Today, while driving down highway Seventeen from Charleston to Savannah, I noticed a slight change in how the RV was handling. We had just hit a bump in the road—not an unusual occurrence in the USA—but something had… shifted.
I glanced in my mirror.
“That’s odd. The outdoor shower is dangling. We should pull
over.”
Almost as an afterthought, I added, “Does it feel like it’s
handling differently to you?” Because it did feel different.
“Definitely. You should pull over,” Raquel said, always wise
in the ways of prudence and caution.
“There’s a bridge, I’ll pull over right after,” I said,
crossed the bridge (it was tiny, running over a creek, and there was no
shoulder on the bridge) then I pulled over, perhaps 30 seconds or a minute
after feeling this… bump.
Raquel and I got out of the truck, went to look at the
passenger side only to discover… that one of the wheels was completely gone.
Not flat.
Not blown out.
Not punctured, or damaged, punctured with the antlers of a
deer nor the spines of a porcupine.
Entire
Tire
Was
Missing.
Apparently, this had happened just a minute ago. The tire
popped off, cut across traffic, crisscrossed behind our RV, before careening
into a field and coming to rest.
I knew this because a little old lady had pulled over to
tell us this. She had been following us, and had seen the whole thing, which is
how I know that the wheel cut across traffic. I thanked her for this
information, and then she was gone.
I realize now that I should have asked her for a ride back
to where she saw it, but in that moment, I was dumbstruck.
I stared, jaw agape, at the clean steel disk where a dirty
black tire should have been. The front of it was smooth and polished, but the
circumference had been grinded, and was no longer in alignment with the edging.
There wasn’t any obvious damage to the RV. The siding was not scraped, nor did
it exhibit signs of sparks as it was dragged along the highway. The bumper was
intact. The water connections were still in place. The gas lines were
undamaged. The landing gear still functioned. At least, as far as I could tell.
But the tire? The tire was missing. The axle didn’t look one
hundred percent either, but whatever was wrong, I was obviously out of my
element. I could change a spare, sure. I have changed many a spare on many a
car. But alas, even my limited knowledge of mechanical engineering was able to
discern the nature of the problem, and how to resolve it.
That whole damn thing right there need replaced, and theres’
prolly gonna need to be some fancy tools.
That was about where my mind was, and then I turned to my
phone, and attempted to get us towed.
The insurance company was useless, or not quite. Raquel
eventually did get hold a hold of them and they did call like six wreckers for
us after an agonizing amount of time spent trying to mark our location in
regards to a town, which was nonsensical because we were in the middle of
nowhere, but none of them would dare to a thirty-foot camper trailer.
Perhaps because they didn’t have any idea where the insurance lady was sending
them. I found this all this tdishearteningly ironic because I had been towing this
travel trailer this entire time with my half tun truck, and now not even tow
trucks could tow it but alas, ‘twas not the time for melancholy humor.
While Raquel finished a work meeting, I got a hold of the
local RV dealer, who referred me to a towing company, who referred me to
Denise, who might have a guy.
Desperate, and aware that I would definitely need a guy to
affix a tire to a smooth steel plate, I called Denise.
“It’s flat?”
“It’s just clean gone, ma’am, You’re not going to be able to
tow it with a regular tow truck.”
“I got a guy. He’ll come out there and check it out, maybe
fix it. Where are you?”
“On Highway 17 coming south from Charleston, near Kinloch
road, by the creek, about twenty minutes outside Ridgeland.” The survivalist in
me was quite proud of this location.
“Alright.”
“Do you need anything else from me?”
“What else would I need? You’re on 17, twenty minutes
outside Ridgeline. I’ll send my guy.”
Click.
I had exaggerated the distance, I realized. 25 minutes. Plus
time for this guy to get ready. A half hour. Raquel got the kids food out of
home that was broken down on the side of the road, and I went looking for the
tire.
I jogged ten minutes and didn’t see the grass the woman was
walking about.
I saw grassy spots, and lots of discarded tires in various
states of repair (A troubling amount, truly) but I did not see my tire.
Disheartened, I turned around.
There was a man armed with power tools coming to visit my
wife and children, after all.
I made it back to the RV, and shortly thereafter the guy
arrived.
“Yep, I can’t fix that,” He declared rather quickly.
Disheartening, yet again.
‘Is there a way you can get us to someone who can?” I asked,
hoping this was some sort of a code.
“Oh, Jacob can fix this. No problem,” the guy enigmatically invoked
a namerd higher power. Then he squirmed under the RV and took out his
cellphone. He snapped a couple pictures of the hub that was obviously in need
of replacement and mumbled something vaguely negative about the axel, squiggled
back out.
“I bet we could ratchet that up, drive along like that,” the
guy said, rather unenthusiastically.
“On three wheels?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Jacob’ll know. I gotta call Denise.”
My eyes crossing, I let him make his phone call which ended
up feeling like mistake because when he hung up, he left.
‘I sent them pictures to Denise. Jacob’ll be around here in
a minute. Well, not a minute.’
‘Thirty minutes?’
The guy nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s ‘bout it.’
And he was gone.
At this point, Raquel had made it maybe half of the way
through the GPS conversation with the insurance, and I had to help bring in the
location (No, no, east of there. Yep, Where the 17 and 21 fork, yeah just go
along seventeen and no, no, you went too far). That ate up some time and soon
Jacob arrived.
His truck was not the decked out dooly I was hoping to see,
with tools hanging from racks, a powerful wench? I don’t know what I wanted
exactly, but I knew that he didn’t have any of it. He didn’t even have any
teeth.
I said hello, introduced myself, and Jacob squiggled under
the RV.
To my great disappointment, he told me that the plan was to
exactly what the guy had said to do.
My heart now wet lump in the dirt, I nodded. The next hour
was going to suck.
Jacob got to work.
We couldn’t hope to drive it without preventing the one good
wheel on that side from trying to balance it.
So Jacob ratcheted the rear axel up as high as he possibly
could. In the end, he got only a couple of inches of clearance from the ground,
but we could both tell that was all we were going to get.
He told me directions to his yard (I paid very close
attention to these because the internet was spotty) and we were off.
I had to drive twenty miles, most of it down highway 17, a
highway with a 60-mph speed limit that I couldn’t possibly hope to achieve.
I had asked Jacob, and he had recommended thirty or forty,
so I put on my hazards, and split the difference. He didn’t immediately signal
me to pull over so I assumed we were OK and I got to driving.
There was none of that odd sensation from before, but there
was certainly less friction. I felt like I was driving in the rain, like there
was just a lessoning of something between the road and car. Twenty five percent
of the traction, I guess.
What was scarier than the speed though was the quality of
the road. Every bump was an obstacle, every pothole a hazard. At one point we
had to switch from one type of pavement to the other, and I clenched my teeth
so hard that I’ll need dental work.
But we made it.
Somehow, we limped down the road and pulled in.
It took some time (mostly because they didn’t have room for
us when we got there, two other RVs were taking up space) but they got the hub
replaced. No axel, so that’s a story for another day, but we were able to drive
down to Savannah and unhitch our RV at a spot anyway.
I’m so thankful for Jacob and the whole crew at Ken’s Tires.
They saved our day.
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