Claire took me to for a surprise Christmas gift to see a Monster Truck show. The show stared at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in the Denver Coliseum with a countdown from the audience, culminating in a chant from the seats like Catholic liturgy “to start their engines!”. Most Monster trucks run on 99.9% methanol, and when ignited, their screaming throats shook and hung like the gizzards of turkey vultures’ from under the fiberglass bodies. As they growled their breaths, the lights in the rafters began to blur into a starry shapes through the tangy fog of emissions. The trucks clenched their drivetrains and spun their 43-inch wide treads through the dirt which rotated around 66 diameter tires that dug dirt from beneath them and sprayed it away like fire hoses spray water at house fires or civil rights marches.
I looked at the goosebumps on Claire’s arm that held the 22oz. Budweiser. She swallowed hard and strained her face in a subtle way to brace her ears against the torrent of sound. And I think – I think – in those first few moments, as the trucks flexed their oscillating frames and moved into the arena, as the pre-teen boys wearing Underarmor Motor-Cross shirts in front of us cheered – I think I even saw a faint tear in the corner of her eye. Whether the sound waves vibrated it out of her sinuses, the exhaust stung her tear ducts, or she just was overcome by the mechanical equivalent of 2000 thoroughbred horses stampeding out of the western world’s supercharged fuel injected big block American bravado, I cannot know. The tear glistened for a minute under the coliseum lights, and her eyes gazed through the 550 cubic inches of fuel being burned and blown through alloyed pistons whose torque quivered on their suspension, and bore the trucks down deep through their 32” of travel on the fully adjustable nitrogen cylinders, like a wildcat crouching before an attack.
It was a grand sight. I great afternoon. And a wild Christmas gift.
