AMY KIRK: Husband is a regular Cowboy MacGyver

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If you’ve ever watched the hit TV show “MacGuyver” from the 1980s and early ’90s, then you have a good idea of what my husband is like — a handsome guy.

Not only does my spouse possess good looks and charm like MacGyver does, but he’s also ingenious in getting out of a bind with ordinary objects lying around.

He uses everyday stuff to come up with a plan no matter what kind of situation he stumbles into.

Besides their footwear and hairstyles, the only other difference between these two men is that MacGyver is calm, cool and even-tempered under pressure. Interestingly though, it was my husband’s spirited emotions that contributed to successfully getting us home when we had car trouble once.

While headed out for a date night in falling snow that got increasingly treacherous, our car’s weakening alternator caused the headlights to dim drastically and reduce our visibility to five feet. In the deserted parking lot of a restaurant in Rockerville and armed with a tire iron, my hero restored the headlights to their full brightness with a little help from his frustration. He banged on the battery and, miraculously, the headlights brightened up long enough for us to turn around and get back home.

When our pickup’s heater control knob broke off, it was a pair of pliers and a brass bullet casing rolling around on the floorboards that he used to replace the knob. It enabled us to resume arguing over where the heater knob should be set.

In the show, MacGyver is never without his Swiss Army knife. Similarly, my husband always has a wad of baling wire handy. This wire has aided our operation in many ranch-related predicaments but also held my old car’s headlight and battery in place for several years.

A good grease rag has proven invaluable as well. They can cover parts missing a cap or lid, plug a hole, tie things up, wrap greasy parts in, or blow one’s nose into. Other items that have helped my husband improvise his way out of dilemmas have included industrial strength tape.

It was trusty duct tape that sufficed as the driveline couplings in place of the real ones that were unavailable at the time of the manual transmission installation of a father-son ranch pickup project (now parked at our junkyard). Duct tape and tire patch adhesive also repaired a bicycle tire tube.

When a pickup tire got a hole in it, he remembered being told that adding antifreeze to the inside of the tire would seal the leak, which it did, so he didn’t have to take it to town.

Another time he used a thick rubber glove found under a pickup seat to stop a stock tank leak.

On our Forest Service lease, my Cowboy MacGyver siphoned water from an overfull stock tank into a secondary empty one using a flexible plastic pipe left behind after work had recently been done on the tanks.

My personal favorite improvisation was when our kids witnessed their dad’s quick thinking skills to kill a rattlesnake using a steel post he had in the pickup box.

My husband’s been able to improvise his way out of predicaments with whatever was handy and looked good doing it but the key item that has always relieved him of these experiences has been Excedrin.

— Visit Amy’s blog at www.amykirk.com, her website at www.ranchwifesslant.com, or follow her at @RanchwifesSlant on Twitter and A Ranchwife’s Slant on Facebook.

Tags: life, columns