THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 2, 1995 TAG: 9509300041
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
EVENING RUSH hour. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
All my windows were up. At first I thought the radio had gone haywire with the sound of a bass drum from a rock band on another station blasting into the David Brenner Show.
Then I realized the sound was coming from outside the car. I opened my window, thinking maybe I'd run over a tree limb or box that had stuck under the car.
Could be a tire, I thought, as I moved up the off ramp for the expressway onto Interstate 64, about two miles south of the Northampton Boulevard exit.
I hit the turn signal and drove off onto the the shoulder. At that hour cars are whipping past like bees, a steady stream of vehicles, lots of them changing lanes, jockeying for position to make the exits ahead.
I got out quickly, careful to keep the door open as briefly as possible before a speeding car knocked it off its hinges.
The new environment sent my blood pressure up immediately. The irritating drone of the whizzing traffic. The rush of hot air from the cars whipping at my clothes, blowing my hair awry.
The left rear tire rested on the rim like a mass of flat black dough. I stood beside the rear bumper looking at the forlorn scene of asphalt and whizzing cars that stretched as far as the eye could see.
I was in no man's land. The nearest service station I could remember was at least five miles away. Great.
About a quarter mile ahead of me was another car on the shoulder, stalled.
I opened the trunk, worked the doughnut tire out of its well. Then I removed the jack mechanism and unrolled the car's tool kit. My car is only 3 years old. I'd never changed a tire on it before. Maybe it would be better to look at the driver's manual.
I was afraid to try entering the car by the driver's door because of the traffic. I used the front door on the opposite side and opened the glove compartment to pull out the owner's manual.
There was a nice drawing showing how to remove the wheelcover. The drawing was of a screwdriver inserted behind the wheelcover rim. I got out of the car again and walked back to the trunk to look into the tool kit. No screwdriver. Great.
The car stalled on the road ahead of me was occupied. I walked along the low metal barricade at the edge of the shoulder and stuck my head through the open window of the door opposite the driver. The woman was using a cellular phone, talking to someone.
She put a hand over the receiver. ``I'm trying to reach my boyfriend,'' she said. ``I've been calling all over but can't reach him.'' I had to shout through the window to be heard because of the unending drone of tires. She said she didn't have a screwdriver. I went back to my car.
Changing the tire was going to be dicey even if I had a screwdriver. I had only two or three feet of space between the car and the roadway in which to make the change. And I'd have to change it with my back to the traffic. Heavy traffic. Remember the football player for the Washington Redskins who was killed a few years ago because he stopped to help someone change a tire?
I thought it over and decided to call for help. But the nearest phone was miles away. By then the woman trying to reach her boyfriend had gotten her car started and moved away. A few minutes later a miracle happened. A blue van whomp. . . whomp. . . whomped to the shoulder a few hundred yards ahead of me. Flat tire.
The woman inside was calling her husband on a cellular phone. She let me borrow it to call my service station. Waiting in my car I figured I'd better get one of those cellular phones some day. When I'd recovered from the pinch of paying for a new tire and the service charge. While I was sitting there a car veered so close, moving onto the shoulder, it missed the side of my car by no more than a foot.
The station's truck reached me a half hour later. Before removing the wheelcover, Troy Hoke, the driver, probed around in my tool kit and found a tiny bar - unreferenced in the owner's manual - that popped out a plate in the center of the wheelcover, exposing the lug nuts. So that's what the gizmo was for. He changed it quickly.
After driving to my condo on the doughnut tire, my blood pressure was still pretty high. For a while out there on the highway shoulder, I'd felt like the little boy on the deck of a burning ship. Scary. Lots worse than Halloween. What if it had been late at night? Small wonder women buy so many of those cellular phones.
As I walked to my condo door, a neighbor walking her dog asked me how things were going. ``Oh, great. Just great,'' I lied. by CNB