Mayday

   Or Guardian Angel to the Rescue.

    The day began inauspiciously enough.  The bread supply was depleted yesterday at lunch.  No toast for breakfast.  Oh well, let them eat Bisquick. 

     From Marie Antoinette, it went to Old Mother Hubbard.  Only ¾ cup of Bisquick in the container.  That will hardly make one biscuit, let alone a pancake.  No worry, a whole new box resides on the shelf downstairs.  Except, there was none.  Hmmm, I don’t remember grabbing and opening that box.  It wasn’t there.  I looked again.

    Now what?  One shouldn’t have to contemplate such things at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday.

     It takes too much time to make bread.  There were things to do.  Myriad upstart fire weeds and clovers and volunteer wheat were waiting a good turning over at the hands of an old John Deere tractor and an ancient pair of Schaefer oneway disks.  Give them a week and the weeds and the sun will have sapped the moisture and the now-mellow soil will have turned to concrete.  The disks will sing a sordid tune trying to dislodge the rank greenery and the tractor will lay its ears back a little further in the effort to coax along its entourage.

    Corn bread.  Doesn’t take any longer than making biscuits.  That jar was dangerously low, too, but substitute a little more wheat flour and it will work.  No milk, either.  Mix up a little nonfat dry milk and we are in business.     

     By 8:30, the tractor was headed to the field.  When things really want to get under your skin, the tractor starting engine won’t start.  Starting engine won’t start, tractor won’t start, you are doing nothing.

     So it could have been worse, much worse.  We suffered only one minor break-down.  When the seismographers came through, they drove an eight-wheeled semi-articulated locomotive with tractor tread tires about three feet wide.  Every three or four hundred yards, the train would halt and a four foot square mall would drop kerthunk into the earth from the bombay doors beneath one of the segments of the locomotive.

      It was wet when they were doing that.  The tractor-tire imprints have dried into a superb chatter strip, even for a three-and-a-half mile per hour tractor.  The kerthunking square pushed the soil down six-to-eight inches and left a pie crust edge along the perimeter.  The pie crust has also dried.  The oneways did some serious jumping up and down when they crossed the seismoglyph’s path.  When crossing the track perpendicularly, the roughness only lasted a few seconds.

 

    But then came the time when the oneways had to parallel the tracks for over a quarter of a mile.  The macadam road vibration caused the tie rod on the front furrow wheel to fail.  A twenty minute operation got the tie rod back together for now, and a couple of wraps of bailing wire will hold the pieces together to get through this operation.  So the day was successful in the scarcity of mechanical problems.   

     Yesterday, I worked in the field all morning, took a suitable noon break, and returned to the field for the afternoon.  Threatening weather arrived around 3:30.  It didn’t look like much, and it wasn’t.  But by 4:30 I was heading homeward just wet enough to be miserable and the day was done.

     So today I thought, “Aha, I will stay out till about 2 p.m. and then break for lunch.  By three, I will know whether to go back out or not.”

    Two came and things were going good, so I kept going.  Besides, there still wasn’t any bread in the house.  What to eat?  At four, the weather was threatening a bit.  At 4:30, I was again headed for the house.

    I would go to town, do some grocery shopping, and have a bite to eat at the local pub. A quick shower and off to town.  The groceries bought, I parked at the local bar and grill.  There the problem was, a glass with a nice foamy head came before the meal. 

      By the time I was half done eating, the glass was empty.   Would I like another one?  Well, yes.  When the French fries were gone, the glass was still half full.  You can’t waste a $3.75 beer.

    When the glass was empty, I began to have worries about navigating a straight line to exit the premises.  With some help from the table I rose and did get through the door without incident.  Should I be driving?  Maybe I should take a walk, or crawl in and take a nap.

      I took the keys from my pocket, but as I approached the car, I realized my worries, at least the ones about my possible impairment, were over.  There flat on the ground sat my left rear tire. 

    The keys opened the trunk, not the driver’s door.  In the far reaches of the trunk stood the donut, held to the back of the back seat by a huge washer and bigger wing nut.  I could reach the wing nut without crawling into the trunk by putting one hand in the bottom of the trunk and loosening the wing nut with the other hand.  Released from the nut and washer, the donut fell into the trunk and was removed.  The jack and combination jack handle / lug wrench were housed behind the spare tire.  Two more boarder-house reaches and changing the tire can begin.    

     Loosen the lug nuts before lifting the car.  There’s nothing to keep the back wheel from spinning on a front wheel drive car. 

     Where does the jack go?  Ah yes, a little stud just the same size as the hole in the top of the jack plate on the undersill just in front of the tire.  Somehow, the engineers have figured out a way so all of the lug nuts have a lot of friction on the last few threads.  I had to use the blasted wrench to the bitter end of all five lugs.

     The flat off, the donut on, lug nuts snugged, jack lowered enough to keep the donut from spinning, lug nuts torqued, jack and wrench back in the trunk, I was ready for the trip home.  My equilibrium was vastly improved by the fifteen minute exercise.  Nothing like bending over, squatting, or kneeling while straining with a wrench or lifting a tire to drive out a drink that has gone to your head.

      Ask and the answer shall be given.  Show me the way to go home.  Do NOT exceed 45 mph with the spare mounted on the automobile.