Most of today’s ride was on very busy highways. However, mercifully, these highways also have awesome, wide, shoulders.
I’ve ridden next to many kinds of trucks on this journey, including coal trucks, grain trucks, logging trucks and, now, hay trucks. I’ve decided hay trucks are my least favorite. I think they generate more turbulence than other trucks, and I think this is because they are taller and have far more irregular surfaces. In addition, they seem to be more averse to giving cyclists room. Even on roads with a passing lane, they generally refuse to move over. On top of this, if they have just loaded up, they shed hay fragments in clouds that billow behind them, and passing cars continually kick it up.
But tomorrow I’ll reach the coast!
Here’s the story behind the tool finds. The guy I rode over Loveland Pass with, Tony Allen, is one of my oldest friends. In the early 1980s, he helped me get a job as a laborer, and we worked construction together, along with another friend I saw on this journey, Wayne Wieber.
One of my and Wayne’s first jobs was tying rebar together to build concrete footers. This was profoundly hard work. We stood bent at the waist for eight or more hours a day, in semi-frozen mud, with continually wet and cold clothes. The skin on my fingers cracked and inflamed, and I found that putting vaseline in my leather gloves kept the pain to a dull roar.
The only tools we had were a heavy aluminum wire spool holder that we belted around our waists, and a pair of pliers that are properly called “Linesman’s Pliers.” But nobody called them that. They called them “Kleins.” Not “Kleins Pliers” – just “Kleins.” Received wisdom was that the best ones were made by a company named Klein Tools, who still make them.
A few years ago, Tony’s brother, Chris, who is an avid cyclist (and who is also featured in this story — he’s the friend I stayed with at the very beginning, when I got to Washington, DC), found a pair of these pliers while riding his bicycle, and posted a picture on Facebook. This provoked a rush of nostalgia, taking me back to that era when Tony, Wayne and I worked together. I also realized I saw tools all the time when I was out riding, so I decided to start collecting them. I have hundreds now! I have kept almost all of them, and I post them on instagram with the hashtag #roadsidetoolfind.
On this journey, I mail them home when I get a few pounds of them, and today’s bumper crop will push me over the edge for the next package!
Leave a Reply