Editor’s Note: Tales from Baja is an ongoing (maybe!) series from a dusty old van deep in Mexico. This is the first installment.
This is tiring. Photo: Stevie L
Somewhere in the middle of Baja this afternoon, the back tire of our van exploded. Not just a hole, either. It wasn’t a screw or a slow leak, it was an explosion. One of those ones that sends you swerving all over the road like a drunken, lumbering bear. Not a front tire blow out, but still violent enough to make steering normally difficult.
It’s an old van with old tires, so I wasn’t all that surprised, but in the moment, it still really surprised me.
My girlfriend Stevie and I left LA this morning around 5 am after a day of preparing for a trip to (location redacted). The van’s an 81 Dodge carpenter’s van, heavily modified with a bunch of bells and whistles that probably all worked perfectly up until about 1982. Just installed a new rad, new thermostat, risers in the front springs to match the lift in the back, and a bunch of other little things for the drive. Fresh linens on the bed in the back, windows open, static-filled Mariachi music through crackly speakers, a beautiful, smiling curly-haired vixen smiling at me from the passenger seat. Small towns whipped by, belching perfect smelling chicken smoke at us. The sky was a hue of blue only found in Mexico–acrid, almost, and filled with sea-spray from a swell that looks to be building. Not quite robin’s egg, not quite perriwinkle–it’s Mexican sky, and it’s perfectly balanced with that dusky orange that cloaks the earth like a thick, hazy blanket. There is nothing I like more on this earth.
Everything was fine until the tire blew up. At first, it wasn’t much of a big deal–I’ve changed a million flats in my life, and it’s never much of an issue. It was never much of an issue, though, because I always had the tools to change the tire. Stupidly, I assumed that the tire iron in the van would fit the lug nuts. Stupidly, I took the bottle jack from my truck. The bottle jack wasn’t big enough and the tire iron was 5/8 instead of 3/4. Still not a big deal, really–scrounge up a block of wood from Manuel who happened to be in a field on the side of the road (gracias, amigo!), and use a ratchet for the lugs. Just wait, though–I get stupider. In our rush to pack last night, I didn’t open my tool set to make sure I had both ratchets. Of course, I only had one that was about the size of my finger, and despite my near super-human strength, that’s not getting air-tool tightened lugs off on a dusty, potholed road in the middle of nowhere. Long story short, I ended up using the leg from our camper table as a snipe, lengthening the baby-penis ratchet to about two feet.
And of course, because it is Mexico, we had the help of two very friendly travelers from Idaho who stopped and lent us their jack, which we used in conjunction with ours to create one of the sketchiest tire-jacking situations I’ve ever seen. In the end, the tire came off and the spare went on. We drank a beer with the Idaho-ers (gracias, amigos!) and continued on our way. Now we’re parked on a tiny dirt road overlooking what might just be the most incredible view on earth. Tomorrow, we’ll drive. Tonight, we’ll drink. And god damn, it feels good to be doing something.
