Towing a Trailer in the Desert

Once we finished in El Centro, we drove up to Lake Havasu for a day, and then the last day of the shoot was out in the desert above Baker.  I had my roommate along to help with the drive for those two legs of the trip.  At one point, I was getting low on gas when we approached the only buildings for miles, at the intersection of two highways.  I pointed out that we would need to stop for gas, but we had to get through the agricultural inspection checkpoint first.  That is a bit nerve racking, because they seem to ask you a lot more questions when you are towing a trailer.  Once we had gotten through that, and I had made the turn onto the new highway, Shaun reminded me about gas, right after we had passed the entrance to the gas station.  I took a quick look around, but there was no other way to get into it, and there were cars behind us.  So I continued ahead, hoping for a place to turn around.  But the road was graded above the desert floor, and it would be a foot drop to go over the side, and I couldn’t pull a U-turn with the trailer, especially with semi trucks blowing by in the other direction every thirty seconds.

 

The next gas station was in Needles, about thirty miles ahead.  My truck told me I had 20 miles of range left, and I didn’t know if that compensated for the 7MPG I had been getting while towing the trailer.  So we had to continue onward, and I was just praying that the tank had some reserve fuel available.  The first 15 miles was flat as a board, but a constant slightly uphill grade, that felt like it was sucking up gas.  The top was visible the whole time, but felt like it would never come.  Eventually we reached the summit, and I felt a bit more comfortable now that we were heading down hill.  We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the Needles City Limit sign, only to discover it was another seven miles before we saw our first building.  We eventually made it to a gas station, and it took two transactions, and $130 to fill the tank with 32 gallons of gas.  I have never put in more than 25 gallons before or since, and have run out of gas on less than that since then, not that I am complaining about how it worked out.

 

That night we stayed at Stateline, and headed out into the desert the next day.  Our “set” that day was a barren stretch of desert in the middle of nowhere.  One of our actors arrived in a taxi from LA.  I don’t want to know how much that four hour cab ride must have cost.  We had two cargo planes land there for the scene, and got the shots we needed.  One of the planes was based in Santa Monica, and took most of the cast and crew back to LA when it left.  After take off, it did a low pass over the production trailer camp.  I saw out the window that it was aiming right for us, but I only heard it fly over as I ran out of my trailer.  I was told by others that the large plane cleared my trailer by “about ten feet.”  I guess the stunt pilot enjoyed watching everyone dive for cover.

 

My roommate was one of the people on that flight out, so I had lost my co-pilot for the trek home, through the heart of LA with my trailer on a Friday night.  The first step was to get gas, and I nearly got stuck in the station as I worked myself farther into a corner.  I took a deep breath, said a little prayer, and then finally managed to back it out of the corner, and right to the pump in a single shot.  Once that was over, I just had to get through LA, in construction traffic on Interstate 10 all the way to Culver City, and made it to the office without further incident.  But I had had enough trailer driving for a while.