Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
A few nights ago, on my way from Marshfield to Montpelier, I got a flat tire coming up Route 2 toward East Montpelier, on that last hill traveling west from Plainfield. It was a cold night, dark and wet. The road narrows and twists as you come up that rise into East Montpelier, squeezed in between a sharp slope and the river, and is practically without any shoulder. I couldn’t stop where I was to change the wheel, so I had to limp into the haven of Dudley’s parking area, the flat tire flopping as I went. Ruination, I knew.
I got started on the miserable process of getting out the jack and other tire-changing gear in the semi-darkness … and found, when I got to it, that I couldn’t loosen the bolts on the wheel with the flat tire, as I needed to do before jacking up the car. The bolts had never come off since the car left the factory a year ago. The dinky tire wrench that came with the car had too short a handle to enable the force needed to loosen those factory-tightened wheel bolts. I had the wit to try to jounce the wrench into action by hitting it hard and down with one foot. That didn’t work, nor did bringing both feet into play, if you can picture that: me (I’m 93 and limber) jouncing down with both feet together on the short wrench handle set horizontally, while balancing myself against the side of the car. Still nothing doing. My 120 pounds, even at a both-feet-at-once jounce, didn’t provide force enough to loosen those five bolts. (I did in fact get one to move.)
Then along comes a guy out of Dudley’s store, in the half-darkness, accompanied by his daughter. I ask him, half-joking but also angling for help or sympathy, if he had a sledge hammer in his truck, that I could use on the tire wrench … I knew that an ordinary hammer was too skimpy a tool to provide force enough to move those frozen-in bolts. The man says nothing to me that I could hear, puts his grocery bags in his truck, and then, to my surprise, comes back, and … takes over the whole job … almost wordlessly … first using the “jump and jounce” technique I had been applying unsuccessfully, to get those obdurate bolts started, at least. He was a bigger guy than I am, and bounced at the wrench with both feet at once, with better effect than I had had. He loosened all the bolts for me; refused my request that he leave off then and leave the rest to me; and proceeded to do the whole rest of the job himself, kneeling on the cold wet pavement in front of Dudley’s store, with just that dim light to go by. He did the job so expertly and fast and well that I asked him if he had experience working in a garage.
No, he said. And understanding the drift of my question, he said simply that he had worked all of his life on the family farm.
There I had it: the key and nub of the why of that ultimate good Samaritan act. My savior (small “s”) had the wide-ranging skills and abilities — mechanical, electrical, plumbing and animal obstetrical too, probably — of the kind possessed by all-around Vermont farmer of past decades, a breed whose numbers are diminishing sharply around here.
And beyond those skills of the everyday farm life, and still part of the territory: There were the common decencies that generally went with that way of life, and flowered out beyond the barn and farmstead, to neighbors and strangers.
As I’ve experienced myself before.
