We Paid Someone to Fix the Tire for us.

Yeah. It was not going to happen. We tried. And then we tried. And then we tried some more. We tried for two straight days. In weather that could best be described as winter apocalypse. You know, temperature hovering in the teens, wind gusts of up to forty miles an hour, sideways snow. I am nothing if not committed.

Or maybe I am really, really cheap.

Either way, Scott and I threw in the towel after making exactly zero progress removing that demon hell tire from the rim. We tried everything, we used every pry bar we owned. All our crowbars too. Even the tiny one that is like, six inches tall. We used every product the Internet recommended. We accused each other of doing it wrong. We cursed. We lost feeling in our limbs.

At one point we had every crowbar and pry bar we owned stuck in the thing at the same time. And I mean everyone. The bad part was that was we couldn't even get all of them back out. Anyway we gave up and started calling people. Of course by we I mean Scott because he is the only one capable of answering technical questions. The first place we called did not repair tires, apparently because as we have all learned by now, tires are the devil. However, they did give us the number of someone they knew that fixed this equipment and also made house calls. So Scott called him and explained that we had everything we needed, the tire, the rim and the inner tube, all we needed was to have someone install it.

He said he'd do it for sixty bucks.

SOLD.

He told us to meet him at the base of the mountain, around four thirty, with the tire, and we could follow to him to his garage and he would fix it. So we heaved that goddamned motherfucking tire into the truck and drove off at the appointed time. He said he would be driving a white service truck. Well we sat there for a few minutes freezing our asses off because the truck doesn't have any heat because it doesn't feel that the comfort of it's occupants is a concern and then his truck rolled past. Now my first thought was, he's kinda cute. My second thought was, he is going to murder us both.

When he pulled past, he gave no indication that he was the guy, such as waving or motioning us to follow, he just gave us one long look. It was a look that said something. I just don't know what that something was.

Well, we pulled out and followed him because that backhoe tire was not going to fix itself. Everything was going great we were tooling along, headed down the main road, when he slowed down and turned onto That Road.

That Road, we had previously discovered, was a horror movie. As in if you ever wanted to combine Wrong Turn and Deliverance with a dash of Blair Witch Project, this would be the road you would go down. It has creepy hundred year old abandoned barns, under the road culvert pipes big enough to hide an ATV in, permanently wet rocky cliff faces, and a lot of scraggly ill kept looking woodlands. Also, it is supposed to be a two lane road, although it is really a one in a half lane road. We were, at least superficially trying to stay on our side, but the vehicles in front of us were just driving in the center because this is the country and that is how we roll.

It also didn't help that the door seals on the truck were going to shit so that whenever the wind blew hard on the passenger side, it would start snowing in the cab.

All in all, I thought it was pretty likely we were going to die.

Then he turned into a driveway of a cute little white house, which turned out to be an easement because we kept driving up what I thought for sure was an access road to a lumber operation but instead turned out to be his driveway. It was almost entirely vertical, heavy wooded, and extremely washed out.

At that point I pretty much knew we were going to get murdered.*

You might be wondering, why at this point I didn't suggest turning around and fleeing for our lives. Well, for one thing, I really hated this tire and someone was going to have to fix it, and two it was almost time for my period and I just didn't give a fuck anymore. I figured that getting cut up and stuffed into trash bags in the woods might not be as bad as this cycle of depression/anger/acne/eating/rage/listlessness that comes with that special time of the month.

Well, Mr. I-don't-talk-much tells us to back on up into the garage and proceeds to hook up a chain hoist to the ceiling to remove the tire from the bed of the truck. Once we backed in we hop out and I think we must have been looking at him weird. To us, who had just women and manhandled the tire into the truck, his method was about as foreign as watching him wave a magic wand at it.

At this point Mr. Mostly Silent asks us how we got the tire into the truck. We told him. He gave us another one of his looks. I am also sure that he also judged us for the two crowbars that were still stuck in the tire. Whatever. Once the tire was up Scott pulled out and let the tire back down and disappeared back into the bowels of his garage.

The garage was, well, a garage, containing what I like to call the project vehicle,** which in this case was some sort of half taken apart skid steer dozer thing, a piles of tools and bolts and cans and of course a bunch of deer skulls.

So pretty much normal.

He returned with some sort of heater that looked like a jet engine. Which he turned on full bore and aimed at the tire. Then pulled the garage door shut behind us. Now, I have to say, at that point I figured we were pretty much doomed.

What followed next was the most efficient display of tire removal I have ever seen. He was always moving, one step flowing neatly into the next. I watched mesmerized as he popped the top of the tire over the rim like it ain't no thing. Scott leaned over to me and said. “Eight minutes.” He had done in what we could not accomplish in TWO DAYS in eight minutes.

At that point I didn't care if he killed me, it would have been an honor.

Also, at some point his son appeared in the process and lent him a hand. Both of them did not really talk. They worked well together, each one right there when the other needed something, ducking and working past each other like a well practiced team.

All in all it took about twenty minutes for Mr. I-have-all-the-right-tools-and-knowledge to install the tube, and reinflate the tire. Then we paid him his sixty bucks even though he said he only wanted fifty because holy crap man that was pretty fucking awesome and then we hopped back in the truck and booked it out of there before it got dark because our headlights only work when they feel like it.

Which is how we got the backhoe tire fixed, boys and girls.

And we didn't even get murdered.

* I wanted to clarify that I did not really think that anything bad was going to happen to us, it's just that this is never something I would do if I did not have a husband to go with me. Yeah, yeah I know, take back the night, whatever, but lets face it, shit happens. So you know. Life.

**Most men that have garages and also know enough to repair there own cars, has one of these. I cannot explain why. It just is.