hellbilly

Well I fear I may have set the bar too high with yesterday's story. I mean hillbilly motorcross is funny, but not as outrageously wierd as the ex con midget story. I should have saved that for last, but what can you do. So here goes.
so this thursday last, the day of the ex con midget, I was cooling my heels in Charlotte. Wait, stop. That's a half truth. I was driving my hung over friend Slade back to Charlotte from our Moutain St. Patricks Day celebration (which is yet another story, Goddamit you people are so making me tell the events of my life out of order) when I got a voicemail from my friend Chris telling me he was coming down to NC to race that weekend, and since my sister had said I was still in Nc, and would I please come on up to his race if I was of a mind. That's pretty much the message, I mean you need to add "fuck", "bastard" and "you fuckin' toilet" in there to get the whole thing but I think I got the point across. So come Friday morning I drove out of Charlotte and headed for the mountains. I'll skip the drive up and how we got there, and head right to Friday night. We were camped out along this creek where the race was being held. Now, Chris and his girlfriend had all their camping shit, and were set up all nice, but me I had nothing but a sleeping bag. I did however have a '92 Izuzu Rodeo and if you fold the back seat down you have just enough room to lie down. Kind of. Well more kind of bend around in sort of a cresent. So I made a little nest with my sleeping bag and threw a wool overcoat on top of me and put my leather jacket over my head and stayed reasonably warm and comfortable.
This howver isn't a story about sleeping in my truck so much as it's about Motor cross, and hillbillys and the world's largest game of homemade Jenga. I need to get back to that. So here we go.
So since Chris wasn't racing until Sunday we bummed around for a while. and watched the races. Well I more crowd watched than anything else. You see Chris participates in Hare Scramble motor cross which is where a bunch of fucking lunatics who you just pray have health insurance go barelling along a seven or eight mile loop course though the woods, on narrow trails, up hill and down, through streams and over cliffs, and they do this for seventy or eighty miles. It's an a test of endurance for the riders and even more so for the spectators who are either stupid, or desperate to come out and watch this. The spectators, run across fields, up hills, and down, over cliffs, and through the woods to view the race, all the while crossing the paths of the riders as if daring them to hit them and end everyone involved's misery.
Now in certain places, like the Northeast, there's a crowd of folks who come out to watch this but usually it's the racers from other classes, their families and their friends, so you can understand this madness. Down South however where watching motor sports is just as strange a religeon as snake handling, this isn't the case. Folks come down out of the woods, and up from the swamps and camp out. Sort of like a back woods Nascar race. These are the folks who wear overalls without a trace of irony (which is kind of refreshing) Young skinny guys with heavily pierced faces, who listen to Fifty Cent, but hate black people, paradoxically. Also hordes of teenagers in baseballcaps work boots and Carhart pants wearing T Shirts that say Hooters/Hickory, or WWJD, or have pictures of delicious huntable wildlife printed on them.
Having in lived in North Carolina for a number of years and having spent a lot of time out in the backwoods this was all pretty standard fare. So when I got tired of running up hill, and down, across streams, and through the woods, while dodging the riders, I lounged around the camp and read Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theater. It's not exactly light reading, and it's hard to get into a book like that when there's the world's strangest version of a Nascar tailgating party going on around you. Meanwhile all through the woods across from me riders are careening off trees, falling into ditches and slamming into the ground. So I pretty much gave up trying to force culture on myself. I mean my god, why try to better myself when I can watch people get hurt. It's not as much fun as watching hippies fall of rocks while bouldering but it's a hell of a lot more spectacular.
So yeah, Saturday night everyone, as was expected, built bonfires in front of their campsites, and while we may have been a bunch of no good carpet bagging yankees, who were swilling down cianti instead of White Lightning, we had us a bon fire too. With one difference. Instead of using big peices of wood, Chris had four large boxes filled with wooden blooks about an inch around and seven inches long (minds out of the gutter kids, this ain't that kind of story). We just kept piling them into the fire, and pretty soon the guys across the way came over and donated some logs to our cause. Not that we needed any help being pyromanics. It's a yankee tradition reaching all the way back to the Civil War when we dicovered large parts of the South were highly flammable. But we keep those coments to ourselves when were up on the hills. Anyway we bonded with these guys by complimenting their music selection. It was classic rock and angry country singers all the way. As soon as the kids next to us opened up with Fifty Cent (which they only did when their girlfriends showed up) the guys across the way countered with, " Turn that fuckin' shit off. We're listening to some real music. You little shits are gonna get schooled." So of course we became fast friends with these guys. Noting that while there still our deep sectioanl differences between the North and South, we can all agree Golden Earing was a great fucking band, and nothing beats hearing Radar Love while the bonfires are raging.
So in the midst of throwing a handful of wood into the fire, I noticed that it looked like we were buring thousands of those Jenga peices, only slightly bigger. So a couple of beers later the world's largest game of Jenga was born. Reaching from the top of our picnic table up four feet, we held Burke county spellbound. At least until the wind came up and Chris knocked down the tower, which was rapidly followed by Chris burning the ersatz Jenga peices. On the heels of that diapointment though we beheld something that most people never see or hear. Well unless they go to things like this then they probably hear them a lot. Anyway what we heard was the rebel yell, rising up in chorus from one bonefire and being picked by the next coming back to the first fire only to be started anew. We went to sleep with this echoing out around the valley.
Sunday while Chris raced I risked life and limb to get good shoots of this event. I can't say if I succeeded but it did reinforce my beliefs on extreme sports, and that's this. Why risk life and limb? Sonner or later fate will come along and do that for you. All it ever took for me to learn that was a couple of car accidents, a bus fire, and nearly being blown to bits on an oil rig. But if I needed any more proof of this, it was Chris hurtling by at top speed screaming " No Clutch! No Clutch!" And if that alone doesn't prove neither he nor I are very bright, then our 14 hour straight drive up to Connecticut should. That saga just plain sucked. It was pure brute endurance and while one day I may find it funny it's gonna be awhile. So there you have it kids hillbilly motor cross. I don't think it's nearly as funny as the ex con midget story, I will say it is long and rambling. Also I don't think I did the wierdness justice, but I will post pictures to make up for it. Let me also state that while I might sound like I'm running hillybillys and southers down in general. Let me assure you I'm not. Anyone who blasts Golden Earing is alright by me.