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Issue of 2003-02-17 & 24. John McPhee later wrote a sequel.

On a grade at Hot Lake, however, he tried fifteenth gear, and his foot had to graze the pedal. He seemed annoyed with himself, like a professional golfer who had chosen the wrong club.
The escarpment was so steep that the median widened from a few feet to one and a half miles as the northbound and southbound lanes negotiated independent passage.

"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." <> This is what raised the thumbs et cetera: a tractor of such dark sapphire that only bright sunlight could bring forth its color, a stainless-steel double-conical trailer perfectly mirroring the world around it.
Ainsworth uses tire blackener in the way that some people use lipstick.
To Don Ainsworth, the magnet was just a magnet. But the truck—the tractor! "It was a Kenworth—olive and glossy—with an olive trailer, a sharp-looking rig."

who carried paint thinner, washed, and then picked up wine. He said, "Your brother better be F. Lee Bailey if you're going to engage in practices like that."
"You clean out cement mixers with sugar and water."
He had a chemical dictionary in his truck to help tank washers break down any unusual product he might be carrying.
Hard liquor is a Class 3 hazmat. Depending on its proof, it is either combustible or flammable. The Glenlivet is combustible. Beefeater is flammable.
Clear fuel is the only fuel you can legally burn on the highway. Red-dye fuel is maritime fuel, farm fuel, or for use in stationary engines.

He became the editor-in-chief of Screw Machine Engineering, a magazine whose name a hyphen would have improved.
he explained the time zones of the United States. "There's four time zones with an hour's difference between them," he said. "Spread your four fingers. There's three zones between them."
They seemed to come up out of the landscape like cell-phone towers. On I-85, George Plimpton: "Is he head of the Paris Review today?" On I-40, William Styron: "He really knows his cured ham." Esquire materialized on I-640 in Knoxville: "I don't know how you can run a man's magazine if you're a lady."

'A Fleet of One' from The New Yorker