Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It’s a staple of those classic westerns. Just a broken twig, or maybe the scrape of an iron horseshoe on an outcropping of granite, but it is enough for the savvy U.S. Marshall, his equally skilled deputy, or more often than naught, his Native American friend, to discover where the bad guys have scammed off into the brush.
We call it scouting, and it has ramifications in a variety of settings. You can scout for deer, antelope, or elk in the weeks prior to the hunting season. This practice consists of a lot of time behind a 40X or more power spotting scope watching for the buck, or bull, with the largest antlers.
In other venues, it’s watching an opposing team’s point guard on a cold winter’s night, a long way from home, trying to pick up telltale clues of how he’s about to pass the basketball. I’ve spent equally long hours on the road recording down and the distance of rival football teams as they execute their offensive sets.
Scouting always pays off. There was no better scout than the late Chuck Wells. Chuck could break down an opposing team’s offense in such minute detail that you thought Chuck was calling their plays.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been walking what Sue and I call the “loop.” In essence, a lap from our home on Gasser Road west to Major Avenue, then east on Sunset, north on North 8th West, and the final 300 yards walking along our property line on Gasser back to the Ponderosa.
It’s a little shy of two miles round trip. It has been amazing for my new artificial knee that is about to celebrate its first anniversary. One day, as I approached the intersection of Gasser and Major, I noticed a lug nut lying on the side of the eastbound lane. It was smoothed over as if it had been “wallowed” out of place by a wobbling rim on a tire.
“Some guy lost a lug nut,” I said to myself.
A few more strides and there was another lug nut matching the first one, a 13/16th nut by my observation, probably off a trailer. Another step, and there was the lynchpin of my informal investigation. In the middle of the road was a broken lug bolt.
The people pulling this trailer didn’t get far. From the location of the broken wheel components, it was obvious they were headed north on Major Avenue, either to one of the half-dozen homes above Jake Hall’s veterinary hospital or further west on Cooper Road. Someone had a breakdown in the very recent past. Since I walk that portion of that path every morning once the sun begins to rise, usually just before or after 5:00 a.m., it had to be very recent.
I’m no detective, but I play one on TV. OK, so I’m not a detective at all, but like most of us, I can figure things out when the clues connecting them align.
On winter mornings, when I toss a few bales of alfalfa to the eagerly waiting cows, I notice the telltale signs of nighttime marauders near the haystack. Those little black piles aren’t raisins; they’re droppings from the quickly growing herd of mule deer that frequent our haystacks in the pre-dawn hours.
I’ve noticed scratches in newly fallen snow, with a bit of bright red color in the middle of them at times during the winter. These are the marks of nature’s ultimate aerial predator, the owl, doing his or her’ deadly business in the wee hours of the early morning with the unsuspecting victim, a mouse, or perhaps a rabbit, never knowing what hit them.
Those scattered lug nuts on my morning walk took me back a couple of years to a fishing expedition.
On a trip to Bass Lake (Lake Cameahwait, for you pilgrims in the reading audience), I once had another encounter with lug nuts. As we approached the boat ramp with our 24-foot “Party Barge” pontoon boat, I noticed the trailer was pulling a little funny. By funny, I mean it was wobbling back and forth on the narrow asphalt boundary road on the south side of the lake.
I pulled over and inspected the pontoon trailer. The lug nuts on the right trailer tire were nearly gone; just one nut remained to hold the wheel assembly in place. I remembered a time when my dad’s 1969 Dodge half-ton pick-up had a similar issue.
The problem with Dodge in those days, and there were many problems with Dodge and Chrysler in the early 70s, was that the lug nuts on the left were left-handed threads, and the ones on the right were right-handed. Don’t ask me why, I’m sure some “genius” in the design section of Chrysler came up with this brilliant idea.
My dad’s solution when the lug nuts fell off the right-rear tire was to pull a couple of lug nuts off the front rim and twist them onto the rear. Those half-ton Dodge rims were the five-hole variety, so three lug nuts weren’t evenly spaced, but instead were attached with a gap between two of them, and the third was adjacent to the first lug.
The boat trailer made the switch a simple process. The wheel has six-hole rims. We had one good lug and nut remaining on the right side. I removed two of the lug nuts from the left side of the trailer and attached them to the right. Six-hole rims, but with only three lug nuts on each side. I spaced the nuts so the three on each side would be separated by an open lug stem.
Off we went, at a much slower pace than how we arrived. Not wanting to ruin a good afternoon’s fishing with my son Brian and my son-in-law Adam by abandoning the trip, we headed to the boat ramp. We launched the pontoon, motored west on Bass Lake to the area where the cattails are the thickest, in just four feet of water. We switched to the trolling motor and proceeded to pound away at the largemouth bass until the sun dropped behind the distant Wind River Mountains.
I hopped out of the boat, backed the trailer into the water, and Brian guided the pontoon onto the trailer for an easy extraction from the lake. I stopped on the Bass Lake Road, took the four-way star wrench and tightened all six combined lug nuts, then did it again at the intersection with the highway.
We made it to town with no issues. I picked up a couple of stems and a few more lug nuts and attached all six to both sides. It was a simple solution, a solution that was waiting for a problem. My sleuthing skills never determined if the people with the missing lug nuts and lug stems made it home as easily.
Not everyone enjoys a mystery, but if you do, they come at you from all directions. Solving one is a simple, yet important part of life.