled out to see what was the trouble...and that's when he saw Conor...
...standing on top of that snowbank, pumping his fist like a lunatic, getting every truck driver going by to blow his horn. That's SO Conor -- he's nearly 12 but such an unabashed fan of big trucks and machines that he would have been having the time of his life, totally oblivious to what he was causing. The story is that Dad couldn't even get mad when he saw how much fun Conor was having, but I suspect that wasn't quite the case as Dad shoved the kid under the trailer to reach that broken strap himself.
And the lesson, of course, is that there are always consequences to showing favouritism: not a chance one of his granddaughters would have caused the head-bonks. As for Ethan...that's even odds.
