Terry Tales

Coasting Home

There’s a narrow, two-lane ribbon of asphalt that stretches straight as a string west of the small town of Ronan. It dips into gullies and rises over a few modest hills, but stays mostly level on an 11-mile run to a deadend near the Flathead River. And there’s a large, roundish butte 7 miles out of town that gives the road, and the surrounding area, their names.

When my dad was a boy, Round Butte had an elementary school, a church, and a general store with a post office. The store had already gone by the time I attended the Round Butte school in the 60’s, and only the church remains in use today. My older sister, Linda, went to her 4H meetings in the church basement, and my younger sister, Laurie, was married there. The church and school faced each other on the Round Butte Road, making them the natural center of the roughly 20 square mile area where I grew up.

We lived on a gravel road that dipped slightly away from our driveway, and then rose steadily for almost a mile to its junction with the Round Butte Road. A right turn onto a gradual downhill slope led us to the school on a quarter mile of what seemed, to us, a glassy smooth surface. Sometimes, we’d ride our bikes up to the highway just to feel the marvel of pavement beneath our wheels, but usually we rode them to school.

It took 15 minutes of hard work to pedal our bicycles uphill, through crunching gravel, to reach the delightfully silent glide down to the school. The trip home, however, took only a bit of work on the asphalt to reach the turn onto our road. Then, we could make a glorious high-speed dash through the gravel with our tires dancing and skidding as we flew home in no time at all.

Riding in Dad’s ’57 Studebaker Hawk was even better. It was an aerodynamic car with a lot of power, and Dad enjoyed using it. Mom wasn’t as thrilled as we were when he’d drop the manual transmission into second gear and hit the gas to pass a slow vehicle on the highway. I don’t remember feeling scared, I loved the roar of the engine and the surge of acceleration as we won an imaginary race. Another game we liked Dad to play was ‘coasting home’.

We’d beg Dad to coast as we approached the Round Butte Hill. He’d get the Hawk revved up to around 90 mph, and then shift to neutral as we crested the steep hill. Our sleek car lost only a little bit of speed in the first quarter mile as we whizzed down the steep slope (I’m sure the tail fins helped). We’d still be cruising along at a cool 60 mph or so after a level half-mile when we reached a short, steep, uphill climb toward the school. We’d pass the school driveway on a 100-yard stretch of level road at a speed of maybe 30 mph. Then the suspense kicked in. Would we make it all the way to the left turn onto our road?

If our initial speed was too high, then we’d easily make the turn at 10 or 15 mph. That was okay, but a bit boring. If the initial speed was too low, Dad would have to put the car in gear to make it ‘over the hump’. But, if our speed was just right, we’d barely make it around the corner at 2 or 3 mph, and then gather speed for almost a mile on the downhill gravel road. Perfection was when Dad could pull into our driveway and park after coasting for more than two miles in neutral.