What is the world record for flat tires in one day?  I don’t know what it is, but my brother-in-law Jim and I tried to set it one time.  I was visiting them when they lived in lovely Jonesville, Louisiana.  Jim and I decided to go fishing over on the Big Black River, so we got up real early one Sunday morning to go.  We were pulling the boat in Jim’s farm truck and about twenty miles into the trip the right front tire started going flat.

    Like any farm truck, he had two spare tires.  One good one tire and one not so good.  The only problem was that the good one didn’t have a lot of air in it and the bad one was fully inflated.  We changed the tire and put on the fully inflated spare tire, which was a worn out mud grip, and got back underway.  We went about fifteen more miles when our fully inflated, not so good tire started being not so inflated.  By the time we got off on the shoulder of the road, it was flat as a pancake.

    Now we were in a situation that we had to put the half inflated, good spare tire on.  Once again we got back on the road and drove for about fifteen or twenty minutes when, you guessed it, the half inflated tire decided it would become a completely deflated tire.  Again, we pulled to the shoulder of the road and had to make a decision.  We were in the middle of nowhere just after daylight on Sunday morning so there was only one logical choice; put the old worn out mud grip spare that was flat back on the right front and limp along the side of the road.

    So here we were going down the shoulder of the road pulling a boat and the old mud grip decided to start coming apart.  We stopped and examined it but there was nothing we could do, so we got back in and kept going.  Flippity-flap-flap-flap-flop.  We had no idea how far it was to the next town, but there weren’t many choices and nobody was going to help us.  So we kept going as the tire started flapping all over the place with big strips flying round and round.  I was sure we were going to tear a brake line off.

    Finally we wore the old tire down till it was only the two beads left on the rim.  We had to get on the road every so often and it seems like we had to cross a bridge that was steel grating at some point.  Anyway, that steel rim was making an ungodly noise as it rolled along.  It was probably about seven o’clock in the morning when we got to a town that had a gas station that was open.  We went grinding into the station, waking the dead, and pulled up in front of the service bay.  There was one old guy working there and he kind of laughed at our predicament.  To add insult to injury, he informed up that there wasn’t anyone to fix the flat.  We told him that we would fix it ourselves if he’d let us use his tools and he didn’t have a problem with that.

    We picked out the best of the flat tires in the back of the truck and started looking for the hole in it.  Just our luck...it was tubeless and they didn’t have anything to fix a tubeless tire with.  So we needed to buy an inner tube.  The old guy got to looking for a tube and the only thing he had was for a 16” rim and, as you would guess, we had 15” rims.  At this point, we’d take what we could get.  Now, what do you supposed would happen next?  We didn’t have enough cash to pay for the new tube.  Luckily, I was a college student at the time and I had my mother’s credit card.  We stuffed the oversized tube into the tire as straight as we could, put the tire back on the rim and inflated it.  We took the old rim off and threw it in the back of the truck, put the repaired tire on the right front and headed to the river.

    We got to the river, a beautiful place, by the way, and fished until about six o’clock in the afternoon.  We didn’t catch one damn fish.  We loaded up and drove over to a river lock that was just a couple hundred feet away.  I was tired, so I took a nap on the seat of the truck while Jim fished off the rocks and caught several really nice fish.  So, the trip hadn’t been a total loss.

    When Jim got done fishing, he came back over to the truck and put his tackle up.  Before we got back on the road, we took a good look at that troublesome right front tire and wouldn’t you know it, it was just about flat.  We got out the jack and took off the tire.  The only sensible thing to do was put the bare rim back on and find a service station.  We got back on the road, shooting sparks and grinding like crazy.  We rode for miles, pulling off the road with the right side whenever there were cars and getting back on the pavement when nobody was looking.

    It was just about dark when we rolled back into the only little town with a service station open.  Yep, it was the same station we’d been in that morning and the same old man was there laughing at us.  He heard us coming a mile away.  We got the flat tire with the big tube in it out of the back of the truck and went into the service bay.  After pulling the tube out, we saw that we’d pinched a hole in it putting it on that morning.  A monkey grip patch later, we had it fixed, aired up and back on the truck.  This time it was “no charge”.

    Believe it or not, we made it all the way back home without having another flat that night.  We’re lucky like that, you know.