The Jack and the Grass

The steppe collected its toll on day six: a slow rear flat, announced by that soft new wrongness in the steering you learn to hear before you can name it. I pulled onto the grass, unloaded the jack, and got under my own car in the middle of a green immensity containing no other human being to any horizon.

There is a particular satisfaction in being your own roadside assistance three hundred kilometers from the nearest tow truck. The Niva makes it easy, being a machine from an era that assumed its owner would lie beneath it regularly.

Twenty minutes, one skinned knuckle, one oil smudge worn afterward with frank vanity. I lay in the grass a while when it was done, looking up at the enormous sky from under my own sill, absurdly content. Self-reliance is a controlled substance. The steppe dispenses it freely.