Having just dropped off the daughter at Good Spirit Bible Camp, I stopped in briefly at my parents鈥� place in Yorkton to refill the belly. Eight kilometres out of Yorkton, the truck made an odd ding.
鈥淟ow tire warning,鈥� the dashboard computer told me as I pulled over to 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 pocket again, the second gauge, the really good one, was missing. I had moved it to my SUV, and this was my wife鈥檚 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 lugnuts and a new air compressor, just in case the one I have in the truck is non-functional. (Two is one鈥�.)
Back at the truck I check the tires, and found one is down from 42 pounds to 24. I dig out the change kit and lower 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 get it out, I notice the old tire that was put on as a spare is incredibly worn and showing almost no thread. Sure enough, it鈥檚 soft, and there鈥檚 no way I鈥檓 going to pump it up and pray it鈥檚 going to stay inflated for the now three and a haf hour drive (on pavement) back home, at night.
I phone my wife, and I phone the Mercury to tell them I won鈥檛 be covering court the next morning and I will 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鈥檛 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 this morning, given the round trip nature and beautiful weather, I didn鈥檛 pack any clothes, heading out in shorts and a nice golf shirt instead 鈥� 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鈥檚 worth of stuff. I take a bag with everything. If I hadn鈥檛, I would be in a panic right now, 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鈥檝e apparently made the foolish choice of putting the 鈥渓east worst鈥� tire on as a spare when we last changed tires. It is apparent now that this was a foolish mistake, and one I won鈥檛 repeat.
I am glad that is was me, not my wife, who ended up dealing with this. It鈥檚 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鈥檝e simply lapsed and become lazy.
I won鈥檛 be doing that again.
听
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
听
