The Lessons Harvard Hasn't Taught Me

I hope that the people who were heading west from Denver on I-70 enjoyed my best efforts to entertain them. It was a Thursday night in late January, I had finished exams (why do I always have one on the last day?), made the flight home to Colorado, and was ready to enjoy a few days of intersession solitude in the Colorado Rockies. I didn't invite my family to come along-I wanted to be by myself in the mountains. So I packed up the car and headed out.

Interstate 70 is a beautiful highway, and even at ten o'clock at night, the snow crested mountains shimmered in the moonlight, and the frozen waterfalls peered down at me as I drove along. I reflected upon the last semester-I was feeling rather nerdy and decided to evaluate whether I had learned much since September. I concluded that I had; Harvard had taught me a great deal.

Bob Dylan kept me company on the stereo, and I was enjoying rolling up the mountain at 65 miles per hour when all of a sudden I heard a horrible grating noise. At first I thought it was just Bob Dylan's voice, but then the car began to rattle and shake (more than it usually does), and although I wasn't applying any pressure to the brakes yet, I was definitely slowing down.

I pulled over-as much as you can pull over on a road that is carved into the mountains-and prayed quickly before getting out of the car. I had taken a couple of steps when I smelled the burning rubber and before I got around to the back of the car I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, the rear right tire had blown.

Perhaps I should clarify the word "blown." When I say blown, I don't mean that I had a flat tire; I mean that I had no tire whatsoever in a place where I quite needed one. The only thing I had was a few shreds of burning rubber.

It is really a remarkable feature of human nature that in times of crisis our brains allow us to instantly access every single obscenity we have ever learned, including those in foreign languages, and then to shout them all in one continuous utterance.

The first problem (after the burning rubber), was the fact that I had been daydreaming and really had no clue where I was. Then I realized that it didn't really matter whether I knew where the hell I was or not-my car was crippled either way.

"Be a man," I thought to myself. I should have been more explicit and said, "Be a man, but not a Harvard man." I got back into the car and immediately did what any reasonable and emotionally sound person does when they get in to a bind: I called my mommy.

"Call triple-A," she said. "They'll come pretty quickly and they'll fix it all up."

I didn't have the guts to tell her that I didn't know where I was so even if I did want to call AAA I wouldn't be able to tell them where to come to help me.

Then my 17-year-old brother got on the phone. "Why don't you just put the spare on?" It hadn't really occurred to me yet. "If you call triple-A for this you're lame." He concluded, and then handed the phone back to Mom.

It is amazing how my younger brother knows just what to say to turn every life experience into an opportunity to prove one's virility. From the moment he hung up, he and I both knew that I would be changing the tire myself.

I opened my car door again and almost lost it as a SUV came zooming by-I stared at the rest of the oncoming traffic, half wishing that someone might think I looked pathetic enough to be worthy of assistance.

I went to the trunk and found the spare, jack and that wrench thingy that can double as a murder weapon in times of emergency. I had learned how to do this all a while back, but apart from the fact that the jack goes somewhere under the car and is somehow made to lift the car up, I didn't remember much. So I consulted the owner's manual, which is of course written, or rather drawn, in such a way that, whenever possible, coherent sentences are substituted with a shoddy drawing.

How hard could this be? I picked up the wrench and started to loosen the bolts. I loosened and loosened, and it only took me about five minutes to realize that there are plastic covers on each of the bolts. Damn plastic covers.

When the bolts were loosened I felt around under the car to find a place that felt sturdy enough to support the jack. I didn't find one, so I just put the jack about six inches under the rear passenger door. This particular jack was made to be compact, and because of this, it requires rotating a small lever for approximately 45 minutes in order to raise the car one inch off the ground. Eventually, I got the old wheel off, and I only sliced my right hand once while trying to remove the hubcap.

It wasn't until this point that I realized that the spare was closer in size to Harvard dining hall bagels than to the other tires. It looked like it belonged on a bike....a very small bike. What could I do? I put the spare on mounting, then searched around in the gravel for the bolts that I hadn't been smart enough to put somewhere safe, and finally I had tightened all of the bolts again. I wound down the jack, and packed everything back into the trunk, including, (for sentimental value,) the shreds of rubber.

I phoned my brother again to tell him of my success. "It took you this long?" he questioned.

I put the key into the ignition and started to put the car into gear when I realized that I had no desire to ride in or drive a vehicle on which I had performed any kind of maintenance work. I drove very slowly at first, quite convinced that my bicycle wheel would in all likelihood fall off. As I eased back into the evening traffic, I found solace in following a VW van trying to pull a U-Haul up the mountain. My mind began to wander again and I thought about all the things that Harvard hasn't taught me.

Daniel B. Baer is a social studies and Afro- American studies concentrator in Quincy House.