When you’re a kid with wheels, one of your favorite things is a very steep hill.   From ages 4 through 8, that’s what I had just steps from my front door in a tiny Connecticut town.  Our street was connected to its parallel neighbor by a sheer asphalt drop we called "Bat Hill".  I never saw that many bats there, but it needed a terrifying name nonetheless.

This was the late 70’s, and despite the advent of the Atari 2600, playing outside reigned supreme.  Before my brother and I graduated to yellow banana seat bikes, we cruised the neighborhood on bright yellow Big Wheels.  (I don’t know why our parents got us yellow rides…I suppose they wanted to maximize our visibility, but they sure attracted lots of bees…)

Bat Hill was a formidable incline.  It took us quite some time to gather the courage to descend from the very top.  One day, I went out to join the neighborhood kids and found they had set up a ramp at the base of Bat Hill.  They were jumping a line of Big Wheels Evel Knievel style, using speed gained from the very top of Bat Hill.  I climbed to the top, heart racing, and began a fierce descent.  Big Wheels, like tricylces, pedal the front wheel directly, so when you’re rolling fast, you just have to lift your feet and let it fly.  Well, my first attempt was a record distance.  Apparently, everyone else just rolled from the top, but I had pedaled from the get go until I had to lift my feet!

Infamous Bat Hill

Well, I was thinking about this the other day when I realized I could visit Bat Hill using wonderful Google Earth!  One cool feature of Google Earth is that you can measure distances and elevations.  This means you can calculate the grade of a hill, which expresses the distance dropped divided by the length of the drop as a percentage.  (You’ll see the percent grade on those steep grade truck signs intended to keep trucks out of furniture stores…)  As best I can measure, Bat Hill drops 44 feet in 438 feet, a robust 10% grade.  There are steeper hills out there, but still that’s a good ride for a Big Wheel!  (In comparison, the Derby Downs Soap Box Derby track in Akron, Ohio is twice as long, but carries a 6% drop for most of its length.)

We got pretty nuts on that hill.  One of our favorite things to do was to pull the red sides off our wooden wagon and ride it down Bat Hill, steering by it’s narrow black handle.  As kids, we were pretty indestructible.  If I were to try that today, it would be grounds for a Darwin Award!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 3:09 am and is filed under Story Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.