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STORY.
Each year as I stand outside and greet the
first snow of the season, I’m reminded of a winter night long ago and a lesson
in humility. A lesson taught by a tire with a mind of its own.
The
theme from A Charlie Brown Christmas TV
special was playing in my head as I slid the flat tire off the Chevy Malibu’s passenger-side
rear axle. I reached down and scooped up the five lug nuts before the snow
covered them and they became lost on the drive of O’Connor’s Standard Service,
402 W. Main St., Osage, Iowa.
The
snow was beautiful – big, fluffy flakes, just like on TV – hence the Peanuts’ rendition
of “Christmas Time is Here” in my head. The gigantic flakes were invisible in
the night sky until they fell far enough to be illuminated by the lights above
the gas pumps. As you drove down Main Street, our service station stood out
like a light house against the dark streets that surrounded it.
It
was a December Friday night and I was working alone. All the Osage Green Devil basketball
teams were playing away games, so the traffic on Main Street was lighter than
normal. It was a quintessential quiet night in small-town Iowa.
I
loved working on nights like this. All was quiet. All was peaceful.
The
Malibu was parked on the edge of the drive, just outside the office door. I
carried the flat tire into the back room. I loved fixing tires. It’s dirty, hard
work, but I always imagined myself like a surgeon – seeking out the problem and
performing an operation to restore the patient to health.
If I
was successful the patient would be as good as new and the customer would be
back on the road. I’d be the hero. If it couldn’t be fixed, then the nominal
cost of repair would be replaced by the expense of a new tire and I’d be the surgeon
whose patient had died on the table. A new steel-belted radial wasn’t cheap, so
the pressure was on to fix the old tire.
I
used the pneumatic tire machine to remove the tire from the rim. I then located
and extracted the offending nail, patched the hole, remounted the tire and
balanced it. The whole process took less than 15 minutes. Another success.
As I
rolled the re-inflated tire from the backroom and through office to the front
door, I noticed the snow was falling harder. It was more than an inch deep so the
tire left a clear track in the fresh snow as I reached the axle.
I
heard the telephone ring just as I was crouching down to lift the tire and
slide it onto the axle’s lug bolts. I left the tire standing upright and hustled
into the office. I leaned over the high desk and grabbed the receiver. It was a
customer asking if his car was ready to be picked up after servicing. My
back was to the drive. As we talked I heard multiple cars honking on Main
Street.
I
completed my business with the customer and hung up the phone. As I returned to
the Malibu I wondered what all the honking had been about. As I came around to
the passenger side I looked down to find my newly fixed and inflated tire was
gone!
“Gone?”
I thought. “How the heck could it be gone?”
It
didn’t take a bloodhound to sniff it out. Because of the fresh snow all I had
to do was put my head down and follow the pristine tire track in the snow. I
mentally removed my sterile surgeon’s scrub cap and replaced it with my
Sherlock Holmes deerstalker. We had a mystery to solve. The game was afoot!
The
track led due-west and down a slight slope onto 4th Street – a
distance of more than 30 feet. Upon reaching the street, the tire took a sharp
right and headed north toward Main Street. Twenty feet later I reached the stop
sign. No sign of the tire. The track continued north.
At
that point I snapped out of it and simply looked up and across Main Street. Now
keep in mind, Osage’s Main Street is four lanes wide – more than 100 feet.
And
there it was. The tire in question had miraculously rolled across four lanes of
traffic, finally coming to rest in the middle of the street at the corner of 4th
and Main.
Now
I knew what the car horns had been about. Happily, no one had been injured,
and more importantly, I didn’t have to explain to my dad how I’d single-handedly
caused a traffic accident without even being present.
In
the end, I retrieved the tire and securely re-attached it to the Malibu. As I
tightened the final lug bolt it became clear to me that just like in the
hospital, the doctor’s job isn’t finished until the patient is safely out the
door. It was a serious lesson. But I also had to laugh. And I still do. Every
year.
A
lesson in humility. Delivered by a tire. In the snow. Only in Iowa.
###
Main Street, Osage, Iowa
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