We had a decent night at the Maverick parking lot, our second stint at a Maverick parking lot.
Thank you, Maverick.
I called the junkyard first thing in the morning after they opened, and he said they did indeed have what we needed, a rim and wheel studs, so we headed on down the highway.
The junkyard was a pretty chaotic scene, organization really of any kind anywhere. The reviews online were terrible, but they were the only game in town, so to speak.
The owner told me where a van was that would have the wheel studs that we needed, so I went out and grabbed them, taking everything apart myself. Then he found a rim that would fit my vehicle, and then I happened to ask if he had a tire machine and could swap the tire from the bad rim over.
That was a big mistake.
It’d probably only taken me about 20 or 30 minutes to get all of the wheel studs and for him to find a rim, and then it took another 2 and 1/2 hours, or so, just to get out of there.
As he was taking the tire off the rim, he didn’t grease the tire, which you’re always supposed to do because the friction of the machine running across the bead with such force breaks the rubber up.
I mentioned that to him just as he was about ready to take the tire off the machine, trying to say something innocuous like, man, every time I tried to use a tire machine without grease, I ruined the tire.
In the middle of him saying that that only happens when people don’t know what they’re doing, I watched the pieces of tire get chewed up off of my tire and fall onto the ground.
Always grease the tire before you use the machine to try and put it onto or take it off of a rim.
So probably for the next hour and a half or 2 hours, I waited while he tried to find another tire. And of course, since he was the main guy, he kept having to stop and answer his phone and stop and talk to other customers, which was why it took 2 hours. In the end, I just had him put the same tire back on. The part that he had ruined wasn’t the part that actually holds the air pressure, so it’ll probably still hold air just fine. It’s just… I don’t want a tire that’s been chewed up like that.
But at least we got out of there with a rim and wheel studs, so we could get everything put back together and be on our way.
Or so I thought.
The nearly 3 hours that we spent at the junkyard elicited many of the same feelings that I was having the night before, about every decision that I make going sideways.
It was the logical thing to do to go to that junkyard and get parts because nobody else had parts. But then he damaged the tire, then his tire machine broke, then he tore the Valve stem. It was just one thing after another.
But we were finally on our way at somewhere around noon or 12:30 or something like that.
From there, we went to the Walmart because they only had one Walmart in all of Durango, and we didn’t want to have to backtrack, and My Walmart app said that they had the vegan Mayo that my mom usually buys. So we went to the Walmart, grabbed the stuff, grabbed some comfort food for me and my ailing emotional mental health, grabbed some more ice, and headed to the O’Reilly’s That was was right next to The Walmart.
The reason for going to O’Reilly’s instead of AutoZone was that O’Reilly’s had the wheel stud installation tool that I needed.
I own the tool myself, and there was a point where when I was going through my tools to take everything on the trip, that I actually picked up that tool, looked at it, and was like there’s no way I’m going to need this. It’s just a little tiny tool, but I use it probably less than once a year as a professional mechanic. I thought, what are the odds that I’m going to need this on the trip. So I didn’t bring it.
Gratefully, O’Reilly’s carried the tool in stock. It was twice the price of what I paid for it, but at least they had it.
I set myself a goal to be done in an hour, which was perhaps optimistic, and definitely so 10 minutes later into the job when I learned something important:
The wheel studs that we got from the van in the junkyard didn’t fit.
😶
Are you kidding me?!?!?!
So then I thought to myself, okay, maybe we can find some other wheel studs that will work, that aren’t specifically for this make and model of vehicle, but maybe close enough.
So we looked and looked, the O’Reilly’s gentleman and myself, trying out a couple of wheel studs before finding one that was the same thread pitch, roughly the same length, and only two thousandths of an inch wider than what the original OEM one was.
I figured that if I was going to go with a different size than the original, better to go 2000s of an inch larger than the original than 2,000th of an inch smaller.
So I brought one out to the van, used the tool that I just bought to install it, and it installed relatively easily.
🥳
So I bought another seven of them, grateful that they had a sufficient number in stock, and I also bought a handful of lug nuts because I knew that when I went to take everything back apart even more of the wheel studs were going to snap in half, leaving the nuts on the broken studs, so I wasn’t going to be able to reuse the nuts.
To that point, despite my mental health being crap, I had managed to hold it together through everything that went sideways at the junkyard, and then everything that had gone sideways still at the O’Reilly’s. But when I was getting everything back together, and trying to torque the wheels down to the proper torque, my torque wrench didn’t seem to be working properly, not clicking when it was supposed to, which put me at risk to significantly over tighten the lug nuts.
And that was it for me. I just completely melted down. With my baseline at overwhelm from the moment I wake up anyway, it was pretty much a miracle that I managed to hold it together to that point, but then when I melted down, I melted down super badly.
I don’t even think I’ve listed all of the things that went sideways over the last few days. It was just uncanny how nearly everything that I touched went to crap. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m so emotionally unstable right now and melt down at the drop of a hat it would be the stuff of slapstick comedy to have everything go bad, everything goes sideways everything go wrong that can go wrong. I know that’s a bit of an overstatement, but at the same time, it’s not.
To add insult to injury, somehow, and I have no idea how, one of the coolant bottles that I had bought had a little tiny cut and was leaking coolant. I didn’t realize it until I went to grab the jug to move it, and ended up with liquid all over my hand. It took a little while before I figured out where it was coming from, but it was just… One more thing.
How?!?! How can so many things go wrong, go sideways?
By that point I’d melted down so badly Dad A grabbed my sledgehammer and was just beating one of my tool bags That still had tools in it.
My mom tried to intervene and shake me back to reality by grabbing my shoulder firmly, but I wasn’t in a space to be receptive at all, telling her multiple times to not touch me.
My poor mom has had to endure watching me melt down and struggle for months/ years, and the worst of it being the last few months, all the while she wasn’t bothered at all by by having to be delayed with the mishaps with the vehicle that were almost all my fault.
She was totally fine, happy-go-lucky unconcerned, and I was completely melting down, and all she wanted to do was help, but my mental health just can’t hack dealing with all of this stuff.
My response to her was forceful enough that she went to take a walk while I finished up and then cleaned up.
Once we got back underway, my mom and I had a difficult conversation, as we drove away from Durango up highway 550 toward our first real Scenic stopping place.
Gratefully, despite conversations being difficult and painful, my mom and I have been able to have many of them, and we always are able to come through the other side the better for it. At least from my perspective.
By the time we made it up to South Fork Mineral springs Creek, we were in good spirits and enjoying the beauty of the surroundings.
Mountains are my home. Waterfalls are my heaven.
We followed instructions from a guy that we found online for how to get to the waterfall, park the van, and took the short little hike down one fork of the creek over to the turquoise waterfalls.
It was gorgeous.
We hiked to the bottom of the falls first, and then slowly made our way up each Cascade, getting increasingly spectacular views as we saw the falls from different angles, and then even more falls. When we were about to head back to the van, and we had the choice to either head back or go one more level up to see what might be there, my mom suggested that we go one more level up, and I’m glad we did. Normally I’m the one to make those decisions, but I was tired and just a bit beat up on all accounts, but we went up to yet another level, and were rewarded with what, for me, was the best of all the waterfalls. It was a triple Cascade, one to our immediate left, one down below us about 20 ft, and one off in the distance probably 75 yd or so. Turquoise pools of water at the bottom of each falls. It was absolutely gorgeous.
We hung out and enjoyed it, taking pictures and marveling at the beauty before heading back to the van.
Given that we now had a mostly self-contained vehicle, we didn’t have to look for a campsite with a bathroom. And so my mom suggested that we just stay right there where we had parked Rover. So I adjusted Rover just slightly to make it level, and we stayed there for the night.
It had been an absolutely beautiful drive from Durango. That’s definitely one of my favorite mountain passes to drive. And once we left the 550 and headed down Forest Road 589, I think it was, the vistas just got better and better. The dirt road followed a crystal clear Mountain River, one of those shallow ones that’s decently wide, past Beaver dam after Beaver dam after Beaver dam in little valleys, with campers here and there having parked their cars and set up tents in random, beautiful places.
It was just lovely.
I hadn’t yet worked for just answer well on the trip, so I decided to get starlink going and do a little bit of work, but it wasn’t reliable at all. 😕
Granted, the little dish was facing about the worst direction it could have been facing, per the orientation guide on the app, but my experience in the past had been that even pointing it straight up at the sky you would at least get more internet connectivity than we had at our house, but sometimes it was 60 MB, and sometimes it was nothing at all, and eventually, it was pretty much just nothing at all.
So that didn’t work for me spending some time actually making some money for a change, and I eventually just gave up for the night. I spent the rest of the night finishing up the journal entry for Monday, and then closing my eyes and drifting off to sleep.
It’s so nice to be back in my Haven. My home. My gorgeous mountains. My pristine waterfalls. 😊
Being out here this time is, along with everything else that’s been going on, I think pushing me to move back West.
I absolutely love the storms and the wilderness, the forests, the creatures in Arkansas, but I can never enjoy my Havens the way I want to because I always have to be on the lookout for ticks and chiggers.
I can’t just sit down in the grass and enjoy where I’m at.
But where do I go?
Most of the West is high desert. I don’t like high desert. I don’t like desert at all. I want trees and Forest and rivers and streams, but I also want the mountains.
It’s all the same problems as it’s always been, of course.
Most of the places out west are either desert or crowded or far too cold for my liking for far too long.
I want to be that where there are forests and rivers and mountains, but where I don’t hear the noise of the road–ever–and where I don’t see a single man-made structure (Not even my own home).
(sigh)
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 