Slide rules of engagement

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

My winter sport is driving. I’m not entirely sure when I developed this weird affinity, but I suppose it began when I took drivers’ ed during the legendary Winter of ’96. 

For the benefit of the newcomer, this was the winter when the snow fell so heavily that it collapsed the roof of the Sandpoint High School auditorium and we kids were out of school for a month. It grew so cold that I can remember shoveling the roof at my childhood home in Sagle and hearing the trees popping in the forest. 

Don’t be this guy. Courtesy photo.

At one point, the weather warmed and turned our corner of the world into a slurry of slush. Just as suddenly, it froze again. This was the “ice storm” phase of that winter, when the power lines from here to Spokane became encased in sheaths of ice and snapped, delivering many thousands of area residents into an extended period of pre-smartphone darkness.

Amid all this I was learning to drive — more accurately, I was learning how not to slide through stop signs and end up in the ditch on the inch-thick sheets of black ice that coated the roads. To call this terrifying is to understate just how treacherous it felt to pilot the enormous old Buick that we used for practice driving. That boat had more chutzpah under the hood than power steering fluid and our teacher was fond of tapping the secondary brake pedal installed on the passenger side, sending us into a sickening slow-motion drift toward oblivion. 

That I grew to love full-contact winter driving is perhaps no surprise, as I think back on the 1987 Toyota Tercel hatchback that I drove to and from Sagle in all manner of weather. The first new car that I can remember in my family, it came down to me in my junior year of high school, though by then it was anything but new. The manual transmission handled like a 1940s Italian tank; to get to fourth you had to downshift from third to second, then skip third altogether. 

When the snow flew and the ice built on South Sagle Road, getting up Reed’s Hill became a daily feat of derring-do. With my little brother in the passenger seat, we’d grit our teeth and build speed on the straightaway, the car bucking and skittering all the while and requiring the finesse of a concert violinist to keep it from flying off into a farmer’s field. 

To keep our nerve, we sang “The Flight of the Valkyries,” from Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, until we hit the base of the hill at full tilt. Then it was a deft yet vigorous power downshift from fifth to third as we began our ascent. The Toyota would jutter and groan under the strain until we made the first curve and it started to flag. At that point, second gear would have to get us to the top, though by then our approach speed had dissipated in a slushy wake. Pure horsepower and delicate maneuvering were all we had left.

Only once did the Toyota fail to surmount Reed’s Hill. Just before the final push, the old girl got seized by a hidden rut and we bogged down on the shoulder. Desperate not to go fully into the ditch, I spun the wheel and we corrected into the lane, but inertia had taken hold. Our wheels spun and spun, yet we noticed we were going backwards — that is, sliding down the hill in reverse toward a blind curve. 

I threw it into reverse and went with the slide, somehow managing to turn the beast fully around after a hair-raising moment when we slouched, powerless, sideways across both lanes. 

We made it on the second try — an experience that with hindsight contained some valuable life lessons: go fast only when necessary, go slow whenever you can, own the slide, don’t panic and try again. Most important: Be safe out there.