Exerpt from Sunday Money
Just started reading Jeff MacGregor's Sunday Money
Lengthy exerpt behind the cut
Might be he was dead. There was no way to tell from the grandstands. It happened too far away and everyone up there was too tired or too drunk to squint away the glare from that thin indifferent sun. Even on television, the Numinous Absolute, where everything is known and everything is seen and everything spoken and shown and everything is by God under control, they didn't know. They didn't know what to say or how to say it, so they just kept talking.
The whole thing happened too fast, too slow, and after that day you'd watch the replays again and again, for months, not believing. Even in real time it still played out lazy and deliberate, the car yawing slow left, then correcting, swerving slow motion right, up the banking, tires feathering smoke, into the wall, then the impact, a sharp sound inside a dull one, and you thought - maube- it wasn't bad, he wasn't going very fast, he didn't hit very hard. Mabye you thought, okay, it happens every year, every weekend, over and over, they crash but they all just walk away. Don't they all? To this day, years gone and the whole world spun another billion miles through the void, you don't believe it. But when the car finally slid to rest the netting never camedown and the first man up to the window seemed frantic, waving like mad for the others to get there, C'mon! Sweet Christ! C'mon! and for a long time after that every gesture was panicked, emphatic, and then they pulled him out of the car and all at once the adrenaline was gone and it didn't seem urgent anymore, and even if you couldn't see it you could feel it somehow, that absence, that stillness, and the twilight quitet descended across the ridiculous immensity of that place, and it was like something being pulled out of you too, and the celebration in Victory Lance was small and fretful and wrong in the foreground, and way out there below the loneliest reach of the far turn, so steep you can barely walk it, that black car sat empty and if you were still in your seat that's when you knew. You just knew.
The rest of it - the ambulance, the lights and the sirens and the hurry, the hospital - was wishful ceremony. A prayer.
By the time they got back to their hotels or made it to the airport, most of the others knew too, the scores of thousands who'd headed for the gates to beat the traffic. They heard it on the radio or their cell phones or saw it up on the screen behind the concourse bar. In every airport from Miami back to Jacksonville and out to Orlando men and women stood crying, and in hotel rooms an motel rooms and in the endless stream of cars moving up or down the great vein ofthe I-95 people sat abject and sobbing, and the news flew out from Daytona in fast concentric circles, across the county, swift rings of grief, until everything in America sat within the blast radius of that elaborate sadness, because Dale Earnhardt was dead. That was February 18th, 2001. (MacGregor ix-x).
Lengthy exerpt behind the cut
Might be he was dead. There was no way to tell from the grandstands. It happened too far away and everyone up there was too tired or too drunk to squint away the glare from that thin indifferent sun. Even on television, the Numinous Absolute, where everything is known and everything is seen and everything spoken and shown and everything is by God under control, they didn't know. They didn't know what to say or how to say it, so they just kept talking.
The whole thing happened too fast, too slow, and after that day you'd watch the replays again and again, for months, not believing. Even in real time it still played out lazy and deliberate, the car yawing slow left, then correcting, swerving slow motion right, up the banking, tires feathering smoke, into the wall, then the impact, a sharp sound inside a dull one, and you thought - maube- it wasn't bad, he wasn't going very fast, he didn't hit very hard. Mabye you thought, okay, it happens every year, every weekend, over and over, they crash but they all just walk away. Don't they all? To this day, years gone and the whole world spun another billion miles through the void, you don't believe it. But when the car finally slid to rest the netting never camedown and the first man up to the window seemed frantic, waving like mad for the others to get there, C'mon! Sweet Christ! C'mon! and for a long time after that every gesture was panicked, emphatic, and then they pulled him out of the car and all at once the adrenaline was gone and it didn't seem urgent anymore, and even if you couldn't see it you could feel it somehow, that absence, that stillness, and the twilight quitet descended across the ridiculous immensity of that place, and it was like something being pulled out of you too, and the celebration in Victory Lance was small and fretful and wrong in the foreground, and way out there below the loneliest reach of the far turn, so steep you can barely walk it, that black car sat empty and if you were still in your seat that's when you knew. You just knew.
The rest of it - the ambulance, the lights and the sirens and the hurry, the hospital - was wishful ceremony. A prayer.
By the time they got back to their hotels or made it to the airport, most of the others knew too, the scores of thousands who'd headed for the gates to beat the traffic. They heard it on the radio or their cell phones or saw it up on the screen behind the concourse bar. In every airport from Miami back to Jacksonville and out to Orlando men and women stood crying, and in hotel rooms an motel rooms and in the endless stream of cars moving up or down the great vein ofthe I-95 people sat abject and sobbing, and the news flew out from Daytona in fast concentric circles, across the county, swift rings of grief, until everything in America sat within the blast radius of that elaborate sadness, because Dale Earnhardt was dead. That was February 18th, 2001. (MacGregor ix-x).