Driver Finishes Untangling Tire Chains Stored Since April, Expects to Be Ready to Chain Up by Late May
The chains went into the side box last spring as two neat bundles. They came out in November as a single metal hairball with its own weather system.
A long-haul driver opened his side box this week to get his tire chains ready for mountain season and found that the two tidy bundles he packed away in April had fused over the summer into a single object roughly the size and temperament of a beaver dam.
"I coiled them. I zip-tied them. I said goodbye to them like they were family," the driver said, three hours into the job, holding what he believed was an end and was in fact a middle.
By the end of the first day he had freed one cross link, a bungee cord he did not remember owning, and a gas station sandwich wrapper dated sometime in July. The rest of the pile tightened every time he touched it, which colleagues described as normal chain behaviour.
At his current pace of about four links a shift, the driver expects to have a usable set by late May, shortly before the season ends. He has already booked the following September to put them away properly, a plan he has made every spring for eleven years.
Dispatch was supportive and asked whether he could chain up in the meantime "with whatever's ready." He has since been offered a load over the pass with a note that says "should be fine, chains optional, probably."
A fellow driver at the next pump offered to help, looked at the pile for a long moment, and went back to his own truck to check whether his chains had done the same thing. They had.