#TBT: Mad Max Feary Ride

The first in what I hope becomes a series of Throwback Thursday posts where I can comment on events of this odyssey that I didn't have the time or the tech to post anything when they actually happened. This whole blog is a week behind on average, but some of these TBT stories go back much further than that. Today's is two months old.

So without further ado...

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At first it sounds like the wind. A strong yet distant wind, welling up far behind you. But thrumming underneath it there's this deep, rumbling basso growl. If you've never heard it before you'll never identify it, and if you have heard it before, you'll never forget it. It's closer now and gaining fast, growling louder and louder. You look over your shoulder, certain it's close enough to see. You need to know how close it is because you need to know when to get the hell off the road. It's when you don't see it that you realize it's much farther than you thought, much louder than you thought, much, much bigger.

Then you see the dust. The monster pushes a wall of wind as it roars along, and when you finally see its headlights, it's as if a dust storm glares at you with unblinking yellow eyes. You still can't see the monster itself, but every Tasmanian you've spoken to has warned you about it. It's a logging truck, and they were right to worry about you. 

A single tire of this truck is four feet tall. It has fifty of them. Each tree trunk it carries weighs more than an SUV. It hauls not one trailer but two, and because it has two, there's no point in swerving to avoid you and your bicycle. Jackknifing the truck will kill you as surely as a head-on collision. 

These trucks are wider than a highway lane. Logging roads are spaghetti-thin by comparison, just wide enough for the trucks to be able to turn. The drivers know better than to jam on the brakes when they see you; these trucks are straight out of Mad Max, and they don't exactly stop on a dime. So they won't brake, they won't dodge, they just barrel on. The rest of us can only get out of the way.

If you've been biking all day you've got a nice surface coat of sweat going, which means the stormfront leading the truck will spray-paint you with dust. After the truck passes, it still takes about half a minute for the dust storm to die down--plenty of time for a nice, even coat over your entire body. Did you close the cap on your water bottle? If not, that'll have a new flavor and texture for you.

I can't tell you how much I wish I had video of one of these things passing me on a dusty road. It really does look like Mad Max. But I didn't dare stand close enough to film it. I had half a mind to cover Booster in sharp, rusty spikes, just to flatten one of those tires if it ever flattened me.