Parking rules don't apply at sale barn

Parking lot etiquette is rarely spoken of other than to complain, but there do seem to be a few unspoken rules that most civilized people (unless they have an excuse) abide by when navigating the parking area.

When lines are clearly painted on the ground, the assumption is that one is expected to park the automobile somewhere between the markings and not let the tail-end hang out too far behind.

This is fine except for the fact that in many cases, one size does not fit all.

If you drive a pickup of any size, or a car that is classic enough to still have manual steering, the more efficient parking lot lines are too narrow, too square with each other, and the rows are not nearly far enough apart.

I think the best parking lots have a lot of different angles and approaches and so will work for most passenger vehicles that might arrive.

But there is a place that no standardization exists. A place where lines would be ignored if someone were to attempt to organize the unstraightenable. This is the sale barn parking lot.

The average vehicle is at least a large pickup and most of these rigs are hooked on to a stock trailer of some length from 16-feet to triple-axled, might-as-well-be-a-semi-load.

You can’t put them in even rows, even if you could control when and from what direction they arrived.

And they are not alone. Semis with full-length cattle-pots, a few cars, maybe a tractor (just because why not), and some days a converted school bus with the back half made into a flatbed so it can pull a medium-sized stock trailer.

Yet despite all this chaos and lack of previously agreed upon rules and painted lines, the maneuvering is deft and accidents severe enough to be noticed are rare and unexpected.

There’s something about a trailer hooked on the back that will increase the driving skill of most any farmer or rancher and decrease the sense of most other cars on the road …

But the best part of the sale barn parking lot isn’t the creative chaos of the parking situation, nor the long conversations with old friends over the smell of manure. No, the best thing I’ve ever found in the sale barn parking lot was tamales.

Those were sure good.

Audra Brown learned to back up a trailer long before she learned how to park inside the lines. Contact her at: [email protected]. Find her on the web at: http://www.audra-brown.com