Wheel of Fortune

So I put the spare wheel from the pickup truck back in place last weekend. That was quite an accomplishment because it’s been sitting in the bed for almost two years now. There's no way way to secure it there, which meant any time we planned to park the truck in town, muggins here had to heave the thing into the passenger seat. Then back again when we got home.

"Why didn’t you just put it away earlier?" I hear you ask. Well, mainly because it was such an ordeal getting the darn thing out in the first place and I had no enthusiasm for the process of trying to get it back. The good people at Ford who designed the spare wheel cradle for their truck line in the early 90’s obviously weren’t allowing for the fact that their customers might one day need to actually access the spare wheel.

First you have to crawl way, way under the truck, so it’s best if you only get a flat on dry days when you’re wearing old clothes. Then you use an enormous wrench (not the one that came with the truck, but a different sized enormous wrench, which of course, you knew to carry with you) to unwind a long bolt which lowers a three-foot long metal bar on which the spare wheel sits.

If the aforementioned long bolt isn’t shiny and new, maybe if it’s been somewhere dirty and wet for perhaps ten or eleven years, like say, underneath a truck, it will be more or less impossible to undo. It might take you an hour or so of struggle before you come to this conclusion, but come to it you will. This is why we have the American Automobile Association. However, lifesavers though they may be, they didn’t come back after the flat had been repaired to put the spare away for us.

I know it’s not a good idea to leave it there indefinitely and winter’s a-coming which would make crawling on the ground even less pleasant. So, last Saturday I spent a happy hour cursing and grunting as I tried to take the weight of a ¾ ton wheel with my left hand while screwing it into place with my right. Three days later, my back hardly hurt at all so as wheel changes go, this was far from being my worst.

One that comes to mind was the time when I decide to rotate the tires on Wilf, my first car, some (clears throat) years ago. As regular readers of The Gunsmoke Files will have gathered, I’m not exactly Mr. Fix-it and never have been, so why I chose to perform this task an hour before I was due to go out for the night is a mystery, even now. Citroen used an elaborate suspension system in those days, which they claimed would allow their cars to be driven on three wheels. I never put that to the test but it did make jacking up the car something of a process because even when the chassis was a good three feet in the air, the wheel remained firmly on the ground.

However, the real fun started after I’d given up and jacked the thing back down again. The chassis remained where it was. I suspect this was less to do with Citroen’s elaborate suspension and everything to do with my car being a decrepit bucket of bolts but either way, Wilf remained listing stubbornly to starboard at an angle of some 45 degrees. My friends weren’t best pleased when I called them to say I couldn’t take my turn at driving that night, but the good news was; he gradually eased himself back into place over the next couple of days.

Even so, that still wasn’t the least pleasant wheel change I’ve ever performed. That singular event took place late one winter’s night, high on the moors of Yorkshire. It wasn’t even my car, but instead belonged to my girlfriend at the time. We’d had a pleasant enough evening in a snug and cozy country pub. Crackling log fire, lots of dark wood, just the thing for a cold evening night. By the time we left, snow was beginning to fall in great swirling clouds and I was hoping we’d be well on our way home before it really got started.

Naturally, that wasn’t to be. We were a good fifteen miles from anywhere when my beloved steered us over a large rock sitting in the roadway. It didn’t have an orange flashing light on it, but it would scarcely have been less obvious if it had. Still, over it we went and immediately I heard the dreaded thump, thump, thump that signals a flat. I prepared to do my knight-in-shining-armor bit.

"Where’s your jack?" I asked before receiving the answer that strikes fear into any boyfriend’s heart.

"What’s a jack?"

With a sigh, I pulled on my thin jacket and headed towards the trunk. The jack was there, in a well under the wheel. Rotten with rust but semi-functional so I hauled it out of its nest and began the backbreaking task of jacking up the car. Mother Nature was obviously waiting for this moment to unleash her full force and the wind picked up to a terrific rate, sending flurries of snow down my neck and robbing me of the little body heat I had left. Visions of a crackling log fire danced in front of my eyes as I heaved and pulled while the car inched painfully higher.

Just when I figured a few more turns of the crank would do the trick, the car gave a sickening crunch as the jack punched its way through the rusted floor.

"Be careful!" yelled my darling from the interior, which would have been comforting had she been concerned about me, rather than her car. Gritting my teeth ever tighter, I searched around the verge until I found a flattish piece of wood and using that as a brace; began the task once more.

Finally the old wheel was off and I heaved the spare out of the trunk. You won’t be at all surprised to learn that it was flat. And of course, there was nowhere to fill it. Not on the Yorkshire moors after midnight, there wasn’t.

It was about that time, I decided my sweetheart wasn’t all that good-looking, there were plenty more fish in the sea, and there was no particular advantage in continuing to be polite. We had a full and frank exchange of views and agreed to go our separate ways.

But you know what? I’m OK with that.