Autumn for Me

Everyone has a certain impression of autumn, a picture they hold in their mind’s eye. For a long time my impression of autumn was orange and yellow in the trees, the Attaché drinking hot tea, and people in scarves. Since moving to Austria my idea of autumn has evolved to include the chestnut vendor on the corner, Dachshunds in sweaters, and pumpkin cream soup. And now it’s changed again.

Austrian Law says you need two sets of tires, one set for winter, one set for summer. I can't say why Americans can get by with one set of car tires and Austrians need two sets, but it's a fact of life here and if you get in an accident in winter, and say, you're driving on summer tires, you're at fault. What does that mean to me? It means I drove for two years on summer tires before the Attaché found out and ordered me to get the right tires. This was last year and her diligence set us back $1500. Sounds pricey, I know, but not only did we need two sets of tires but because our existing tires were run-flat we found you need to have two sets of rims.  Do the math and you've got eight rims, eight tires, a spring tire change, and a fall tire change. Sometimes I feel like my life is just tires.

Auto shops advertise storage and changing of winter tires for around $150 per year, but all the shops near us have a five year waiting list for storage space. That puts the burden of storage on me. And the burden of storage is the story I’m about to tell. The burden of storage when you live in an apartment in the city is the burden of using your basement.

I don’t know how many apartments in Vienna come with basement storage. I’ve seen a half-dozen and they generally amount to a 4 by 6 foot caged space about a half-mile below the ground floor. They are dark, damp places, probably 500 years old, either brick or earth formed. Getting to your basement storage is probably a lot like a Chinese coal miner getting to work. You say good-bye to your loved ones and put your life in the hands of some long-dead engineer.

The Attaché refuses to enter our basement and I can’t blame her. She’s not too fond of small spaces, and on top of it, it looks like the kind of place where the Nazis might do human experiments or serial killers hide their bodies. It also smells kind of bad, a strange mix of electrical fire and piss. You can imagine the fun I have using the basement for storage of our tires. Getting into our basement amounts to nothing less than opening two keyed locks, five doors, and switching on six different lights. There are 22 descending steps, seven 90 degree turns, and one low hanging ceiling. The air is hot. There’s the rumble of HVAC machinery, and I sometimes get the feeling I’m heading into the boiler room on the Titanic. On top of it all, tires are filthy and for things that are mostly air they weigh a hell of a lot.

Guess it’s time to update that idyllic image of autumn. It’s not just wet leaves in the grass, November flurries, chimney smoke and farmers’ markets on my mind. When I think of autumn now I’ve got a stack of 195/55 R15s, a pinched finger, and a smelly basement. I think the picture below sums up my latest impression of fall.

Comments

[mark from nrc]

Snow tires, studded tires, change them in the winter and spring. Use chains if you don't have the tires. Storm windows with big heavy wooden frames. Visits to grandma in the coal country of southwestern PA...everything covered with the coal dust and ash used for gritting roads. Sounds like autumn in Vienna presages an old fashioned American winter.