Saturday, I went to Spokane for a hunt training session with
Maple. Alder came along for the ride. On the way back, the tire pressure light came
on. I nearly dismissed it, because it’s
a little glitchy on the van. Sometimes
it comes on because it doesn’t get a reading from a tire. The problem always goes away by the time I
get it to a mechanic. So, I ignored it for a couple miles, thinking it was the
old problem recurring, but finally ran through the tire pressures.
It was getting readings from all four tires. Three tire pressures were between 35 and 37
psi. The left rear was 28 psi. Okay,
low, but not too alarming, except that I wondered why it would be low instead
of high on a hot day. (Gas expands in
heat. The pressure should go up, not down.)
A mile or two more down the road and the pressure reading on the
dashboard dropped to 27 psi. Uh oh. Not
good. Not good at all.
I was on a two-lane highway with a narrow shoulder running
through vast rolling wheat fields. I had 2 dogs in the van and the temperatures
were in the 90s, or probably closer to 100 on the black pavement. Colfax (the
largest town between me and Pullman) was 25 miles away. Steptoe was 10 miles
closer, but Steptoe is a speck on the map.
It’s not a one-stoplight town. It
has no stoplights, as far as I know. It probably has a couple of stop signs,
but I know it has a little roadside mart with a couple of gas pumps.
The tire pressure sank to 26, then 25, then 24…. It was dropping
at the rate of about one psi/mile. I was
keeping one eye on the GPS watching the miles go by and one eye on tire
pressure on the dash watching the psi drop.
(For those of you keeping track of eyes, I was watching the road with an
eye, too. Guess that makes three eyes.) It was clear I’d be driving on the rim before
I reached Colfax.
The psi was 17 when I parked in the shade under the awning
over the gas pumps at the little market in Steptoe. The clerk gave me a phone book and I called
Les Schwab in Colfax, thankfully open after noon on a Saturday. They sent their roadside assistant fellow out
to change the tire. (Yeah, I know, I
could have changed it myself, but it would have taken me a half hour of reading
the owner’s manual to figure out how to crank that spare down from the cable
that holds it underneath the van. Also,
I hate jacking up a car on those miniature emergency jacks.)
I am grateful for my van’s dashboard tire pressure indicator
and warning light, even if it is glitchy sometimes. Without it, I would have
had no idea the tire was losing air until it was flopping on the rim, probably
between Steptoe and Colfax on a blazing hot highway with the two dogs in the
van and no shade for miles. Technology is a wonderful thing. (And so is Les Schwab’s roadside service.)
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