Flat Tire

I hadn’t changed a flat tire since August 1978 (I recall specifically for a number of reasons, most regarding my frustration and anger, including the flinging of several non-essential parts over a fence across the side of the road). When I first started driving in the mid-60s and early 70s, flat tires were a common experience. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn (I can’t recall) that I had at least one flat tire on each of the first five of my cars (the fifth being the August 1978 flat). Back then it wasn’t uncommon to see some poor schmuck pulled off the road, wrestling with a jack and flat tire and sweating and cursing and in general having an existential inner monologue about the nature of automotive fate. But tire technology took an apparent turn for the better, the more reliable, beginning in the late 70s, and it’s become much more rare to see that schmuck in existential crisis beside the road.

Unless you happen to have been driving the other day along a desolate stretch of Minnesota Highway 61 on the North Shore of Lake Superior. That would have been me out there, about 50 miles south of Grand Marais, just on the east edge of Beaver Bay (population 170). There are two gas stations in Beaver Bay, but one is just a convenience store with pumps and the other just a relic from the past with two gas pumps and a teenage boy who wondered what someone from Iowa was doing all the way up here in the first place. I have a roadside auto plan, but when I checked my cellphone all I saw was “No Signal,” and I don’t know that I would have been able to get someone up from Duluth in any timely manner. So I had no choice but to do something I hadn’t done in 32 years — I first had to take my bike off the back of the car and my fishing gear and luggage out in order to get to the jack, tools, and spare; then had to consult the manual to try to understand how to work something that didn’t look at all like a jack from my youth; and finally figuring things out and muscling the lug nuts off, wrestling the flat off, and getting the “donut” spare positioned and tightened. And repacking my luggage, fishing gear, and bike.

My first hope was that I could get a new set of tires in Two Harbors (population 3616), 28 miles down the shore. (My car is all-wheel drive, so because there would be even a slight variance in the tread, I couldn’t just repair the flat or buy just one new tire; and I’d recently been thinking I needed new tires anyway.) But the only place in Two Harbors that had tires was an auto dealership, and they didn’t have the size of tires I needed. So they pointed me down the shore to Duluth (population 87,000) and the Expert Tire store, and I drove the 40 miles down the expressway at 50 mph, through the city, and without problem to the tire store. And everything from there was fine. Expert had four tires for me (though I did have to get the deluxe in the size I needed because that’s the only model they had four tires for); they could get them installed in a couple of hours; and it was noon and there was a decent restaurant/tavern just a couple of blocks away where I could have a slow lunch and check my email and read newspapers using their wireless.

In the end, things went much more smoothly than I first feared, but that fear was based on memories of experience from over 30 years ago. Things have changed greatly since then (not least of which my having the means to handle this kind of situation, technologically, temperamentally, and financially). And there was no more than an initial frustration and anxiety, no cursing the gulls laughing from above the lake, nothing thrown over fences or trees beside the road. It’s a mellower time, a mellower schmuck.