The dirt race track was an eighth of a mile around, built back in the early 60's. Rural New Hampshire had sprouted a number of them back then, there wasn't much else to occupy peoples time between winters of burning the wood they chopped during the summer. Most of them closed down in the mid 70's as insurance costs rose, and the owners decided competing against each other was simply too costly. By the late 80's, there were only a few left, still hanging on, seemingly by momemtum alone.

It was his first time there, a Saturday night, the summer humidity still oppresive, even at dusk. The track was being watered, which didn't help the pervading dampness, already he was sweating. Parking his car in the dirt lot, he'd parked next to a pickup with a gun rack and a Harley davidson sticker in the rear window. Another truck, the same items displayed, had pulled up right next to him. Was that Lynard Skynard he heard on the radio? He wondered if people still listened to them anymore.

He paid his money to the cashier, an older woman in a tank top drinking a can of beer, and walekd up to the grandstands, finding a spot a little farther towards the top, away from the fence, and the seats that were covered with dirt from the cars spitting dirt of the track during earlier races. He found a spot on the bleachers that wasn't sticky with beer, and started looking around. The cars below in the pits were all at least 15 years old, not a metal panel on them undented, numbers painted by hand on the doors, a few with names of local sponsors on the fenders, ironic sponsors with names like Earls Body shop and Teds Muffler. That brought a smile to his face, these cars that were probably pulled froma junkyard, stripped of anything that would fall off, made as loud as possible, and then bashed into each other each weekend night, as a showcase for body shops and muffler repair.

About 20 cars were in the pits, a few people standing around each one, a few hoods open, but not much work being done to the cars. Almost as if whatever they had brought was going to have to do, or that they weren't going to fix it anyway, even if it was broken right then. Most of the pit teams seemed to know each other, talking with each other, a few with a can of beer in their hands. A few drivers revved their engines, apparntly only to get attention from someone in the stands who would hoot and yell at them.

In the stands, he noticed, there was an odd familiarity between what would appear to be a group of strangers. In most public events, most people know one or two people in a crowd, but almost everyone seemed to know each other here, people would wave or shout, a few of the already drunk ones would throw something. He started to realize that he was close to being the youngest one there, even though he was in his 20's. The average age, he thought was somewhere around 45. That struck him as kind of odd, usually that would have been the upper age of something like this. The more he looked around, the more unusual it was, he thought. Usually racing appeals to younger people, in their 20's, and when these people were in their 20's, it was the mid 60's.

From his seat he could see the parking lot, and most of the cars, if they were cars, not trucks, were older Amercian sedans, clapped out, once-luxury vehicles. The majority of vehicles was trucks. Once again, mostly older, and all with the same generation of styling, with big tires, cb antennaes, curtains in the back windows, other things that had gone out of style. He idily wondered how many of them still had 8tracks in the dashboards when a guy with a flannel shirt, a cooler, and a huge beard asked if he was saving the seat next to him. He replied that it wasn't, and noticed the stands were pretty much full, it must be getting close to the start.

The PA horns, positioned across the track, just underneath blinding vapor light started to crackle, and a man with a smokers voice started to announce the drivers. Each time he'd mention a drivers name, some different section fo the crowd would start yelling, his friends then easily picked out. About 10 cars started out onto the track, revving loudly. One or two stalled, their motors cold, and the person behind them just bumped into them, pushing them forward, then backing off, restarting them. Once again, that odd familiarity crept in, just on the edge of his senses.

What was it, he thought,that gave him that wierd feeling? He looked around at the crowd, the middle aged hoodlums, the overweight women beside them who were convinced they could still wear tube tops, fat rolls be damned, at the vague beligerence on their faces. Once, he realized, they were at the front of a fad, a new racing scene, a whole new culture of their own. The factories were still open then, the unionized pay good enough to support a new truck, weekend partying, going to the then-new races, but those factories had moved on, closed their doors, technology undercutting the wages, and though the world had moved onwards, this small subset of society, a society in their own right, had stayed where they were. They had bought new cars, trucks and houses in the woods when the factories had employed them, while they were young, and they had made thier lives in the rural woods.

How was it, he wondered, that with a tremendous metropolitain area only 70 miles away, could a whole set of people not grown, moved on, followed the high paying work, but instead, have nursed umemployemnt until it ran out, and started a never ending cycle of unskilled jobs, low paying, with no future, and no hope?

He realized that the track was all that they had left, that one final link to what each of them had once had, and would never have again. He saw the resignation on the faces, an occasional look of blind envy and sadness, just before a can was lifted to lips. For on those weekend nights, they were, all in fact, 25 again, their trucks new, their 8tracks playing the Allman Brothers newest songs, and they could erase the life that they had drifted into, a vague feeling that something could have been different, better, if only the Saturday nights they had once merely enjoyed had not become something that they lived for to merely survive the rest of the week.