Having just dropped off the daughter at Good Spirit Bible Camp, I stopped in briefly at my parents’ place in Yorkton to refill the belly. Five miles out of Yorkton, the truck made an odd ding.
“Low tire warning,” the dashboard computer told me as I pulled over on the next approach.
I reached into the door pocket for the trusty air pressure gauge obtained from some oil show handout. FOOSH! What the heck? The thing had fallen apart.
Checking the door again, the second one, the really good one, was missing. I had moved it to my SUV, and this was my wife’s truck.
Lesson 1. Two is one and one is none. If you have only one piece of mission-critical equipment, and it fails, you are hooped.
So I drove back to Yorkton instead of chancing it to Melville. The shortcut from Yorkton to Estevan involves about 40 kilometres of gravel on what used to be paved Highway 47. This route indeed took me all the way from Estevan to Good Spirit earlier in the day on an almost perfectly straight line, but I am not going to take a risk, in the evening, with a suspect tire.
Mom happened to be out and about so she met me at the gas station where, surprise surprise, they were sold out of tire gauges. Thus I still did not know what tire was suspect. So she drove me over to Walmart and I loaded up on two gauges, an extra lug wrench, WD-40 to loosen the lug nuts and a new air compressor, just in case the one I have in the truck is non-functional. (Two is one ….)
Back at the truck I checked the tires, and found one was down from 42 pounds to 24. I dug out the change kit and lowered the spare tire, which would have been difficult to see in the dark. (Do I have a functioning flashlight besides my phone and the one on the new air compressor?) When I got it out, I noticed the old tire that was put on as a spare is incredibly worn and showing almost no thread. Sure enough, it’s soft, and there’s no way I’m going to pump it up and pray it’s going to stay inflated for the now 3.5 hour drive (on pavement) back home, at night.
I phoned my wife, and I phoned the Estevan Mercuryto tell them I wouldn’t be covering court the next morning and I would be taking the truck to the tire shop first thing in the morning.
Thank goodness most vehicles today have pressure gauges in the tires to alert the driver in exactly such instances before they end up upside down in the ditch. But there are several other lessons I realized from this little episode.
Lesson 2. Check the tire pressure regularly. This was apparently a slow leak, which means a periodic check would have detected it before I set out on a 700-kilometre journey. I used to do this religiously, and have gotten out of the habit.
Lesson 3. Circle check. I do this daily. While I couldn’t really see if the tire was down, a proper circle check might have detected it.
Lesson 4. Always pack a few things. No one has ever accused me of packing lightly. But that morning, given the round trip nature and beautiful weather, I didn’t pack any clothes, heading out in shorts and a nice golf shirt instead – the very same golf shirt I would be in while crawling on the pavement to extricate the spare tire. The thing is, I consciously considered doing this, but chose not to.
Lesson 5. Never, ever leave town without all your medications. This one, thankfully, I did follow. I never go out of the city limits with just the afternoon’s worth of stuff. I take a bag with everything. If I hadn’t, I would be in a panic, trying to get heart meds and insulin in a different town, at night, on a Sunday.
Lesson 6. Never put a crap tire as your spare. I’ve apparently made the foolish choice of putting the “least worst” tire on as a spare when we last changed tires. It is apparent now that this was a foolish mistake, and one I won’t repeat.
I am glad it was me, not my wife, who ended up dealing with this. It’s one thing to have to change a tire, but quite another when you have no spare, and on a gravel road, in the middle of nowhere, at night.
Most of these lessons I know from my previous work in the oilfield, especially the circle check. I’ve simply lapsed and become lazy.
I won’t be doing that again.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
