The Village Idiot: No snow tires mean spring is here
You can see the signs of spring everywhere: the grass seed commercials on TV, the Miracle-Gro commercials on TV, the allergy commercials on TV, my losing baseball team on TV.
For me, the true sign spring has sprung is yesterday’s removal of my snow tires. The guy at the garage gave me a funny look and said, “Well, someone’s got to be first. Besides, I can’t take them off everybody’s car at once. I guess it’s better to space things out, just didn’t think anyone’d want them off this soon.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “I know we’re in the mountains, but April’s almost over. It’s 70 degrees out. Any snow bold enough to fall from now on would be an absolute freak of nature. How often could that happen?”
The guy at the garage looked at me as if I were being incredibly brave or incredibly foolish to go back to regular road tires. I get the “you’re incredibly foolish” look from people all the time. The “you’re incredibly brave look” — not so much.
Well, never, actually.
These snow tires have lasted me four or five winters now, and it seems they’ll be good for four or five more. Tires last forever now. Everybody thinks the big changes in our lives over the last 40 years have been the high-tech ones: Home fax machines, home computers, the Internet, hundreds of channels on cable TV, cell phones. But there have been some great low-tech changes, too. Have you noticed that you almost never have to change flat tire anymore? I’ve owned cars for years that never had a single flat tire.
When I was a teenager in the 1960s tires were always going flat. It seemed every other time I drove the family car somewhere I got a flat. I think four guys were late for our senior prom because they had to stop and change flat tires. In their rented tuxedos. And this was in the days before Handi-Wipes. If you changed a car tire you got filthy. It’s hard to imagine anything dirtier than a tire. Dirt, grease, road kill, cigarette butts, spit — a CSI’s dream, all on your hands, getting on everything you touch: the door handle, the steering wheel, the gear shift, your date.
We all got pretty good at jacking up the car and putting on the spare. Back then, you’d take the flat to the gas station, the owner or the mechanic would find the leak, repair it and throw it back in the trunk. That’s all gas stations did, then. Sell gas and fix cars. There was no candy, no magazines, coffee, donuts, tables and chairs; no lattes, Snapples, hot cashew nuts, hot dogs and pizza; no made-to-order sandwiches, bagels and Lottery tickets. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they’d have Coke machine out front.
These days, the last place you’d go to fix a flat is a gas station. The gas station is where you’d go to eat lunch and read a newspaper after you called AAA on your cell phone to have them send someone over to fix your flat tire. A gas station is where you go to buy cigarettes and beer, not to get your tire fixed.
You could try to fix a flat tire yourself, if you could discover where they hide the spare in these modern cars. I’ve had my car five years and I’ve never seen it. Maybe if I had a degree in engineering, X-ray vision or Harrison Ford, I’d have found it long ago. It’s in the back somewhere. Under something. And would you know how to use those new jacks, the ones that look like fancy nutcrackers? As if that little thing is really going to lift your car? And are you really going to get the lug nuts off with the little toy tire iron that comes with new cars? When I got home Sue asked me to run over to the gas station to pick up some soymilk and some olive oil. She wants to stock up, the weatherman said it may snow tonight.
Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life” and “Baby’s First Tattoo.” You can reach him at jim_mullen@myway.com.