Engines roar, transforming exhaust into a mirage. Mechanics sprint at crude angles, lugging canisters or shoving cars through the pit’s cement aisles. Beer vendors bark. Journalists in orange vests pace toward the track with cameras, looping through commentators clutching microphones. Around the corner, Hooters waitresses give teenagers directions to the VR racing simulators: down past the knife stall, but before the NOS Energy station with full-can freebies.

Shivering ahead of a nationwide freeze, 20,000 people have flocked to the Tulsa fairgrounds for the final day of the 38th Annual Chili Bowl Nationals, the prestigious “Super Bowl of midget racing.” Six days of fenderless single-seater mania as tiny cars spray mud into the bleachers. Motorsports fans, racers, pit crew, vendors, and media from all over the world gather at Expo Square, with its Golden Driller statue out front; the Chili Bowl trophy is a miniaturization of the 75foot landmark.

The bleachers are full of lifelong racing fans, many of whom have visited Tulsa every year since the Chili Bowl began in 1987. And, of course, there is the “HEY” guy who walks around with a sign that says “HEY” and tosses sacks of BBQ to people who shout “HEY” back at him.

“Hell yeah,” I whisper into the roaring engines and the blaring Bon Jovi anthem “Livin’ On A Prayer.”

The air swells with ethanol, dirt, oil, and popcorn. Palisading constellations of dust, oil, and light shiver through the haze. A 20-something girl with her family hands me a Jolly Rancher. “This will help with the fumes.”

It’s cold—everything is cold.

People line up for state fair food, snaking into the lines of people waiting for the bathroom, blending Philly cheesesteak aroma with the skunky stench of urinal cake.

The rubber fume of shredded tires blends with the plastic sweetness of their brand-new replacements.

To be American means to hold to a pilgrimage of the open interstates and bridges and roads. An accelerator connects you to a literal continent of pavement while the brakes embed you in our nation’s soil.

Revving engines multiply. A faint yellowish veil sparkles across the race track. Cars line up on the ramp down into the oval-shaped dirt track called the bull ring. There’s a nervous clarity in many of the racers’ eyes before they’re shoved out onto the dirt. Fastened with arm restraints and cocooned into various fire-resistant gear, it’s almost like they’re trapped. Occasionally, they are.

Legends and Rookies

Within dirt racing, the term “brain fade” denotes a costly absentmindedness, a lack of clarity and focus that often leads to danger or mistakes. Drivers have to focus, but not to the point of anxiety.

Their hands grip the wheels. Some of the drivers have wedding rings; many are too young.

Midget cars are bigger than karts but smaller than Indy Cars, a lean 900 pounds–rugged little racing machines with four-cylinder engines: up to 400 horsepower and no brakes, at least in the traditional sense. The phrase for suddenly slamming the brakes is “jump on the binders.” This is part of the reason midget cars start each race with a car escort to launch them into motion, and from there, they cannot stop without needing another shove.

Once they detach, they become pure, unstoppable motion. Only the violence of a wreck can slow them down. The racing term for full-throttle acceleration is “hammer down,” which just feels more badass than “pedal to the metal.” They hammer down on the straightaways, the longer portions of an oval track.

At such high speeds, the drivers commit to what’s called “sawing on the wheel,” a rapid back-and-forth jerking at the steering wheel.

No glass, no division except netting and metal framework. In short, those sommbitches are scrappy.

One person can squeeze into the car through the roll cage, but the car is wildly prone to flipping at 45 mph on such small tracks.

An American invention, midget cars have been around since the 1930s when tracks and cars had fewer safety measures. These days, it’s a professional sport, a competition among trained drivers. But there’s always a wildness, an endless wildness. With enough talent and bravado, a complete nobody can climb into one of these flying steel cages and hammer down until he whips past the big honchos.

Midget car racing is useful as a launching-off point for drivers wily enough to make it to NASCAR and IndyCar.

Every year, the Chili Bowl becomes the hub of this middle ground, gathering racing legends past, present, and future. The latest generation of NASCAR elites, like Chase, Briscoe, J.J. Yeley, and Kyle Larson, rub shoulders with 62 rookies and a pack of up-and-comers, including Hank Davis, who coincidentally lives in the same small town as I do.

Then there’s “Slammin” Sammy Swindell, the 68-year-old NASCAR legend, with five Golden Drillers, the only person to win more than three. I inexplicably and unknowingly wandered up to him at one point, without knowing who he was, and asked him a few dumb questions that he smiled at, looking as baffled as he was amused.

The 12 women drivers at this year’s Chili Bowl range from 15-year-old Kayla Roell to 52-year-old Randi Pankratz, a third-generation racer, and Karsyn Elledge, Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s granddaughter.

Entire groups of racers gather under banners—Swindell SpeedLab, Abacus Racing, Trifecta Motorsports—in the pit area, where all the drivers and cars rest as they’re fine tuned and repaired. The pit is like a crowded village surrounded by an expo center.

Rows of luxury trailers and mobile garages line the throughways that lead to the dirt track obstructed by bleachers. I’d guess one of those trailers costs more than most houses.

American Drive

I don’t know much about cars. And almost nothing about professional racing. But I know that America is calmest through a windshield on a drive.

Being American links you to the pulse of highways and open-sky backroads, white lines and yellow lines, so many billboards are willing to be your companion—depending on what state you’re driving through. Cars have become a newfangled beast, a miniaturized fortress, a ship, a horse. In America, we have the sturdiest cars, the largest turnpikes, and even the best parking lots. We also have abandoned fields and empty locations perfect for an aimless driving lesson.

To be American means to hold to a pilgrimage of the open interstates and bridges and roads. An accelerator connects you to a literal continent of pavement while the brakes embed you in our nation’s soil.

These sentiments are coded into the people at Chili Bowl. They get it.

I felt it, too. They won me over almost immediately. The more racing I saw, the more apparent it became. This place, this sport, is American with an enthusiasm that urban elites assume has died, if they ever even knew it was alive to begin with.

So, with every race I attend, I inch closer to that track. The view from the bleachers is lovely. At first, it feels dangerous. Then, I wander the pit beneath the hulking mega-screen and follow cars and drivers. Then I walk right up to the track and follow every advancement, like a puppy watching a tennis match.

As with any perfect art form, dirt racing mesmerizes. It bulldozes you the power, beauty, and fun of witnessing 20 to 25 cars hurl around the dirt track at dizzying speeds.

Earlier, during a qualifying race, as I leaned into the hail of mud-spatter, one of the blue-vested work crew shook his head and waved at me, silenced by the drone of race cars, mouthing, “No beer in the mud!” while pointing at my freakishly large can.

Miming agreement, I shout, “Ope, sorry about that!”

“No problem, brother!”

I hid my 36-ounce Coors Light, hurled it behind a concrete barrier, and then hurried back down the entry ramp to return to the fury.

All week, 365 drivers have competed for 24 spots in tonight’s A-Main feature, the headlining event. This comprises 55 laps, initially 50, but was upgraded after, in honor of the driver of car Number 55, 24-year-old Donnie Ray Crawford III—a beloved racer who once saved an eight-year-old girl from a flaming wreck. As Donnie was leaving his house for the final day of the 2012 Chili Bowl, he was murdered by his grandfather.

Ride or Die

As cars, drivers, and crew prepare for the second to last race, I find a spot on the ramp that connects the pit to the track, which all the cars use to enter and exit. I can see the racers’ helmets when the yellow flag slows them down.

Being so close, surrounded by people eager to capture the same experience, all of us leaning forward, it feels like we’re out somewhere quiet, a worn track hidden in the groves of Oklahoma or on the backroads of Kansas. Which also imbues me with a sense of return, of revival, of finding a portal to the supposedly lost America.

But it is not lost.

In the five days of races, there are about 120 crashes. With the enthusiasm and pace of the midget cars, it’s a wonder that there aren’t far more.

Not every crash is serious, but the closer we get to the A-Main feature, the higher the stakes of a collision. Any hindrance or failure can be catastrophic for a racer’s trajectory.

He was ejected. He crawled through the metallic ribcage. Every person who could stand was standing. Even the guy selling beers stopped to watch.

He punched an official, the guy with the fire extinguisher. They kicked him out. For some reason, I didn’t expect there to be ejections.

He reappeared later with a much different attitude.

They tell the racers, “if you’re gonna fight, do it in front of the fans, so you won’t get in trouble.”

The midget racing experience resembles a good and deafening concert. The atmosphere is simultaneously loud and silent. Commotion! Noise! Heat! Pressure!

All 24 engines blaring at once cause a near deafening roar. My eardrums will protest for days. The four-cylinder front engines wail with a mechanical buzz that turns into a death-flamed symphony of giant robot wasps. You have to feel that roar. You have to lean into the uncertainty.

Is it strange that I find this uproar comforting, that the destruction is peaceful?

At their most intense, the races—it’s incredible—move both too quickly and perfectly slowly. You find your car, hope for the best, and see it whip and hurl around the curves and down the straightaway, a hero amidst a cascade of blur.

Pellets of hard mud spray over the bleachers and the walkways that are flung and shaped by tires. The chunks—known as “loose stuff” or “marbles” because they provide no traction and can send a car into the track walls—grow in size the closer you get to the track.

The occasional steering wheel goes flying. Tires pop loose like bad dentures. Sometimes they launch through the catch fence.

Living on a Prayer

After someone dies, you get a chance to know them again. There’s an investigative clip to this endeavor. You can’t consult the source anymore. So you have to piece together stories, footage, writings, and traditions. You have to ask many questions, pray, and wait for the answer, which is usually a meaningful coincidence that cannot be explained logically.

As time carries you further from the person who died, you forget things you were positive you’d always remember but you remember things that seemed trivial or even annoying: their jokes, their sayings, their stories. Bad moments flutter through your mind like a cheap recreation, colliding with memories of the good times you shared, moments that seem to take place in total brightness, sunlight, or, as if in a movie studio, under soft-box lamps.

This eerie, beautiful sensation has capsized me for the entire length of the Chili Bowl as I ponder the life of Jack Peterman, my wife’s stepdad, who passed away a couple of years ago. I knew the man for 15 years and heard him talk about racing probably about a hundred times, but I never really listened. It wasn’t until after he was gone that I realized the complexity of what he had described.

He loved racing. I never quite understood it. They go round and round, in a circle? What else? Sometimes, they crash. How horrible!

Not horrible, actually—most of the time. Crashes signify devotion, the spilling of commitment to the task of driving.

As I wander around the Chili Bowl, Jackie’s stories have flooded back to me for the past week. I need them, after all.

Jackie happens to be the entire reason I’m here. When pitching for this magazine, I scribbled six events and then shrugged. One of them was dirt racing.

My wife Caroline and oldest daughter attended the Friday night races, but not today’s.

Without them, I feel quick and lost, giddy yet a tad lonesome. Cold air sneaks into the Expo, a slippery chill, a devouring freeze. People begin to chatter.

Without any grace, the house music starts blaring again. It’s the same songs on repeat, one about Paradise and another about freedom.

And the spirit keeps ramping up—the energy, the intensity. A bright power fills the building and everyone in it, unlike anything else at the Chili Bowl. It’s a moment of total solidarity. Fifteen thousand fans are happy, loving, eager, and excited. Every one of them is in the entire building singing till their lungs rattle: “Sweet Caroline, buh buh buhhhh ...”

Jackie called my wife “Sweet Caroline”...

I blink, and I’m backstage in the dark, between the underside of the bleachers and the ramps. “Rhinestone Cowboy” roars as three young women with glowing blonde hair glide to the front of the ramp on a four-wheeler.

In the dark, they glow in their white sneakers and all-black centerfold spandex, which snakes into giant dark angel wings.

Something about the darkness feels overwhelming, achy, fallen, entirely at odds with the sanctity of the occasion. They resemble (old school) Sports Illustrated models wearing peacocks covered in sequins that look like stars.

Then, silence. Lights out. Now, everywhere is dark. It’s 9 p.m., and it is fucking cold. A rumble; rumble; growling earth; this is the final event; this is what everything has led to.

The dust and ethanol fumes swarm the air nearly to opaqueness — cloudiness so bad that the Expo staff has to open the doors, unleashing the bite of a cold front that will lead to snowfall the following day.

The lights return. And, like that, I have escaped the backstage darkness.

I stride down the platform with various members of the press and pit crew. The flagman grips the pinpoint green of the starting flag. There’s a silent pause during the moment before the race begins. The floating instant is unique to sporting events, where thousands of people get silent simultaneously: the buzzer-beating three-pointer; the “Hail Mary”; the 93rd-minute goal. A wince of time that expands and subsumes. A brief suspension, a floating sensation.

Then, war, eruption, life! The unseen finds its concrete. The machine screech begins! The engines erupt into that powerful symphony.

Like an avalanche, the cars whirl around the track, launching clods of stiff earth at everyone before me. Folks take a lot of mud to the face, neck, stomach, and head.

One by one, they shuffle backward, desperate for cover. I’m a large and tall guy, so before long, I am their cover, and I wind up at the front of the pack, taking mud shrapnel.

Bring the mud! More mud! Let it blend with the dust and the fumes! Throw all of it this way! More chaos! More flavored whiskey and cold, cold Miller Lite! More life! More paradise, more motor music!

Here, at the mouth of a roiling splatter, I am distinctly at home. At the edge of the dirt is where I belong.

Earlier, with the help of “Sweet Caroline,” I chanced into Heaven, and there were angels and Jackie in the bleachers up above in the relentless bleach of light. I didn’t belong there, so I had to leave. Then, I sank into an underworld, with dark-winged angels in the trespassing shadow.

But here I remain in between. This is what it means to be human. I stare ahead at the barbed entrenchments that sprout from the soil of life.

As the midget cars launch around the track, I glimpse life’s most wondrous secrets. Strap into the driver’s cage and pray for victory, or at least safety—an unbroken body. So hammer down, expel your hesitance. Jet around the earth in a tiny car, your body, your home, and do your best to keep steady.

Expansion, always spreading, constant acceleration—life with all its motion. Then, eventually, you grow enough to realize that everything is alive and moves so slowly. But this slug’s pace reveals some vital truths. First, each of us came from somewhere. Second, the event we know as death is not a departure but an entrance, a holdover, the first tep of continuation.

Why would every other part of life take its time to unfold, only for death to rush the close? Of course, death announces itself throughout your life. You get glimpses of it, enough to send a chill up—or a ghoul clawing through—your spine. This horror about the prospect of life’s departure is too vast to comprehend. But can an eternity stop?

The entire Chili Bowl Nationals thrives in the whir of motors, this splaying of dirt.

The slugs of life applaud your commitment to a game of ups and downs, each day dunking you into an ocean of radiant muck. So much of each life occurs within containment, the occupation of a body you were given and a personality you might not have chosen. Pitter-patter tiptoed lurking, inching across a concrete walkway towards the whirlwind of midget cars. The sacred days are here. They’re deep and bright and loud. Each time you’re left in the haze of bad moments, life keeps inching you forward. Grip the wheel; grit your teeth; grip the wheel; focus; grip; tell your eyes to do their job; grip; turn; saw the wheel; don’t wipe out.

When the moment is right, I’ll also glide across the seasons, the daylight, and the oceans. The newness of life will embark into a spalled realm. The constellations of my voice will find peace in the ether. And even then, I will love God for the gifts he has given me.

And if this is all I ever get, if death bonks me off the show right now, I will have lived a greater life than I could have imagined. Please—keep us constantly searching for light. Where does the morning lack sky?

Some horrors await me, such as barbed entrenchments sprouting from the soil. The fence sneaks up on me. The collision. The explosion. But each moment, even the most unbearable, contains the gift of paradise.

I’m ripped from this prayer by a hefty lash of dirt. It refreshes me. I can feel the mud. The earth. Our mud. Our earth.

The dust and ethanol fumes swarm the air nearly to opaqueness—cloudiness so bad that the Expo staff has to open the doors, unleashing the bite of a cold front that will lead to snowfall the following day.

Every lap, I get hit with a biblical wind, more chunks of hard mud, sometimes the size of a fist. The cars begin to glide until 12 or so laps in, and the dirt shrapnel subsides, crushed smooth into the tire-bruited track. And the haze of exhaust layers into a dense fog. It illuminates the bright glow.

Somehow, the engines harmonize. There’s no music. There’s no shouting. There is only the electric purr of the midget cars, gliding, weaving.

The effect is starlight.

Levitation.

The entire building hung in the air between the mechanical racing warfare of engines and the gears. Time could linger forever between the first lap and the 55th lap. That thought from earlier buzzes into my mind: But can an eternity stop?

The checkered flag will undulate soon. The winner—26-year-old stock car driver Logan Seavey—will do a cage dance for his second year in a row.

He will have kept a lead the entire race. There will be no sudden upset. No clenching comeback.

But for now, I don’t know any of that. I’m ten laps from the end, and every atom of my life is suddenly peaceful.

It’s not entirely certain that the race will, in fact, end. That it will ever even need to. Maybe the cars will jet and glide like this forever, somehow more excellent with every revolution.

For someone I know, this is heaven.

Kevin Ryan is a staff writer for Blaze Media. He is an award-winning writer focusing on long-form literary nonfiction and investigative reporting.