Almost immediately after leaving Sue’s house last Friday, I realized I had a flat tire. So I rolled back to Sue’s, contacted AAA, had another cup of tea, and petted Tesla some more. I know how to change a tire myself, of course—Dad made sure of that—but I question my current ability to loosen pneumatically tightened lug nuts and to heft a tire.
When I told my sister Carol about the flat, she assured me that Dad had also taught her how to change a tire and that very promptly afterward she had had occasion to put that know-how to work. Carol had gone with some girlfriends to a concert about an hour away, and the driver’s car had a flat on the way home. Carol said, “Stand back, girls! I’ve got this!” She showed them all how to do it, and they were back underway in short order.
Don did an unintentionally snappy tire change himself when he was a young man. Cruising along in his Pontiac Sunbird coupe, he had a flat at US12 and US23. He loosened the lug nuts, jacked up the car using a single-slot bumper jack, and switched the flat with the spare. “I was done in two minutes,” Don remembers. “Then I threw the flat tire in the trunk and the car fell off the jack. I was lucky I didn’t kill myself.”
Don has since taught lots of people how to change a tire. It’s part of owning a horse farm. He teaches employees how to drive a stick. How to drive a truck. How to back up a truck. How to hitch a truck to a horse trailer, both gooseneck and bumper-pull hitch. How to drive a truck with a trailer. How to back up a truck with a trailer. And he teaches them how to change tires.
They have to know how to do it safely and quickly. If it’s a hundred and four degrees when you get a flat on an Oklahoma expressway, you can’t unload the horses. They’ll get loose and into the road. You also can’t leave the horses in the trailer. It’s a box, and without the motion of traveling, there won’t be the constant flow of air needed to cool it. “You can’t let the horses bake in there,” Don says. “You have to change the tire fast.” He stresses the importance of using the tandem wheel wedge jack when changing trailer tires, to make sure the wheel doesn’t move.
My most memorable flat tire happened decades ago when two other leaders and I were taking Girl Scouts Up North to go camping. We pulled our vehicles to the shoulder of US23 and designated one leader to keep the girls well back from the expressway. Joann and I set to work on the flat. Someone had tightened the lug nuts with a pneumatic tool; we could not loosen them. But we intended to show the scouts that women could get the job done.
So Joann and I placed the tire iron firmly on a lug nut, gripped each other’s forearms, and took turns jumping on the tire iron till the nut eased up. Then we went to the next one, and the next one, till we got the wheel off and changed the tire. We definitely showed the girls women can change tires. I just called my daughter to ask what she remembers about the episode. The answer: absolutely nothing. “We must have been too far away to see what was going on,” she said. “Sorry, Mom.” Okay, so what we really demonstrated to the girls was highway safety. That’s important, too.
After while, last Friday, the man from AAA arrived in a tow truck. He pulled slowly up the street where Sue lives, Tesla alerted us, and Sue and I dashed out to let him know this was the place. He got out, greeted us pleasantly—his name was Ali–and turned to attend to something in the truck. In the meantime, Sue dashed back inside to see to what she was making for dinner.
Then Ali did the nicest thing. In the drizzle and darkness, he mistook me for Sue. He’d helped her with her car a couple times and was happy to see her again. Sue and I have been friends for a long, long time. When we were teens, people sometimes mistook us for each other. We didn’t mind. We still don’t. Mixing us up was the nicest thing Ali could have done, a little extra blessing while he changed the tire.
20 November 2021