One morning this past week, a dump truck and I crested the same hill from opposite directions and shifted up simultaneously, from the crawling grind of climbing to the gravitational release of the descent. I've shared the road rhythms of dump trucks a lot over the years. Even a racing cyclist has more in common with them than with sports cars. A commuter or a tourist on a loaded bike is definitely close kin, at least when the truck is loaded as well.
On the long grade climbing the north slope of Route 28, the slow grind of dump trucks has allowed me to tuck in behind them and draft at 50 mph for the rest of the way to town, once we passed the height of land. It's deadly dangerous if anything goes wrong. If there's a dropped piece of firewood or other debris in the roadway, the truck will clear it, but if the cyclist t-bones it you'll do the human crayon in a big red smear. It's a stupid habit, but that's true of many addictions and labor-saving actions. As long as you get away with it, it's useful as well as fun. As soon as you don't, you have no one to blame but yourself for whatever condition you end up in after impact. Fortunately, age has slowed me to the point where I can seldom make the jump even into the wake of a big, slow truck on the highway. I still use the draft of large vehicles and the safety zone they create in town traffic whenever possible.
Because heavy trucks and bicycle riders share similar challenges of power to weight ratio, we settle into similar shifting patterns responding to terrain. The big motor vehicles perform over a much wider span of speed in most situations, but on mountainous roads I have passed them on descents where I was better able to handle the curves. Just don't be in the way when the road straightens out, because big brother truck is going to take full advantage of gravity then. They'll mow you down in your car, let alone on a bicycle. You're probably better off on a bicycle, because it's easier to squeeze out of the way and let the monsters run.
It was strangely companionable to share that simultaneous shift. I'm sure that the truck driver didn't notice me at all. There was no need to.
COVID REINFECTION?
And then there's this: I don't know if it should have been the lead item or a subhed, but trainee Dave was a bit under the weather last week. We haven't seen him at all except when he came in to work on his race bike because he wanted to drop in at the local training race series that night. Other than that he's been too busy or too sick or too well-paid humping brush for a tree service to bother with our paltry needs. He had called in sick every day we needed him, so we asked him what he'd had. He said that, based on his symptoms, he figured he'd had a breakthrough case of Covid, rendered merely uncomfortable because he is fully vaccinated. His unvaccinated girlfriend, whose anti-vax family had all been slammed with it months ago, got slammed again by whatever Dave had. If it was Covid, her immunity from having had it didn't hold up worth a crap. But because we really don't do medical research as thoroughly as we could in this country, there is no comprehensive testing program to determine who had what when. We lose a crap ton of data every day on every medical subject just because we don't scrub personal identifiers off of patient reports and then mine them for very useful case study information.
AND A SAD FAREWELL:
I happened on an item reporting that the legendary Harris Cyclery, long the headquarters for retro ingenuity, and all things Sheldon Brown, was closing. I was heretical enough to disagree with Sheldon on a few things, but no one could deny that his work represented an invaluable resource to anyone interested in the minutiae and healthy functioning of 20th Century bicycles. He did last into the 21st, but was gone before the flood tide of expensive disposability rendered a great deal of his research obsolete. I have not seen how or if his website will be maintained or his Library of Alexandria might be saved from destruction. Even after his death, Harris maintained one of the best cog-farming operations in the business for creative cassettes, and preserved the ethic of long-term ownership and investment-quality goods. No wonder they couldn't keep it up.
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