Two things happened last night that haven't happened in well over 20 years, one driving the other though not intentionally.
First, I received a phone call from someone I hadn't heard from since just after high school. Catching up with that voice from my past caused us to leave later than we would have otherwise to run some errands. Which put at the intersection of alt 19 and 102 just in time to dodge around a car parked in the right-hand traffic lane. Which gave us just enough time to see but not quite avoid the detritus in the center lane strewn around a work-belt and a five gallon pickle bucket. Which ended our trip prematurely with a thump, thump, thump coming from the right rear tire that most of us are familiar with.
Minutes later as I was struggling to free the pneumatically tightened lug nuts with an old-school, x-shaped tire iron ,which Karen fortunately had in her car, and she was relating our information to AAA on the cell in case I didn't succeed, I flashed back to an older encounter, a different night on a different road nearly 35 years ago.
I was eight and my parents had decided to take my sister and I on the classic American family vacation, a driving and camping tour of the great, natural places out west, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, Carlsbad Caverns, the works. I think it was supposed to save their marriage, but only ended up prolonging it another couple years. But they didn't know that at the time so they packed us into a green, four door Galaxy 500, strapped a Starcraft pop-up camper to the hitch and headed for the interstate. This would be in the early 70's. There were no cell phones and roadside assistance wasn't quite as common as it is today.
It is late afternoon and we are on an interstate littered with blown out truck tires somewhere in Texas when we hear a POW like a gunshot followed by a rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump behind us. My father throws on the flashers, pulls onto the narrow shoulder and gets out to look. Traffic whizzes by at alarming speed and closeness. My mother, afraid someone will hit the car while it is stopped, has my sister and I get out through the passenger side doors and has us sit in the grass as far from the car as we could get, just on the other side of grass-filled ditch against a barbed-wire fence. My father reports that the rear tire on the Galaxy is shredded completely, and the shrapnel has taken one of the camper tires with it.
The camper spare is hung below the camper, a pain, but not too difficult to reach. The spare for the car is in the bottom of the trunk, which is packed with all the things a then modern family with two children needed to survive for three weeks on the road. The Galaxy is a throw-back to the 60's, so you could easily fit five bodies in the trunk should you ever have the need. Had our luggage been dead mobsters, we would have squeezed in a sixth.
While my mother distracts my sister and I with an impromptu dinner from whatever she can scrape up quickly from the car and camper, my father proceeds to empty the trunk and pile our belongings on the side of the road. The now intermittent traffic is still cruising by, whipping the corners of his clothing in each draft. He finally excavates to the bottom of the trunk and pulls the jack and the tire iron free. Again, this is the 70's so the jack is the old-style ratchet you no longer see. He has a choice of tire irons, the curved classic that came with the car and doubles as the jack handle that you now see only in the hands of angry bikers in old movies, and an x-shaped iron that fits three different sized lugs and has a pry. Both are longer and capable of generating more torque than anything you find in a car today.
My father starts with the car, thinking if worse comes to worst, we can drive somewhere safer to continue with the camper. He doesn't have to pull the hubcap as the concussion of the failure sent it speeding past the car somewhere farther up the shoulder. He sets the first iron around the lug nut, pulls, then repositions and pushes. It won't budge. Not even a hint. Not even a tiny creak of metal on metal that tells you that maybe, just maybe you'll be able to break it free if you work hard enough. He switches lug nuts. No go. He switches tire irons. Nothing. We can see he is getting frustrated, but there is nothing any of us can do to help. It's him versus the tire.
He struggles and strains. He curses and mumbles. Finally he switches to the camper tire, changing it without too much trouble just to get a sense of accomplishment. With a victory behind him, he approaches the car again. He studies it, checking it from every angle, measuring, calculating. He tries again with a fresh perspective. Budged. He tries stepping on the tire iron, using weight instead of strength to generate the torque. Nothing.
With a deep sigh of frustration, he calls my mother away from us for a conference. They huddle, talking, arguing. All we see is him pointing up the road and her shaking her head. We only hear a few words from him, "walk," "gas station," "tow truck." My mother crosses her arms crossed, "two kids," "dark," "alone." You have to remember, my parents are Bostonians transplanted into Florida. To them, remote Texas is the Deep South, alien, perhaps hostile territory in the early 70's. Civil Rights is a fresh wound here, recently been imposed by Northerners just like themselves.
By now twilight has started to fall. We have been stranded well over an hour. While there was traffic, no one stopped. Now there is no more than the occasional big-rig screaming by. I am scared and I think my sister, who is older than me, is too though she does a better job of disguising it. "Sally, what do you want me to do?" my father asks my mother in exasperation. She has no answer. Now it's almost completely dark.
A pick-up truck passes us. It is beat-up, dented, chalky white and rusting. And big. Today, it would be an F-350 or better. Or maybe that's just a child's eyes making everything larger in memory. It slows, then stops, overshooting our car by 100 yards. It backs up on the shoulder until it has us blocked in. My father tenses, unsure what to expect.
A man hops down from the truck. The first thing I notice is that he is short, much shorter than my father who is over six feet. This man is more my mother's size, five foot four maybe five six, but stocky and strong. The second thing I notice is that this man is missing his right arm from just below the elbow. He is older than my father, perhaps by ten or fifteen years.
"Looks like you folks could use some help."
"Yeah," my father says nodding, obviously dubious of what kind of help this one-armed man can render other than perhaps a ride. "We blew out a tire, and the lug nuts are seized." My mother holds us back protectively.
"Damned mechanics always over-tighten them with those pneumatic wrenches." The man hops back into his truck. "Give me a second to turn this thing around."
He pulls a three point turn using the shoulder and one lane of the highway, then stops nose to nose with the Galaxy. his headlights shine into the windshield of our car. He leave the engine running. He gets out again and heads for the hood of his pick-up, lifting it with his only hand, sliding the pole into the slot of the hood with the crook of his other elbow to brace it open. He does this with the practiced ease of a man quite used to his "disability." He reaches into the cavernous hood of the truck and comes out with a shop light, the kind with a reflective metal cowling, which he hands to my father.
"Go ahead and get some light on that tire," he says as he uncoils the cord, feeding it to my father.
As my father positions the light on the ground near the tire, the man roots around under the hood again, trying to unbolt something with his one hand. When he finally frees it, he emerges with something that looks like a giant drill.
"Since the mechanics never listen, I had this installed." He hefts the drill. "Out here, you never know when you'll need it and no help is around. Let's see what size lug you've got."
He continues chattering at my father as he checks the lug nuts, finds the appropriate socket, installs it on the drill and wanders up to the tire. My sister and I squirm, but my mother holds us back.
"Don't worry about them," he says to her. "They'll be fine."
She lets us go, saying we can watch but to stay out of the way. We approach, openly curious and cautious as only children and animals can be.
I watch as the man squats down before each lug, holding the drill in his one hand, bracing behind it with the crook of his other elbow and leaning into it. The drill bucks a bit, making the sound of an angry Bengal tiger. He drops the first nut into my father's open palm. Four more growls, four more lug nuts in my father's hand. He finishes in seconds what my father couldn't accomplish in more than an hour. Simple, easy, efficient.
But the man isn't done. He insists on helping my father wrestle the spare out of the trunk. My father jacks up the car, then the two of them wrangle off the shredded tire, then wrangle on the spare. They tighten the lug nuts with the tire iron. They pack the spare back into the trunk. My mother stuffs our belongings around the spare and into the back seat, knowing the spare will have to be replaced.
My father thanks the man profusely. The man simply responds that he knows what it's like.
"Let me follow you up to the next exit. There's a garage up there that can probably replace that tire. You don't want to be stuck out here after dark." He stows his tools, pivots his truck to face the right direction again and waves my father around. He follows us to the next exit and makes sure the garage attendant doesn't completely rip us off for a new tire before he heads back on his way.
My father still tells the story in his own semi-sardonic style of how the only one-armed man in all of east Texas with a pneumatic drill installed in his truck helped him change a tire one night.
The thing is, this man, if he's still alive, probably doesn't remember me, my father or our family. He just seemed to do what came naturally to him, helping people in need, probably not much special to him. But I remember him precisely because what he did for us was so much more important in our eyes than it was in his.
In my experience, it is often the things we think least about that have the most impact on others. Sometimes there is an odd causality to the world, a phone call that leads to a flat tire that leads to a memory that leads to a message delivered on the wings of a butterfly. What wind those wings stir, I cannot know. A positive one, I hope.
As a final note, I want to thank Sean for posting a similar experience with a radically different outcome on his blog. His got me thinking about how very fortunate my family was to have met that man on that night so many years ago. I wish he had been able to walk away with as positive a recollection.
© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III
