Take the Backroads Home: Part 2

One of my high school buddies was an instigator who drove racecars. There was a narrow gravel road that led from just south of the previously mentioned spook bridge, passed the blueberry plantation into the west edge of Lapaz. It had two sharp turns within a few hundred feet of each other. These are formally known as Michigan Road Land Section corrections which are only located along Old US 31/Michigan Road between about Fulton, Indiana and South Bend, Indiana. It was in this corridor that sections of land were surveyed and sold for the construction of the Michigan Road in the early 1830s. Because these were sectioned prior to full surveys of counties, section lines didn’t align, but to align roads on section lines, the roads were required to have abrupt right angle turns. Sometimes these are 100 feet or a few hundred feet apart. The blueberry plantation road’s correction turns were far enough apart to allow one to build up speed and complete what my racecar driver friend called holeshots where one would take the curve, step on the gas, and throw gravel out of the hole like gunshot, hence, hole-shot. The beauty was to be able to do this in repetition with right angle turns. The old Chevy pick-up performed hole-shots very well.

I commuted to classes at Bethel College, having purchased a Pontiac Grand Am using some of the cash tucked into my graduation cards. When I wasn’t in a hurry to get home, I drove one of two parallel back routes with US 31. One was Oak Road, which led down from Sumption Prairie southwest of South Bend. The other was Miami Trail, which led southeast from South Bend to Bremen. Oak Road was a more substantial detour for me, but Miami was often my routine for staying off 31. Miami Trail was, as the name implies, a trail used by the Miamis long before the days of white men driving Pontiacs. The road has subtle curves and is a beautiful drive with large, historic farms. It also rides the ridge of the north-south continental divide shaping the division of waters running into the Great Lakes versus into rivers that eventually go to the Gulf of Mexico. From Miami Trail, I turned at Huff’s Cemetery at a four-way stop, and headed west on First Road, passing my grandparents old farm on muck land they had used to grow mint, even having their own mint distillery. This route took me just east of home, having managed to avoid highways for all but the last half mile. Often were the times that I would roll my windows down, turn the radio up, and chomp away at a crisp apple from a bag I picked up at Mac’s Market in Lapaz. Still today, some songs will take me back to that drive and my mouth waters thinking of apples.

That other route on Oak Road, rose in my routine staying off 31 while at Andrews University in Michigan. It was an easy off-ramp for me while driving the 31 bypass around the southwest side of South Bend. I could jump off at Mayflower Road and continue onto my route. The route to Sumption Prairie is a very old road, leading southwest out of South Bend to a loosely organized community of old farms, a few churches, a school, and even a post office at one time. It had rich agricultural land, which as the name implies, was a prairie. The prairie takes its name from the first to settle that area, Mr. George Sumption, who cut and stacked logs for a cabin on the prairie in 1830. The route, like many routes prior to formal organization of county roads, has sweeping curves and some fabulous old homes built before the Civil War. The road takes a direct south route at Sumption Prairie Cemetery, but traverses hill and vale, through some old growth forests and past Potato Creek State Park’s east boundary.

The Oak Road route was one our family would occasionally take home from Potato Creek where we would go for picnics or just drive through late Saturday afternoons to look for deer. That seems so strange now when I see deer out my window daily. Potato Creek was established in the mid-1970s but had been lobbied for several years prior. The creek was dammed, and lake created as the focal point to the park. It consumed old family farms, including one of my ancestral farms, and wraps into its boundaries a cemetery in which they are interred.

I was rarely in a rush to get home on Friday afternoons, so Sumption Prairie to Oak Road was my go-to route. By my last year at Andrews, because of a stash of cash I had accumulated the summer before, I went a little crazy and bought a new black Mustang GT. It handled terribly on snowy roads but was a real joy to drive fast on highways and slow down county roads. A friend was driving it once while I was shotgun when we were pulled over for speeding. The officer asked, between you, me, and that fencepost over there…how fast can this thing go? I shrugged my shoulders.