By Hal Walter
When I use the excuse that I don’t “get out enough,” what I really mean is I don’t get out of Custer County enough.
Over time this actually becomes a problem. Driving skills deteriorate. Social skills vanish. Anxiety around people and crowds increases. I think a lot of it stems from working alone most of the time and not having enough social interaction.
As much as I love it here, it’s easy to sometimes feel hostage to this place. Making the escape is always more difficult than merely packing some clothes and driving away. You’re not just leaving your house – you’re driving away from an entire lifestyle and also inconveniencing your friends with feeding your animals.
I recently signed on to go to Albuquerque with Mary, who had a conference there. We made plans to take Harrison out of school, and I enlisted our neighbor Patti to watch our place and animals, as well as keep an eye on the ranch I manage. Complicating matters was a door, purchased by Mary weeks before the trip, ready for pickup in Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque, explaining the necessity of taking the truck rather than a car.
The afternoon before we were to leave I made a mental checklist of all the stuff I needed to do before departing. Mainly I needed to fill stock tanks, put out two 1,000-pound round bales for the horses and cows over at the ranch, and set out some small square bales to make feeding the burros easy here. While doing the evening chores I noticed a flat tire on the truck and cursingly added dealing with that to the to-do list.
There had been some recent snow and resulting mud. So the next morning I weighed the dilemma of running the tractor and doing the hay first versus fixing the tire before the mud thawed. The tire seemed the obvious answer.
So I broke out all the cheap-ass, tire-changing tools that Chevy provides with its pickup trucks. I lowered the spare from its resting place, raised the rear axle with the jack, and removed the lug nuts.
Oddly, the wheel would not budge. It seemed stuck to the axle. I wondered if there might be some sort of security device, so I called a local service station to see if there was some secret code. Nope. They saw this all the time with anodized wheels. The oxidation fuses the wheel to the axle. The answer? A big hammer.
So, with the truck squatting on a cheesy bottle jack resting on ice, I carefully beat on the tire to no effect. I stepped up to a 10-pound maul. Nothing.
Finally I decided to just go do the ranch work and get back to the tire later. The mud was already becoming an issue, and time now seemed stuck in fast-forward.
Over at the ranch I navigated the quagmirish driveway to the barn. I turned on the horse-head faucet for the water tank and started the tractor. After setting out one round bale I went back for another and glanced over at the water trough only to see the flow trickle to a stop. Upon further investigation, I found the power was out at the barn and also at the main ranch house – a real problem because the forced-air furnace doesn’t run without electricity.
So now I am trying to get out of town on a timeline, with a flat tire fused to my truck sitting in six inches of mud, and the ranch I caretake without water for the stock and heat to the main house. The song “Hotel California” seemed stuck in my head – “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
I drove back home through the mud and ate something. I thought about bailing on the trip or just taking the car, but the ranch power issue was a new twist – there was enough water in the tank for a day, but I couldn’t leave the house overnight without heat. I had a cup of tea and made some phone calls. The power company would send out a crew. Patti had a can of Fix-a-Flat and also an air compressor in her garage. Mary was frustrated but doing her best to be a good sport about these situations that were beyond my control.
I knelt in the mud and inflated the tire with the canned sealant, which raised the pressure enough to make it to Patti’s compressor. I tightened all the lug nuts and put all the tire tools away.
After filling the tire to proper pressure, it was back through the mud to the ranch. There I found the power crew with one guy in a cherrypicker at the power pole that serves both houses. They had discovered a blown cutout, a porcelain fuse that protects transformers. I talked to the guys while they worked and was amazed how fast they changed out the part. I went into the house and made sure the heat was working.
Suddenly I was free to move about the country. All I had to do was pack.
And so we drove away from Custer County in the evening light, arriving at 11 p.m. in a neon-lighted theme park for consumerism, where there was a Marriott awaiting, near-perfect weather, interesting restaurants, wine and beer sold in grocery stores, 30 Starbucks, an aquarium and botanical garden, a Skechers outlet store, a Trader Joe’s, and a well-established trail system in the nearby Sandia Mountains.
And a whole lot of other amenities that really made me appreciate the snow and the mud, my relative isolation, and all the broken and dysfunctional stuff I routinely have to deal with back home.
I really should get out more often.
Hal Walter writes and edits from the Wet Mountains. You can keep up with him regularly at his blog: www.hardscrabbletimes.com.
