Start Your Engines...

Every now and then I get a few days of outlandish.
It takes on several forms, be it impromptu trips to the beach (for a day), brew tours, a caving trip gone wrong by rednecks or just Waffle House at an ungodly hour. Yet each and every time I am struck with the same feeling of hilarity and awe—hilarity at the characters and situations, awe that I get to live it.
Two weekends ago the outlandish took the form of a ½ mile oval track called Bristol Motor Speedway, which is, I have now learned, is one of the more revered NASCAR tracks out there. Nathan and I first had to stop at Wal-Mart to pick up various sundries for the journey: ear plugs, size-specific coolers, tailgating chairs and the most ostentatious shirts we could find emblazoned with our token driver upon it. After fifteen minutes in Wal-Mart we were both itching to leave as quickly as possible. It was the people...that's when we realized how snobby we were. And how we were judging people by their clothes, their weight, what was in their cart or the rowdiness of their kids. I was sort of OK with snobby because of the stigma of Wal-Mart, the great homogenizer of the US. Hypocritical? Absolutely.
So after our forays into Wal-Mart and our subsequent judgmental rantings we met up with Cara and Anthony, who were coming off of a stay at a cabin near Hot Springs for their anniversary. Anthony's family has property and connections in Bristol and graciously let the four of us crash on various couches and air mattresses.
Saturday night we stayed out much too late at Anthony's cousins house, drinking PBR in cans and smoking cigars in the frigid night. One of the guys kept assuming I was married to Nathan and I/we didn't know how to tell him otherwise. I was keen to go along with it and would have probably made up a fantastic story about our wedding if I was assured the friends who knew better would have gone along with it.
We began tailgating around 9am at a campground less than a mile from the track. We fired up the grill and began to cook our brats and drink our beers and quietly play our music, like every other person there. I was laughing internally because though we were looking mighty redneck, the music we were blaring was bluegrass, not country. Our brats were from the organic grocery and were called things like “bison chiorzo”. Even our beers were microbrewed porters or organic ales. It was like we were just playing dress-up.
What can I say about the race? It was mighty loud, it was dizzying, it smelled like oil and rubber and my driver won. There was no conversing with the people around, no trash talking, no cheering on a team. The crowd was silent. Eerie to be in a stadium of 170,000 people or so and have it sound so ambivalent to the goings on. We did nothing but spectate; it might as well have been on TV.
Would I go again? Maybe not to a 'short-track' race. I have heard that longer track races allow time to actually speak to those around you, and that would be exactly the experience for which I was looking.