Roller coasters ain't what they used to be

The red glaze is still on the mountains.

At this point the painter's done a bit of daubing--there's more texture. Individual trees with an almost-invisible color that just suggests the shape to come. As if the artist was playing with a cotton ball.

From the Arkansas flood plains through the hills and plateaus of Kentucky yesterday, and over the West Virginia mountains today. And I do mean "over."

One does see the country, at least.

I don't remember taking this stretch of Interstate before. The really interesting part was the 13-mile stretch of 6% downhill grade.* Occasional level spots, but mostly downhill.

That's more of a slope than it sounds. When I was young, the trip down would have involved a slow, careful, crawling pace and the sharp smell of overheated brakes. Even if the load was fairly light, like this one. The runaway truck ramps would be a source of gratitude even if you didn't have to use them this time.

Now? I dropped two gears and flipped two switches. One activated the jake brakes. The other set my cruise control at 45.

Then I just sat there. Every time the speed got close to 50, the cruise control engaged the jake. When the speed dropped a bit, it turned the jake off.

I never touched the brakes at all. I didn't have to.

"Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas" was based on a real incident. Not funny to the people involved. And not that atypical at the time, I understand. I've been taught how to avoid that kind of accident, and how to deal with it if the brakes do overheat and fail. But I've never even been close to having to deal with it for real.

Spoiled, we are.

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*For those who don't drive jeeps or 18-wheelers, a "percent" in this context means the percentage of a 1/1 slope. On a 1% grade, for every 100 feet you drive, you've gone downhill a foot. A 100% grade would be a 45-degree downhill slope.