All Chip Sealed Roads Lead To Pullman

I have no doubt that I was violating some environmental law as I bled into the ditch last Saturday. But I didn’t think about that until much later. As I lay on the side of the road I pondered how much I hated chip sealed roads.
There is a high likelihood that all chip sealed roads lead to Pullman. There are few routes out of Pullman that are not chip sealed. When I left Pullman for Spokane on highway 27, I was looking at about 80 miles of chip seal.
Even those of you unfamiliar with the term are almost certainly familiar with the surface. One can travel many, many miles on chip sealed roads around here. If you’re like me and drive a low priced car that transmits every little road imperfection into the cab, then you know that many area roads are so rough that it makes conversation difficult. This is a consequence of a resurfacing practice called chip sealing.
When a road is deemed in need of resurfacing, an oil or asphalt is sprayed on it and the fresh oil is covered with gravel. The road is then re-opened to traffic and the gravel is gradually pressed into the new asphalt surface by the weight of cars driving on it. The excess gravel is removed by being flung into the air by tires and into windshields. You then call your glass repairman who injects some sort of resin into the damaged windshield to prevent the damage from spreading, thus the name, chip seal.
At least that’s how I think the name arose. Don’t quote me unless you want to get in trouble.
But as bad as driving on a chip sealed road is, it is pure pleasure when compared to riding a bike on such a road. The roughness creates a shudder that is sent straight up the seat tube and into the rider’s fanny. Shockwaves are conducted up the fork and through the handlebars so that the hands and shoulders ache. That alone would make riding on chip seal exhausting, but it is exacerbated by the fact that chip seal causes so much rolling resistance that it’s like biking into a relentless headwind.
But as bad as all that is, nothing inspires a true hatred of chip seal like crashing on it. Last Saturday, I took a bad angle across some railroad tracks near Oakesdale and went down at 20 mph. One does not really slide across chip seal as much as one bounces off of it. The surface is just too rough for the human body to glide. I hit the pavement, bounced once, landed in the gravel on the side of the road and slid into the ditch. A pickup saw me go down. The driver slowed briefly, then after satisfying himself that enough life remained in my carcass that he could not steal my bike without a fight, accelerated away.
If that was you – thanks, I’ll never forget you.
Nearly two generations ago, I worked my way through college. One of my jobs was selling tires. It was not uncommon in those days for a good tire to last 50,000 miles. If one kept the tires rotated, properly inflated and maintained wheel alignment, 70,000 miles was not out of the question. That was before chip seal. Chip seal is like driving on sand paper. Tires are quite simply consumed. The practice may be the most cost effective for the highway department, but we all pay dearly for chip seal in worn tires and cracked windshields.
I’ve developed a system for scoring the area’s chip sealed roads that ranks them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 representing a horrendously rough road and ten describing a road so bad that there are no adjectives adequate to describe it in the English language. Actually, roads too awful for words start with number two. Yes, there is such a thing as a ten. You can find one just northeast of Moscow on Mountain View Road. That surface looks like the coarsest sandpaper imaginable, from the perspective of a mouse. The road I crashed on was a six.
I have never wanted to hold any political office other than absolute dictator. Should that happen, my first order of business shall be to prove my benevolence by banning chip seal.