Monster Trucks and the White Bellaire

We sang the national anthem. Then they shot the buxom blonde out of a cannon. Naturally there was a great pop—a breathy, explosive punch of sound. The white sparks of the fireworks traveled out with the Cannon Lady, and she sailed high above the red, white, and blue Buicks and Caddies in her shiny red suit and crash helmet. She was free, though she had only a fraction of a second to consider the fact before turning her mind to the rotation she needed to achieve before landing. Or perhaps she was always thinking of the rotation—never thinking of the flight so much as the requirements she must meet to carefully end it. In her instant of travel we were hushed, wondering at the sensation that she must have, waiting for her safe return to our more ordinary, ground-bound existence. Fireworks. Air rushing past a small body encased in a tight and iridescent red suit. Flight and descent. Once she’d plopped into the net, we clapped encouragement. A man near me yelled, “Whew!” Another whistled—a long and warbling streak of sound traveling alone above the applause.

She strode across the arena then, popped off her cherry red helmet, shook out her mane of curls, and revealed herself to be somewhat shy, though she’d undoubtedly been confronted with that microphone in many cities before ours. Not the exuberant gunpowder traveler that we might have expected, she was a bit quieter, a bit more serious than we might have imagined the Cannon Lady would be. They shoot her so fast that the first few times she did it, she was a good fifteen feet out of the barrel before she had the awareness that her journey had even begun. She told us this and then the announcer told us that she came from a family of cannonballers—her father and brother both holders of assorted cannonballing records, having been shot distances exceeding two hundred feet. And then we seemed to understand that she came to her profession by the complex familial ties that shape us all as much as by any compulsive need to descend that dark barrel in order to achieve an instant of exhilarating, unfettered flight. “Whew!” the man yelled again. Then they drove her cannon away and turned to the serious business of vehicular competition.

Grave Digger is the most popular monster truck in the world. This is according to the Grave Digger Web site. While the other trucks were gathering and circling, Grave Digger remained tucked away beneath an inconspicuous fifty-foot tower of cardboard boxes right in the middle of the arena, only to come careening out at the last minute to surprise us. The men in the row in front of me yelled “Donuts!” and swung their hats over their heads, then giggled and settled in to watch quietly as the various competitors drove over the red, white, and blue Buicks and Caddies. Grave Digger is painted with a death motif of gravestones, ghosts, bones, and the inky blackness of an uncertain eternity. Jurassic Attack, High Roller, and Obsession were also in attendance. Not present but discussed in my program were Cyborg, Captain America, Backdraft, Live Wire, and Reptoid. And lest you question the potential for mayhem, other truck names include Destroyer, Devastator, Equalizer, Eradicator, King Krunch, Thrasher, Maniac, and Godzilla.

I’m not so very certain that there really is anything that is actually mindless about mindless entertainment. We throw ourselves into this extravagant display of gears and wreckage, but it can’t engage us unless it summons or suggests the greater forces of uncertainty and damage against which we shake our small flesh fists. Why watch an exercise of power if not to quell fears of powerlessness? To what dire battle do we summon Eradicator and Destroyer? What greater work do we have at hand for the Equalizer? To the darkly moving unknown monsters we reply, “monster truck.”

They crunched their way over the row of old cars, sprinting into the air and descending again in a great roar of pure engine power. And after the...