Learning to Change a Tire

When the flood happened i stayed home from work for 2 days. The first day i stayed home because the river was rising and i didnt want to be separated from my animals when it took the bridge and cut us off from the rest of the towns and cities. Who would feed them, hive them water, and let them out? No, i had to make sure i was wherever they were when the bridge went under water. The second day i stayed home because the electric poles went down the river and therefore there was no automatic climate control in the house so someone had to be there to open and close windows as needed, and because the river had gone over the bridge and a creek had flooded the back way out, so i couldnt have driven to work if i wanted to.

However, after those 2 days, the electricity was back on, the bridge was open, the debris swept to the sides of the bridge, the water had gone down considerably, and no more significant rainfall was expected. i left for work. I drove through all the areas that had been flooded over several roads and highways. This year there were no volunteers from out of state, no national guard handling everything….we did see the cajun navy but once the rescues were complete they went to help others who were harder hit. We werent the worst off area this time. A good amount of texas was dealing with flooding and it was going to be easier for us to lick our wounds by ourselves than some areas that were under water up to the roofs. So there were no big operations and crews this time. Things happened slowly. And it fell to the people who owned the land on either side of the roads that were flooded. The men who owned the fields on the side of 27 started taking down what was left of the barbed wire fence covered in twisted grass. Once they had it all unstrung and taken down they put in new sticks and strung new wire. That was at least a week long process if not two. The first day i went back to work people had used trucks to pull trees and logs out of the road so cars could pass but they left them right where they pulled them…just barely to the shoulder. You had to drive through a road with piles of trees and branches on either side. Buckets, trash cans, pool floaties…other stuff was amongst the branches and logs and tree trunks. It looked cluttered and there were a lot of plastic items littered amongst the fencing and branch/tree piles. However, the real problem was that when the water tore sheds and houses apart, it took all the pieces and deposited them on the road where the water had ended up going over the highway. There were nails and screws and little shards of things everywhere. As i drove through the areas where water had gone over the road…it was dry. There was no danger of “turn around dont drown” anymore. However, because it was not swept tidy like last time for cars to come through, i kept driving over smaller pieces of things that were left in the road while the trees and logs and bigger branches were pulled to the side. And the debris would lodge itself in my tires.

As time passed, the landowners on either sides of the highway started collecting the logs and branches from where they were dragged to the sides of the road and dragging them into the grass to make piles. They would get a mostly cleared dirt area all set up and then move a bunch of the wood debris over to it and light it on fire…watch it close and let it burn all day. For a week and a half the air was thick and hazy with smoke because everyone in a 5 town radius was burning the debris. There were no giant strange looking trucks that came to carry it all away this time. Once they started burning the debris, i stopped popping tires, because at that point, somebody swept the roads. I dont know who….i was at work and didnt see. I dont know if it was a street sweeper truck or a person with a broom. All i know is the small shards of stuff disappeared.

Well, I was one of the few that decided to stay home on that Wednesday. Most people decided to brave the weather on thursday and either go to work or try to go to work. I was one of two out of my peer group who didn’t have to race floodwater home thursday morning because i was already there.

I did feel a little guilty that I had stayed out from work Wednesday and Thursday when it turned out I could’ve gone to work on Wednesday because the river didn’t rise enough to flood the bridge until after dark on Wednesday night. so I promised I’d work Saturday to make up for it. Several other people had had to go home early due to flood waters cutting them off from their properties and families, so there were several patients that had not been seen that needed to be seen. There was a lot of work to be done. I had a full day’s schedule set for Saturday. Friday was the first day I went back to work. On the way home, the tire light went on. I got out and took a look and sure enough, there was a nail so far into that tire, it would’ve taken a miracle to pull it out. It was literally embedded to the point that it was not flush with the tire, but sucked into it. I figured the Post Office parking lot was as good a place as any to change the tire so I stopped there. The problem was, though I knew theoretically how to change a tire, I had never actually tried it out. I had always had roadside assistance with my insurance, but you really had to be located in a city when you had a flat tire to get roadside assistance to respond. They weren’t coming to the country. If I got a flat tire In Kerrville or San Antonio, Austin or Dallas, they would have come then. But in a smaller more remote town, they want you to tow the car to a larger town where they have crews and then they’ll respond. I was already in my small town by the time the light went on. I called my neighbor. She and her husband were helping flood victims. They stopped what they were doing to come help me with my tire. My best friend’s husband showed up with his air pump, ready to teach me how to change my tire.

I was pretty glad he brought his air pump because I had an air pump in the back of my car and I was trying my damnedest to figure out what these two attachments were for, but there were no pages in the instructions that indicated any kind of use for these two attachments. I had been standing in the Post Office parking lot reading and rereading the instructions for this air pump to try and figure out what these two little bitty pieces were for and it just wasn’t in there. As soon as he took a look at it, he said, “ oh, well, there’s your problem, those aren’t for a car. This one’s for a volleyball or a soccer ball, and that one’s for a bicycle tire. You don’t need those.” I asked, “well why can’t they just print that in the instructions?” so they were not relevant at all to the activity of pumping up a car tire, which might explain why they weren’t included in the instructions. It does not explain the lack of detail of any sort pertaining to the process of plugging the device into the tire.

My friend’s husband walked me through how to change my own tire, step-by-step, answered all my questions, and had me do it so I would have the muscle memory and be able to do it myself if it was needed again. There was a donut tire in the back of my car. I didn’t put it there. It was a used car and it just came with a spare tire. Upon examining the very clean, never used before donut, my friend’s Husband notified me that there was no air in the donut. He said it was either flat, or they had just never aired it up and it was the spare that came with the car. The car was 10 years old. If that was so, it was a very old spare. He asked me if I wanted to just leave the flat tire on the car, because it wasn’t all that flat. He said the nail was actually plugging the hole pretty well and though it was leaking air, it was leaking slowly. I told him that I wanted to change the tire to the donut, because I needed to drive two cities away and two whole hours the following morning and it was imperative that I get there because I had a very full schedule having missed two work days and needing to see patients who had been on schedule, but not tended to. He said OK and started pumping up the donut from square one. He inflated it to 55. he warned me that I was not supposed to drive over 50 miles an hour on a donut. I started researching why. The internet said something about the donut, being a smaller tire, turning faster to keep up with the other tires. It gets hotter the faster it turns. You’re not supposed to drive above 50 because the donut can experience a blow out if driven above… well, the highway that I needed to take to get to work… the speed limit was 75. I thought about just driving the whole way at 50 with the flashers on, there was also a thought that I could try the back roads, but they went over several creeks, and there were conflicting reports about whether the creeks had gone down enough to pass, going through the back roads. Several people advised me not to try the back roads, because unlike the highways, they would not be a priority to clear, and I may find myself driving a long way on the back roads only to find out I have to turn around and go back to Square one to use the highway because they are impossible at some point down the road. It was decided that I would just drive 50 with the flashers on on the highway and people would just have to tolerate it.

After the donut was on the car, I remember my best friend’s husband telling me that I needed to check the pressure of the tires in the morning to make sure the donut didn’t also have a hole in it. He had showed me how to use the manual tire gauge that discount tire gave me when I had a tire that needed patched and they assured me I didn’t and just turned the light off only to have it go on again down the road. They were not very helpful in diagnosing the problem, but they did give me a tire gauge and i had stashed it in the driver’s side door.

Saturday morning, I got up, got ready, got dressed, packed the car, situated all the animals, and prepared to drive to work for my full day. I unscrewed the cap to the donut tire and pressed in with the tire pressure gauge. The little stick shot out to indicate a number: 45. I did it again. This time the number was: 43. Well, shit. The donut tire was flatter than the flat tire. well, at this point, I knew what I had to do. It was right around dawn on a saturday. Nothing was open. Everyone was asleep. I needed to get to work. priority number one was getting the car to a flat paved area. A recently flooded very very muddy dirt road under a carport was not the ideal place to change a tire. I never would have arrived in a halfway decent set of scrubs in any condition to see patients in a city, and the car probably would not have jacked up. The jack would’ve just sunk into the mud. Once buried I would’ve had to retrieve it.

I started the car and drove it to the new O’Reillys near the highway in my small town. it was the nicest, smoothest, flat cement parking lot we had. I parked the car in a spot I was comfortable with and got out. Somehow, I would need to change the donut tire back to the flat tire, pump it up, and drive to the city I worked in, where I could purchase another tire at discount tire or Walmart, and preferably another spare tire since this one was also flat, without getting my uniform dirty. I tried my best to carry the tires extended away from my body, with the worst body mechanics I have ever used in my life. Let it be known that if ever you have to carry something heavy, you should hug it to your body, as close to your core as you can get it. This is a do what I say not what I do situation. I just knew that I could not show up in scrubs with tread patterns and grease all over them. They already don’t love it when I show up with mud and chicken shit all over my shoes, so earlier this year I had to transition to having two sets of tennis shoes, one that I take off at the post office and then another one in the back of the car that I switch to before getting to the Homestead. it’s a giant hassle, having to put on tennis shoes twice every morning and switch into other tennis shoes before getting home. It seems like a massive waste of time to me, but it’s really important to people that you not show up tracking mud and chicken shit all the way through their facility. You have to be clean. Somehow, I did it. My hands were dirty as all get out, but there was not a single mark on my scrubs by the time I was done changing the tire.

My best friend’s husband was a teacher. That’s probably why he was so good at teaching. I remembered everything he had me do the night before in the Post Office parking lot and I just repeated it exactly in the O’Reillys parking lot the following morning. I went to the trunk and got the flat tire out, put it on the ground. I grabbed the jack and put it together. I positioned the jack where I wanted it under the car and made sure it lined up with the little spot he showed me near each tire where you can put a jack. Then I turned it until it rose up and began lifting the car. I used the lug nut remover to take all the lug nuts off and lifted the donut tire off the car and onto the ground. Then I lifted the flat tire back onto the bolts that pertained to the lug nuts. I put each lug nut on and tightened the ones across from each other in turn, pushing down until I could not push any further. Once I got the flat tire back on the car i checked how much air was in the flat tire. It was now at 30. I plugged the air pump into the cigarette, lighter and attached it to the tire. I set it to pump the tire up to 33. It’s been a while pumping and then it stopped. I put the gauge on and checked. It read: 30. I set it again, this time setting it to pump the tire up to 34. When it stopped, I used the tire gauge to read it and it read: 30. I set it again for 33. This time the tire gage read: 28. At which point I realized that out of the two tires, the flat one was my best bet at getting two cities over to the place that sold tires, where I could get an Uber over to my job. If I could not make it 40 minutes to an hour from where I was in either direction, I would not be in a town or city that possessed a business that sold tires. if I wanted to buy a tire, I had to go. Drive under 50 miles an hour with the flashers on suddenly morphed into a plan of drive fast, really fast, like before the tire finished deflating fast. It is my suspicion that rather than pumping the tire up, I was just increasing the pressure so that air could escape around the nail each time I used the air pump. This whole process took me about 30 minutes that morning. Realizing I needed to just go and hope the flat tire would limp along for an hour while I drove two cities to the nearest discount tire or Walmart, I threw the donut in the trunk, gathered the tools I had next to the car, threw them in the backseat, lowered the car, put the jack in the trunk, and threw my hands up, “We’ll just drive fast.” I drove two cities over. I didn’t slow or stop. I did say a prayer asking God not to let the tire pop or lose enough air that it became a bigger problem. I made it. I limped into the discount tire parking lot and told them I needed to buy five tires. The tread was nearly gone on all of the tires, so if I was replacing one tire and the donut tire, I might as well get new tires. I told them I just wanted something with good treads. They pulled out the most expensive tires anyone has ever seen or heard of in the history of mankind. I looked at them for a while and said, “ great, just like that, except imagine I’m poor. What kind of tires you got for people who are poor?” they pulled up some basic tires with barely more tread than the ones that were on the car. I looked at them a little longer. They pulled up the next cheapest tire. There was more tread to them than the ones on my car, but they were only $163 a piece. I nodded my head, “ that’ll do it. I need four of those on the car and one of those in the trunk. It’s not gonna fit because it only fits a donut. I already know that. Just put the jack and everything back there in the whole shape like a tire, put the trunk cover over it, and then lay that spare tire in the trunk on top of the cover.” well somebody there did not know how to follow instructions because while they assured me, they understood and could handle that, the car came back with a full-size, spare tire jammed into the doughnut compartment, with a precariously balanced sideways trunk cover angled on top like some kind of kentucky derby party hat. Whatever.

I took an Uber to work. There’s really only two people that do Uber in that city/town. My first Uber was the guy that I don’t see regularly in my second. Uber was the woman that I normally get. she has a giant pick up and rainbow colored hair. 

I did not manage to stay completely clean. The jack had had grease on it, and when I picked it up, well, let’s just say I grabbed the wrong part. Then I went and handled the flat tire and the spare tire, so my hands were not city healthcare job ready. But my uniform was. I washed my hands thoroughly in the bathroom and got to work. After install, I owed discount tire over $1000. Ouch. That was not in the budget or the plans. But life is like that. At lunch break I ubered back to the discount tire, paid, and retrieved my car. I finished working in the afternoon, then drove home through more debris in the evening. I now have a full spare tire and am comfortable changing a flat anywhere there’s pavement.