Gravity Is Broken on This Up North Road
On this mysterious stretch in Benzie County, you feel that your car is rolling backward and uphill while you're driving
Blaine Township — Hidden deep in the bowels of Benzie County is a most mysterious stretch of road where gravity suspends itself, where your eyes play tricks on you, where your car rolls backwards and uphill, and where all logic of time and space seems to fade into madness.
Past rolling hills and farmland, taking a left off Joyfield Road and heading south onto Putney, you pass the Blaine Christian Church on your right, a last glimpse of sanity before you enter the realm of wicked confusion. Ahead of you lies a seemingly beautiful stretch of country road adorned with orchards and fields on either side. Veering off to the left, Putney disappears into the woods in a picturesque way. It’s before this turn, between the church and a steel barrel that reads “Bug’s Woods” on the side of the road, where you’ll find Michigan’s northernmost gravity hill.
No, gravity is not actually suspended here on Putney Road. Time does still exist and so does space. I exaggerated a little there. But your eyes are confused, there are tricks being played on them, and it is very weird.
A gravity hill is essentially a hill—usually a road in the era of automobiles—where the surroundings create an optical illusion which leads you to think you are going downhill when in fact you are actually going uphill. It’s a constellation of factors that create this bizarre (mis)perception, but a key element is an obfuscated horizon. When the horizon is clear and visible we are able to accurately judge the slope of a hill, but when the horizon is unclear or hidden and the surroundings are disorienting in the right way, a gravity hill can occur.
Today, we know the clear scientific explanation for a gravity hill. In the past, however, people had other ideas. Some thought they were haunted, others claimed magnetic anomalies which forced cars uphill, and in the case of the hill on Putney, local legend has traditionally suggested that the gravity hill was dragging sinners back uphill toward the Blaine Christian Church.
There are countless roads where the horizon is unclear. You’ll probably drive on one today. But it’s the sum of the unique parts that make a gravity hill, and it’s not so terribly common for those parts to be coupled together in just the right way. Today, of all the pothole-ridden roads in our great state, there are only three known gravity hills. One in Oakwood Cemetery in Farmington Hills, a second is in Rose City near the end of Reasner Road, and the third is our gravity hill on Putney Road.
It’s pretty slow out in Benzie County, so I was able to mess around on the gravity hill on Putney for about an hour on a blessed sunny Monday afternoon in March without any real interruptions. I can say after being there, that the whole gravity hill phenomenon isn’t made up or exaggerated. It’s real. It’s hard to accurately convey the sensation in photos or even video—you have to be there—but you really do feel like you are going downhill when you are, in reality, going uphill.
The gravity hill on Putney does stop somewhere, meaning the perception stops being skewed or inverted. You do actually start going downhill when it appears like you are going downhill. I did some tests in order to discern just exactly where my car would stop rolling back “uphill” if put in neutral. After numerous trials, I concluded that the end point of the gravity hill is just south of that barrel on the side of the road that reads “Bug’s Woods.”
Our eyes play tricks on us driving Putney Road. It’s a strange feeling seeing something but knowing it’s actually something else. The disconnect between feeling and fact is real. At risk of stretching the metaphor too far—but what else are we going to do?—it’s worthwhile to think about perception, reality, what we think we see, the explanations we come up with for ourselves, and our knowledge of the observable world.
If you’re up north and want to feel a odd kind of feeling (for free!), go to the gravity hill on Putney. It’s fun to put the car in neutral near that barrel and feel yourself roll backward uphill toward the church. It makes you feel pleasantly disoriented, if that makes sense.
In a world where we are able to generally trust our eyes and feel quite certain of things around us, it’s actually pretty fun to feel your senses being a little confused and caught in that place of skewed perception, to let our eyes be deceived and just sort of laugh about the fact that it’s weird. Life is weird.
