by Jeff Barrus

EDITOR

It's homecoming week in Grantsville, a time for GHS alumni to come back to the town and make sure the younger generation haven't screwed up any of our traditions. Or, if they've improved anything, to grouse about how much better we did homecoming back in the day.

I don't remember doing much decorating or effigy burning or anything else leading up to the big game when I was a kid. I was always in the bleachers, but I seldom paid attention to the action on the field. In those days it was considered communist to throw the football at GHS, which left our running backs to plow up the middle four yards at a time -- not the sexiest sort of game for spectators. By my admittedly hazy recollection, it seems we always grunted out a 7-3 homecoming victory that left the students to make their own fun in the stands.

One thing I do remember was "dragging Main" after the game. In Grantsville, this involved driving at parade speed down a Main Street rumored to be second in length only to Salt Lake's, turning around at the two drive-ins that marked the eastern and western frontiers of the town, and repeating the process until your collective gas money ran out. Ideally, you did this in a souped-up Trans Am or a Mustang with a big, muscular stereo, but I recall many less glamorous nights trolling in my parents' Subaru wagon while we tried to tune something in on the AM dial.

The goal, of course, was to meet girls, though how four boys in a moving car on a road the length of the Nile were going to accomplish this has never been satisfactorily explained to me. Still, I went along. I respected the tradition. And my sacrifice was rewarded with lots of bad heavy metal, and stops at the Way Station to pump cheese on my nachos and Mountain Dew-up for the long road ahead. It was like working a shift. We were convinced if we just put in the hours it would all pay off in the end when our soulmate crawled out of a Dodge Charger looking like Daisy Duke.

Sadly, dragging Main is becoming a lost art -- one of those cherished traditions the younger generation has cast off, like churning butter or ice fishing. Kids today have too many other things competing for their attention to enjoy patrolling that long stretch of road the way they ought to. Satellite TV, iPods and My Space have conspired to kill off the practice of dragging Main as surely as the railroad killed off the Pony Express.

Economics has played a role too. We did the best we could with $5 in our pockets and a borrowed car, but for today's kids a Saturday night means driving their new Prius in to the Gateway for dinner and clubbing. It's not the same thing at all.

A GHS intern at the Transcript recently told me her generation didn't drag Main because when they wanted to meet someone they just went to a party. That was far too brazen for my generation, which held the Victorian view that if you announced your intentions so openly you might become less lonely, and thus less likely to appreciate true love when it did roll into town. In our day, we stuck to horn blasts, arm waves and indecipherable yells at passing cars -- a subtle code that would be lost on today's hello-and-nice-to-meet-you teens.

I drove Grantsville's Main Street again not long ago on a Saturday night. It was, frankly, a shadow of its former self, more like Main Street Ophir than the lively strip of my homecoming days. Not one torso stuck out of a car window, nobody was doing donuts on the road shoulder, and even at a distance I could see the cheese dispenser at the Way Station was alone and unused. My nostalgia gave way to sadness, then anger as I thought of the youth who had squandered the cultural inheritance we had bequeathed them. Why weren't they in their cars taking their shift? What could they possibly have to do that was more important?

Then I remembered a favorite quote from Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever." That was the answer. Today's teens would grow up to grouse about traditions their kids abandoned -- and that would be their punishment. But Main Street would abide. And someday the draggers might be back.