At the Derby

Spent a good chunk of the day today at the Mitchell Fair.
Now, the Mitchell Fair is not something, I hasten to tell you, that I would normally be clamoring to attend. Fairs, particularly small-town fairs, rank just behind sorting my sock drawer and just ahead of brushing my teeth for sheer excitement. But Eva's brother had a car entered in the demolition derby. Jim wasn't the driver--he was the guy who built the car--but the way these things work, the driver, if he won, would be paid in prestige and Jim would get cash dollars. So we were there to cheer Jim's driver on.
We got to the fair a good three hours before the derby was to start. So we made the grand tour. Over there's the midway: Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl, Berry-Go-Round, Round-Up, a couple of other rides, none meant for adults. Over here's the community center, filled to the brim with local colour. The Bake-Off entries are right here: some of them look quite tasty...too bad we can't try any of them. This here's the "sheaf competition", right next to the "field crop" competition; the point of either escapes me. And all around are dozens of earnest dioramas that public school students put lots of work into and which no doubt made their mothers proud.
Onward, please.
"Come Down On The Farm!" the sign intones, and we enter to find three prone bovines and a gaggle of hens and geese squawking away, all reeking that peculiar country reek that starts a John Denver clone singing away inside my skull: "Thank God I'm a City Boy!"
I think we've covered everything. Let's check the time: hmmm. Seven minutes have gone by. Only two hours and fifty three minutes to go.
My loving and understanding wife has allowed me to bring a book to kill the time. So I sit on the wooden grandstand bench, slather myself in sunscreen, and immerse myself in I Am Charlotte Simmons. A novel this engrossing can easily overcome a serious case of numbed butt; before I know it they're announcing the first heat, and the car Jim jerry-rigged together rumbles out to take its place amongst its fellows. A cloud of testosterone forms.
This is my second demo derby. The first one was in Elmira two years ago, and I'd had to steel myself for it: in a former life derbies were the sorts of things I would pay to avoid. They actually offended me on some primeval level. I mean, the whole object of these things is senseless destruction...even if there's little chance of driver injury, the point is to seriously cripple the cars. Yes, yes, I know that cars are inanimate objects. But you'd never know that, the way most men treat their rides, would you? They name them, they coo to them, and they react like cornered grizzlies at the sight of a little scratch on the paint. And yet, in derbies, even the winners lumber out of the ring looking like beaten puppies.
(Sometimes, like here, the whole concept of "context" mysteriously vanishes out of my mind. The sight of naked breasts signals dinnertime to an infant...to an elderly cardiac patient it might be fatal. Context, Ken, context...there is a place under the sun where cars go to die...to kill each other. Okay. Let's accept this.)
Today I am able to appreciate the skill involved in piloting these wrecks around. There's a little white car in one of the six-cylinder heats that REFUSED TO DIE. Everybody teamed up against it. Parts of it were flying all over the place, and still it careened around, bashing all hell out of everybody else as if that was its sole purpose in life. Eventually it was reduced to an engine on four rims, and when it finally sputtered out and died after a particularly vicious hit--leaving its sole remaining tormentor the winner--we found out it had merely run out of gas. If a pause to refuel was allowed, I'm convinced this little white beast would still be out there, probably destroying the grandstands. Nobody said what make and model (Sherman mini-tank?) this thing was, which kind of peeved me off.
I seem to have an ability to predict, after about twenty seconds of observation, which car will emerge victorious. I'm right about three quarters of the time, and even when I'm wrong, my bet's among the last things moving. I didn't bet on Jim's car, for two reasons: one, there were bigger cars in its heat, and two, the driver didn't overly impress me, getting himself pinned almost immediately. Sure enough, that car's the third one out...and there's no 'hard luck heat', so that's the last we saw of it.
I have to admit, that was kind of fun. Still not something I'd seek out, but at least it wasn't too much of a trial to sit through. Next one for Jim is in Stratford in three weeks. Hopefully he'll have better luck.