Sunday, November 08, 2009
When Big Dogs Become Old Dogs
Not all front porches are the same. You can't really see much from mine. You can see the neighbors going out in their tattered old bathrobes to get their newspapers or their mail, and the guy down the block flying his radio-control airplanes in swoops of purple or blue up and down the street when no cars are coming and the weather's good.
But you can't see what big-vision politicians always seem to see from theirs. No glimpse of that "One World" that Wendell Wilkie used to see from his front porch there in northern Indiana when he wanted to be president. And no inkling of some forbidding place like the Russia that Sarah Palin jokingly said she could squint and see from her place in Wasilla, Alaska, when she wanted to be something more than governor of our most-remote state.
No, my porch and I aren't that farsighted. About all I've seen lately, just a few days ago in fact, was something odd I imagined I saw off in the distance, a vague and murky semblance of a billow of dust moving from east to west at the lip of the horizon.
I knew what it must be. It passes this way just about every fall, when the air is starting to chill and the short-track racing crowd packs up its gear and leaves these summer camping grounds, grimy open-wheeled race cars and tons of tough racing tires rattling along behind their vans and motor homes. They've traveled around these parts, pulling up into dusty parking lots at old racing places with familiar names like Williams Grove and Eldora and DuQuoin for as long as the Midwestern weather behaves itself.
Then, when the feel of a chill in the air that promises to lay down coats of snow and ice on the racing grounds in this part of the universe hits them, they scamper to their trucks and trailers and lay down tracks to escape to those newer race places with Western- and warm-weather-sounding names like Devil's Bowl and Manzanita and Calistoga.
I've watched them do it for all these years, this annual migration from my comfort zone to that of others. And, most years, I have done it from some place closer than my front porch.
I grew up inside the short-track circus, following my dad around when he geared up his mighty midget and hauled it to one of those quarter-mile or half-mile tracks scattered throughout Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. He'd find the fittest driver who showed up without a ride and usher him into the white-and-red number 18 he'd rolled into a pit stall at great physical exertion.
I've spent the intervening half-century following him or, later, the sniff of a good story to try to land in a reputable newspaper or magazine like a well-cast fishing lure. I snagged quite a few, only saw a few of them returned to the in-basket beside my keyboard.
I became a small part of that translucent racing community, at least part of the fringe of a tightly knit quilt of cars going too fast for complete human control and tall, sinewy men (and, more recently, women) going somewhere, or nowhere, just as fast.
A lot of memories have accumulated from those seasons in the dust-obliterated sun of small-caliber racing, as compared with the top guns that make more noise at places like Indianapolis and Daytona. I still use my mind as a scrapbook for the soundtracks of mental movies of things like spending a couple of hours in an old station wagon with Larry Rice and Johnny Parsons Jr. and a racing photographer in the infield at New Bremen during a rainout -- drinking tomato beer (it gets harder to swallow with every swig) and listening to tales of evil race promoters who had absconded with the purse money and were in the next county before the racing was finished.
Or the moments leading up to a sprint-car feature at a mile-long fairgrounds track one summer evening, trading wild speculations with other reporters and photographers about how third-rate romance could turn into first-rate mayhem at the start of the race. A veteran driver whose wife had just left him was starting from the pole, and the young upstart driver his wife had run off with was starting beside him. A melodrama of cosmic proportions never dreamed of on "As the World Turns" and fraught with more tragic possibilites than any soap opera ever scripted seemed immediately at hand.
The mega-drama that most of the grandstand crowd didn't know was scheduled never made it to air, though, as the young wife-rustler somehow forgot where the gas pedal was located when the race roared into the first turn, and the aggrieved pole man never caught sight of him again that evening.
Those things don't happen as much anymore as sophistication, for better or worse, has rubbed smooth the four corners of even the short-track racing world. Besides, Larry Rice left us this past summer, and Parsons Jr. has been relegated to the rubber-chicken oldtimers' banquet circuit.
Drivers don't come to the tracks with all their earthly gear in old gym bags, either. They carry that paraphernalia, other than their custom-painted helmets, inside briefcases or laptop computers these days. If there are personal scores to settle, they hire lawyers now.
And I haven't been there for the tomato beer and scandalous scuttlebutt, either, at least not this summer. Age and surgical necessities have pretty well left me to my front porch, where I couldn't catch a glimpse or a whiff of the dust-encrusted traveling caravan the way I used to. Other than a couple of trips over to the bigger speedways where the big dogs with big bankrolls run, I had to try to follow it on TV and the Internet, which is a lot like trying to find true romance on an Internet dating site or actual education through an online "university," the words and pictures pretty pale substitutes for the non-virtual, in-person experiences.
I have begun to take heart the motto on the old T-shirts that people wore at those rustic short tracks: "If You Can't Run With The Big Dogs, Stay On The Porch." The big dogs have been running without me, and I'm not one to happily resign myself to the porch with the rocking lawn chairs and artsy coasters for my beer.
I'm not the race fan I used to be, but then even short-track racing isn't the racing it used to be, either. Smaller fields of cars, smaller crowds, rundown tracks -- all have made it appear to be headed for the same overcrowded shelf as typewriters, Studebakers, vinyl records, and Burma-Shave signs.
Maybe my confinement to the porch has made me too pessimistic, bitter before my time. Maybe I'll make it back to the circuit next year, if there is still a circuit to go to, where you sit on sagging, splintery bleacher seats and shell peanuts from the last-century concession stands with one hand. Who knows?
I just can't see that far and that clearly from my front porch anymore these days. Can you?
But you can't see what big-vision politicians always seem to see from theirs. No glimpse of that "One World" that Wendell Wilkie used to see from his front porch there in northern Indiana when he wanted to be president. And no inkling of some forbidding place like the Russia that Sarah Palin jokingly said she could squint and see from her place in Wasilla, Alaska, when she wanted to be something more than governor of our most-remote state.
No, my porch and I aren't that farsighted. About all I've seen lately, just a few days ago in fact, was something odd I imagined I saw off in the distance, a vague and murky semblance of a billow of dust moving from east to west at the lip of the horizon.
I knew what it must be. It passes this way just about every fall, when the air is starting to chill and the short-track racing crowd packs up its gear and leaves these summer camping grounds, grimy open-wheeled race cars and tons of tough racing tires rattling along behind their vans and motor homes. They've traveled around these parts, pulling up into dusty parking lots at old racing places with familiar names like Williams Grove and Eldora and DuQuoin for as long as the Midwestern weather behaves itself.
Then, when the feel of a chill in the air that promises to lay down coats of snow and ice on the racing grounds in this part of the universe hits them, they scamper to their trucks and trailers and lay down tracks to escape to those newer race places with Western- and warm-weather-sounding names like Devil's Bowl and Manzanita and Calistoga.
I've watched them do it for all these years, this annual migration from my comfort zone to that of others. And, most years, I have done it from some place closer than my front porch.
I grew up inside the short-track circus, following my dad around when he geared up his mighty midget and hauled it to one of those quarter-mile or half-mile tracks scattered throughout Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. He'd find the fittest driver who showed up without a ride and usher him into the white-and-red number 18 he'd rolled into a pit stall at great physical exertion.
I've spent the intervening half-century following him or, later, the sniff of a good story to try to land in a reputable newspaper or magazine like a well-cast fishing lure. I snagged quite a few, only saw a few of them returned to the in-basket beside my keyboard.
I became a small part of that translucent racing community, at least part of the fringe of a tightly knit quilt of cars going too fast for complete human control and tall, sinewy men (and, more recently, women) going somewhere, or nowhere, just as fast.
A lot of memories have accumulated from those seasons in the dust-obliterated sun of small-caliber racing, as compared with the top guns that make more noise at places like Indianapolis and Daytona. I still use my mind as a scrapbook for the soundtracks of mental movies of things like spending a couple of hours in an old station wagon with Larry Rice and Johnny Parsons Jr. and a racing photographer in the infield at New Bremen during a rainout -- drinking tomato beer (it gets harder to swallow with every swig) and listening to tales of evil race promoters who had absconded with the purse money and were in the next county before the racing was finished.
Or the moments leading up to a sprint-car feature at a mile-long fairgrounds track one summer evening, trading wild speculations with other reporters and photographers about how third-rate romance could turn into first-rate mayhem at the start of the race. A veteran driver whose wife had just left him was starting from the pole, and the young upstart driver his wife had run off with was starting beside him. A melodrama of cosmic proportions never dreamed of on "As the World Turns" and fraught with more tragic possibilites than any soap opera ever scripted seemed immediately at hand.
The mega-drama that most of the grandstand crowd didn't know was scheduled never made it to air, though, as the young wife-rustler somehow forgot where the gas pedal was located when the race roared into the first turn, and the aggrieved pole man never caught sight of him again that evening.
Those things don't happen as much anymore as sophistication, for better or worse, has rubbed smooth the four corners of even the short-track racing world. Besides, Larry Rice left us this past summer, and Parsons Jr. has been relegated to the rubber-chicken oldtimers' banquet circuit.
Drivers don't come to the tracks with all their earthly gear in old gym bags, either. They carry that paraphernalia, other than their custom-painted helmets, inside briefcases or laptop computers these days. If there are personal scores to settle, they hire lawyers now.
And I haven't been there for the tomato beer and scandalous scuttlebutt, either, at least not this summer. Age and surgical necessities have pretty well left me to my front porch, where I couldn't catch a glimpse or a whiff of the dust-encrusted traveling caravan the way I used to. Other than a couple of trips over to the bigger speedways where the big dogs with big bankrolls run, I had to try to follow it on TV and the Internet, which is a lot like trying to find true romance on an Internet dating site or actual education through an online "university," the words and pictures pretty pale substitutes for the non-virtual, in-person experiences.
I have begun to take heart the motto on the old T-shirts that people wore at those rustic short tracks: "If You Can't Run With The Big Dogs, Stay On The Porch." The big dogs have been running without me, and I'm not one to happily resign myself to the porch with the rocking lawn chairs and artsy coasters for my beer.
I'm not the race fan I used to be, but then even short-track racing isn't the racing it used to be, either. Smaller fields of cars, smaller crowds, rundown tracks -- all have made it appear to be headed for the same overcrowded shelf as typewriters, Studebakers, vinyl records, and Burma-Shave signs.
Maybe my confinement to the porch has made me too pessimistic, bitter before my time. Maybe I'll make it back to the circuit next year, if there is still a circuit to go to, where you sit on sagging, splintery bleacher seats and shell peanuts from the last-century concession stands with one hand. Who knows?
I just can't see that far and that clearly from my front porch anymore these days. Can you?
