Taking Back Our Town

A strange and surreal phenomenon has been building in our town. It started during Covid lockdowns. Though our state wasn't nearly as locked down as others, locals got antsy and decided to revive a tradition from their teenage years—the Friday night Main Street cruise.

I'm sure it was fun and healthy at first, a way to be with friends, relieve pressure from being indoors with nothing to do, and relive the '80s. Over the years, however, the racket has become a neighborhood nuisance, and the city council has tiptoed around placing some restrictions. Police have been present, and from the beginning, participants have been cited for tricks like burning rubber. Yet the event is still popular with some residents, a handful of whom bring lawn chairs onto the sidewalks to get a comfortable view of the spectacle.

I suspect that the activity evolved into a local method of thumbing noses at the long trajectory of our town as an expensive tourist destination. It's a noisy expression of the resentment that has been building since our home values have shot up, with the median value at nearly $600,000 in our area, without a comparable rise in salaries.

As a cruise outsider, I don't fully understand the attraction. To my jaundiced eye, it looks like this: while enjoying a cold, sweet confection outside the ice cream parlor on a warm Friday night, an old sedan roars past at ear-damaging decibels, startling customers and making babies cry. Your brother comments, "Where can I find a 2008 Toyota Camry?"

Participants get creative in their garages with their welders and paint, and you see bizarre contraptions speeding by too fast to fully digest what you've just witnessed. There are truly fancy rides—shiny trucks, classic cars with special paint jobs. Yet I've seen an old car with no hood, the engine fully exposed. Once, a long vehicle—made by splicing cars together—zoomed past my daughter and me on a side street. The metal Frankenstein beast was splashed with American iconography, and the driver enrobed in what looked like a flag. And this was immediately after I'd said to my daughter, "You live in a strange area."

Now the event is no longer confined to Friday nights, and it has spilled over from Main Street. If I'm anywhere near downtown, any night of the week, there's constant revving of motorcycles and riders doing stunts on public streets. I daresay there's some drag racing happening, with what feels like minimal police presence. It's like Mad Max out there. One evening during our long, late Montana dusk, I witnessed two motorcycles riding wheelies near our bypass entrance.

The overview sourced from our local paper bears me out:

[The cruise is] a popular, unorganized Friday night summer ritual where locals cruise down Main Street in classic cars, trucks, and hot rods. Originating in 2020 as a safe community parade, it currently faces friction with downtown residents and police over reckless driving, loud exhaust, and burnouts.

The weekly Friday night event operates primarily as a grassroots gathering. While a nonprofit organization officially hosts a few sanctioned events throughout the year, the summer parade itself is unorganized.

Due to complaints regarding excessive noise, tire screeching, and safety hazards, the . . . Police Department routinely monitors Main Street. Police conduct an increased number of traffic stops and citations during the summer. Despite these concerns and discussions at the City Council, community groups continue to work with participants to preserve the tradition without harming local businesses or nearby residents.

Here's an excerpt from a recent article:

During a city council meeting Monday night, [the city] Police Chief . . . said since May the department has made roughly 180 traffic stops downtown during the cruises, issued around 80 traffic citations, made multiple arrests for reckless driving, and has towed multiple vehicles. The department has increased staffing this year to a minimum of four officers downtown Friday night to help with traffic enforcement, he said.

“We focus on dangerous driving behavior,” [the chief] said. “Our officers are not there to stop cruising in general. People have every right to drive up and down the roads lawfully. They’re there specifically to focus on reckless behavior, moving violations, stop signs, speeding, careless driving, those types of infractions are our focus. And we have seen an impact over the last, I would say, month to six weeks.”

Examples of reckless driving, he said, include when someone is peeling out or spinning through parking lots, or other unsafe driving behavior that appears to be intentional.

Police officers also hand out citations for engine revving, also known as engine racing, which is against city code, and rolling coal, which involves deliberately blasting thick clouds of exhaust. Whether officers issue a citation depends on factors such as if the alleged offense is significant enough to impact others’ driving, [the chief] said.

Despite the increase in officers on the ground, however, [the chief] said he believes reckless driving incidents have largely gone underreported. While the police department has had reports of some “near misses,” in the last two months, the police department has only received six complaints of reckless driving on Friday nights, he said.

“I’ve worked on Friday nights,” he said. “There are plenty more that should be called in.”

I hadn't heard of "rolling coal" until several years ago. My daughter and I were walking in a lovely tree-lined neighborhood with historic homes, and on it a truck was putting out all this black exhaust. I had to text my brother to ask him what it was. Was there something wrong with his vehicle? Nope. It was "rolling coal." The black cloud was so bad, I believe we ended up having to switch streets.

Obviously, not everyone is bothered by the trend. My niece visiting from California had been playing with some neighbor kids and informed me and her mom that the twelve-year-old boy probably liked her. "How do you know?" we asked. She listed off a few examples. And then she added: "And, he invited me to go with him downtown to get ice creams and watch the cruise together." This kid racked his brain for what might appeal to my niece, and he came up with this proposal for a dream redneck date. She would have loved it, too.