“Six per cent is serious,” he said. “I’ve seen some sevens or eights. British Columbia drivers talk about tens and twelves.”

In two strategic places among the broad looping switchbacks were escape ramps, also known as arrester beds, where a brakeless runaway truck—its driver “mashing the brake pedal and it feels like a marshmallow”—could leave the road and plow up a very steep incline on soft sandy gravel. In winter, the gravel may not be soft. Ainsworth recalled a trucker in Idaho who hit a frozen ramp. His load, bursting through from behind, removed his head. On Cabbage Hill, deep fresh tracks went up an arrester bed several hundred feet. After trucks use a bed, it has to be regroomed. The state charges grooming fees. Some drivers, brakeless and out of control, stay on the highway and keep on plunging because they don’t want to pay the grooming fees. Ainsworth said, “Would you worry about your life or the God-damned grooming fee?”

He was asking the wrong person.

A little later, he said, “Bears will roost at the bottom here.”

“As board members, we need to speak with one voice. I’m suggesting Donald Duck.” Facebook

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Fulfilling the prediction, two cars were in ambush in the median where the grade met the plain. Wheat fields filled the plain—endless leagues of wheat, big combines moving through the wheat, houses far out in the wheat concealed within capsules of trees. We passed a couple of dry boxes, both of them Freightliners. Among truckers, they are universally known as Freightshakers. “What’s the difference between a Jehovah’s Witness and the door on a Freightliner?” Ainsworth said.

I said I didn’t happen to know.

He said, “You can close a door on a Jehovah’s Witness.”

We crossed the Columbia River and went over the Horse Heaven Hills into the Yakima Valley, apples and grapes in the Horse Heaven Hills, gators in the valley. To avoid a gator he swung far right, over rumble bars along the shoulder. A gator is a strip of tire, dead on the road, nearly always a piece of a recap. “A gator can rip off your fuel-crossover line, punch in your bumper, bomb out a fender.”

The Yakima River was deeply incised and ran in white water past vineyards and fruit trees, among windbreaks of Lombardy poplars. Hops were growing on tall poles and dangling like leis. There was so much beauty in the wide valley it could have been in Italy. Now, through high haze, we first saw the Cascades. On our route so far, no mountain range had been nearly as impressive. We had slithered over the Rockies for the most part through broad spaces. Now we were looking at a big distant barrier, white over charcoal green, its highest visible point the stratovolcano Mt. Adams. We met three new Kenworths coming east—three connected tractors without trailers. One was hauling the other two, both of which had their front wheels up on the back of the tractor ahead of them. They looked like three dogs humping. It was here that we were first passed by the scant bikini in an open Porsche, here that Ainsworth touched his horn for the second time on the journey. I was marginally jealous that he could look down into that bikini while I, on the passenger side, was served rumble bars in the pavement. I had long since asked him what sorts of things he sees in his aerial view of four-wheelers. “People reading books,” he answered. “Women putting on makeup. People committing illicit acts. Exhibitionist women like to show you their treasures. A boyfriend is driving. She drops her top.”

We skirted Yakima city. “ ‘Yakima, the Palm Springs of Washington,’ ” Ainsworth said. “That was written by a guy on laughing gas.” He reached for his CB microphone. “Eastbounders, there’s a pair of bears waiting for you. They’re down there right before the flats.” Now ahead of us was a long pull up North Umptanum Ridge. “We’re going to give ’em hell,” he said. In the left lane, he took the big tanker up to eighty-three, pressing for advantage on the climb. He was in the fast lane to overtake a flatbed hauling fifty thousand pounds of logs. The distance had almost closed; we were practically counting tree rings when the logging truck began to sway. It weaved right and then left and two feet into our lane. Ainsworth said, “Oh, my goodness!”

Ordinarily, I tend to be nervous if I am riding in a car driven by someone else. Like as not, the someone else is Yolanda Whitman, to whom I am married. On trips, we divide the driving time. I make her nervous and she makes me nervous. She was a student in bad-driver school in the same year that I was. While she is at the wheel, I sometimes write letters. I ask the recipients to “excuse my shaky penmanship,” and explain that I am “riding in a badly driven car.” Coast to coast with Don Ainsworth was as calm an experience as sitting in an armchair watching satellite pictures of the Earth. In only three moments did anxiety in any form make a bid for the surface. None had to do with his driving. The first was over the Mississippi River on the bridge to St. Louis—the big arch in the foreground, the water far below—where we seemed to be driving on a high wire with no protection visible beside us, just a void of air and a deep fall to the river. The second was in St. Joseph, where we swung through town on I-229 for a look at the Missouri River, and the narrow roadway, on high stilts, was giddy, a flying causeway convex to the waterfront. Falling down Cabbage Hill, concern for safety hadn’t crossed my mind. And now this big logger was bringing up a third and final shot of adrenaline. We got by tightly. The driver was smoking something.

The ridges were dry in that part of Washington—rainfall less than eight inches a year. At elevations under three thousand feet, the ridges were not notably high—certainly not with the Pacific Crest becoming ever more imminent at twelve, thirteen, fourteen thousand feet. We made another long pull, over Manastash Ridge, and drifted down from the brown country into another paradise of irrigation—instant Umbria, just add water. It was a dazzling scene, the green valley of hay, wheat, and poplars; and here the string bikini passed us again, goosed by the air horn and waving. By Cle Elum, we were pulling at the mountains themselves—less than a hundred miles from Seattle and approaching Snoqualmie Pass. Listening to his engine climb, Ainsworth called it “operatic.”

Ainsworth thinks his chemical tanker is at least as attractive as anything that could pass it in a car. He is flattered by the admiring glances it draws. He is vain about his truck. That day in particular had started in a preening mode— at a nylon-covered building called Bay Wash of Idaho, next to a beet field west of Boise, where we drew up soon after six and went off to have breakfast before the big doors opened at eight. Ainsworth will not go just anywhere to have his truck’s exterior washed. All over the United States and Canada, for example, are washes called Blue Beacon, and they are known among truck drivers as Streakin’ Beacon. Ainsworth passes them by. He insists on places that have either reverse-osmosis or deionized rinse water. He knows of three—one in Salt Lake City, one in the Los Angeles Basin, and Bay Wash of Caldwell, Idaho. To the two guys who washed the truck he promised “a significant tip” for a picture-perfect outcome, and he crawled in granny gear through the presoak acids, the presoak alkalis, the high-concentration soap, and warm water under such high pressure that it came through the seams of the windows. “They’re hand-brushing the whole critter,” he said admiringly a little later. And soon he was getting “the r.o. rinse” he had come for. Ordinary water dries quickly and spottily. This water had been heated and softened, sent through a carbon bed and a sand filter, and then introduced to a membranous machine whose function was distantly analogous to the gaseous diffusion process by which isotopes of uranium are separated. In this case, dissolved minerals and heavy metals failed to get through the semipermeable membranes of the reverse-osmosis generator. Water molecules made it through the membranes and on to rinse the truck, drying spotless. The Army and the Marine Corps use reverse-osmosis generators to go into swamps and make drinkable water. (Deionization is a different process but does the same thing.) Ainsworth paid sixty dollars and tipped fifteen. We were there two hours. “If you go into a Streakin’ Beacon, you’re going to be out in twenty minutes,” he said. “You see the amount of time we fuck around just manicuring the ship? If I were in a big hurry, I wouldn’t be doing it. Lord help us.” We were scarcely on the interstate rolling when he said, “This is as close as a man will ever know what it feels like to be a really gorgeous woman. People giving us looks, going thumbs up, et cetera.”