There's life in the slow lane

By JOHN HOWELL
Posted 10/1/20

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock . I had almost dialed out the sound but there it was. Ted switched on the hazards 30 minutes earlier after we joined the stream of traffic on the New York Thruway. The colorful fall foliage unfolded ever so slowly in front

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There's life in the slow lane

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Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock …

I had almost dialed out the sound but there it was. Ted switched on the hazards 30 minutes earlier after we joined the stream of traffic on the New York Thruway. The colorful fall foliage unfolded ever so slowly in front of us. We were seeing things for a first time on a stretch of highway we’ve traveled for years. We were creeping along, the broken white line establishing our lane clearly defined … tick tock, tick tock. I was seeing meadows, small, neatly tended farms and white clapboard houses with American flags flying and Trump signs. As we came ever so slowly to the Albany suburbs, residential neighborhoods gave way to office buildings, shopping centers and big box stores. I knew the buildings were there but until now I never really looked at them. At a constant 50 miles an hour you can see a lot.

“Shall I try 51?” Ted asked cautiously. That seemed reasonable, certainly not too risky. Bumping up the speed was a welcome thought. We’d get back to Rhode Island that much faster, maybe all of 10 minutes. Ted tapped the gas pedal. Amazingly, because a mile faster shouldn’t be noticeable, we both felt the difference. Perhaps we wanted everything to go faster that we convinced ourselves.

We anxiously waited to see if the added speed would affect the truck. We didn’t feel the sway of the trailer behind us. Ted set the cruise control. It would be 51 mph.

We had learned anything faster was flirting with … well, we didn’t know what, but we imagined the worst. Might the trailer swing into another lane? Might its load of freshly milled lumber fly across the road despite the heavy straps we used to tie it in place? Would the trailer get a flat, and if it did, how would we handle that?

After 20 minutes of 51, Ted nudged it up to 52. That was the threshold. Anything more than 52 and the trailer would start swaying. Had we been able to load the trailer to place more weight on the tongue, we would have been able to do at least the speed limit. That had been impossible with 16-foot beams and boards.

Ted gripped the wheel tightly, his senses honed for any troubling motion, engine complaint or road noise. This would be exhausting even though the chances of anything going wrong at 52 seemed remote.

All of this because a giant white pine was uprooted by a winter storm. It had fallen neatly between equally large oak and hickory. It never threatened the house and like so many other fallen trees could have been left to decompose into the ground from which it had grown. It was a beautiful specimen, straight and at least 70 feet long. Ted was intrigued. He’s been wanting to build a shed. The tree offered the potential for some heavy timbers. The arborist who has cleared fallen trees for us said he would cut the pine into lengths and haul them to a field where he would set up his portable mill. Milling a fallen tree from land we knew for a project appealed to both of us.

Everything was coming together, with moving the lumber 250 miles being the last step before construction.

I had not anticipated the anxiety of the trip. A 70-foot pine produces a lot of lumber. The two 12-by-12 beams we estimated at 400 pounds each, with the full load in the range of 4,500 pounds. That was a lot of lumber for the two of us to load and offload from a trailer, even with a volunteer we recruited for the loading.

The trailer was the unknown. Could it carry the load? Ted checked the leaf springs above the double axels. They weren’t flat, yet the trailer was low and one of its four tires looked soft. Friends at the nearby farm quickly remedied that. So, we were off. We experienced the first swaying barely two miles into the trip as we accelerated downhill. It grew increasingly violent – a tail wagging the dog – until Ted braked reducing our speed to 40 mph.

“Shall we go back and lighten the load?” Ted asked.

It seemed like an option, but abandoning good sense, we decided to test the limit. Where was the edge? Ted slowly picked up speed as we braced ourselves. It was going to be 52 mph, a fact we were reminded of at almost every hill – and there are many of them between upstate New York and here – when cruise control lost control.

Eventually, we resigned ourselves this was going to be a longer trip than usual.

It seems we’ve had to do a lot of that lately. There’s no immediate return to the pace and conditions that once were the norm. We keep testing the level of tolerance and are reminded when we’re going too fast.

We made it, but not without one scary moment when we came close to hitting a car merging from the right as Ted sought to reach the far lane in five lanes of merging traffic.

If there’s a message, it’s that even with careful attention to the details, we must also be ready for the unexpected. And just as important, when we take it slowly we can discover new things. And that, hopefully, is the silver lining to this pandemic that has us stuck in the slow lane.

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