In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places. Details are at http://www.maplecornermedia.com/inthisstate/. Andrew Nemethy is a veteran journalist and editor who lives in Calais.
For 46 years, the “Home of the Coupes” has been hauling them in for a dose of Saturday night fever, down-home and dirt style.
A race track is an odd thing to put in the middle of nowhere, reached up a steep, winding notch-like paved road, then a quarter-mile on a dirt road deep into the puckerbrush in the hills above Bradford on the Connecticut River border with New Hampshire. It’s far from any urban center, even farther from common business sense. But there it is, Bear Ridge Speedway, at a clearing in the woods marked by a sign topped with a red and white coupe with the faded number “6.”
Race car driver and enthusiast George Barber built Bear Ridge back in 1967 with a “build-it-and-they-will-come” attitude, long before that phrase was immortalized. He’s been proven right, give or take a lean year here or there.
And so, despite an age where car mayhem is mostly the realm of video games, Vermont’s only remaining dirt racetrack lives on in real life, a hard-fought quarter-mile of deafening decibels and dust, devil-may-care driving and dents, a place that hasn’t lost a bit of its country roots and rustic edges, from the grass parking lots to the spartan plywood structures perched atop a natural amphitheater.
Call it a throwback, call it a remnant and a time-warp slice of Vermont. Call it also incredibly loud, chaotic, thrilling and entertaining. Call it, for sure, not everyone’s cup of tea (or scoop of Ben & Jerry’s). But certainly, call it authentic.
For “Butch” Elms, call it simply home, for every Saturday from spring through fall: No problem mapping out his summer calendar.
“From the first of May to the end of September to the first of October, you know where your Saturday nights are going to be,” he says with a chipper enthusiasm that reflects a lot of things. Foremost is that he’s the owner. For another, he started racing there in 1972 and won his share of dirt-track championships. For a third, he’s race director and supervisor, promoter and even tech inspector. And then there’s the fact he’s been hanging out at Bear Ridge since he was 14, back when he was too young to be allowed in the pits.
“I had to sit in the grandstand for a while,” recalls Elms, now 57. You could say he’s got Valvoline running in his veins, not to mention feet of clay dirt, and you’d be right.
“I’ve never really had the opportunity to take time off. This is what I’ve always done, and this is how it works, and this is what I do,” he says, covering pretty much all the bases.
How he came to own Bear Ridge – supposedly named because Barber saw a bear at the proposed track site – starts with his dad, “Chuck” Elms. His father was a longtime race car enthusiast and dairy farmer from North Haverhill, N.H., who once ran the Waterford Speedbowl, one of the many now-vanished local race tracks in New England. Elms and Barber were good friends and when age caught up to Barber, Chuck Elms and some partners stepped up and bought the track in 1972.
In 1989, it seemed as natural as a dirt-track suspension setup for Butch Elms to step up and take it over from his dad. And the rest, as they say, is 24 years of cacophonous history, wave after wave of slip-sliding competitors slinging themselves round the corners sideways, occasionally backward and every which way, from smaller Midgets and Hornet classes to Coupes and Late Model cars.
Dirt-track racing is a rustic pastime that roared to life in the 1950s when tracks sprang up all over Vermont, from Bennington to Rutland, Malletts Bay to Northfield, Waterford and Catamount in Milton. Today only three “speedbowls” remain, the quarter-mile asphalt oval at Thunder Road in Graniteville, and the half-mile asphalt oval at Devil’s Bowl in West Haven, which paved its dirt track in 2012. Bear Ridge Speedway has stayed with racing in its original form, and Elms wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Most of our guys love the dirt. A lot of the people that I know have gone asphalt racing,” he says, but they prefer the “seat of the pants” driving and skills involved. Or as one driver put it, “Some people will tell ya asphalt’s for traveling, dirt is for racing.”
Dirt-track allure aside, Bear Ridge is like a big family gathering, albeit a loud one. Bob Riley, 70, is a longtime friend of Elms and “motorhead from the word go” who comes up from his winter home in Florida to be jack-of-all-trades at the track. He says most everyone knows someone who’s racing or in the pit crew and it’s not unusual to find several generations of a family involved and even racers who are now in their 60s.
“That’s what I like about it, the people,” he says.
As genial head of this family, Elms is a big man with a paunch and a beaming, gap-toothed affable smile. He overlooks his oval empire from the second story of the “tower,” a simple two-story building next to the track, wearing big headphones that connect him to the racers – one way, so they can’t talk back. Advising, alerting and cajoling the drivers in each heat, he rides herd and keeps them in line, wearing a yellow cap, wire-rimmed glasses and look of sharp concentration amidst the billowing dust and an engine roar that drumbeats in your chest.
“Seventy-seven, three, we’re going green this time, green this time,” he advises two leaders that a heat is about to begin. At another point when a driver in second place gets overly rambunctious trying to pass, he cautions, “Easy number five, easy.”
“That’s one of the things you’ve got to do, to keep things under control,” Elms says later, explaining he doesn’t want anyone hurt. On a recent Saturday, a midget car sliding around the corner suddenly rolls two times, a reminder of the violent forces concocted by speed and the laws of physics. But injuries are infrequent, usually a broken arm or some lacerations at the worst, Elms says. He tells the story of a mother who worried about it being dangerous for her son to get into racing; he told her it was a lot safer having her son on the track than out on his own on a Saturday night.
During a break in the races, Elms wanders down to the grandstand to get some food, shake hands, chat and meet patrons, many of whom he calls by first names and has known for decades.
Bear Ridge has 20 races scheduled this year – the rains have washed out three so far – and each Saturday is a long day for Elms beginning in mid-morning. “I’ll get there and stand on the gas till the last race track driver leaves the track,” he says, which is often well past midnight.
At $10 general admission, Elms – who has a dairy farm and auctions cattle for his day job – knows he’s not ever going to get rich with Bear Ridge, where a good crowd is around 1,000.
“I wouldn’t say you’d want to go out and buy a race track,” he jokes. But for him, that’s not the point.
“I’m a race fan, there’s no two ways about it. I love to drive, I love to race.”
For race information: http://www.bearridgespeedway.com/
For good historical information and photos: http://www.catamountstadium.com/bear_ridge.htm
