When I was 15 years old, my sister pressured me to take the driver’s permit examination with her. My sister, who is one year younger than me, couldn’t wait to drive. I had friends who drove or I took the bus, so I really didn’t care. Living in a city without a driver’s license is a lot easier than in rural Wyoming.
My dad, who did a lot of mechanical work in his spare time, thought it would be a good idea to teach my sister and I how to change the oil and rotate tires before we learned how to drive.
That lesson has come in handy more than once. I have had to change tires on almost every car I have ever owned and taught my sons how to change tires when they had a flat.
Sunday, that lesson came in handy, once again. It has been about nine years since I have had to change a tire. I was on my way to Blackhall Ranch when my rear passenger tire started to lose air. My GMC Terrain has one of the fancy computers that tells me when I have a problem with my tires and I watched the monitor as the air went from 32 pounds of pressure to 28, to 26, then 20. I quickly looked ahead and found a flat spot on the road to park the car. By this time I was on the ranch road.
When I checked the tire, I was shocked to see a big piece of rusted steel sticking out the sidewall of my tire.
“Great,” I thought to myself. “No one is here to help, or will be.”
I opened the hatchback and moved all the stuff in the back of my Terrain in to the back seat so I could get to the “donut” spare tire. In the past, I have found it easy to remove the donut, but this time it took a little maneuvering to get it free.
When I took the jack and its parts out of the hatchback, I could not for the life of me figure out what the hook was for.
I have used a lot of jacks; most of them have been the old handyman type, where you ratchet a lever to lift of the car. This was not what I was used to. I loosened the lugnuts on the wheel, and tried to figure out how to use this ridiculous jack. It wasn’t long before I pulled out the owner’s manual to read how to use the jack.
“Oh, so that is what the hook is for,” I said to myself. This was a screw-up jack, literally and figuratively.
After figuring out how to wind the jack, and as the car started to lift, I realized I had the jack in the wrong place and had to unscrew it. By this time, two cars had driven around me. I was blocking the road, so they had to drive around me.
No worries, I have never been a very good damsel in distress. I continued to wind up the jack. Soon a third truck passed by, but this one stopped. I recognized the voice immediately. Jennifer Maskell was talking to someone on the phone finishing up a conversation as she approached me.
She was as shocked as I was when she saw the steel protruding from my tire. She offered to give me a break from jack twisting. I had been struggling for half an hour and was very willing to give her a chance at the jack. She started to twist it and was amazed at how difficult it was. She started laughing. “I am sorry Liz, I am not much help.” I had already figured out how to use the jack, so I took back over twirling the tire iron onto the hook that was in the eye of jack.
As the back of the Terrain started to lift, Jennifer would check the tire to see if it would come off, until finally we got the wheel high enough off the ground. Jennifer threw the bad tire in the back of my vehicle as I put the donut on and started tightening the lug nuts.
We had a good laugh over changing the tire, and what could have been a huge chore turned into a fun adventure.
As I was changing the tire several things went through my mind.
• The person who invents a jack should be required to use it before putting it on the market.
• I was thinking “Where was Tom Grainger?” About four years ago, he changed a tire for me in downtown Saratoga in the pouring rain.
• I was thankful dad had taught me how to change a tire.
• I was also thankful that he was not the one who had tightened the lug nuts. My dad was referred to as our pet guerrilla because of his strength in his younger days. We had a few instances when it took an impact wrench to remove nuts he had tightened by hand
• I was grateful this didn’t happen the week before when I was driving up to Blackhall lookout.
The tire was ruined, but I felt good as I headed up to the ranch to learn more about Chris Irwin, the horse trainer. I was proud of myself for changing the tire and I was happy that someone like Jennifer stopped to help and made the adventure fun.
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