AMERICAN DEMOLITION DERBY
There’s something about it I can’t shake. I grew up with it. My childhood home sat a mile from the now-storied St. Charles Speedway in rural Missouri. Every 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. I don’t know exactly what beckons me. 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.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Ephesians 6:12
