Blow-Out

7.16.11

We get up early enough to get a good head start to St. Louis. I get to lounge in the back of the van for an hour or so, then its my turn to drive.
I'm goin for about 120 miles or so when BAM! the right rear tire explodes into a fury of shredded rubber and grinding metal against hot pavement!
I struggle briefly to maintain control of the van, swerving a bit back and forth (thank god I wasn't surrounded by other vehicles!) and bring the van to a safe gradual halt on the side of the road.

Whew.

Well now, its over 100 degrees in the hot sun, the whole caravan brought to a screeching halt, we have a show to make in a couple hours, and we're out a tire.
Everyone hops out, gloves on, we get out the spare, and we start loosening the lugs. The jack for the van is a little one-post crank jack that can barely lift the van high enough to get the wheel off the pavement! We jack it up in two different spots, but we still can't get it high enough to get the new tire on.

I was thinking we'd have to get a tow, or hitchhike to the next stop to get a better jack. The jack we had was simply not fit to raise the van appropriately. But we weren't defeated yet, and wouldn't you know this crew of gypsies and their eternally twisted smiles were still managing a few jokes here and there (I attribute it to the dash of irish on board, we'd be laughing down the throats of crocodiles if we were still in earshot) and we surveyed our collection of junk to find a solution.

We tried a number of ideas until we concluded that the best bet was to jack it up as high as it would go, place the old wheel under the brake housing, let the jack down, and shove both a table top from in the van and a 1-1/2" piece of plank wood under the jack to gain an extra 2" of height. We jack it up again, all the while warning each other about appendages and heads under the body of the van as the sheer wind of oncoming traffic shook the van on its precarious little peg leg.

A number of cranks later we had the clearance we needed to get the full-sized spare on. We snugged the lugs, let her down, tightened everything up, and jumped for joy at another seemingly impossible obstacle averted.

We broke the new tire in, stopped at the next gas station, checked all our tire's air pressure, bought ice cream for all, and I took my pants off.

To put shorts on.

An hour later we were passing the Saarinen;'s Arch, the Gateway to the West, landing at Lemp Arts where we enjoyed air conditioning, fruit & salads, & a couple retellings of the days events.

One of my oldest besets friends Dan Hawks, who now resides in St. Louis with his family, met us out at Lemp just as we were about to go on. We spent some time before eth show rigging gear up to work - our broken Rhodes stand got a master lock to hold it up, and CB & Evan used hammers, pliers and brute strength to free up the Rhodes' sustain pedal pole.



It all paid off at the end of the day - we played well, were received well, Dan & I went grocery shopping and caught up while the rest of Ghastly closed up the show, and we reconvened at Dan & Anika's to enjoy delicious gnocchi, salads, beer, Arnold Palmers with Vodka, and home made chocolate filled cakes with ice cream courtesy of Anika… who also gave us a slightly less than sober tour of her garden in the pitch black backyard, and we all crashed on comfy beds with full bellies and exhausted bodies.