Respect, safety are the rules of the road

As I stood at the Tesoro station this afternoon, pumping gas into my Jeep “Red,” enjoying the beautiful sunshine, I spotted a father and his young daughter zipping by on a side-by-side. I stood there filling Red, thinking back to sixth-grade. My friends all had three-wheelers, and man did I envy them.

But Dad hated them. Said they “tore up the land” and ruined everything and no way were we ever going to own one. So whenever I could, I would pal around with buddies that had one. Greg was especially lucky, because he had the largest three-wheeler on the market: the humongous Honda “Big Red.” At 110cc it was the biggest, baddest ATV you could get. That is, until Suzuki came out with the 125.

Two cousins that lived down the road shared a brand new, yellow Suzuki 125, and it was clearly a far superior machine to Greg’s feeble 110. But then, no sooner did the 125 hit the market when an odd, never-been-seen before ATV hit the scene. The truck driver that lived down the road bought two of them as soon as they hit the market in Anchorage. They were also Suzukis but they were red and had four wheels.

What an odd set-up! Why? What was the point? (It wasn’t until later that the danger of three-wheelers started to hit the press and kill them off virtually overnight.) He and his wife didn’t have any kids, so they would frequently let me ride them around. I was in heaven. Dad would just sneer, so I always drove them around the neighborhood in the opposite direction from our house.

The years went by and I did the back-and-forth thing from my Dad’s house in Wasilla to my mother’s house in Washington. One summer, during a time I was living in Washington, I came up to visit Dad and – well I’ll be! Sitting behind the house was a teeny, tiny little 50cc four-wheeler.

My little brother, Paul, bought one using his PFD. And so that summer, while Mom and Dad were at work, Paul and I rode the tar out of that diminutive little thing. I didn’t care, still loved it.

Came back up the summer after that and, yep, now Dad had a garage full of ATVs. Guess he thought differently now about “tearing up the land.”

I think the deciding factor was a couple years of putting feed etc. into the horses that he had bought to ride out to his cabin. Turns out ATVs cost a lot less to own and operate.

And so I was now spending my time riding all over the Valley on all those trails we see alongside the road. Stop at intersections to make sure a car wasn’t coming. Stay off the road unless you absolutely have to cross, in which case stop, look and hurry across. Take it slow, especially when the trail cuts across the front of somebody’s property, and take it easy on their driveway.

I don’t know if Dad pounded that into my head, or if I just did it all out of common sense.

As life took me all over, one of the things I always missed was the freedom to hop on a quad and drive wherever in Alaska. It was one of the many things I looked forward to when we returned here.

But I gotta ask: has the time come for more rules and regulations regarding all these trails? Before you blow a gasket at that question, keep in mind that nobody is more against endless rules and regs governing every little bit of our lives than me. It’s one of the things I couldn’t stand about living in Washington state, where they probably have statutes regarding how you wipe your backside. So this is a genuinely depressing thought for me to have.

But remember way back to grade school where all it took was one or two dipsticks to ruin it for everybody? It’s kind of like that.

Remember that father and daughter I mentioned earlier? That dude was driving almost as fast as the cars on the road, bouncing up and down and rocking from side-to-side. No helmets. Not one on him, not one on his daughter. And when he reached the pull-in to the gas station he just zoomed right across, never slowed, looked or stopped.

I can’t remember the last time I drove down Knik-Goose Bay Road in the summertime to visit my Uncle Mike and didn’t see somebody on a dirt bike, quad or side-by-side ripping down the side of the road kicking up a dirt plume so high that the cars had to slow until they regained visibility. A dirt bike jumping onto the road in front of a car, screaming along the pavement for a bit before darting back off again. Mud and dirt flinging and wafting up and over the fences those homeowners have put up next to the trail, probably for that very reason.

What’s going on? Is it a different culture now where people just don’t care? Or has the Valley just become so big that there are now a ton of ATVs, too many?

I don’t have all the answers, but it’s an interesting and worthwhile discussion to be sure. It seems clear that we have to find ways to balance the freedom we enjoy as Alaskans riding ATVs with the rights of property owners and safety on the other. Maybe those old rules about respect for the land and basic safety that my dad taught me are a good place to start.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist. Contact him at bcompton1971@yahoo.com.