My friend has a trailer. I have a wrecked donor. The donor sits behind my mom's office and the gap between those two facts is the whole story.

I bought the donor because these days it's easier to buy a second car for parts after a wreck or an auction than it is to find the parts on eBay. Especially when your car is vintage. Especially when it's JDM. Go ahead, try to find a fender for an '89 Cima. I'll wait.

Day one. The plan was to swing by Pete's, grab the trailer, move the car, done by dinner. Pete doesn't drive his tow rig much, so the battery was flat. We tried to jump it. That's not the size of vehicle you jump off a car battery and win. We gave up after work and pushed it to the next day.

Day two. I got to the lot in the morning and realized we wouldn't have moved anything the night before anyway. To drag a wrecked Cima out from behind the office you need a winch. Pete owns a winch. It isn't bolted to anything, and there's no steel plate under the trailer to anchor it. So I figured I'd grab a winch from Harbor Freight, bolt it straight to the car, and hook the cable to the rings inside the trailer.

Started early. Pete showed up around three with the trailer, and I still wasn't done prepping. Good thing we didn't try this the night before. We'd have accomplished nothing and broken something doing it.

Here's where it went sideways. I'd told Pete come to the office, he was picturing a plaza, a parking lot, room to move. His tow rig is twenty feet on its own. Add a twenty foot trailer. That's a road train. My mom's office is not built for road trains. Pete pulled onto the lot and got stuck. The car was all the way in, the trailer only halfway, reversing was impossible. Active traffic behind, a narrow lane, and a little bridge. One foot the wrong way and the trailer goes swimming.

Great.

We stared at it for a while and arrived at the only answer. Unhook the trailer from the rig. Did that fast. Then the suffering started. A trailer like that weighs a couple of tons. The rig we pulled clear and re-parked, easy. The trailer we moved by hand. Past the seventh round of sweat Pete announced he'd forgotten deodorant and was going to stink for the rest of this. We dragged it to the opposite side of the lot, by the exit. I don't know how we managed because we broke the dolly we were using to move it, but we got it turned around and backed in.

Hooked the winch to the rings inside the trailer and started pulling the Cima in. I'm a big guy, so I push. Pete's small, so I told him get inside the Cima, you steer. There he sat, through the busted window, the interior turned inside out, trying to drive a car that was being dragged by a cable.

We got stuck twice. Opened the doors, got it halfway up, then realized the door support cables were blocking it from going further. Had to let the Cima back down, close the doors, and keep pushing, because somebody still had to turn the wheel. Pete squeezed in through the broken glass, then back out. A workout he didn't sign up for.

Then the horror. Cima halfway into the trailer, and somehow the trailer decided to tip. Turns out the Cima is almost as heavy as the trailer, and with the wheels sitting where they were relative to front and back, and the trailer not hooked to the rig, it stood up on its tail. Impressive, honestly. I had to sprint to the front of the trailer and climb onto the hitch. That brought it back down with a crash onto the front.

Pete felt that one in his soul. His brand new trailer deck, just scraped raw. Cima dripped oil all over it. Fresh wood, gone. We'll find a day and repaint Pete's pole and his trailer. Not today.

When the Cima was almost in, the winch died. Right on cue, like a good comedy. We were pulling to one side, the cable wrapped uneven on the drum, jammed the whole mechanism, and burned out in the same second. Well. That's it, we thought. This car is not going up into the trailer. Not one of us, not both.

Then Pete, so thoroughly fried by the whole adventure that his problem-solving brain leveled up, looked around and said let's grab the straps. Ratchet straps. The kind that pull big loads tight with a ratchet you crank back and forth. He wrapped them around the frame. The straps don't have much travel, they're made to pinch a load down to the deck, not haul it forward. So the move was simple. Crank a little, slide sandbags under the wheels, release, reset, go again. Five, seven times. After a lot of suffering, the Cima finally sat inside the trailer.

Pete climbed into the rig. I got into my grandmother's car. The same one we saved with four umbrellas an episode ago.

As they say, the night was young and the problems were just getting started.

We'd been at it until dark, so by the time we rolled out it was night. And surprise, both of Pete's low beams were dead. Just not working. The fix was simple. I drive in front, he runs high beams behind me. Last thing we needed was to get stopped. So I drove the whole way home half blind.

Not the end of it. Pete and I don't run trailers every day, and getting onto the highway we met the usual move from drivers who decide to pass a trailer on a curve. What a mistake. One more second and the trailer would have taken out a Chevy Traverse that decided to overtake the road train, because trailers, as we all know, swing wide. Pete reacted in time and went left onto the shoulder. Saved my beloved Cima, his trailer, and clearly that guy behind the wheel of the Traverse.

Got to my place after that without much drama, but at the last moment the tank ran dry. We meant to park it perfectly. Three minutes in, we both admitted we wanted to sleep. Long day for both of us. So we parked it as is. Dropped the Cima on the front lawn and went our separate ways.

The next day was a brutal one at work. After that workout I felt tired the moment I woke up. But Pete swung by the shop and brought good coffee. That woke me up enough, and I worked my normal day like nothing happened.

And it was a good day.