PORTRAIT OF AMERICAN DEMOLITION DERBY

There’s something about it I can’t shake. My childhood home sat a mile from the storied Saint Charles Speedway in rural Missouri. On Sunday nights, engines bellowed over the horizon and through my bedroom window screen. I couldn’t always see the track, but I felt it, stirring in my chest and throat like thunder buried in the earth.

Up close, the derby was all spectacle—fun, cheap thrills for the whole family—but from afar, even as a child, I sensed something more. A quiet desperation, a longing, in the wail of machines and men.

Thirty-some years later, I still chase that sound. That feeling. It’s more than nostalgia. It’s older. Familial, maybe. There’s a story to tell, though I don’t know exactly what beckons me to tell it. It’s like memory without language. Like blood remembering where it came from.

So I stand in the belly of it and try to remember.