Ghosts on a 5/8 Mile Oval

“You got no business bein’ up there. I’m callin’ the sheriff.”

With that, the young large woman in white shorts trundles back into her trailer.

Is he going to show? How many minutes have we to escape? Won’t be hard to find us in this little town. I look down at her trailer, and parked in front of it our flaming red Hertz Ford Mustang we rented from the “Fun Collection” for the hell of it. No, it won’t be hard to spot that Mustang.

Steve, my 16-year-old son, and I look at each other. “We better make our getaway,” I say. We’re maybe 30, 40 feet up, atop the ruins of the North Wilkesboro Speedway. The view is outstanding, and I keep clicking pictures. We’re standing on the splintering black wood planks of the spotter’s perch above the press box. It’s about 97 degrees, mid July, in the Northern High Country of North Carolina. Some call it the soul of NASCAR nation.

For a huge nation, it’s got a small soul, and it’s not easy to find. North Wilkesboro’s population is about 4,100. “Out there,” is how the locals describe the Northern High Country, where Carolina’s coastal expanse rises into rolling hills and then, further west, the Blue Ridge Mountains. No major highways lead into the high country. Not much in the way of fast food, motels and malls. Just red roof barns, pastures, apple orchards, churches and more churches. Old cabins, lonesome homes, rivers, ravines, hollows, valleys dipping and rising, hills, hard red clay, and thick forests of pines, birch, ash, oaks and maples. Everything, trees, telephone poles and lines, billboards, abandoned cars, drapped in kudzu, like an ever-growing blanket of thick leafy vines.

Perfect for hiding the old creek-side moonshine stills that made surrounding Wilkes County the self-described white lightning capital of America in the 1930s,‘40s and ‘50s. A number of the bootleggers hauling more than 100 gallons of ‘shine out of the foothills, outgunning treasury agents in supercharged, turbocharged Fords, Dodges and Chryslers that roared across Route 421 up to 115 miles per hour, became NASCAR’s earliest racers.

I imagine the trailer woman on the phone. “The kid looks like a surfer, sheriff, lanky with a mop of blond hair. The father’s smaller ‘n he’s wearin’ a pink tee shirt with palm trees on it.”

We clamber down the press box’s stairs, search for the quickest way out. “I want to take one more look,” says Steve. I snapped a couple last shots. We climb over a chain link locked gate. No barbed wire luckily. Jump in the Mustang and leave the trailer and the track in the dust.

Fifteen minutes later we’re safely eating lunch in the Mustang in a Food Lion parking lot — bananas and bottled water, typical grab-and-go road trip grub. We look at all the pickups. Not a mini-van in sight. So what are a couple of Yankees from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, doing parked in a Food Lion shopping center keeping an eye out for the sheriff?

It’s a secret pilgrimage.

Why the secrecy? NASCAR’s fan and revenue growth have exploded wildly in the past 15 years. Attendance at races averaged 127,000 in 2006, according to Forbes magazine. (The NFL averaged 67,000 that year). Sponsors shelled out $650 million in ’06 to have their logos painted on NASCAR’s top 35 cars. Races deserted the likes of the homey confines of North Wilkesboro Speedway in the mid-‘90s for modern tracks across the country, from New Hampshire to Los Angeles. Still, stock car racing carries a stigma, no more so than in the East Coast megalopolis.

A sportswriter in Philadelphia prints a NASCAR quote of the week, in which he finds a driver saying something about fried bologna sandwiches being his favorite, to make the point one more time that the sport (which he fails to dignify as a sport) is overblown, unfathomable hype full of sixth-grade dropouts, tire changers, and Bud-swilling, pot-bellied rednecks.

So to be a NASCAR loyalist in a suburban East Coast enclave calls for going underground. Otherwise you’re an alien from Alabama or someplace else covered in kudzu. If Steve is watching a race on a Sunday afternoon and his friends come knocking, he hops up, goes to door, and talks with ‘em outside. Sometimes he just tapes a race and watches it that night. When his buds troop through the house, the F1 Racing, Racer, Speed Sport News, and MotorSport magazines are stashed away. Nothing much he can do about the 12-inch wide, 27-inch diameter bald Goodyear Eagle tire sitting at the foot of his bed. He got it at the Las Vegas Speedway once and rolled it through the Vegas and Philly airports. I’ve had my own scrapes with the stereotype. Not long ago my wife made me strip off from our familymobile’s windows about a half-dozen NASCAR team numbers (every driver’s car has the same number plastered on both sides all season). “I’m not driving that car,” she protested. “People think we’re hillbillies.” This is a smart, liberal, reasonable woman, mind you.

Growing up, none of my friends were aware of my interest in hillbilly racing. In the late ‘60s, a few years after my father died and I was a few years younger than Steve, one of the things I did to pass time was glue together plastic model stockers, paint ‘em, and stick on the numbers and sponsor decals. I watched NASCAR races on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, with the legendary Chris Economaki barking his reports from the pits. He wrote his first racing column when he was 14, in 1934. At 87 he still writes his column in Speed Sport News.

So what’s the fascination with watching 43 very fast, wildly painted cars make left turns for four hours? Could be any number of things. Speed pure and simple. Noise, the roar from the track. What’s called “tradin’ paint” or running “door to door.” A driver trying to wrest control of his car fish-tailing at a 100 miles an hour ‘round a tight turn. Watching a mad racer tear through the field, passing cars high and low. Cars racing “three wide.” Spin outs, cartwheels, T-bone collisions. Blown tires, engines and tempers. Ten-second tire changes, refuels and body adjustments. Bumper-to-bumper drafting. Sometimes two cars coming down the stretch for a nose-to-nose finish.

Maybe it’s the culture. You get it or you don’t. Us versus them. Makes you feel like you own something that’s just yours.

Or it could go beyond the oval. Maybe it’s the names of racers down through the years. Junior Johnson, a North Wilkesboro native who spent 11 months in a federal penitentiary in Chillicothe, Ohio after his arrest at his daddy’s still. Fireball Roberts. Cale Yarborough. Richard “The King” Petty. Dale “The Intimidator” Earnhardt. Earnhardt Junior. Benny “BP” Parsons. Maybe it’s the rivalries. The duels between King Richard and David Pearson. The infield fist fight between Cale Yarborough and the Allison brothers, Donnie and Bobby.

Or how racing gets in a family’s blood lines. Four generations of Pettys have raced: Lee, Richard, Kyle and Adam. Early on there were the four Flock siblings: Ethel, Tim, Bob and Fonty. Ned and Dale Jarrett, father and son. The Earnhardts. Darrell “DW” Waltrip and his brother Michael. Rusty and brother Kenny Wallace, and now Rusty’s son Steve.

Or perhaps it’s the romance of some of the hallowed tracks themselves. Rockingham, “The Rock,” now gone from NASCAR’s schedule. North Wilkesboro, shuttered in 1996 after 50 years. Darlington, “Too Tough to Tame,” in South Carolina. Bristol, “Thunder Valley,” in Tennessee. Martinsville, with its paper-clip shaped oval, in Virginia. Talledaga’s superspeedway in Alabama. For a sport second in TV ratings only to the NFL, can anyone find these places on a map? Then of course there’s Daytona in Florida, where they raced on the beach before building a speedway.

Pilgrimages are part of sport. Life-long baseball fans go to the Bronx, to Yankee Stadium, to sense the grandeur of the sport’s past. The more timid might settle for Boston’s Fenway Park or the Cubs’ Wrigley Field. NFL fanatics find their way up to Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. These shrines aren’t exactly Stonehenge. Yankee Stadium will be razed after this season. For ice hockey cultists, the old Maple Leaf Gardens, Montreal Forum and Boston Gardens are history.

So Steve and I slipped out of Philadelphia without a trace early one Sunday morning (needless to say, mom stayed home) to track down the roots of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing — NASCAR. Before prime time TV coverage, the Speed Channel, the Car of Tomorrow (the universal car design forced on every team to improve safety and lower costs). Before multimillionaire track owners purchased places like North Wilkesboro solely to shut them down and move their races to new frontiers like Kansas City or Chicagoland. Before smiling Earnhardt Junior’s Wrangler commercials. Before the sponsor millions poured in — Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, DuPont, 3M, M&Ms, the U.S. Army, Bass Pro Shops, Alltel, Best Buy, Cheerios, Caterpillar, Dewalt, Jack Daniels, and obviously, Budweiser.

We cruised up I-77 one morning from our base in Mooresville, North Carolina — about 25 miles north of Charlotte, sitting on the sprawling and glittering Lake Norman, and called “Race City USA” because of the 30-50 team corporate offices and garages in the area. What exactly we were going to find in backwoods North Wilkesboro was a mystery. We knew the speedway still existed, mothballed by its current owners, Bruton Smith and Bob Bahre, who refuse to sell out. (Smith needed an extra security detail when he left the speedway after the last race in 1996.)

I had been there twice before: dragging my wife through the town on our honeymoon to the Smokey Mountains 25 years ago, and passing the track at a distance on a very remote sales call about 18 years ago. “What kind of business did you call on out here?” wondered Steve, looking out the window at nothing but brush and farmland. “An old glove factory full of women at knitting machines. Called Golden Needles. Long gone.”

After barreling about an hour north on the interstate, we turned left on Route 421, and headed west 14 miles. Three miles from the track we stopped to read the recently planted roadside historical marker. “North Wilkesboro Speedway. Pioneer NASCAR dirt track built in 1946; paved in 1958. Hosted sanctioned events, 1949-96. 5/8 mile oval. 3 mi. W.”

The adrenaline kicked in. And then minutes later, damn, there’s the track, still standing. Many pilgrims in the past dozen years have made this trip and stood where we were now. Some actually have camped out on the grounds. Most snap photos from the highway. But from a distance you could be looking at the remains of an oversized high school football stadium. A tattered “NASCAR Winston Cup Series” billboard invites us up the half-paved, half gravel entrance road. We take it slow and the Mustang bounces along.

“We gotta get in,” I said, surveying for an opening. Steve stared at me. “Aren’t we trespassing?” For a second I considered my role model obligations. But it was easy to rationalize: The boy is 16. Hell, when Junior Johnson was 16 he left plowing a mule and planting corn to start running ‘shine for his dad. “We came this far,” I said, “and it’s still here standing. What, are we just going to get back in the car?” Seeing nothing but rusted locks at every gate, I eventually found a cinder block wall with the toehold and heaved myself up and over. Steve shrugged and scampered over.

We had the speedway to ourselves. Sixty thousand empty seats. Single tier concrete stands with gray metal fold-back chair seats anchored in long rows still ring the track. The “North Wilkesboro Speedway” sign stretches beneath the dark and empty press box, its red background and white lettering framed in black. The infield, with large swaths of dirt patches, is overgrown with wild grass. The electronic black scoring tower still rises atop a pole, as does the familiar “76” orange and blue circular gas sign next to the one remaining infield garage. The pit lane is divided by low concrete walls, with white paint cracked and peeling. The red and white Winston Cup Series lettering, red and white Coca-Cola letters, and the black and white North Wilkesboro Speedway signs on the outer pit wall are gouged and faded by the relentless Carolina summers.

The paved oval track, with its 14-degree banked turns and the front straightaway that dips slightly and the back straightaway that slopes up, still has white lane makers and a wide white finish line. But the region’s sudden, drenching storms over the years have opened up cracks everywhere. Rows of grass run up and down either side of the finish line and zig-zag along the track in long stretches.

Truman “Fonty” Flock, a Georgia bootlegger, won the first race here when it was a dirt track on May 5, 1947. Brother Bob Flock won the first NASCAR-sanctioned race in 1949, taking home a purse of $3,800. One year Dale Earnhardt and Rusty Wallace drove side-by-side for around ten laps straight dueling for the lead. In ’72, Bobby Allison and Richard Petty traded the lead 13 times in the Wilkes 400. In ’88, Earnhardt and Ricky Rudd banged fenders for the final 41 laps. Both were black-flagged for rough driving and sent to the back of the field. A fight in the infield got out of hand once and track officials threw a yellow flag to slow the race so one of the pugilists could be tossed in a car, driven around the track and out of the speedway. King Petty won here 15 times, the record. One of those times he was attacked by a drunk in victory lane. In all, North Wilkesboro featured 73 NASCAR races in 50 years.

After we get the warning the sheriff is coming, we stand at the top of one of the faded blue concrete aisles to take a last look around. Weeds sprout up between the steps. There’s nothing much to say, like walking a graveyard or a battlefield.

An hour later, banana peels tossed in the back seat, lunch finished, we head out of the Food Lion lot aiming to head south to Taylorsville. Steve’s not much of a map reader, something of a lost art with the GPS generation. I think I know our way, but not for long. The narrow two-laner we’re on starts twisting and turning up and down the Brushy Mountain ridges, an isolated spur of the Blue Ridges. Soon we’re absolutely lost in the Wilkes County apple country. I’ve driven the Pacific Coast Highway twisting through Big Sur. Down a steep gravel road on the side of a southern Utah canyon with the family horrified. Nothing compares to this unknown, unnumbered county road in the North Carolina Piedmont for S curves, one after another after another, for a half hour or so at least.

No wonder Junior Johnson was once quoted saying stock car racing was a comedown compared to running moonshine. I couldn’t imagine racing these curves in the night without searchlights. Junior would take them sideways, clipping mailboxes and newspaper boxes — with the headlights off. He was famous, as Tom Wolfe described in “The Last American Hero,” for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” where, coming up to a “revenuer” roadblock, he’d throw the car into second gear, twist the wheel, hit the accelerator, and make the car’s rear end skid around in a complete arc, then tear back up the same road he came down.

“It’s official, Steve.” “What?” “I have no idea where we are.” “You sure?” “Sooner or later we’ll hit a road with a number. Right now we’re off the map.” The maps shows nearby towns like Thankful, Love Valley, Hunting Creek, Boomer. We’ve driven more than an hour without coming to a stop light or stop sign. The only people we’ve seen are road crews. Every so often we get a fleeting glimpse through the pines of the Blue Ridges, maybe 10-15 miles to the west, then we lean into another tight curve. Somewhere nearby is Brushy Mountain Township, population 524, where the most common job is driving a truck and the median age is 43. The “Brushies” as the natives call these hills usually rise from 300 to 800 feet. Hickory Knob. Walnut Knob. Fox Mountain. Asbury Mountain. It’s isolated. Slow. Very green.

Or as an Internet blogger posted when I was researching the trip, “First and foremost, Wilkes County is BACKWOODS country. You have backwoods people who live miles from anyone and may or may not have luxuries such as electricity. There is absolutely positively nothing to do in all of Wilkes County.”

The family calls Steve the mystery man because he’s the quiet type, laid back like a surfer dude. Maybe he’ll respond with a Marlon Brando mumble sometimes. He is 16. But he doesn’t brood. He’s a pleasant traveling companion. Unless we’re stuck in traffic (“Isn’t there another way?), on a long road trip (“Couldn’t we have flown?”), or there’s static on the radio (“Mind if I turn that off?”). iPods have no static.

I don’t own an iPod, despite the urgings of Steve and his sister Kate. “You got to get one. You got to get one. We’ll get one for you.” No thanks. I’m a tactile person. I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs. I like pulling them out, pulling out the liner notes and reading about the musicians and where the music was made. I like to look at my collection, like a library of books.

Once Steve accepted that we were off the map and his dad had no idea where we were going, he settled back and we listened to music to soothe our frustrations. Old-timey mountain music would have been the most appropriate soundtrack, but show me a 16-year suburban boy who’ll listen to fiddles, mandolins, banjos, maybe wooden spoons, a washtub and an autoharp. So it was The Clash’s “London Calling.” Clash alums Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and Mick Jones and Carbon/Silicon. The Band. The Roots. Bob Marley. The Strokes. The Libertines. With music as with racing, the kid appreciates his history. He’s got more than 1,000 iTune songs on his Mac, half of them must be from the ‘60s and ‘70s. That would have been like me at 16 listening to Benny Goodman, Glen Miller and the Andrews Sisters. Last thing I wanted to hear was my parents’ music. Maybe there is something to this classic rock hype.

“Why do you think Sgt. Pepper’s was the Beatles’ best album?” asks Steve at one point. How do you answer something that profound? Particularly when you’re lost on unmarked roads. “I don’t think it is. I’d go for Revolver.” “A lot of people say Sgt. Pepper.” “It was the album cover. Had all these famous people on it. Tarzan. Bob Dylan. W.C. Fields. Laurel and Hardy.” “Who?” “A doll wearing a ‘Welcome the Rolling Stones’ sweater.” “On an album cover?” “Believe it, Steve. Album covers used to mean something.”

We finally emerge from the wilds of the Brushies totally by chance not design, and hang a right onto the Wilkesboro Highway, which takes us in short order to I-80, east to Statesville, and back down I-77 south. It’s all familiar again. Interstates are interstates. We’re back in the land of the homogenized. But for a while there we were chasing ghosts, moonshine ridge runners and oval daredevils. And about that threat of a call to the sheriff, mom never will know.