The Fixer: On Low Tire Pressure, Parenting, and Keeping One’s Cool

"Dad, I need help."

This was the first thing I heard when I answered my phone a few weeks ago. It was my youngest daughter calling, speaking in a strained voice the four words that hit straight to the adrenal gland for a father. My ever-at-the-ready "Wheel of Mis-Fortune" started spinning and I mentally saw the categories flashing by: Pregnancy; Mugging; Emergency Room Visit; Car Wreck; Loss of Limb via Spontaneous Industrial Accident; Stranded Automobile; Rent Is Due; Mac Virus; Boyfriend Troubles; Roommate Troubles; Wardrobe Dilemma. I braced myself and asked what was wrong.

"I'm in a rental car headed to a photo shoot and one of the tires has a slow leak". Bless you, my girl, I muttered to myself and we sprang into action to cure a relatively minor problem. No one is in the hospital, no one needs bail: a victory for any father.

The dashboard was flashing a tire-pressure warning. I am not a fan of the current nanny state that our cars have taken on. However, in this one instance, I was glad that GM had provided an onboard tire-pressure monitoring system, since it was my daughter in a strange car, after all.

She'd pulled off of the highway somewhere in New York State heading west. I asked her to scroll through the informative 2023 Chevy's instrument panel to get to the tire-pressure screen. She told me that the right front tire was at 22 psi while all the others were at 32.

"You're safe to drive to the next exit and find a gas station with an air pump," were my first instructions. And so the dance began. After filling up (to 35 psi, for a little margin), she called back 15 minutes later to tell me that the pressure was going down 2 psi every five minutes. So, this had become a problem we needed to address. Her route was taking her across a few state lines, so we needed a semi-permanent fix. She had a deadline to meet for a photographic shoot, which meant calling the rental car company for service was not an option.

Two more gas station air pump stops were needed on the route to the nearest auto-ish parts store, which in this case was a Walmart in Pennsylvania. I texted her a shopping list of what she would need to travel the remaining 200 miles on a questionable tire, and her scavenger hunt amongst the four acres of merchandise available behind the big blue sign began. I had her send me a photo of the shelves of each area and guided her through her "picking list". A Facetime call and her doing her best Vanna White hand gesturing cleared up any lingering confusion.

The list was comprised of a) diagnostic equipment; b) repair options; and c) last-ditch solutions. For the diagnosis part, I had her pick up a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex (generic substitutions allowed). This would give her something to spray on the tire to try to identify the leak spot in case a repair was needed, and to ascertain how large of a hole we were dealing with, as well as its location (in the tread, as-in "repairable", or on the sidewall, as-in "terminal").

For the side-of-the-road repair, I had her get four cans of tire goop such as Fix-a-Flat (or whatever was on sale) and a tire plug kit complete with insertion handle and rubber cement. The last item, which could be returned if not needed, was a cigarette lighter-powered air compressor so that she could become untethered from gas stations for an air supply. The analogy of an electric car having limiting "refilling" options was not lost on me-finding an air pump these days is difficult (every Lowe's store has one, by the way, with free air). With all of this equipment, my confidence grew that my daughter was not going to be left stranded on the side of the road, far away from my helping hands. Heck, I have driven years on slowly leaking tires, so how bad could this be?

The ultimate medevac solution would be a call to the rental company's tow truck, but this would be an admission of failure in my family system. We have obsessive tenacity in some situations, often to the frustration of others. A Dad-ism that I passed down is to be "relentless toward your goals," delivered to multiple eye-rolls around the dinner table over the years, because I usually was talking about a papier-mâché volcano due at a middle school science fair in three days or some such. . . .

Equipped with $60 worth of weaponry, she attacked the problem. Being daughters of an engineer, all my girls are very handy with tools and tire irons, so our collective confidence was high. Each of them know how to change a flat tire, check their oil, and drive a manual transmission. Fixing a leaky tire was not going to be a problem. The tenacity gene today was going to be applied to getting to a professional photo shoot in time. Being an adapted New Yorker, my daughter's agitation level was still low (life in the Big City makes you adaptable to disappointment. The secret to happiness? Lowered expectations). The Windex exercise did not reveal any one particular hole to be fixed, so "we" shot in one can of goop, inflated to 35 psi and set out toward the event. One data point that was discouraging: The inflation pressure reading on the dash did not rise appreciably during the goop-injection procedure. Maybe the can was a dud, or there was a user error in its application. She did not call for 20 minutes, so I was emboldened by her resourcefulness. Then the phone rang.

"It held for a while, then started leaking again at the 2 psi per five minutes rate," came the report. I instructed her to pull over and put in the second can of tire inflation goop and inflate to 40 psi. I was aware of the calculus of having a higher pressure differential between the 40 psi in the tire and the 0 psi (gauge) in the atmosphere, and how that may cause the tire to leak faster, albeit momentarily, but I took the gamble on getting a bit more range and hoping the goop would fill the gap, as it were, along the way. I was more encouraged by her observation that the second can had made a positive gain in the baseline tire pressure, so maybe we were on to something.

Thirty minutes later the inevitable call came in. "We are leaking back at the same rate," she said. With no visible hole to plug, and her making poor progress, I abandoned the idea of her using her newly acquired air compressor to limp to the photo shoot via a series of self-inflations, since it would make her miss her deadline. I asked her where the nearest airport or large town was, and she replied that Google Maps said Harrisburg International Airport was less than 30 minutes away (bless our modern smart phones, as this would have been an entirely different story in 1980). I told her to put in the third can of goop, top off the tire to 45 psi with her compressor, and to head for the airport where she could switch-out rental cars. With more goop in the tire, she set off. A cell call along the way reserved her replacement car, and her version of the Pony Express was under way.

Ten minutes into this leg of the trip, my phone rang again. "The car is shaking like crazy, and the steering wheel is hard to hold on to," she reported. I make a mental note that three cans of tire goop are too many and told her to keep it under 60 mph and just suffer her way to the airport rental car lot as best she could. She proceeded, in a Churchillian fashion, and never, never gave in.

I am happy to report that she made it safely through this final leg of her saga, switched rental cars, and arrived at the photo shoot only a little behind schedule. To her great credit, she did not once raise her voice or blood pressure, she just took it as another set of problems to be fixed. The life lesson here? Obstacles are just opportunities to invoke some resourcefulness and cleverness. Everyone faces challenges; it is how you respond that determines the quality of your life.

I guess growing up around broken British sports cars rubbed off on her in a very good way. . . .